Tis Thursday

Tis a Thursday in June and I feel like I'm working on a Saturday. My eyes are sleepy, my body numb. Soon, my boss will leave for a three week assignment in India. I'll stay behind, thankfully, and watch the fort while he's gone.
Yesterday I found another cotton seedling in the pot with the Mississippi brown. A nice gentleman on the OHG forum told me how to properly care for my cotton plants and I'm very thankful for his advice. Everyone else I had asked just told me "plant them in the ground and they'll grow," which wasn't quite the information I was looking for.
I also found out that my blackberry bush experiment seems to be sprouting blossoms, or, just one blossom. A couple of months ago I wanted to try my hand at growing blackberries from a cutting. I asked our Site Operations manager at work if I could go down the hill and snatch some cuttings from the creekside in the cow pasture. He agreed, so I brought my clippers in, hopped two fences, and went in to take cuttings. Sure enough, the leaves on the cutting died, new ones sprouted, and now a couple of months later, blossoms are showing up when I least expected it. I know that blackberries only grow on 2nd year canes, and technically this is a cane more than 2 years old, but since I potted it I wasn't sure of the timing.
Why am I doing these odd experiments? My goal is to become more self sufficient in life. If I learn this information and these skills now, I will have them later when I really need them (praying for a homestead). Sometimes I feel like it is too late for me to learn all there is to know about self-sufficiency and how to do things and sometimes I feel like I cannot absorb enough information. Just since January, I have learned: how to build a wall out of used concrete and mortar, how to lay vinyl flooring tiles, how to grow my own bean sprouts (growing my first batch now), how to grow sage/blackberries from cuttings, a new way to stake tomatoes, and this weekend I will learn how to make my own stepping stones. I'm currently reading a book on caring and raising chickens and I recently finished a book on butchering livestock, game and poultry including chickens, turkeys, squirrels - you name it.