To think that this is the time to become as self sufficient as possible?

[letsgetplanning]

Just as the title says really??
Anyone else aiming to get more sufficient?
Buying some land, living as eco friendly as possible?
Growing your own as much as you can??
Using local shops that are more eco friendly too??
I'm just starting on my journey and I'm so excited!! Land/house bought, just working on the garden and growing all the while being as eco friendly as I can and buying plastic free etc.
Anyone else doing this or wanting too? Any more hints, tips or ideas??

@GnomeDePlume thank you!! There are a few places nearby where we can get horse manure so we are steeped that way thank you!!

I have no illusions of self-sufficiency; isn't going to happen. But our allotment has been a source of joy for over 30 years and is certainly not laid to waste so still very much worth it.

I am hopeless at mending, but I do know that my mother saved and still saves a lot of money that way: taking over clothes that her family can no longer wear and doing them up with a needle and thread. Has a store of thread and buttons in a box for emergencies. She also saves odd bits of yarn and knits them together into patterned jumpers. In her generation, these were skills shared equally between middle and working classes and handed on from generation to generation.

In our generation, there is YouTube. I never learnt to garden (as in pretty gardening, growing flowers). But I don't have to spend money on some kind of organised tuition or books to take it up now: all I need to do is google "planting dahlia tubers" and some kindly person will pop up on my screen and show me how. When I ordered them from the grower I didn't even know what end was up. They're in now and I have no doubt will make a lovely display.

My ds absolutely refused to let me teach him to cook. But he is quite happy sneaking downstairs at night and letting the internet teach him.

This thread is really not very nice. The OP has simply shared her excitement at trying to do something which is making her happy and is actually worthy and IMO quite sensible given that we are likely to be plunging into deep recession.

OP we plant as many edibles as possible. Strawberries very quickly took off and we now have a whole raised bed full and lots overflowed into the flower beds too. A couple of decent plants was all it took and after a few years you end up with masses.

Rhubarb, asparagus and other long life edibles are a good bet. Both take a while to establish before you can eat them though and so you need to plant them quickly since you wont be eating fro them for a few years.

Likewise fruit trees. We planted six apples (mixture of cooking and eating) 18 months or so ago. I'm hoping for some fruit this year but it might be next year.

6-10 chickens will see you completely overrun with eggs and you'll get through feed at quite a rate too. We have five and struggle to use the eggs when they're laying every day (although I should really force the DC to have an egg for breakfast every morning). We freeze them though and they see us through the non laying period (bonfire night through to valentines day roughly). I'd suggest if youre doing this you need a couple of chest freezers.

We heat the house through a log gasification furnace and are largely self sufficient in wood. Its a lot of work though processing the wood.

You really need to start keeping everything. Even things like the bags out of cereal boxes can be reused and then finally put to work in the garden.

You will need a few water butts since your edibles will need a lot of watering and a decent composting system.

The truth is that a lot of local shops are substantially more expensive than the supermarket or online. I would like to support them rather than big business, but why would I pay twice as much for a book? Or a lot more for fresh fruit and veg if I can walk a few minutes down the road and get it cheaper? If I had lots of disposable income then sure, but nah.

If you are wanting to extend the growing season a polytunnel is really useful. I have now set mine up with a huge box which I fill with horse manure to use instead of a heated propagator. Gives my seeds a real boost.

OP maybe pop over to the Preppers board. There is a lovely homesteader thread which I think you would enjoy. We have a small holding with a small herd of sheep, some chickens and lots of fruit trees, but due to work and children have only just got round to properly establishing a kitchen garden, we are loving it.

I think it is far more important to act as a country to take back production and reduce globalisation and outsourcing of production to other countries. Covid has exposed the dire weakness of long supply lines and just-in-time ordering.

So self sufficiency, yes, but as a country - at least, much more than now. This would also lead to a better supply of real jobs with decent wages rather than a reliance on the gig economy.

Growing your own produce is great if you can, but small beer relative to the wider picture.

@Rumboogie totally agree.

We have an allotment and we love it! However it's an expensive hobby when you tot it all up. We could realistically buy a boatload of fruit/veg for the outlay we actually spend vs time/quantity produced. We also make chutneys, jams, pickles, but then there's the intial cost of the jars and electric used to boil up jams/boil down pickles. Polytunnels cost an arm and a leg even if you build your own with scraps, and don't even mention greenhouses. Then if there's a storm 🙄 We enjoy it and budget for it vs going to the gym or eating out much. But if we had no surplus money it'd have to go realistically. We would also like chickens but that's currently beyond our means as I'd class that a 'real luxury' in terms of upkeep vs actual output. And I've a strong suspicion the old hens wouldn't make it to the cooking pot once we became 'friends'.

I’m pondering moving to another planet and starting afresh.
Anyone else?

Also adding our allotment plot was established during WW2 and has a clause for rearing rabbits as foodstock. I've noted plenty of chickens, but mass produced rabbits for eating appear to be thin on the ground 😁

I think it’s a pretty basic concept. Hence why home ownership appeals vs renting. Similar to saving money. Deep down I think everyone hopes to be somewhat self sufficient. Otherwise we’d live with our parents and not toilet train.
Those who can afford might place higher value on garden space in the years to come.

But to be honest garden space doesn't mean jack if it turns out you have heavy clay soil, crappy drainage, or you don't get the sun 😒 You could have all the space in the world, but if you can't even sprout a respectable weed you're on a hiding to nothing. We have the dreaded horsetail at our allotment and yes we could nuke it (probably with an atom bomb), but the constant digging, weeding, frowning at it doesn't really do much than keep it at bay. We probably spend as much time removing it as we actually spend growing frickin vegetables (plus you can't tip it, dig it over, composte it, allow the wind to spread it 🙄).

And all this talk about everybody living off small farms, if brought into reality, will mean nothing but malnutrition and hunger for the majority of people. Small farms where everyone produces just for themselves are inefficient. There is no efficient utilisation of machinery and infrastructure, no specialisation, no sharing of skills that require specialised education. This mean more expensive food and a restricted food supply for the majority

Yup. I’m only a generation from the land, so to speak. Everyone used to be subsistence farmers from there; it was a fairly brutal way to live and everyone was grateful when factories started opening up. Now just two families have big agribusinesses and everyone has pretty much abandoned the old way of life.

My grandparents remember this time of life being difficult and full of deprivation. Starvation was also the wolf at the door, if your crops failed, you couldn’t get the basic necessities for lack of money.

Being self-sufficient is great when you have a rich society that can back you up. But in the self-sufficiency of old, you failed you starved.

( and yes, obviously not originally from the UK where people managed to get off the land much earlier)

This is not to dash your dreams, it’s a nice hobby for your mental and physical health. But it’s not the social change we need for the rest of us.

@Lalala205 I think you paint quite a jaundiced view of allotmenting

While I recognise a lot of what you say in terms of the challenges we face many of those challenges can be overcome in time.

We too have a big horsetail problem on our new orchard plot but have plans to deal with it (glyphosate mixed with a bit of washing up liquid).

Heavy clay soil benefits from having a lot of organic matter dug in but we are lazy so pile it up on beds and let the worms do the heavy lifting.

Our polytunnel is of the cheaper type and is now in its fourth year. The greenhouse must be 10 years old if not older and still going strong.

We are fortunate to be on an allotment and smallholding field. This means that some of the plots are effectively small businesses as we are allowed to sell our crops. One plot near me supplies a veg box business, there is also a small pig farm.

Hens break even (I costed them up once) in little more than a year if you eat eggs regularly and are prepared to eat the non layers.

There can be capital outlay for having an allotment but what I see on my field is a lot of reusing, recycling, re purposing. We are an elephants graveyard where old swings, climbing frames and bits of old scaffolding go to finish their days as supports for netting and beans.

The biggest expense in allotmenting is time but that is my own.

I doubt the Spanish or the Italians will be up to growing their usual tons of salad and veg this year so I’ve spent lockdown growing salad leaves, tomatoes, chillis, courgettes, cucumbers,French & broad beans, spring onions, leeks....
If I’m redundant the reduced costs will help. I’ve grown enough for swaps for eggs with a neighbour. And I’ve rehashed an old business idea just in case.
But no, I won’t be taking on an allotment or making my own soap. My efforts are against boredom, stress and higher prices this summer, not because I want to be Barbara Goode.

My brother had an allotment. It had beautifully maintained vegetable beds. He had chickens and ducks. Most he had raised from eggs using incubators.
But he would regularly get thieves in the night. Stealing his veg, tools and chickens. He was camping out there for a while to protect his birds. He gave it all up in the end, it was far to heart breaking.

I have a garden and grow what I can. We get eggs from a local lady. I am fairly frugal. I mend my own clothes. I love darning and sewing. It's a skill worth learning. I used to mend friends clothes on the side. I did this while watching tv. It's amazing how many people can't sew on button. Just a few pounds here and there I didn't spend any of the money. At the end of the year I counted out what was in my tin and I had over £800. If I had advertised my skill I could have made loads more. I just didn't have the time. Before I throw any clothes away I save the buttons and cut off any fabric pieces that may be useful. Saving me alot of money buying fabric and buttons. Someone up thread was talking about how expensive thread is. I have brought loads of thread from charity shops/car boots. Bags full of reels for a couple of pounds.

I think self suffiency is a pipe dream. A lovely idea. But alot if us would be going hungery.

I think it is inevitable that we in the UK will see a shortage of the fruit and veg which normally come in from the continent. Just as examples we import around 80% of our tomatoes and 70% of our apples.

Thinking locally, every pack of tomatoes or bag of apples home grown leaves a pack or bag on the supermarket shelf for my neighbour to buy.

letsgetplanning wrote about becoming as self sufficient as possible. What is possible is different from person to person. For some possible might mean going full off-grid, compost toilets, harvesting rainwater for drinking etc. For others it might mean repairing things rather than binning and replacing when broken.

For letsgetplanning possible is somewhere inbetween those two.

For me self-sufficiency is an attitude of mind. Can I make it, do it, cope with it with the resources I have to hand rather than automatically thinking 'buy it'.

We've got a decent garden (about a third of an acre) and DH has been growing for past 3 years so we do end up with great home grown produce for some of the year, though not all.

We are going to see a house on Friday with 2.5 acres but we would need to completely gut and extend the house and a bit scared of putting ours on market given what is currently occurring. That said, we wanted to move this year or early next anyway so just wondering whether to go for it.

If we had a house with that much land we would grow a lot more and probably get chickens, goats and some pigs as would be nice to move towards some form of self sufficiency and also give DC the experience of growing up with and caring for animals which is a great lesson in responsibility for them. MIL bought us a chicken coop for a wedding present and not used it yet so needs to be used!

We'd also love an orchard. Currently we have 3 pear trees and 1 apple, 1 fig and a raspberry. We also grow strawberries and watermelon. But would be great to have a separate area where we could properly grow fruit as DC loves fruit.

I'd also like a horse and maybe one for DC's to share as I had a horse when I was little - but we would need the 2.5 acre or similar property for that.

Ideally we'd love to move to France but are not brave enough to just think sod it and go!

I think @Lalala205's view of allotmenting is actually the realistic view. It's bloody hard work, especially if you get an overgrown plot at the start. I personally won't use chemical weed killers on my plots, so just have to dig / hoe (depending on location) the rampant horsetail. I also have creeping buttercup, bindweed and nettles which I battle daily!

It's great exercise and brilliant growing as much as possible, but anybody thinking it's a bit of a jaunt to grow your own is deluded.

Oh, and proper polytunnels ARE bloody expensive, that is also a fact.

If you just look at the seed cost, yeah, it's cheaper than buying, but compost isn't free and it's a big time investment too.

I think I love you Gnome. Growing your own cake is genius.

I used to grow a bit of veg but been busy the last few years and use my time on my flowers. We are still self sufficient in rhubarb, gooseberries, raspberries, strawberries, artichokes, asparagus and loads of herbs, basically with very little effort.

This year I'm growing salad leaves, tomatoes, peppers and chillis. I think there may be shortages. I might try some beans if I'm not too late.

We moved a year ago, and are so glad we did. We rent a holiday cottage in our garden (obviously not at the moment!) We are in the process of having a shepherds hut built to rent out so we will be financially independent.

We grow our own vegetables as much as we can. We use local shops and the local organic butcher and Baker. I love it!

I am very aware of how privileged we are to be able to do this though. I feel so desperately sad that our society is the way it is- so many working in minimum wage jobs while I swan about planting my carrots.

I've worked really hard my whole life in a job I didn't really love, I'm an old bastard so I had a lot of equity in my house to enable me to do this. I'm also aware of how precarious this all is. I've got a big mortgage which was easily covered by the holiday rentals which of course are non existent. However, my previous job literally doesn't exist at the moment and wont for a long while. So I think that Covid would have fucked me over either way. I would rather be here, or is a luxury and I am grateful.

I am SO thankful for the government help without which I would be up shit creek!

Not using weedkiller is a choice you are making so not an essential part of allotmenting. We use weedkiller, sparingly but we use it. That's the choice we are making.

Expensive is a personal perspective. Our 6m*3m polytunnel cost £250. It is of the cheaper sort but we sited it carefully, made sure it was well dug in and put a wind break next to it. It is now in its 4th year.

Certainly growing fruit & veg is not light work especially when you have new ground to turn around from being a weed covered never cultivated mess. However, even in this situation we have learned techniques which make this easier and less back breaking.