Becoming More Self Reliant - The Dream

Comment

Comment by Peter Niepel on April 24, 2013 at 6:48am

Yes Janine Williams, life would be so much easier if there wouldn't be so much .........nature.

Peter

Comment by Cally Brown on April 23, 2013 at 2:07pm

This is the first summer that we have not had to buy fruit and veggies. Though I admit that we did sometimes, for an occasional variation - never thought I'd crave broccoli buI've discovered it can happen! We've lived out of our garden: eggs, beans, courgettes, tomatoes, capsicum, silverbeet, nz spinach, potatoes, onions, garlic, sweetcorn, leeks, cucumber, herbs, peas, lettuce, apples, lemons, plums, peaches, feijoas, grapes, chestnuts, pears.... I've frozen, dried, made jelly, tomato sauce, 'sun'dried tomatoes, fruit-flavoured water kefir, lemon honey..... there's still pumpkins to harvest. The only disappointment has been my bees - they go very badly infested with varroa and took a long time to recover, so I'm leaving what honey they did collect on the hive as stores for them to use over winter. Hopefully next year will be a better year for them.  I feel that at last we are actually making a worthwhile dent in our reliance on outside sources for our food. We don't have milk of our own, but I do get lovely organic, raw milk locally. It's a wonderful feeling.

Comment by Janine Williams on April 23, 2013 at 12:51pm

Aren't rats horrible?  Shame about the cucumbers.  Your garden did well this year :-)  We just got rid of the wasp nest under the big tree root, they were little wasps the size of honey bees.  Now I see these huge bright yellow and black ones with long wings eating the fallen apples.  The wax-eyes peck holes in the apples then the wasps move in.  On the whole though, the self-sufficiency thing has been successful.

Comment by Melanie Banton on April 11, 2013 at 12:24pm

It's hard yakka for the first few years, but harvesting your own produce is wonderful.  So happy our bees had a good year, too :)  I haven't made much cheese this year as the drought kept milk production down.  Still harvesting spuds, pumpkin, beans & tomatoes, but the rats found the last of our huge cucumber crop.  Oh well...

Comment by Janine Williams on April 11, 2013 at 12:14pm

Harvest Time

Isn't this a great time of the year?  We are eating a lot of our own produce - potatoes, pumpkins, apples and pears, our own honey, meat...

I would like to encourage those starting out, that it's is very sweet when it starts working, it just takes a while.  We have been here almost nine years now.

And we just sold the calf and started milking again, yay!

Comment by Tom Reid on February 26, 2013 at 11:46am

Koha Healing Sound workshop This Saturday 10 am in Grey Lynn.

More details here: http://provennaturalremedies.info/sw.html

Cheers Tom 021 251 3058

Comment by Tom Reid on February 26, 2013 at 11:46am

I am looking for an Intentional community based on growing food, healing and working towards an alternative economy. Just a good bunch of live and let live people is the most important thing though.

Comment by Richard Grevers on April 10, 2012 at 10:55am

We are now half-moved from town to country, with our house on the market (and fingers crossed for offers this week). We've been very lucky to be able to rent an off-grid house across the road from our land - a winter of living on-site will most definitely inform our design decisions. So far we've spent a disproportionate amount of time keeping our water-line (and hence pelton wheel) running. We're also learning how to get a shacklock range hot enough to cook and heat water with wood.

 

Comment by Scott B on April 7, 2012 at 4:48pm

interesting peter.... tv is an easy way to disseminate informatiom and educate people, which is what the tv part is about.... creating a show on how to incorporate sustaninable practice into everyday living, weather that is really a tv programme or shows on youtube i think,

tv shows on overseas attempts on sustainability and its ease in every day life is what brought me here...

Comment by Laine on April 4, 2012 at 11:39am

I disagree! Ning is easy to join, log in, share photos, vidoes and keeps the focus within one site, rather than the broader FacreBook. Go ooooby!

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