Sufficient Self Forum

  Even though you have been here a while.

Last edited by miss_thenorth (04/05/2011 3:38 pm)

  I see my daughter's cat has gone and visited somebody elses house again.  I keep thinking Dust Bunny is home, and all these people keep saying she's over there.

So yeah, more about me and my journey to self-sufficiency

As I've posted elsewhere, we have a 10-year plan to get out of the city and buy a piece of land in a more rural area that has much more temperate winters than we do here in southern Alberta.  We know where we want to go, and how we want to live there, we just need to pay off our mortgage and save up some in order to make the transition.  We also have two kids to get through high school and university (or at least well on their way through university so they/we don't have to pay room and board on top of tuition).

We plan for flocks (chickens, ducks, geese), bees (my hubbie has been fascinated since third grade when his teacher was a bee keeper and the class learned all about bees), and probably a goat or few.  I'd love to have sheep and pigs as well, but we're going to break into "farm" life slowly. 

My older daughter's third grade class incubated and raised 2 ducklings to the "quacks like a duck and has real feathers" stage before giving them back to the farm, and we took them home several weekends.  They were a handful but a lot of fun, and I'm also looking forward to eggs and chicken/duck/goose on the table, as well as down/feathers for featherbeds and pillows. My younger daughter actually has the touch with goats, her second grade class took a tour of a working farm and she got milk from a goat on her first try (and she got it all in the bucket!)

We're not getting away from it all to hide ourselves away from the world, or because we think bad things are coming--we do enjoy certain things about living in the city.  But we have been on a years long road of simplifying our life and getting more healthy (I have asthma and allergies) so have already got way more back to and older way of life than our neighbors will ever consider.

We live pretty frugally but we think comfortably.  I cook everything from scratch (although I do have a weakness for potato chips occasionally) and hubbie bakes really great bread.  I make yogurt and just got handed kefir grains last night so that is doing it's thing on the kitchen countertop.  We grow a garden every year, and buy most of our other food from the farmer's market and local bison/hog/chicken farmers.  I've recently fired up my Mom's old pressure canner and successfully canned beans and soup now, and I've been making jam and canning fruit for years.  I make soap and laundry soap and use natural cleaners (mostly vinegar and baking soda) and hang all of our laundry to dry.  I sew, although not as much as I did when my girls were younger, knit and crochet and I also quilt when the mood strikes me--I have a plan in my head and just need to save up a bit more to hit the fabric store! 

I strive to be like my Oma who pretty much never threw anything out and could re-purpose things to death.  This forum is very inspirational and everyone so helpful that I know I'll have even more skills by the time we get to our future country home.

hi!

Cool, sounds like she would blend in under my furniture sometimes

Couple of questions:

How do people edit the title of their journals?  ('Cause today I'd like it to say that I have some questions about kefir...)

The grain that I was given is huge, and I'm wondering if it needs to be split or something?  I received it in a pint jar but it's just about as wide as the jar and about as tall as it is wide, so when I used some and then added milk today I put it all in a quart jar to give it more room.  I also noticed that there is a separate piece, about the size of a teaspoon--is that big enough to give to someone else?

We had lovely smoothies made with it today though:  I don't measure when I make smoothies but about 2 cups of mixed frozen berries (raspberries, blueberries, blackberries), a banana, and about 2 cups of kefir plus a little splash of maple syrup because the kefir is more sour/different tasting than my home made yogurt and I made this for myself and my two girls after school to go with their after school snack.  Everyone agreed that it was very yummy