What was the deciding factor(s) to become SS?

[CrealCritter]

I think it would be good to talk about what were the deciding factor that caused you to become self sufficient. Maybe you've always been self sufficient and can share some golden nuggets with use newbies like me.

My way to and I raised our family in small towns we both can not stand cities. The last small town we live in, in NC had a population of 300 I think that included dogs and cats though. This was your typical NC small town. The house was 3500 sq ft built in 1899 and had all the old woodwork, all ceilings and a small coal fire place in every room. I rewired the entire house, redid some of the rooms that still had lath and plaster and installed a centeral heat and air gas pack, duct and the whole 9 yards.

When our kids starting moving out. We had this huge house for two of us. Then the town passed an ordinance of no livestock in city limits (did you know chickens are livestock?). Then the town came in and condemned my well, rendered it inoperberable and hooked us up to city water that we could not drink and charged us by the gallon that we consumed monthly. The city water was bad and we had to buy bottled water to drink. My well water was good tasting and I had it tested - it was good and clean. Then the Mayor who live just two houses up the street started complaining about me running my sawmill out back of my house. The city then passed an ordinance about running sawmills, chainsaws and heavy equipment within city limits and threatened to fine me $2000.00 if I started up my sawmilling again. Needless to say I had enough...

Shortly after the sawmill ordance passed. A wind storm rolled through and knocked over lots of trees in town. I got a call from the Mayor asking me to cut up trees that fell in town to help the town clean up after the storm. I laughed at her and said "why so you can fine me $2000.00? You guys are absolutely crazy. When your the one that needs work it's ok but when I want to work to make a little money it's not ok." Then I basically told her to go F... herself. Mayor or not I don't care who it is - I speak my mind and her and the board pissed me off with their sawmill ordance.

My wife and I just decided that there are too many rules and grew tired of having someone else telling us what we can or can't do... So we moved to the country in southern IL and never looked back. Only regret is we didn't move a lot sooner.

So what's your story? Why did you decide to become self sufficient?

 

[Beekissed]

My folks wanted to become more independent of the grid back in the late 70s, so moved us to a 110 acre piece of land that had been a small farm 75 yrs previously but had no standing structures or fences except one tiny log outbuilding by the time we got there. Dad had spent every penny on the purchase of the land, so we started clearing it and building a simple 2 room log cabin with hand tools alone. That cabin still stands strong this day, as does the one we built a few years after that.

The road back from the hardtop was not passable with vehicles back then, even 4x4s, so everything had to be walked in for almost a mile.

We lived back there, no running water or electricity for 12 yrs...then they finally had electricity run, but still no running water. No solar power, no hydro, etc. Just wood heat, propane refrigeration, water toted from a spring at first, then a well.

I was 10 when that all started, so it left a profound mark on me for the rest of my life. I was working harder than I had ever worked before, walking further to catch the bus and doing without many things I had always taken for granted~like a hot bath in a tub, flush toilets, heat that comes on when you turn a thermostat, water coming from a spigot when you turn a handle, lights that come on when you flip a switch. It was strange but also a little wonderful, though very hard and uncomfortable at times.

Here's a pic of Mom sitting next to that first cabin, built in 3 wks time. We all lived in that small cabin~parents and 5 kids still left at home and older kids coming back to live at home~ for the next 6 yrs until the larger cabin was built. Then I and my brother continued to sleep there a few more years, after other siblings had went to college and the military, and Mom and Dad lived in the larger cabin.

This cabin had thick cardboard flooring over the rough cut boards underneath. Yes, we lived on a cardboard floor. Slept on log built beds, all in the larger room. The lean to portion held a huge wood cookstove on one end and the rest of the kitchen on the other....that wood stove is where Mom did all the canning each summer. Thousands of jars canned each summer over the heat of that stove.

This next pic shows the land some years later after we had built the larger log cabin...you can see the edge of the smaller cabin in the right side of the pic. By then we had cleared the land to a smoothness~it was filled with multiflora rose, junk cars and thousands of old tires when we arrived there...and those were filled with bees, snakes and other filth.

All that was built with a chainsaw and hand tools, no power equipment was used. Six acres mowed with push mowers. Dad finally got an old '48 Case tractor for the brush hogging of the outer fields and paths, but he expected the place to look like a golf course at all times, so lots of use of mowers, weed wackers, sickles and such all through the growing months.

I liked that we could grow big gardens and have our own livestock, hunt for food off the land, etc. and preserve it all in our cellar. It was like having your own grocery store out back. When they called off school due to snows or power outages, we weren't really affected all that much...we used kerosene lamps, heated with wood and had our food stored out back.

My grandma had a farm and she had a magical cellar also, so even as a youngster I grew to appreciate that a person could do some hard work and have something others didn't have(by that time WV was JUST getting power and running water up in all the hollers and no way were people wanting to go BACK to living without it...grandma was still on a party line phone system even.)

I was the only kid out of 9 who grew to love that homesteading kind of living. I won't call it self sufficiency, as I feel there is really no such thing and we are all dependent upon God and also upon one another, so it's a misnomer. No one is sufficient unto themselves.

Since then I've tried to live a more sustainable kind of existence, trying to produce food of my own wherever I live, trying to decrease dependence upon the utility grid, etc. After moving all around, I find myself back on that same land(the folks retained 20 acres of it when they sold the place) and I can see that original small cabin from this place...gets more cute with each passing year. I live with my mother so she can continue to live where and how she likes to live, here in another log cabin build, back in the holler still, and close to the land.

We still grow a garden, though a lot smaller than the grand ones we used to put in each year, still forage for food off the land, still preserve most of our foods in a jar, still make our own breads by hand, heat with wood using the same barrel stove kit we purchased back in the 70s, still use an outhouse when necessary, still raise some animals for food, and still have the knowledge that we could go back off grid in a heartbeat and with very little stress on our own sensibilities. We've been there, we've done that and we got that T shirt good and dirty...and we could go back in a heart beat.

Mom, at the age of 80, still up on roofs doing the patching and maintaining.

So...here I am and that's my story. That's our story, my family's move off grid, to living off the land and how it shaped who I am today. To this day, each and every time I turn on the water to take a shower, I thank God for it...for that pure, good water coming from the ease of turning a handle.

 

[Chic Rustler]

I don't know a darn thing about it. It's just a dream. To live back in the woods far from others in a cabin I built with an axe and saw and never come back.


For now I push it as far as the wife will let me. Which means we play homesteader and try to learn the old ways.....enough to keep me sane anyway.


I think the only real way to learn to swim is to jump in. One day.....

 

[tortoise]

I've always been inclined toward SS, even as a child. My first husband was not, and I didn't trust him with power tools or animals, so it was well enough. I learned how *not* to garden in those years. After divorce, I promptly acquired chickens, rabbits, and a baby goat, and I was living in a city. I moved in with my then-boyfriend-now-DH and had to rehome the chickens, goat and 2 of my dogs. Rabbits and one dog came with. He lived in a small city in a rural area. He was house shopping when we were dating. The first house we looked at together was a condo in a ritzy lakeside community. (If he bought the house I was going to break up with him! ). He was looking at lake homes, but I kept saying I wanted something agricultural.

[backstory: He had grown up agricultural (and moved a lot as a military family), and his dad raised beef cattle. My parents had a dairy farm but moved to a city when I was two. I'd visited their friend's dairy farm, but never donw farm chores.]

He looks at me with this longsuffering "you are an idiot" look and says that it would be a "lifestyle change". I looked around and thought of our current lifestyle. He got home from work, we watched TV all afternoon and evening, sometimes into late night and ate frozen pizza and doritos most the time. THAT WAS THE MOMENT. "[Lifestyle change] is exactly what I want!" I replied.

We didn't find our farm for a couple years after that. My health restricts how involved I can be with farm chores, but I like the lifestyle. I love the quiet. I love having tame livestock. I love that my kids can play outside with little supervision. I love the panoramic view.

 

[NH Homesteader]

Well I grew up in "the country", but not being SS. I was very much a consumer my whole life, enjoyed farm animals but more because they were cute than anything else.

When I was in college a friend shared with me some horrific videos and articles about the meat-packing industry. I became an immediate vegetarian. Six months later I had to start eating meat again after my iron levels crashed and I passed out, on several occasions in random places. So, not knowing there was another way, I resigned myself to eating grocery store meat again.

When my now-husband and I started dating, he had bees and we started a small garden. By the time we got married and had our daughter, we got a few chickens for eggs. Then I discovered Joel Salatin and Food Inc, and the other well known movies, books, etc about raising your own food... And fell down the rabbit hole.

It's been a progression for sure. My husband grew up on a horse farm but raised some meat animals and always hunted. This was all new to me. Now I can't stand the thought of buying meat and can't wait to be dairy independent(next year if all works out). And we've branched out into non-food SS skills as well. It is fun learning new things all the time, can also be incredibly exhausting and disappointing and frustrating but it makes you appreciate what you have, and the lives you are responsible for. My freezer is full (like, couldn't fit another package in there) of meat that I raised and saw enjoying life every day. My daughter knows what she is eating and thanks the pigs when my husband butchers them. I can pronounce the ingredients in my food.

Since we've been living this lifestyle I notice and embrace things I've never noticed before. You start to live by the seasons, respect mother nature (storms affect me a whole lot more than they used to!), and live according to forces outside yourself (goat heat cycles can really affect your plans for the day!)

I wouldn't raise my kids any other way.

 

[baymule]

My Daddy was the son of a sharecropper. They grew up poor, as a boy, Daddy chopped cotton for 10 cents a day. They grew a garden because if they didn't , the family wouldn't eat. He grew up much like Beekissed, no power, running water or telephone. As a grown man with a family he always raised a garden. My earliest memories are of toddling behind my Daddy in his garden. I absorbed his knowledge by helping him.

My Daddy was organic before organic was cool. When I grew up, there were times that I had a garden and times that I didn't. Sometimes I raised rabbits, quail, chickens. Even when I didn't have a garden, I bought peas, corn, okra and tomatoes and put them up. At various times, I set the table with food I either grew, hunted or fished. Sometimes the only thing store bought was the salt, pepper, tea and sugar.

Before we moved 3 years ago, we lived in a small town 75 miles north of Houston. We lived on a small city lot, just a few blocks from down town. I grew a garden in the front yard, in beds and managed to grow a lot of what we ate. I kept chickens in the back yard and we had fresh eggs and meat. My husband thought I was nuts when I first wanted a garden, but the first tomato made him a huge fan of the garden. He really thought I was off my rocker when I wanted chickens, but the first egg made a convert of him.

The catalyst that really moved us was hurricane Rita that hit Houston 3 weeks after hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans. Houston evacuated. It was a real eye opener to be in the path of thousands of people in a panic.

We moved 160 miles to be close to our daughter and her family, we bought 8 acres. We have a garden, chickens, sheep, ducks and raise feeder pigs. We live in a great neighborhood and share seed, raise group effort pigs, and help each other.

We wanted out of town and out of the Houston area. We wanted land where we could raise our own food. I have chemical sensitivities and I don't want poison on our food. I can, dehydrate and freeze what we grow. We are not self sufficient, we buy electricity, water, internet, satellite TV, fuel for the truck and car, plus many other things. If the economy crashed and those things weren't available or hyper inflation priced them out of reach, then at least we would be in better shape to support ourselves and make sure our daughter, her husband and our precious grand daughters didn't go hungry. In our community there are a few who hunt, a few who garden, and a general feeling of neighbors watching out for each other.

 

[Joel_BC]

My deciding factors were: wanting to live in the country, not wanting to work for cash at a “job” all of the time. Simple upshot: need to economize, budget, and acquire knowledge and skills.

See, my mother had grown up in a small town, and was the daughter of cattle ranchers who had moved into a town and set up a leather-tanning enterprise. My dad was raised on his uncle’s poultry ranch (but he wanted to escape that and see the big city). True, we always had relatives in the small towns and countryside. As a kid I liked making and fixing things. I learned how engines worked, some basics of electricity, how to mark and cut boards, and bits of this and that.

But my dad had wanted to be rid of the messy facets of country life and be clean at both ends of the day—and prosperous, if possible. But money was usually pretty tight. For me, having jobs from a fairly young age was encouraged. In my late teens, I got to know some people who lived out in the countryside, were friendly, and had interesting minds. I became convinced theirs was the kind of environment I wanted to live in.

But before it was possible, I got drawn into the money-earning possibilities of the city. I swerved into a job in an organic-foods store, and was able to rent a tiny, cheap country cottage. Part of my job was to truck produce from the farms to the place I worked. My cottage was on a small farm, and I learned gardening from books, from the farmer's wife, and trial & error. The farmers had me milking the Jersey too.

Then I found a valley in the eastern mountains where people were friendly and land prices very affordable, and I sunk everything into a piece of land. Took on various jobs for various stretches. I learned more about gardens and started keeping chickens. I learned carpentry, water systems, how to wire buildings for electricity, and more mechanics (basics of cars, trucks, small engines). I was married by this time, and had a daughter. We sold the original land and moved down the valley to a spot with better soil, better neighbors, and a shorter commute to off-land employment. While here, my practical skills increased and I learned basic metal-working, including welding.

So you get my drift… my shift into SS was a result of the fact that I never liked the hubub of the city, nor the cramped limitations of the suburbs. The city and modern suburb offer education opportunities, concert halls and movie theaters, big bookstores and libraries, shopping opportunities (tools and supplies, clothes, reconditioned cars) — but they also present many distractions and irritations. And nature and the sources of human sustenance can seem very remote in those places.

SS knowledge and skills save you money. In a lot of ways, the cities are more expensive settings. To me, the alternative is learning to raise and preserve food, learning to use tools, shopping for secondhand when you can, and all the things that we talk about here on SufficientSelf.

 

[Hinotori]

I'm just trying to live like grandma did. Well my great aunt still does to a degree, but her back prevents her from doing a lot of it now. My way of living is mostly just what everyone on mom's side has done as far back as remembered. Great grandma and grandpa came over from Switzerland back in the 1910s and met here and married. Great aunt has visited over there frequently and some still live that way. Like lots of my generation and younger, a lot now live in town.

My brothers live in town and both feel there is just to much work in taking care of animals and acreage.

 

[CrealCritter]

I don't know a darn thing about it. It's just a dream. To live back in the woods far from others in a cabin I built with an axe and saw and never come back.


For now I push it as far as the wife will let me. Which means we play homesteader and try to learn the old ways.....enough to keep me sane anyway.


I think the only real way to learn to swim is to jump in. One day.....

You so right... A wise man once told me. You want to learn to build a house? Then build a house. He also so said there is only one thing that will stop you dead in your tracks and that is fear! But I found that not to be completely true - a angry wife does the same for me.

 

[treerooted]

So, I haven't been sure how to answer this question.

I grew up in the suburbs, with parents who gardened and spent their free time out in the woods. I decided to go to university and I enrolled in an Environmental Studies program. So my general inclination for self sufficiency maybe comes from a 'live in harmony with "nature"' type thing, though that doesn't quite capture my outlook. I don't know when I decided I wanted to live in the country; maybe I always have.

Halfway through my university education I suffered from a bout of deep depression/anxiety/whatever it was and had to drop out. A couple months later I went to work on my uncles small farm and it was so incredibly restorative for me. I think perhaps with that experience I developed a more concrete desire to farm for myself. (I did finish and get my degree, as well as a post graduate technical course.)

So here I am, 65 acres, husband and son, no clue, but I hope 10 years from now I'll be able to share my knowledge with others as well.


*It helps as well that I have a partner who had 0 desirability to live in a city, so we've always had this shared vision of how we want to share and grow our lives together.