I don't think we would ever be self sufficient but after DH lost his job and mine felt shaky for a while, we did start cutting back. Fresh veggies and fruits are more a way to treat ourselves than something to survive on. If we ever find a way to cook veggies so that I like them (I don't like the green bitter taste of most veggies), then we might be growing more of them. I am growing some tomatoes for DH this year, but I wont eat them unless they are cooked in a sauce of some kind. Many fruits require spraying, which I am not willing to do. I know blueberries require some kind of covering to protect them from the birds, and I have not figured out how to do that yet. I heard that birds can get tangled in netting and I'm not always there to free them. I have not been very successful with strawberries, but I am willing to try again next year.

Oh, and whenever I bring up the subject of keeping a few chickens, DH lets out a resounding NO!

I wonder how much electricity we could generate with a nice new windmill......

I've always had a veg garden, but I've always had lots of waste too. There's only me to feed and I can only eat so much fresh veggies when they start to come on full force. Unfortunately, I'm not one of those who enjoys canning or freezing - my mom did while I was growing up but I never wanted to learn. Sure would save money too. Oh, I'll can some green beans and I'll make tomato sauce to freeze and stuffed peppers, but that's about it. I give lots away, too.

So, take that into consideration when you put out a big garden - what to do with all that great produce before it goes bad. I've done just the opposite this year, scaled back. For one person, the local farmer's markets or Amish produce stands can provide me with fresh produce I don't raise.

Self-sufficiency is a good thing, but alot of work and dedication I would bet.

We are slowly moving towards a more self-sufficient lifestyle. Grocery stores frustrate me, there is so little in them I can and want to eat. We want to move slowly towards more self sufficiency but my hubby is not QUITE the yet. He talks, but is not quite ready to walk, so I am going slowly and working on my own skills.
My community is also working on community sufficiency. It's been wonderful. We had a community canning day at my house two weeks ago and people who didn't can even just lent us their pots! My friend will teach me cheese making. I traded her homemade organic jam from local and found fruits for her hen eggs.
I have been freezing a years full of veggies and we hardly bought a vegetable at all last year. We shop once a month, and I think the clerks thought we were nuts because there were not fruits, no vegetables, no bread, no meat!
Self-sufficiency is work however we are working towards a lifestyle which is more work in the home and less work out of the home. I'm there already. DH is working on a way to get there.

well sure we can produce our food to offset our grocery bill, but that's hardly called self-sufficiency. Self-sufficiency is an ideal that's hard to achieve in this modern society. For instance, here we all are relying on our computers to write about this stuff..

Sure, I would love to live off the grid, produce my own electricity, heat, cooking gas, conserve water, produce my own livestock for meat. But all I have to do is check out the washroom to convince me I will not survive self-sufficiency. Think about it. Can one live with cold water, no soap, no toothpaste, no toilet paper and a hole in the ground instead of a flush toilet. And I'd be too much of a softy to kill any of my livestocks. I might instead name every single one of the animals and knit them sweaters for winter. LOL...

So, I'm just satisfied with my homegrown tomatoes, grown in plastic tubs, in store bought 'organic' fertilizers. ;-)

Glynis I have nothing but admiration for what you're doing, if I was a little younger I'd be doing a lot more myself, for instance we no longer buy any jam, homemade tastes so much better and you know exactly what's in it. I freeze a few things and grow enough garlic to see us through most of the year. DH and I love beans so I grow a lot of these, and then I grow the warm weather stuff like cucs and tomatoes and am trying melons this year, I have some in the greenhouse and a couple of plants in a raised bed covered with plastic to keep the heat in. I think these might be a bust this year but we'll see the warm weather has finally arrived in my neck of the woods.

Annette

I think that self-sufficiency is something very important to think about. Let's face it - if we look back in history, only in the last couple hundred years have we been able to live lives where we don't have to produce all of our own food and goods.

I think everyone should be at least a little mentally prepared in case things go really bad one day. They probably won't, but you never know. I'm not going to any great lengths at the moment, but we did keep our old property with many acres of land as a backup. Also, I have some plans in my head of what to do in case society starts to breakdown and we need to supplement what we can get on a shopping trip with what we can make do with ourselves.

Most of us that visit this forum are lucky enough, I would think, to have the gardening skills necessary to become self sufficient if we NEEDED to.

Learning to can is certainly a good way to be prepared for whatever the future brings.

I know it sounds paranoid, but in the back of your mind, you should always be prepared on what you would do if society breaks down, if there's some plague, or a war or something. I don't think about it often, but I make sure myself and my loved ones will have a place to go and a way to survive if such things were to happen.

Learning to can is a great first step...maybe when I stop being lazy I'll have the old lady across the street teach me!!!!!!!

Over 30 years ago we had the idea of working toward increased self-sufficiency. However reality stepped in and we knew we wanted a different standard of living for ourselves and our children. We did get to the point where we raised our own beef and lamb and also sold meat. Yes, it was difficult to send our 'pets' off to the slaughterhouse after naming them, but unless one wants to be a vegetarian that's another reality to face. We also had chickens for eggs altho they were not good eating birds but made good dog food.

Being self-sufficient is a huge amount of work and even the 'little' we did tied us down more than we ever thot possible.

We did plant lots and lots of garlic last fall as some years it's been difficult to get good organic garlic and the prices can be very high.

While I could be as paranoid as anyone I do not believe that civilization will end in our time altho there are always natural disasters that affect many. It's good to have some knowledge and abilities which might be useful but IMO the likelihood of needing to grow all my own food is pretty remote. I know Edgar Cayce did predict problems with the food supply in North America but it hasn't *yet* come to pass. I *could* learn which wild plants are good to eat and we have a lot of deer on our land so we probably wouldn't starve.

We're currently in the process of selling our house so that we can move to a small acreage and become self-sufficient. I will plan a new cottage garden but the rest of the acreage will be for self-sufficiency.

Grocery store food is starting to really gross me out. The meat has become flavourless. The produce has always been flavourless in addition to rotting within days of purchase.

We hope to produce all our own meat, dairy and fruit/veg. And someday we hope to also get off grid.

I'm slightly curious about the ages of the people who wrote on this thread. I only lurk here occasionally, but this post caught my attention.One of my grandaughters who is 30, and bought a new house last fall, no not new, just an older house. She is ecstatic about growing veges and fruit. For once we have something in common. She is also learning to sew. That does make me smile!! Yes, I'm an old timer, but have always felt that we should be as self suffient as possible. There are entirely too many kids now days who know nothing about this at all. TV, video games, I-pods-texting are their whole lives. How pitiful. How did we ever get to this stage in the greatest country in the world?

Ianna, I'm still chuckling about knitting sweaters for the livestock. I would be in the same boat.

I love the idea of self-sufficiency. I go to the grocery store and am horrified as the prices go up and up and up. I've looked into solar, wind and geothermal power options. However, I always end up caving to the idea of what's practical rather than optimal.

I am growing veggies and herbs, but considering what I spent to build my potager I'll probably never break even let alone achieve any cost savings. It does feel really good to produce some food, though. I'd love to keep a couple of laying hens, but I live in town.

As much as moving to a larger property can seem appealing at times, I'm a single woman and taking care of this small space is about all I want to handle. When the rubber meets the road, I am really a creature of comfort, too. I've had my air conditioning running nearly non-stop through this horrific heat wave. I've still been a little cranky.

Bottom line for me--I adore the idea, but the reality is a different story. Simple case in point, I read about Annette growing enough garlic for a year. My first reaction is that I should do that. My second thought is that the produce stand down the street sells a quart-sized bag, fully peeled for $1. Maybe I'm just too lazy to be self-sufficient. LOL.

Lisa

I think it is wonderful for people to understand how to grow their own food and cook and sew and do many of the home tasks that are no longer necessary for us to do today unless we want/need to do them. Being self sufficient, while sounding wonderful and romatic is NOT something I would want to HAVE to do. I am very grateful for all the hard work of my ancestors and happy I have a choice in the matter. The "Good Old Days" sound happy and fun but were filled with backbreaking labor and heartache for anyone who had a health problem and I say halleluia for all the wonderful medical breakthroughs we have at our disposal. In doing genealogy I find every family with a long list of children who never lived into adulthood and I would NEVER want to go back in time.
Joann

There are different degrees of self-sufficiency and while I hope to never have to do everything myself, it is nice to have the knowledge and skills to be ABLE to do more for youself, if necessary.

My grandmother grew up during the Depression and insisted we all know how to sew, cook, bake, garden, etc. I may never be a seamstress, but she was more concerned that we be able to take apart an old coat and cut it down and redo it for a smaller size. Her attitude was what people now call "green" because she was always recycling and reusing things :)

While I know how to grow vegetables, I don't know that I would want to grow ALL my own vegetables to last an entire year...unless I had to for some reason. Then, I might even try canning. It was the one thing my grandmother did not teach us, because she had such bad memories of doing it in the heat and humidity of Illinois summers. She did love the freezer! LOL

Very interesting responses and I think recent economic times and terrorist attacks (although we all hope to never see another one) have made many people think about being more self sufficient.

Ianna- I don't eat red meat, but I don't like to knit either (although the same grandmother taught me the basics). Maybe I could crochet a scarf :)

I just have to comment about the garlic - yes it's possible to buy garlic cheap but the cheap stuff is usually grown off-shore with questionable methods of fertilizing. If you can get cheap garlic grown in the US that's great. We are trying to only buy food items grown/prepared in Canada or the US where there are health standards. This is becoming increasingly more difficult and I highly recommend reading labels. For several years we bought garlic grown in our own province or in California but there is such a demand that prices have gone as high as $20 a pound for the local bulbs. Since we love garlic and use quite a bit we decided to try growing our own and planted over 100 cloves last fall. Harvest will be in a few weeks and I'm really curious to find out what we have. The tops look really good but I don't know how large the bulbs are.

For those who don't want to eat their pets I wonder if you are vegetarian - if not you may be eating someone else's pet! We always said we gave them the best life any livestock ever had but their purpose is food. I do eat less meat now which started when we were raising our own.

I definitely concur with what others have said about how difficult trying to be self-sufficient is. It's really a lot of very hard work, sometimes little sleep, lots of pain (both physical and emotional), and there is little profit in it. However, I think it is an experience everyone who has an interest in trying should have and there are moments of great satisfaction. If we had kept it smaller it might have been easier. And we did raise the best tasting meat I've ever eaten.

Luckygal- Good point about the garlic. That's why I'm growing more fruit...I just don't trust how safe some of this imported fruit may be, not to mention all the pesticides...YUCK!

Anyone know of some nice/tasty purple grapes that do well in zone 4?

Always in the back of my mind is what if..... what if everything falls apart, anyone who thinks this could never happen has got their heads stuck in the sand. Look at all the manmade and natural disasters that have happened in recent years. Condos now stand on what was once rich farmland, farmland sold because farmers couldn't compete with the lower cost of imported produce.

I've been around longer than most of you, I don't have memories of the dirty thirties, but I do remember the war years that followed, ration books were a reality, those were very tough years for many. People who had veggie gardens, kept chickens didn't have it made but they were better off than most.

Even if you don't grow your own veggies you should know how to, even if you don't can and preserve you should know how to. Remember if the lights go out, there goes the freezer. Don't throw away your mother's canning jars, what if you can't find any to buy, or don't have the money to buy them.

None of us can predict what lies ahead of us, it's better to have a plan and hope to .... you never have to use it.
While I'm on a roll, those that do veggie garden should be saving their own open pollinated seed, over the years saving and planting your own seed will give you better harvests as these have adapted to your growing conditions. An example the bean seed I've been keeping since 65 is growing gangbusters where other varieties are struggling because of the weather we've had this year.

Sorry to be such a wet blanket, but there are so many what ifs, no longer what ifs, they have become realities. Nobody want to go back to THAT time, but there could come a time when we don't have a choice.

So take classes, learn how, even if you don't put what you learn to use now, the know how is stored in the old memory bank :).

Please buy local whenever you can, keep these people in business, we might have to rely on them heavily in the future.

Annette

I have thought about these things a lot. What if something does fall apart. I mean it has for DH and I before - two weeks without electric after a winter storm. Our neighborhood is a "forgotten" area of Atlanta, and they basically forgot to turn us back on. Luckily we had gas.
We do not have a fireplace. Maybe someday we'll a wood fireplace but for now we do not indoors. It's easier to build one outside ourselves, then we can cook. Our stove is gas, if we had no gas? I'm building an outdoor oven and a sun oven. I already have some manual kitchen appliances that I like - and appliances that others have always had, (like a sturdy mixer) I've never had - I've always used a wooden spoon!! In the next few years as solar and other small home energy sciences improve, we will begin to employ solar and other technologies. Some tied into the grid, some not and also possibly some back up technology (which we can use for other purposes as well, because I'm not about to go all Y2K and buy a bunch of useless stuff we won't ever need for any other reason...). We already have water collection and will eventually be doing more water reclamation water recycling and even more. The "more" is for the future. Maybe we will decide that some of those projects are too much as we get older, maybe we will tackle them...it's the skill and know how I would like to have. It sure doesn't hurt!

LOL -- I know. It's ridiculous. I can't kill a living thing. Heck I even gave CPR to a fish (okay, it was a betta fish that jumped out of its bowl and it's an airbreather). Yet, I'm not a vegetarian..Love my meat. Oh the contradictions...

I wanted to expose my very modern living friends to the country. Let's rent a cottage by the lake I said so we can enjoy nature. Well, we ended rented one with aircondition, a pool and a hottub. I was thinking more along the line of a more rustic cabin - a lazy walk to the lake, canoing around..Well I had to go along with their preferences. It was just a funny experience. These are folks who will never feel right in such environments.

Next summer, I just plan to take my daughter & husband and do a canoe adventure along the Algonquin. I'll have to get a guide of course.

You don't need a ton of land to be more self sufficient. Even on a teeny city lot you can grow something.

The family over at Path to Freedom does it on less than 1/5th of an acre.

Our current property is a teeny bit bigger than that and it was our plan to convert the entire back yard to food crops. The weather here and the fact that we can't have farm animals in the city (not even chickens) was the main factor in our moving to the country.

I'm 29 with two kids and a third on the way 0and there is definitely a growing trend towards self sufficiency amongst my age group.

Here is a link that might be useful: Path To Freedom

jenangelca, I love Path to Freedom too. I met them originally through this forum, way back around when they started their blog. I am not converting our entire lot to food crops (because my lot is much bigger than theirs!!!) but much of it will be food crops, herbs and useful things. We will be able to grow more fruit because of our space.

I'm 30.
I'm an relatively adept seamstress and a newbie gardener. But I have a lot of hobbies and a demanding fulltime job. I know the amount of work it would take to grow a significant amount of food in my yard wouldn't be worth it to me.

I also know that when the zombie apocalypse comes (he he), I'm very clumsy, can only barely shoot a gun, don't know a martial art, don't know which plants are poisonous and can't make fire.
I do have a disaster kit in my car, though and I've been told I "hit hard".

I don't see how it would be possible without a good income on the side, or a partner that has a steady job. Unless you could make a big enough profit off your labors to pay for essentials. However, I do have a friend who has adopted the "barter" system. He's a carpenter and doesn't charge for a job, but takes other services in exchange. Now I do know that he once owned rental properties and sold them; so he probably has a good chunk of change in the bank (or mattress?) to fall back on. That would make alot of difference as to whether you stayed awake at night worrying about the bills.

A fruit orchard is alot of work, pruning and spraying (if you want good fruit) and that is time consuming.

I agree with a lot of the posters, in varying degrees, lol. We have gradually added quite a bit to our veggie and fruit garden, but it definitely isn't enough to truly feed us. Esp when you consider that so far the kids don't eat much out of it - dd will eat some lettuce, but that's about it. I used to can jam & preserves with one of my friends, but she had all the equipment, so I would need to get everything, including the nice little book of instructions. It's nice to have fresh veggies to supplement, but we also buy stuff at the store. Oh, and I'm 40, fwiw.

One show on self-sufficiency that I really enjoyed was part of the "Going Green" BBC television series. It was about Dick and Brigit Strawbridge who bought an old stone house in Cornwall and along with their grown sons (and daughter?) they began a quest for self-sufficiency, using green methods. I tried to find episodes online, but they are unavailable. Maybe the library would have them? I'm sure they are for sale on Amazon. If you do a Google search of their name, you'll find information about the family.

I was sad when the series came to an end. Some things like the solar energy installations and wind turbine, waterwheel ect. would still have cost a pretty penny; but probably paid for themselves over time. You would still have to have funds available for those or borrow from a bank.

My husband and I tried to be as self-sufficient as we could when we started out 30 years ago. His then 99 year old grandmother gave us all her old canning jars and canning pot and told us what to do. We haven't bought applesauce or jam for all these years. We spent many August days canning our own tomatoes and homegrown vegetables. Now we mostly freeze everything, I just got tired of all the work involved in canning, (especially in a house with no a/c) now we have dozens of cases of canning jars in the basement.

Last year we replaced our old Food Saver System with a new one that vacuum seals. We really like that. We have always preserved our own vegetables, made homemade breads and pastas and have even made wine and beer, just haven't mastered cheese yet.

We like to think we are more self-sufficient than most, but we never raised livestock for food, only as pets.

My daughter and her boyfriend are giving serious thought to moving to a place where they could be off the grid, they have learned the basics of preservation from us and he was raised on a farm. We'll see how that goes, but my guess is that they will miss the little luxuries of life and being around family.

If I were younger, I might try it though, knowing what I know now about the nation's food supply.

Carol

When you say 'going off the grid' do you mean not buying power, or getting away from cell phone towers? I've heard both used at different times.

I like electricity, but would like to eventually remodel the old farmhouse, which has a great fireplace in the living room (heats that whole half of the house) and put a woodstove in the kitchen. Heat and a place to cook, when the power goes out in the winter :)

Has anyone read Animal, Mineral, Miracle (I think I have this right) but I found it tremendously thought provoking about trying to live self sustaining.

We do a lot of things in the right direction - I always have believed in just reveling in what is wonderful at the moment and we eat a lot of vegetable garden primary meals like salads in the spring, sweet corn, then tomato only meals in the summer. Well to be honest we add a loaf of good bread and a nice chianti...

But it does appeal to me and I rather yearn to try it - all of it is a huge amount of work, but I think there are huge steps in the right direction we can take without giving up coffee and chocolate. :)

Correction it is is Animal Vegetable Miracle - LOL I should have remembered, by Barbara Kingsolver.

Here is a link that might be useful: Animal Vegetable Miracle

"When you say 'going off the grid' do you mean not buying power, or getting away from cell phone towers? I've heard both used at different times."

I have never heard of that in reference to cell towers. It is primarily getting of the electrical grid but can also refer to city water, natural gas etc.

The house we are buying has a drilled well and a septic system. It has hydro and an oil tank. We want to upgrade the tiny woodstove to one that'll heat the entire house and get rid of the oil tank. Then we can buy a woodlot to provide firewood for heat. It'll just be the hydro left to deal with. Solar/wind is expensive so it'll be slow going getting off grid. I'll be keeping our phone and internet. We don't have a cell phone.

My grandmother raised most of her food. She canned and so had food for winter as well. My mother never canned in her adult life.

As things go, I being from the next generation, and not having had to help a lot in canning as a teen, had an interest in canning when I became an adult.

My MIL gave me her pressure canner many years ago. I have used it to can everything from vegetable soup to beef stew. I rarely use the pressure canner anymore. DH is not into gardening, so I grow only tomatoes, lettuce, cucumbers, peppers, herbs, and blueberries...lots of blueberries and figs.

I am determined to have a little bigger garden next year. I am so fortunate that I have neighbors who have shared their squash, corn, okra and beans this year.

I can jams and jellies, and pickles and pepper sauce, tomatoes, and sometimes (if I have plenty of tomatoes) salsa. In fact, today I canned tomatoes and blueberry jam, and I love to can the easy things like that. There is no feeling like hearing the little pop! pop! pop! and counting to make sure all of your jars have sealed. You feel as if you have really made something.

If you would like to make jams, jellies, and pickles and/or can tomatoes, you can, without using a pressure canner. You need only a tall pot and boiling water. (and the jars, of course.) Buy the Bell Blue book. It is very cheap and will give you instructions for "water bath" canning of all of these things that are more delicious than you could imagine. And it is not difficult. If I can do it, you surely can.

But I don't fool myself that I am self sufficient. I am nowhere near to being that.
kay

Jenangelcat- I guess I watch too many spy shows. LOL

I think my idea of some self-sufficiency would be to know our family will be okay if we lose power for a few days, or even a few weeks. Since we've moved to "the country" we've had snow storms close the roads, lost power on many cold winter days, had our hay barn collapse under 3 feet of snow (on Christmas day) and had the well go out...a couple of times. Even with all the craziness, I would not want to move back into town with all the so-called conveniences. The only scary neighbors out here are coyotes, porcupines and the occasional moose :)

Kay- You make canning sound easy and fun! Now, I'd like to try it.

We live on a farm in Ohio near where my husband grew up. They had their own milk cow, chickens, huge garden, etc.
Even they were not totally self-sufficient--To be truly self-sufficient takes a lot of work. And if we HAD to be self-sufficient as our ancestors did, it wouldn't seem nearly so romantic.

It is good to see that some of the younger(30ish)people are finding gardening interesting...we all need to remember we are connected to the land no matter where we live.

We also need to realize how lucky we are to walk into a grocery and find a wealth of produce all year long. It wasn't always this way by far. I always had an orange in my Christmas stocking because that was one of my parents fondest memories from their childhood...receiving an orange in the winter.

We should certainly grow our own food. How many feel and practise organic gardening? Or does it matter if we do use whatever means to produce these food?

We practice organic gardening. We only amend our soil with compost and mushroom soil and do not feed the plants with any chemicals. We don't use any kind of pesticide or fungicide either. If a plant shows signs of having a disease it gets pulled out and destroyed.

Other than doing all the canning and preserving, we also heat our home with 2 Vermont Castings woodstoves. We have not had to turn our heat on in a few years. We purchased a generator a few years ago when we lost power during the winter for a few days. Those woodstoves kept us in our home and we actually were able to put pots of soup on them to cook.

We try very hard to be as self sufficient as we can but we do also enjoy the modern convenience of flipping a switch to turn on the lights.

Carol

Carol- I think you are at a place that I am hoping to be in the next few years :)

Modern conveniences are nice (and who wants to get rid of them) but organic food, a well-stocked panty and woodstoves are easy ways to make yourself more self-sufficient...and get by a lot more comfortably when heavy snows close the roads or knock down the power lines!

Lass, thank you for starting this thread if nothing else it will make us all think about what if......and if it doesn't it should.

A couple of years ago we replaced what we had in our fireplace, it was pretty good but, not as good as the airtight we have in it now. The fan does use a little bit of power when it's on, if the power goes off we have an alternative way we can run the fan.
Even in the very cold winter we had the year before last our furnace didn't come on once. We saved over $1200 on oil alone, didn't have to buy any. We still have more than half a tankfull which we WILL have to use up before it goes bad. We're also very lucky we have access to free wood. Ahhhhh, wood heat is so nice and cozy, none of that cooling off then blasts of heat from the furnace, just nice constant warmth.

Annette

You'll all laugh. The power was off today and we had no AC, high humidity and heat. I could just hug the power man because we're back on. :)

ggg, that is exactly what I mean when I say I love the modern conveniences and wouldn't want to give them up. We just had central air retrofitted in our house 2 weeks ago. It took 4 days to run all that duct through the attic and get everything running, but boy am I glad we did it, it has been in the upper 90s and low 100s this past week. This is first time in 30 years we have central a/c and we love it.

Carol

We have a cellar more so than a basement and it's cool down there even on a very hot day, if it stays up in the nineties we button up the house, turn the furnace switch on summer and blow all that cool air from the cellar through the heat ducts. Our pseudo air conditioner, but it works :).

Annette