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Spicy Eggplant / Aubergine Pickle

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Simple Spicy Indian Eggplant Pickle This is a great way to deal with a glut of Aubergines (Eggplant) in the summer.  Scale the recipe up or down depending on how much of a glut you’ve got!  We love this as a chutney side served with curry and poppadoms but is also good (perhaps surprisingly) with cheese sandwiches too. Ingredients for Aubergine Pickle 2kg aubergine / eggplant cut into 2cm dice 125g green chillies chopped 2 garlic cloves crushed 600ml white wine or cider vinegar 2 tbsp chilli powder 2 tsp ground turmeric 310ml sesame oil 1 tbsp cumin seeds 1tbsp […]

We Cannot Waste Food and be Self Sufficient.

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One of the underlying principles when aiming for a self sufficient life is not to waste resources.  One of our most important resources is food, so please do NOT waste any, ever, at all! That’s the shouty bit over for now… I know there are always exceptions, but, as a general principle, we should all be aiming to ensure we waste no food.  I won’t bore you with the figures – we all know a massive volume of food goes to landfill which is completely unforgivable.  However you get your food; hunt it, buy it, grow it, find it, please […]

Build Chicken Houses Plans How To Build A Chicken Coop Or House

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Part of a more Self Sufficient lifestyle is all about getting certain things done for as little expense as possible. We spend money on certain things, such as Solar Panels and other construction stuff but if we can get something done for next to nothing then you can bet we will take that option. Now, i’m not saying this is for everyone. Not all of us have the time or the skills to build Chicken Houses from scratch. Indeed there are some great ready made Chicken Coops on the market. If you fancy keeping Chickens though, and they should definitely […]

Orange Egg Yolk-Tastic

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Part of any Self Sufficient lifestyle, if at all possible, should be the keeping of Chickens. They are cheap to keep and you have the advantage of having the freshest, most fantastic tasting eggs imaginable. Many of us feed our Chickens on a mixed feed that is readily available and fairly cheap, but with added greens their yolks turn an amazing deep Orange. We have three Dogs and it is just not practical to let our Chickens roam free. Our Dogs would be pestering them, or a stray would most certainly be picking up a free snack at our expense. […]

Double Digging, You Know It Makes Sense!

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Whether you are just about to start Growing Vegetables for the first time, or are making a new bed, or maybe want to get the best out of existing plots then as far as we are concerned Double Digging is the way to go. First a brief introduction: What is Double Digging? Double digging is different from the traditional way of digging over the ground in that, as the name suggests, you dig twice as deeply as normal. In traditional Vegetable Growing you normally dig to about a spades depth and turn over the soil. In Double Digging you will […]

Crease-free Laundry the Easy Way

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This is either a post giving you the okay to be lazy OR it is a post about saving time, electricity and helping you be self sufficient, you decide. I have never liked to iron or press my laundry but I did always do it.   Until  that is, we ended up without any electricity for six months when we first  arrived here.  It turns out you can get perfectly smooth clothes and linen without the need to burn huge amounts of fossil fuel or giving over whole days to the task.  Simply follow these steps to a crease-free future: never […]

John Seymour – The ‘Dirty Boots’ Gang’s Hero.

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We gardened before we’d heard of John Seymour but once we had got hold of a few of his books our gardening really took off. He  had small-holdings and lived a relatively self sufficient life with his family in Suffolk and then Wales for many years.   In Wales he even created a school in the arts of self sufficiency.  His books share some of his huge wealth of knowledge, personally gained and researched – he remained clued up on the cutting edge of self sustainability thinking. Most importantly though he was an excellent teacher.  I wish we’d had the chance […]