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Enjoyable Emergency Food Survival – Grow Your Own

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Unusual Heirloom Vegetables

If you want to feed your family yourself, why not simply grow your own? Mr DB’s recent look at emergency survival food supplies got me thinking (dangerous obviously). I cannot imagine having a bucket of dried prepared meals handy should zombies attack, but I do have a stash of home grown vegetables to munch on. Of course there would be plenty of potential emergencies that might actually put an end to the vegetable plot, but hopefully not in the long term. If you grow from viable seed and then collect some of those seeds produced by those plants each season, […]

Protecting Your Garden from Genetically Modified Pollen

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Today, at A Self Sufficient Life, we have a guest post by Ashley Warner.  It’s an interesting look at the perhaps very worrying world of GM food and the implication for home grown crops everywhere: Genetically modified organisms (GMO) have sparked a hot debate in the world of agriculture.  Many people scorn the usage of genetically modified seeds due to their questionable safety of consumption and potentially harmful biological effects.  Others claim that this attitude is pure conservatism and that GMO crops are the future of agriculture, bringing higher yields to poorer land and allowing us to feed a burgeoning world population. Whether safe […]

Frugal Living & Self Sufficiency Keep You Fit

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Last weekend I realised how much more fit we were when everything was about frugal living and self sufficiency.  You see, from part time olive farmers, part time vegetable growers, part time builders and full time “never really go anywhere as there is no money for fuel” type folks, we have moved “up” in the world, to become full time laptop typing folks making a living at home.  Yep we still do work on the land and we still do some building (the house will never be finished), but never for so long every day as we once did. It […]

The Cheapest Place To Buy Vegetable Seeds

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Part of being self sufficient is growing your own, not your hair, but your veggies. Browsing around today in order to buy some vegetable seeds I suddenly had a Doh moment. We talk about Amazon quit a bit for the best place to buy books and many other things but for some obscure reason had never thought about buying seeds from them. I honestly don’t know why. It seems odd it it never even entered my head. Here is the link to the fantastic range of seeds on Amazon. Just be warned, some of the descriptions are a little daft. […]

What Does Being Self Sufficient Mean?

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I was talking about this with Mrs. Dirty Boots last night. What exactly does being self sufficient mean? I guess it means different things to different people. I would love for you to leave a comment after this post and let me know what it means to you. EDIT: Please note that this is a long post. I seem to have got a little carried away. I believe it IS important though. Please read it and leave a comment about how you feel about it. This article kind of sums up at least my attitude to the way we live […]

The Self Sufficient Vegetable Garden

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This year in the huerto where all our organic vegetable growing, is going on,  we’re self sufficient in… Chillies! Okay, so this is not the most useful thing to be self sufficient in.  But, they are packed with vitamin C, so we’re feeling pretty healthy.  And, it got me to thinking…  I thought about how the vegetable plot is very different every year.  We’re learning all the time and trying out new things.  But, with the best will in the world, a lot of our successes and failures in the vegetable growing department, are left down to the weather. Weather […]

Spare Cabbage? Make Sauerkraut

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I have long had a love affair with Sauerkraut but always thought you needed to live in Eastern Europe and have a tonne of cabbage to make it yourself.   I was wrong.  It is simple to make sauerkraut at home with very basic implements.  Best of all homemade sauerkraut is full of goodness most bought products have lost.  And, if the spare cabbage you have is not the white hearting cabbage usually recommended for krauting worry ye not! What is Sauerkraut? First of all, sauerkraut is not pickled cabbage.  Sauerkraut is a fermented food.  The vegetables are tightly packed into […]