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 […]

At Last New Homemade Compost Bins

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Aah, we love our garden compost here at Casa Dirty Boots.  But, the one thing we don’t – well didn’t love was our compost bins.  Oh they were fine and dandy when first created.  In fact we were rather smug that we’d used scraps of wood from the house that were good for little else to make them. Five years on though and what once was merely wood-wormed was starting to dissolve a little.  The whole bin arrangement needed reinforcements to keep it all dog proof (essential when you are composting humanure).    I shuffled some spare blocks that had […]

Frugal Sustainable Gift Wrapping

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Today we have something a little out of the ordinary at the kind of Self Sufficient Life; a guest post from Kate Willson about helping achieve a frugal gift giving season this year.  So over to Kate: Christmas is fast approaching, and as some of you may know, sometimes buying the wrapping paper can cost as much as the actual gifts. To save money this season and continue with your mission to live green, below are some great and cheap ways to package your gifts this Christmas. Old Gift Bags/Wrapping paper—The easiest way to save and be green is to simply reuse old […]

Green Energy from Insects – The Carnivorous Clock

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Okay so killing insects is somewhat of an odd “green” thing.  But the other night we just wanted to zonk out in front of the TV.  An episode of “Wallace & Gromit’s World of Invention” was on.  I have to admit I was pretty skeptical about stop motion animation trying to be educational. But I was wrong. We were shown an insect powered clock.  Now obviously clocks don’t use that much power.  But still seeing a very large fly paper feeding insects into something that is supposedly a battery was a little on the mind blowing side.  Not because we […]

Starting the Olive Harvest

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I don’t know how many olives we will be able to harvest this year.  Time is not something we seem to have enough of at the moment and other things are just more important.  It’s a shame seeing olives going to waste but such a low price commodity often rots on the floor I guess. We will do some though not the 150+ trees that we should.  The main olive oil crop won’t even be our trees.  Instead we will pick the Mother-in-law’s who lives on flat ground with great trees that produce fine olive oil.  Most importantly they are […]

The Most Important Frugal Living Tip You’ll Ever Need

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Or why window shopping is bad for you, oh and magazines, the internet and tv! The most simple and straightforward way to save money and live frugally is just to avoid shops.  Hardly a jaw-dropping surprise that one is it?  But it is true that window shopping whilst relaxing and an excuse for a coffee with friends, is also totally detrimental to a frugal life.  If you don’t see stuff you don’t think about all the things you are missing, or would like to have. I’m pretty lucky as I am not a big shopper.  In an ideal world my […]

Living off Grid but no Longer Under the Radar

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Living off the grid and under the radar has been fun and easy.  Just the initial round of registering on arrival in Spain for personal numbers to allow us to buy the house and get residency cards, but not too much interaction with officialdom the rest of the time.  There wasn’t much point in announcing ourselves too much, we had nothing to give the tax man or the social security office so played Russian Roulette with hoping we never needed a doctor.  Exciting but I wouldn’t recommend it!  Luckily, so far antiseptic cream, aloe vera and tea tree oil has […]