It really doesn’t matter how you word it - being self-sufficient,
self-reliant, a homesteader or a prepper – it all means the same thing to
me. In general it means doing what we
can as an individual or a family unit to support ourselves now and in the future.
Will I ever be what I would consider 100% self-sufficient? Nope.
My goal is to do the best I can.
If tomorrow was TEOTWAWKI (a prepper acronym for The End Of The World As
We Know It) would I survive? Sure, but probably not my full life span. Would I live comfortably? Yes, for a while.
Where to begin in deciding what level of self-sustainability
I have or can attain? First I want to
take a quick look back 20 years ago when I was in my child bearing years. I never would have been ready back then. Then I may have known what a midwife was, but
never thought “real” people would use one!!
Now, 20 years later, I actually have FB friends who are a Midwife and a
studied Doula. Okay would using a
midwife or a doula be considered self-sufficiency? I guess here (as in MANY areas of back to
basics living) is where lines blur. I
don’t think there is nor has there ever really been an era where individuals
had to do absolutely everything alone.
Oh sure towns may have been days apart, but there was a system of bartering
and money even in the Wild West days. So
with all that rambling said I will move on to how I feel we are doing on our
journey into self-sufficiency and living a back to basics lifestyle.
I’m not sure when to begin so this won’t be in any special
order.
Clothing: I can sew
with a machine and by hand. I can make a
quilt and repair clothing. I can
crochet, but not knit. I am learning to
spin processed animal fibers. I need to learn to process animal fibers from “scratch”
and would like to learn how to process a few plant fibers. I want to learn to felt. I will probably never learn to weave, but
would like to if I ever have the money, room and time!
Household: I don’t do
many back to basic things in my house at the moment. I do have plans to begin goat milk soap
making. Maybe someday I will move on to
lotions, creams and balms. Homemade
shampoos? Probably not. Homemade laundry
products? Yeah, I’ll try that. I love essential oils and although I will
never begin distilling my own I have begun using them for pest repellants, air
fresheners and a myriad of other things.
I can cook on a woodstove, or
better yet over an open fire. I prefer
the use of our cast iron pans, griddles and pots and know they will live on
long past my natural lifetime.
Entertainment (and knowledge): I love the internet with the almost endless
choices of things to study, learn and explore.
And of course don’t get me started on social media…. Yeah
Facebook!! With that said, can I live
without it all? Of course. I own a large
cache of informational books and books for entertainment purposes. I have many
decks of cards, board games and I can only dream of the day I might be able to
force my husband to play cribbage with me because there is nothing else to do! There can be much more to entertainment than
games or books, wood working with hand tools in one. I don’t have experience in that, but own the
tools and may one day dabble some in it.
Pets: Not much back
to basics to go into here. I will however
say that by-products of our food (meat specifically) production fills a great
niche in allowing us to feed our dogs and cats a raw diet on a small
scale. Flea prevention can be
accomplished with just a few essential oils or even diatomaceous earth.
Transportation: We
have cars; we can maintain our cars….end of story? Not quite. We own horses and are knowledgeable in the care
and training of them. We even own some
horse drawn equipment that we could use with some training on our horses. If however in the event of TEOTWAWKI
eventually we would have to find a way to replace our horses since we have
never bred horses and we don’t own breeding stock. Oh, and of course we have our feet, snowshoes
and skis.
Food (and the medicine cabinet): This is a huge category so
I will try and break it down just a bit.
Meats are pretty much covered by livestock and vegetables I will cover
under the gardening header. I have books upon books about wild foraging. I would like to try cattail tubers and flour
someday. I have tried some things such
as milkweed (fried and pickled) that in a dire emergency I could choke down but
won’t bother again for any other reason.
I’ve eaten fiddleheads and they are not a bad early spring treat. Now leeks, morels and wild berries are high
on my list of good eats to gather and preserve.
Speaking of preserving, I have much to learn about canning and
preserving meats, but have been canning pickles, jams and jellies for many
years. Drying foods and herbs is newer
to me, but has been easy to pick up.
Eventually I would like to build a solar dehydrator and get a nice big
fancy Excalibur electric dehydrator. Herbs
fill a huge hole in the overall picture of self- sustainability. Herbs can be used to flavor foods of course,
but did you know they can be used for healing too? I grow a couple of very large comfrey
patches. These don’t necessarily fit
into the food category for humans, but fit very well into the medications
section. We use comfrey here for all
types of skin ailments, bumps, bruises and cuts. It has even been used on the goats, dogs and
cats. We aren’t really drinkers, but I
LOVE to make homemade blackberry wine.
We have never added yeast to wines made from wild blackberries. There is natural wild yeast on the
blackberries so all you really need is sugar, berries and water. It does lend a bit of a surprise to each
batch due to the differences in yeasts in different areas. I have to admit one thing though; I am still
a boxed food junkie….. I like the ease of boxed potatoes and boxed macaroni and
cheese. But I AM learning to wean myself
off of these conveniences, I no longer buy boxed brownies and I’m starting to
make my own soup mixes.
Livestock: We are traversing
along our knowledge journey of breeding and raising livestock. We are
working on breeding pigs, rabbits, chickens and goats. Could we maintain our breeding programs without
outside stock? For a period of a few
years easily, but eventually we would end up with severe inbreeding of our pigs
and rabbits. The goats and chickens
would last a few more years past the pigs and rabbits as we have a slightly
larger gene pool to dip our bucket into.
We can care for many of our animals using mainly organic methods. I have never tried herbal wormers, opting
instead for the infrequent use of chemical wormers as needed. We try and determine need by doing our own
fecals and using the Famacha scale. The
livestock provide us with meat, eggs, dairy and fiber. Learning to make cheese has been fun, but
learning to make yogurt has been frustrating.
I’m sure I’ll get better someday.
(I hope so anyway.) My husband is
a long time hunter and is very handy when it comes to the butchering of our
livestock. Both hunting and butchering
are skills worth knowing. I don’t fish,
but I love to EAT fish. My husband has
also found a love of ice fishing and brought home a dozen or so delicious meals
(some of which are in the freezer for a later date.) We have also begun working on curing our own
meats. Can we make a bacon as good as
Thornapple Valley? Nope, not even
close. But we will get there I’m hoping
with a bit more practice. Our hams are
different than a Smithfield for sure, but they are tasty and we made them
ourselves!! I do plan on learning more
about preserving and working with animal hides.
I would just love to have a handmade hat lined with some soft warm bunny
fur…OH and a pair of mittens to match! Now
to go backwards just a little bit, from what we get from our animals to what we
give to our animals. We make our own hay, although not all comes from our
land. Our animals are also grained and
although I have grown corn and I can grow both oats and soybeans if I try, I
seriously don’t have the place to do so on the scale that I currently need to
support our animals. As mentioned
earlier, I raise some large patches of comfrey and I use lots of it as feed for
the animals. It is a great winter fodder
(once dried) for the chickens, rabbits and pigs. I don’t know if these count as livestock, but
someday we WILL be adding honeybees to the farmstead. An on the farm source of sweetener and
antibiotic salve what could be better?
Gardening: Compost,
compost, compost!! That is just the place to start for sure. All that livestock mentioned above gives us
lots and lots of compost fodder. Heck
we usually even have manure to spare. The
comfrey is even a wonderful addition to the compost pile (Do you see a pattern
here with the comfrey? It is a VERY
useful plant on the homestead.) We make manure tea for our plants and
seedlings. We have gotten away from
buying commercial seedlings and instead have opted to grow as many heirloom
varieties as we can. We also maintain
seeds from these heirloom varieties and have had great success there. It would be nice to envision us being able to
save seeds entirely from our own garden, but we haven’t the room to separate varieties
that aren’t self –pollinated. We have
had good luck with tomatoes, beans, peas and peppers. Seeds were saved from the bird house gourds
last season so we will see how those turn out.
It’s kind of fun seeing what comes out of gourd seeds anyway as they
seem to cross-pollinate readily and give have some odd “offspring”. We collect rain water in rain barrels to
water our garden with. Currently we have (3) 55 gallon barrels, but hope to
double that this summer. We can, freeze
and dry many of our vegetables. Another
method of preserving our harvest?
Fermentation!! I made a small
test crock of Kimchi with our cabbage last year and I found it to superb. Definitely a try-again recipe!
Other: Here I will
list a myriad of things that I just don’t know how to categorize. Bartering can play a key role for back
to basics living and although it seems a paradox – self-sufficient living as
well. Barter a dozen chickens for a
pound of fresh organic butter or a trailer load of manure for a few loaves of homemade
bread or a raw mohair fleece for a well- made drop spindle. The possibilities are really endless. Recycling (or up-cycling) can be a
lifesaver. As mentioned earlier, we currently
buy all our grain. With the amount of
animals we have – that really leaves us with a plethora of grain bags. We use them for garbage bags in the barns, to
seal out cold winter drafts and as door flaps in the animal sheds, and as
tea-bags for our manure tea. We recycle pallets as barn dividers and
gates. We have bartered other used
building materials for around the farm. I
have heard that many items make great soap molds. I save old peanut butter and mayonnaise containers
to safely haul shots and other medication doses to the animal barns (full
syringes fit beautifully in them without worry that the plunger will accidently
get depressed). Milk jugs work great
for hauling water to the critters in the winter. Buy the good stuff: Okay I wasn’t sure how to title this little
section but there is one thing that I would like to emphasize for when there
are items you just HAVE to purchase because you can’t make them yourself (i.e.
tractors, boots, etc.). Buy the best you
can possibly afford. In many things you
do get what you pay for. For instance, I
LOVE my Muck chore boots, they are priceless in the spring, summer, fall and
winter. My first set of boots lasted me
around 12 years. I tried a “knock-off”
pair and they ended up costing me about triple (on a per year average) than the
more expensive Muck. I now have another
pair of Mucks going strong.
Some of the skills we are pretty good at: Sewing, crocheting, cooking, canning, dehydrating,
animal husbandry, herbal lore, butchering, meat curing, gardening, composting, hunting,
fishing, haymaking, recycling, bartering, construction, wild foraging, animal training, metal
working, seed saving, water collection,
Some of the skills we are working on (or will be working on
soon): Spinning fibers, harvesting
fibers, tanning pelts, wood working, soap making, cheese making, bee keeping,
candle making,
Skills we should learn or get better at (and someday really
hope to): first aid, knot – tying, how to start a fire (the “hard way”), trapping,
gunsmithing, weather forecasting. I own
books on all the previous “skills” in this section and while they may come in
handy someday there is nothing better than actually putting things into
practice BEFORE you need them.
Okay so just a quick summary. Could we survive indefinitely if the rest of
the world ceased to exist? Probably not. No man is an island and we are no exception,
we couldn’t maintain every aspect that we would need to survive without being
able to interact with at least a few other individuals (or groups) with skills
complimentary to our own. Do we have skills
to sustain ourselves if we needed to long term? Yes we would most likely stay
warm, fed, clothed, entertained and healthy for a good long time.
Thanks for reading to the end of this one!!!
Until next time……
