A Road To Self Sufficiency

My old blog had occasional month long (or even longer like the car and plastic experiments.) trials to test me out so I thought that this site could do with a new one so here it is for November.

I shop at Asda a lot and they have the whoopsie / yellow label reduced items that are due to come to their sell by date.

I am good at making up meals from nothing or various different things so i thought this challenge would be to cater for my wife, myself sand occasional uni visotor my son from what is available in the yellow label items.
Of course there are a lot of items available in the early moring around 9.30 in my local asda but the better deals are generally fewer in quantity but better in price, like 1p for 2 salmon fishcakes reduced from £3.00 or bread for 2p reduced from £1.80 but these are available after 2300 hrs.

I wonder how many times I'll be down at the shops at 11 pm or after but that is the test for this month of November, 2009.

One note of caution is that these yellow label deals will soon be coming to an end as the government, in their wisdon has decided to do away with the sell by/ best before/ use before date labels to encourage more food useage and less going to landfill. All well and good for the reduction of methane and CO2 etc but what about the thousands of people who, like me use these low price deals for basic living from day to day ?

UPDATE I tried this for a few days and although it was sucessful in that i was able to feed the family very cheaply I totally forgot about it after about day 5. Because it means going daily to the shops this caused me more pain in the chronic back problem and so I was on stronger pain relievers. I say that because nothing kills the pain so the morphine substraites are not "pain killers". Being spaced out I just bought what I fancied. I will try this again, maybe January...

Well it's happened..... All my skip diving has started to pay off!!

I'm on my way to getting my new " recycled" greenhouse... woo hoo...

It started a few months ago when it became evident that I needed a greenhouse to grow more crops. I managed ok this year planting seeds out when the weather determined I could. I did get many plants from my good friend and neighbour, Brian who has several greenhouses but on the whole, Like a man needs a shed it would be easier if I had a greenhouse.

Being skint and I mean destitute hence the growing of my own crops I decided that i couldn't afford a greenhouse but then with the usual thinking in a hot bath I came across the idea to see if I could get a greenhouse for nothing.

Now my greenhouse in plan form isn't your average little thing, nop, I wanted mine to be 3m x 4m or 10ft x 13ft in good old english money. so how was I going to get one this size.... build one I thought but with my knackered back it would not be possible but if I could salvage the materials from places such as skips and building plots then I might be able to pay someone to build it and although it would not be free it would be well cheaper.

So I started to look around especially when taking the dog for a walk. I'd get to know the builders and say hello to them etc and take an interest in what they were building. This is an interest of mine as I'd love to renovate an old house into an eco grade 6 house but for now can't afford that. Anyway, I'd get to talking to the builders and renovaters and I began asking if I could take bits of wood, pallets etc from the skips.
This would lead to them asking what I would be doing with them and I'd mention my recycled greenhouse plan. It's amazing on a number of fronts, firstly because many of the builders were genuinely interested and secondly the amount of free materials that were skipped that had nothing wrong with them was amazing.
As time went on I spoke to one renovator and he gave me 400 facing bricks that were new. He'd bought a couple of packs of them and started to use them only to find out that they were metric size and his house was built with imperial size bricks. Those he had used could not be returned so were to be skipped. I got them. Lsater on from this renovation he took the complete roof off as some timbers were rotten... Guess who got the remaining timber which was something like 100ft of 8" x 2".... I got a couple of old 1953 pantry windows from his skip and these will probably go on ebay as they are leaded and complete, EVEN with the shoulders on the frame... He even delivered all the stuff in the back of his van just when my son was home from uni so he earned his keep that day,lol.

Total cost... 4 heads of garlic, beetroot a couple of pounds of onions and 2 heads of lettuce. His wife was shy about taking the produce but they certainly enjoyed it.

At another skip the builder was knocking down a couple of stoothing walls to build an extension. Virgin 2"x4" rough sawn timber, about 223 ft in 6 ft pieces. Even if i had to splice a couple of bits together I'd still have over 100ft of 2"x4"x12ft long.

In the allotment that i share with another neighbour the greenhouse is well knackered and really is dangerous. It hs a lot of glass still intact so I said I'd clear it out and they can put up their flimsy allu 6'x4' greenhouse that they paid £70 second hand.

I was riddling some soil and collected a lot of loose gravel type stones so these have been washed and stored for the concrete so all I need is some sharp sand, yellow sand and some cement and bobs your uncle fred. I've even got anothe neighbour and his son to do the building and the cost for their services..... 4 boxes of fresh fruit and veg NEXT YEAR.....

I reckon if I have to pay anything it will be around £50 for the sand and cement and maybe some for glass if there isn't enough around the lottie but even so it should be less than £30 I guess. Therefore a 3mx4m greenhouse for less than £80 ... that'll do me fine.

Oh, I nearly forgot, I also found an old calor gas bottle which I plan to make a greenhouse heater out of after all the safety precautions have been taken to remove gas etc.

Is it possible to be self sufficient in the 21st century??

This seems a daft question and it's only become possible to ask it, and maybe go some way to answering it as we have been looking into the formation of the bselfsufficient website.

The idea of being self sufficient was a thought, a dream, an ideal that we have had for a few years now following a few monumental changes in our life. Mainly these changes were the closure of our candle making business, re emergence of a disabillity and a major issue of burgeoning debt.

These three issues made us look at our priorities and re asses where we were and where we were going. Part of the thought that came out of this angst was the ideal of being able to provide one's basic needs of food, shelter and security.

So, Is it possible to be self sufficient in the 21st century?? The short answer is no but only if you take it to the nth degree.

Wikipedia says:

Self-sufficiency refers to the state of not requiring any outside aid, support, or interaction, for survival; it is therefore a type of personal or collective autonomy.

The term self-sufficiency is usually applied to varieties of sustainable living in which nothing is consumed outside of what is produced by the self-sufficient individuals.

Therefore to be totally self sufficient you will need to be able to build your shelter, grow / rear your own food and be able to defend these. So can you build your own house and rear all youre own livestock, grow your own food, find and purify your own water ? for many I think the answer would be no.

If the answer is no then that need not be the end of the dream. In days of yore people were probably self sufficient but on a village aspect. You would have your baker who may have bought / traded flour from the farmer along with a butcher, brewer and candlestick maker. So in terms of self suficiency you could achieve it on a village or settlement basis but as we have "progressed" into the now 21st century we have lost that inter relliance on each other... unless of course you include the supermarkets and our inter relliance on them.

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