Our reasons for living more self sufficient are born out of love for nature, self respect and an urge for living healthy.
For us living (food) self sufficient fits into our values and vision. Sustainability, renewability, independency and love and good care for living beings. It also fits into our aim to incorporate permaculture in all aspects of our life.
We enjoy our simple way of life. We eat what nature provides and we are thankful for her abundance. We like to share this joy and abundance so we're growing a village.
We are on our way to live self sufficient but it is a goal we might never reach. Why not? Because living self sufficient is more about making choices than about making jam. It is more about taming cravings and training willpower than growing enough potatoes or rabbits.
What you can expect in our blog: tips and tricks from practical realists, ideas and experiments worth mentioning and our stories that are interesting enough to be told.
Blog Skills & tools for a self-sufficient life
We love a more natural living, with the cycles of nature. In winter we live inside and take care of our personal insides. In summer we're outside and more open to the world. When the snow melts, we'll be able to pick claytonia and lambs lettuce. When the wild strawberries are ripe, we can exchange our winterclothes for t-shirts. When the last apples are falling, we start to put on extra layers of clothing. And when the rose hips are sweet, it will be Christmas soon. Who needs a calendar!
When we came to live here in 2009, I made a mind map of what I wanted to achieve in 5 years. The paper hung on the wall, fell down a few times, got lost and around christmas 2013 I found it back. Just before the 5th year would start!
It surprised me how much of that mind map we had actually achieved! Almost everything, except brewing our own beer and having goats for their milk & meat.
The different area's where we are pretty self reliant:
- All year round fresh vegetables
- Dried, frozen, fermented & potted vegetables & fruits
- Mushrooms
- Herbs (kitchen herbs and herbal teas, tinctures, syrups & remedies)
- Syrups (elderflower, berries, rosebuds)
- Jams & compotes (from several fruits)
- Wines (dandelion, elderflower, cherry, plum and elderberry)
- kombucha & water kefir
- Apple cider
- Apple vinegar
- Nuts (walnuts, hazelnuts & sweet chestnuts)
- Eggs
- Meat (rabbits, chickens, snails and wild animals)
- Sourdough bread
- Firewood (we cook on fire)
- Animal food (hay and dried vegetables, corn)
- Seeds for the garden
Our neighbors provide us with honey & a pig (Stevo), milk for yoghurt and fresh cheese (Milka) and sheep wool (Marko).
Definitely our favourite book on this subject is John Seymour's book about living self-sufficient.
But of course we have many sources, like Jenna Woginrich's book Made from scratch, Tom Hodgkinson book Brave old world or The Self-Sufficiency Handbook by Alan Bridgewater. And also the internet and our neighbour Anja who also likes to experiment with making wines, jams and herbal salts.
SInce we're becoming more & more experts in self sufficiency, we'd like to share our knowledge about several subjects in autarky.
>> See our list of workshops in self sufficiency