Clyde’s garden planner

If you’ve been reading this blog at all, you have probably already figured out that a big part of self-sufficiency to me is cultivating your own food. Nutrition is one of the most important things to survival and if you can take care of that yourself you have one of your most important bases covered.

I am very much an apprentice gardener, but I have learned a lot over the past few months of research. Since I live in a fairly cold climate with a short gardening season (zone 3a), starting seeds indoors is very important.

Not too long ago I heard about Clyde’s Garden Planner, and ordered it that day to see what all the fuss was about. For $5 how could I loose?

…this thing is amazing.

For a novice gardener I was totally overwhelmed by the amount of information this tiny little chart contained. The problem with following the information on the seed packet is that it doesn’t take regional frost dates into account.

The downsides of doing it yourself

As I’ve mentioned here a few times, my husband and I are in the process of building our own home. We’ve been working on it in earnest for about almost a year now (the foundation went in last june). Though we’re certinaly not done, we’ve come a long way.

I’m off work for a week right now for march break (yay!) and my husband is off for a few weeks… so we got down to work. I took the day on monday and cleaned the place from top to bottom. I swept up sawdust and used the shop vac to get as much of it as possible. I did a run to the dump, and burned a ton of scrap lumber in the woodstove in the garage. It was a rainy day, but it felt great to get the place tidied up.

For the rest of the week my husband and his uncle (who does this kind of thing for a living) continued working on framing interior walls, and getting ready for the plumber to come finish up the rough ins. We really want to get some inspections completed over the next few weeks so that we can have the drywaller and tilers come and do their jobs.

Yesterday I left to go pick up our son from daycare, and we went home and made dinner for us and the guys working on the site. When I came back with dinner I found out that my husband had hurt his hand on a grinder when the blade broke, and had been driven to hospital to get stitched up.

Oh boy.

So we drove to the hospital and he was just having the stitches done. We waited around a bit (amid chaos in the emergency department- I am so glad I don’t work in health care and am so grateful for those that do), and finally drove home once a tetnus shot was had.

Unfortunately my husband now has one hand out of comission for the next little while (I say this as he’s currently out at the house, lifting plywood with one hand) as his hand is so swollen he can’t move his thumb.

So, is doing it yourself worth it? There is an immense satisfaction that comes with building your own home, and it’s a level of customization that you can’t get from just paying someone to do it for you. Not only that, but you do save so much money as well, and we’ve been able to build a home that we would never have been able to buy otherwise.

Of course things move more slowly, and it is exhausting. I would be lying if I said that I haven’t wished that someone else could just make the decision for me, or book the electrical inspection, or dig the hole, or clean up the sawdust. All that being said, even considering my husband’s injury- I wouldn’t trade the experience for the world (and I know hubby would say the same).

Growing Your Grub podcast

A few weeks ago I acquired a Blackberry playbook to use at work with my students, but have been finding more and more ways that I can use it at home too. I went in search of some decent podcasts that I could listen to on the way to work and came away with an amazing one that I wanted to share with all of you.

Growing Your Grub  is an amazing resource for novice gardeners who want to focus on organic techniques. Despite the fact that the creator, Steve Howard, lives in Texas and I live in Canada, I have found his information to be so useful as I plan and fanticize about the garden that I will someday create. I have listened to almost all of the episodes, and I’m planning on moving onto his other podcasts Born to Farm and Persuing a Country Lifestyle for a different perspective on my goals. Steve also has a very interesting blog that I read from time to time when I’m feeling uninspired.

 

Infographic: How big a backyard would you need to live off the land?

Source

I came across this on pinterest this weekend and was very surprised by it. I would be interested to hear if anyone reading this has any insight on this. My husband is a hunter, so we won’t be raising livestock for meat, but I do have it as a long term goal to try and raise chickens and goats in the future (for eggs and milk).

Book review : Country Wisdom and Know-How

Amazon link

This was the first book that my husband and I read about homesteading so it was only natural that it’s the first book review I do on this blog. My parents actually bought this book as a gag-gift for my husband, but it quickly became clear how useful it actually was. This book has so much information in it, it took us a few weeks to fully process all the information and figure out how we wanted to use it to improve our lives. The book contains information on raising livestock, quilting, gardening, training cats and dogs, home brewing and so much more.

There are countless tables, check lists, recipies, and step-by-step instructions for making even the most inexperienced (ie. me) would-be homesteader feel comfortable living a self-sustaining lifestyle.

The only problem that I encountered (and was mentioned over and over in the reviews on Amazon) is the physical size of the book. It’s far too big, and it’s a soft cover, so it’s difficult to hold and read. My copy also seemed to be missing a few pages… I’m not sure what that’s all about (but it could have been a problem with how my mom bought it).

Regardless of those problems I would recommend this book to anyone who was interested in homesteading, whether novice or experienced. There is so much varied information that I’m sure there is something that anyone could learn from it.

Why be self-sufficient?

Last week some collegues and I got to discussing the idea that solar flares could potentially knock out the power grid. This particular idea has been all over the news here over the past few days and has certainly got people talking. Despite the fact that the solar storm knocking out power is extremely unlikely, it’s one of many way that our dependance on the power grid could all come to a crashing halt.

The most uttered point from my colleagues was about how much we rely on technology and electricity, and how the majority of us would,essentially, be helpless without it. In the group that I was talking about, no one had a garden, no one had a means of heating their house other than an electric-furnace, and no one had a means of cooking food that didn’t rely on electricity. The general sentiment was that there would be chaos, but no one seemed all that concerned about it.

That’s when I realized what being self-sufficient is to me: not being helpless.

A long time ago I came across this great TED talk (if you haven’t seen the TED talks you should check them out when you have a spare couple… days… there is a ton of great ideas from some of the most brilliant minds in the world).

Obviously a toaster isn’t the most important thing in the world if the electricity goes out, but this serves as an excellent example of how helpless many would be when left to their own devices. We rely so much on other people and companies to help us live our day to day lives, and we rely on technology to link us together.

What would happen if the power went out? It’s hard to say. I’d like to think that people would band together and find a way to survive, but I’m sure that there would be panic, looting, chaos (just like there is in so many disasters throughout history and the world). I’m not advocating paranoia by any means, but I do think this is a great argument for being prepared and being capable of doing simple tasks like cooking, keeping yourself clean, and cultivating food without the help of electricity.

Gardening with my kiddo

One of our goals for this year was to expose our little one to gardening. I tried it on a long weekend in February (“Family Day” to all you Ontarians out there), and could never have predicted how well it would go.

We went to the grocery store and popped into a local garden centre on the way home. Right now they’re only selling seeds and seed-starting supplies because it’s still -20C out there and there’s no chance of planing anything in the ground. Kiddo picked out sunflower seeds and cactus seeds and we headed home. I’ll readily admit that I was very uncertain about the cactus seeds, but decided to give it a whirl. We headed home with our seeds, started tray, and potting soil, and began our planting adventure.

It was not long until the dirt was everywhere… but man did we have fun.

Kiddo had the time of his life putting the dirt into cut up toilet paper tubes in the starter tray. We managed to get them into some semblance of order, and then he had the time of his life squirting me with the spray bottle.

 

We took care to water every day, and my son quickly learned when the soil felt dry or wet. And a few weeks ago we were rewarded for our labour of love- the seeds actually sprouted! I have to admit I was a little bit dubious about the whole thing, never having been much of a gardener, but the look of excitement on my son’s face was worth it a million times over. The sunflowers have grown quickly and the cactii are even starting to grow (a huge shock to me). I’m looking forward to having some sunflowers in the house, and maybe even a few cactii to place around the place. I’d love to have one to bring to my classroom.

We have a very busy weekend coming up, but stay tuned for next week when we plan to repot the sunflowers and try some more green cleaning ideas!

Getting rid of plastic

I’ve mentioned before that one of our long-term goals is to eliminate as much plastic as possible from our lives and our household. Plastic is a problem for so many reasons.

Plastic is the cheap and easy solution to so many problems in our lives: need to wrap up some food? Get some plastic wrap. Don’t want to wash that plate? Throw it out! More often than not it’s such a lazy solution, and it makes us lazier as a society. Not only that but it’s utterly horrible for the environment and our bodies.

Because of that we’ve been replacing some of our older plastic stuff (that needs replacing anyway) with non-plastic, durable items. I have ordered the majority of them from Life Without Plastic, an amazing company that truly seems to care about the products they sell. They also have a great blog that links to all kinds of interesting information about plastic and why we should get rid of it.

I’ll leave you with this awesome info graphic from facebook about plastic and it’s role in our lives.

Our goals for 2012

Yesterday I went over our goals for 2011 and how we did. Today I’m going to tell you all about our goals for this year and how we’re going to go about accomplishing them. We have a lot of lofty goals for ourselves this year and since starting this blog it will be easier to reflect on them.

Here we go:

1. Finish the house to the point where we can move in. I can’t tell you how excited I am for this to happen.
2. Build a composting bin and start composting.
3. Get the yard cleaned up and firewood cut up to last us through the winter. We had a gigantic wind storm last summer that knocked over quite a few of our large trees. It was sad (and much more emotional than we thought it would be), but they’ll make good fire wood.
4. Start growing some herbs and a few veggies in containers. I ordered some tomato, peppers, basil, and rosemary to grow on the deck. Unfortunately we don’t have time to set up the raised beds this year, but we’ll move on to that in 2013.
5. Our property has a huge amount of delicious wild blueberries. Last year I took kiddo to pick some but we were a little late to get to them, and the little guy ate most of them. At the end of the day I had enough to put on my cereal one morning, but this year I’d like to make a bit of jam or a few pies for the freezer.

Five goals doesn’t seem like many but they’re big enough goals that they should keep us busy… and like I said before: self-sufficiency is a gradual process.

What our simple living goals were for 2011

I believe that self-sufficiency is a very gradual process for most people. We have always had it in the back of our minds that we wanted to be as self-sustaining as possible, but it wasn’t until 2011 that we really started to set out goals for ourselves to live more simply.

1. The first thing we did was cancel our satellite tv subscription. I mean really, who needs it? I still watch some shows on Boxee but having no subscription really eliminates the “turning tv on to see what’s on” thing.
2. The biggest thing that we did was start to build our house. It will be heated primarily with a wood stove and is designed to be as energy efficient as possible, though it’s not off the grid. It is located on a large parcel of land on which we can grow our own food.
3. We wanted to introduce our son to gardening which I did just last week. Stay tuned for an update on that later this week.
4. Start replacing some household items (as they needed to be replaced, we didn’t throw anything out needlessly) with durable plastic free items such as cast iron.
5. I intended to nurse my son until he was 2, but unfortunately had to stop when he was about 16 months. None the less I was proud of not putting him on formula or forcing him to stop before he was ready.
6. I wanted to start cooking more healthy meals and snacks for my family. No more buying pre-packined products like cookies or pizzas. I do sometimes default back to these convenience foods when I’m running low on time, but it’s far less frequent than before.

All in all I only really failed to accomplish one of these goals, which I’m pretty proud of. We have many more goals for 2012, you’ll hear about them tomorrow!