Selfsufficientish.com

Reading this thread has reminded me of a guy I met when I was doing up a house in Rochester, he worked in a builders merchants working out in the yard, humping sand and cement, this was 30 years ago before they all had forklifts. Before work he had his own key to the local swimming pool and would sw...

We've got about a dozen of the usual culinary herbs, although I don't think anyone has listed summer savoury, but also this year I'm growing caraway, as the OH likes caraway seed tea.

Mustardseedmama, glad it worked for you. My OH became vegetarian and a few years later got arthritis, hands, knees and toes.

We ordered our pig from a local farmer in France several months in advance, the pig was to be suitably fattened up, only to find on the arranged date for killing that she had her first period. We were told that you couldn't kill her at this time (is this correct or just a superstition?) so we had to...

Don't think there is any difference between men and women as such in regards to money. I am no good with money, in the sense of looking after it, getting the best interest, etc - I'm just not interested, somehow I feel you should earn your money through work not by investing it. Fortunately me and m...

Perhaps not the ideas you were looking for, but from my experience these are the best tips I can give to successfully keeping an allotment 1. feed the soil with as much compost or manure as you can, lay on top as a mulch 2. don't dig the soil except to remove pernicious weeds such as couch and bindw...

Oldjerry, I'm not actually a vegetarian, although I do not eat a lot of meat, I do have a lot of sympathy with the view that you should kill and butcher it yourself. However I'm not sure that you need rifles to do that, in fact rifles have only been used since the times when this source of food has ...

As far as I am concerned no one in a civilised society needs a gun, even to shoot rabbits, however in Britain it was not illegal to own or carry a gun up until the First World War and thugs would openly flaunt them, tucked into their belts. In France, probably most men in the country still appear to...

A traditional way of making a smallish clay oven, was to weave a rough dome out of willow and lay your clay mix over this. When you fire your oven the willow will burn away but the clay will remain.

My experience is in central France where although they use the double guyot system, it is pruned harder, to each of the two branches in winter they are pruned to leave one leader off of the preceding years growth and to leave 2 eyes. This quite simple, once you grasp the idea. The only other point i...

We fostered through Social Services and despite fine words the last thing they wanted to do was support you or the child. They had 'targets', ie. get the kids off their responsibility and having to pay for them, and secondly to protect their own backs and jobs, and if that meant individual social wo...

Last night we found outside our council flats a really nice solid oak table which with the flaps up will seat 8, with a clean well worth £800 in an antique shop, but we love it and will keep it.

Yes and unless it is a good year, the plants well spaced and well fed, the second and third ears are unlikely to amount to much.

Yeh, it's going to get harder to grow our own, rotting crops in the fields are going to put food prices up this year..... but you should see the slug damage to my veg. The almost constant downpour has incereased garden mollusc numbers exponentially, anyone else experiencing this problem? (Apologies...

Getting our feet firmly back in touch with the ground, straight rows are not just for hoeing. I'm into no dig and mulch, so I don't have that many weeds and don't like to hoe (disturbs the mulch and it is easy to just pull them out when small) but a big advantage of straight rows for me are that the...