Selfsufficientish.com

What KeithBC said! By some standards, we would probably be considered p*ss poor, our income is very low. But we have chosen to live a life that does not require us to spend all our time trying to earn more money. We are much more ish than self sufficient at the moment, turns out we don't have very g...

We have 4 large trees and I think we got 60-70kg of nuts from them last year. We don't have to compete with squirrels, just our dogs for whom walnuts are a delicacy. Still, that many nuts is quite a bit for two people and three dogs to get through in a year! In terms of harvesting, we tend to leave ...

A book I have recently read (Kitchen Medicine by Julie Bruton Seal & Matthew Seal) recommends star anise tea for sinus problems - 2 or 3 star anise in a mug, fill with boiling water, cover the top of the mug with a saucer to stop the steam escaping, steep for 5 minutes or so. Apparently the acti...

I gave up the corporate world and we now live on the income from OH's graphic design business - which is him doing the design and me doing the admin. I earned about 60% of our income in my corporate job and we adjusted our life considerably so we could afford to work for ourselves. We left the UK an...

Like Tosca, we moved abroad, although we came south to central Portugal. We bought our house and small bit of land with the proceeds of the sale of our house in the UK so are mortgage free and OH is a self employed graphic designer - his very part time work is our only income. We are far from even s...

My dad has kept stuff for years and years. When we bought an old motorhome a few years ago, we needed to replace a bit of the carpeted area and used carpet tiles from a house my parents and I moved out of in 1975. He took great pleasure in telling my mum 'I told you they would come in useful one day...

I've made that spud & carrot 'cheese' sauce, one of the best I've had. And yes, it works very well on pizza, dolloped about like blobs of mozzarella. A use it up challenge would be a good idea here, we seem to have so much food but keep buying more. Maybe when we don't have any more visitors and...

Well, Lush are definitely a UK company not Canadian - they evolved from Cosmetics to Go which was started in Poole, Dorset by a couple of people who made products for The Body Shop when it first started in the 1970s. On to ergonomics. I have also suffered a lot from headaches and neck/shoulder pain,...

We've tried the same thing in one of our raised beds this year, although the beds are quite deep so we have two 20cm pots siliconed together. We have three of them in a bed with about 12 tomato plants in. So far so good - we've had temperatures over 30° already and the plants are looking great. If i...

We've just got back from the UK where my parents bought us an Ecofon - my dad had seen one in action in a pub and decided it was something we should have for our wood burner. No scientific analysis behind it, but we are noticing a significant difference. We have a small, pretty much open plan house ...

No need for full investigation thanks Rachel - I'm pretty convinced that it would make a difference to the overall feeling of warmth, just didn't want it to have to suffer a draught (or rather suffer OH suffering a draught) for it to work. I think it sounds like a good investment for us if the gift ...

Any updated reviews of the Ecofan? I think we may have had an offer of one as a gift but our concern is that it might create a draught - we have always avoided any sort of fan heating for that reason.

I think it is the Christmas special that is most repeated on the BBC - but usually in July/August for some reason!

I was a child in the 70s but have always loved The Good Life. I bought the various series individually and just recently watched them all again. It is a wonderful show, one of my all time favourites.

It isn't clear which email address was used - if it was your work email addresses, then no problem, if it was a personal email address I have to ask why you would be using that for work? And why should the sender be concerned whether you and the other person have any problems? If they are sending a ...