self suffiency, what turned your head??

[Millymollymandy]

Oh that Ina!

[baldowrie]

Oh that Ina!

Oh poor Ina...not not her

Just to also add Mrs Flibble I remember the hospital being built and was of it's first patients after I broke my arm...pre A&E dept there. It had no main road and no roundabouts and we were all excited when it was being built as we didn't have to travel a good distance to hospital. Also the heating system was seen as state of the art!

It also had concrete rot and parts were rebuilt but that's another story

[MikeM]

not sure what got me into the whole SS/country living thing (it certainly wasn't my parents or upbringing). Grew up in a medium sized commuter village in S Herts. I think (and have been told ) that I'm just some sort of agrarian throwback coupled with a large dose of being a malcontent and curmudgeon.

[hmk]

I'm another one that has been fascinated since childhhod.

My youngest brother used to criticise my set up of the toy farm because I had a few chickens, a few ducks, a couple of sheep, a cow and a horse, all in the farm yard. 'Proper' farmers didn't do that, he said, and he used to set up huge dairy farms, or just have sheep. He's worked in livestock on and off since leaving school.

I got my revenge later by experimenting with cooking wild foods and feeding it to him and my other brother. I was about 13, I think, and used to make salads with hawthorn leaves and daisies, dandelion and bacon salads (they were popular!) and there was the Great Acorn Autumn, where I tried to make acorns palatable, which wasn't so successful...

Mum and Dad used to grow veg, and we did the usual blackberrying and made oodles of green tomato chutney etc, but otherwise I'm a genetic throwback I think!

Haven't got a small holding yet, but we've got the chickens, just accquired an allotment and my next mission is bees on the allotments...

Hazel

[hamster]

Hmk, you just reminded me about my brother's and my farm set when we were small! We went through and put blue marks on all the sheep with a felt tip, because 'proper' sheep had marks on so the farmer could tell them apart and if they were pregnant!

[romany123]

Such wonderful stories.
Samphire, is a bit like asparagus, but harder to find, and to my mind better. It's also wonderful to hear people's stories of the past. Brightlingsea is a bit like a town that has refused to move out of the 1950s. But I love it for all that.
I was particularly glad to read Kiwiach’s post.
The decision to make everything from scratch is not an easy thing to do, but the rewards are out of this world. I have been fortunate enough, to participate in teaching cookery, and I can't remember the last time that we ate preprepared food.
One of the major problems of cooking everything from scratch is that your taste buds become acute. The downside of this is eating out, becomes a bit of a problem, (in most restaurants that is) as you can taste all the junk that is put into factory prepared food. The plus side of courses, you know exactly what's going into your body.

If we ever do come to New Zealand, will be sure to let you know, you are very generous people.

[mrsflibble]

I know EXACTLY what you mean. the last time jim and I had a chain restaurent meal out (rather than the delightful chinese we go to where everything is cooked to order and if you phone ahead they will make ANYTHING for you) it was pretty much horrific.
he was fine, he went with a fairly easy option of salad followed by curry. I went for prawn cocktail- scary taste and texture to the prawns so after nibbling one i didnt want to finish it as I feared for my life, followed by chicken chasseur with potato gratin and green veg. pretty hard to mess up no?
chicken was dry. sauce tasteless and i kept finding lumps of the packet mix they'd used.
green veg was grey and swimming in water.
the gratin was the most hillariously bad bit. TINNED new potatoes, sliced and coated in a home-pride style carbonara sauce wouldn't have been quite so bad if the tinned potatoes weren't MINTED ones.

NEVER AGAIN will I set foot in a brewers fayre. I was just glad his company paid and not us. that was last valentines. ok this is a prety bad example but I'm hacked off with most places 'cos they suck.

[Jarmara]

I was brought up with self sufficientish parents, chickens, rabbits bred for eating, always grew their own veg, made homebrew, my mother made most of my clothes knitted or sewn, when I first left home I was glad to leave it behind and be able to buy things but after the birth opf my daughter and with more time on my hands - I have turned into my mother

Same here for me

[kiwirach]

Such wonderful stories.
Samphire, is a bit like asparagus, but harder to find, and to my mind better. It's also wonderful to hear people's stories of the past. Brightlingsea is a bit like a town that has refused to move out of the 1950s. But I love it for all that.
I was particularly glad to read Kiwiach’s post.
The decision to make everything from scratch is not an easy thing to do, but the rewards are out of this world. I have been fortunate enough, to participate in teaching cookery, and I can't remember the last time that we ate preprepared food.
One of the major problems of cooking everything from scratch is that your taste buds become acute. The downside of this is eating out, becomes a bit of a problem, (in most restaurants that is) as you can taste all the junk that is put into factory prepared food. The plus side of courses, you know exactly what's going into your body.

If we ever do come to New Zealand, will be sure to let you know, you are very generous people.

gosh , thanks for that!. i'm looking forward to the challenge....i enjoy cooking, so it doesnt scare me!.
and yes, we are nice people us kiwis

[ina]

Oh that Ina!

Oh poor Ina...not not her

What, what, what???

No - I'm much older than Baldowrie - could be her granny, really!

OK, maybe not quite.

[farmerdrea]

Like a lot of others here, I grew up with it, and my German grandmother instilled a love of living off the land as much as possible (she grew up on a farm in Germany, and even though she lived in San Francisco, always had a huge vege garden, and taught me to kill chickens when I was 8 years old!). I grew up on a smallholding, with a huge orchard and vege garden, and chooks for meat and eggs, and attempts at keeping rabbits (though predators got more than we did).

That's about it, really. Always remember my grandmother admonishing me that when I plant things to make sure they feed either us, the birds, bees and butterflies, and best yet, all of us!

Andrea
NZ

[ina]

That's about it, really. Always remember my grandmother admonishing me that when I plant things to make sure they feed either us, the birds, bees and butterflies, and best yet, all of us!

Very sensible, your grandmother! My grandparents also had a garden, and at times chickens, rabbits, and - when my father was young - a sheep. But unfortunately they died when I was a little kid... My father was a very keen gardener; grew almost all our veg and fruit; and my mother was very good at preserving all that we didn't eat fresh.

[Annpan]

You are all so lucky to have been brought up in such a life... I am starting from scratch, teaching myself everything as I go along... Am I really the only newcomer to all this?

[farmerdrea]

I'm realising now what a wealth of information I learned from my grandmother, with plant identification, companion planting, wild foraging and preserving. We lived in an area of California that was huge in pick-your-own orchards, and every summer we spent days picking and then even more days preserving, apricots, peaches, plums, pears, apples, blackberries, etc., and I loved it. The hot kitchen, smelling heavenly of stewed fruit, blackberry pies in the oven. Absolute heaven. There is not much more satisfying than a row of freshly bottled fruit lined up on the bench, with the little pop pop pop as they make their vacuum seals...

Andrea
NZ

[Martin]

spent a lot of my childhood on the family nursery, played with the kids next door, who lived on the most amazing ramshackle smallholding, complete with pigs and swill-boiling.......my father was ahead of his time, and refused to use any chemicals on the nursery, and insisted on growing tasty varieties, rather than heavy croppers, and was very strong on "make do and mend"
Then when we got married in the early 70's, we bought a boat to live on - which is THE ultimate self-sufficiency course..... you've chosen the romantic life, but you still like little luxuries, like a bath, and some sounds.......so there you are, gently swinging on a mooring, just around the corner from Frenchman's creek, and you want those 2 small luxuries
There has to be sufficient coal/anthracite aboard to fire up the stove which heats the water, which you have had to pipe into the main tanks at the top of the tide at the nearby jetty, and you've remembered to manually pump enough up to the header tank to give the water pressure needed - so you've got your bath, and jolly nice it is too, but the bath is below the waterline......so you have to have a sufficiently charged battery to pump the used bathwater uphill and over the side.......which means you've either had to run a thundering great main diesel engine for a while, or had a petrol gennie hammering away for a while...but you can at least run the stereo while you're doing that...........then you want some "instant light" for the cabins, and you plumb in some of the early battery fluorescents, which were awful - they gave off a dreadful high pitched whine, and were horribly blue........so you end up with a collection of hissing Tilley lamps......
You're not that keen on "bucket and chuckit", so you put in marine loos (below the waterline again - so you have to manually pump it away afterwards....)
Which is where my interest in "self sufficient energy" started, and has been used on several boats and caravans since.....