Living the simple life

[firecracker]

Magnificent!! Yepp, my garden and chookies manage to keep my friends and family smiling! Been busy with a bountiful harvest this season, been preserving it all for winter-pantry looks shit hot! I plant by the moon and love having my hands in the dirt.

It does take an extra effort but nothing feels like hard work when you enjoy it. I'd rather trade my time and effort for good food than pay for the opposite, where it's the greedy middle man reaping the rewards and not those who put the resources and labour into it.

I might add that I made an honest effort to knit a scarf once but when my friends and family clapped their eyes on it, they thought I was taking the piss

Stay keen, eat green

[cave weta]

I built my own house for three grand!

[Big Dave]

Motu has the most awesome vege garden!

His Silver beet is like shrubs- you could hide behind them!

Motu could hide behind a spring onion

[Swoop]

How many of you out there do it?

growing your own vegies, Most definately!
making stuff from scratch, Umm? Like what.
keeping chickens, No
baking your own bread, No
bottling & preserving, Does homebrew beer count as "bottling"?
composting, Definately
sewing, I used to. No machines now though
knitting I was pretty good at macrame at school. Close enough?
etc.

...........

[firecracker]

I built my own house for three grand!

Farkin legend mate!

[Manxman]

I built my own house for three grand!

I'd move along sharpish if I were you - that parking meter has expired.

[puddytat]

The Wife & I did the hard yards years ago, working overseas & saving evey pennie so we could come home, get a small farm (freehold) & do the self sufficiency thing as much as we could. Its worked
We officially live on an income that is well below the "poverty line", mainly because we dont need to work as much to get the dollars to buy the food...its not as hard as people think to grow a garden, its mainly the initial stage of starting one thats that requires the most energy.
We can afford to eat the most expensive organic fruits, veges ,honey, meat milk, & eggs because we grow them ourselves. Simple really.
Im not trying to be smug, rather more snug
Good on anyone who thinks or is thinking along these lines....its been the way of life for millenia, its the way of life for the future.
P.s...I balance out my gas guzzling tendencies by planting trees & because we drive far less than the national average, I can can justify it to myself at least.

[cave weta]

I met some germans who live near Murchison - they have goats grazing on their roof- brew their own elictricity and knit their own cheese, they also milled the timber to carve their own bicycles - perhaps you know them?

[puddytat]

Yeah Bro,theyre my neighbours!!They are also in the process of recycling thier 2 Moto Guzi's,quite a long process though as it involves leaving them out in the rain to rust....
Top folk,rather hardcore though....
Their cheese is superb, salami's sublime,cider is stupifying!!!:
Hey,youre not part of one of the groups that come up our valley,via the Porika & Braeburn tracks are ye ? If you are, you ride right by our gate...

[BOGAR]

I'm trying, I only rent a farm cottage at this stage and have a small vege garden. I'm not so good at keeping it maintained though but I am learning and (hopefully) trying something new and extra each year to build up. I make my own wine, used to make my own bread ("lazy" at the moment) and my parents live in a house that is off the grid which i like. My aim is to build my own proper log cabin somewhere near a national park (I like the isolation and trees) and produce as much as i can for myself as possible. This would include power, food and fuel for a start. My other hope is to find someone like minded to do it with.

[ynot slow]

I have 17 chickens at the moment and sell the eggs or trade at work for fish, veges or whatever my work mates have in abundance.
Vegie garden is a bit sad this year but plenty of beef and lamb in the paddocks....oh and mushrooms for soup...
It is a good feeling to be able to supply some of the `essentials` from the lifestyle block but it takes a lot of hard work to reap the rewards....... and can get in the way of good bike riding time

And a one armed turkey,broken tiger,sheep inpregnater,so the buell is classed as a farm bike,has a high enough front guard to be one,just let tax man know it is to tow the trailer for feeding out.

[Finn]

I buy fresh basil in a little pot from Woolworths. Does this count?

[Burtha]

Hubby likes to grow the vegeis, I do the home crafts - everything from embroidery to homeopathic remedies, herb garden and PC maintenance (although I doubt the last one counts) and we have a * large * garden - mainly cos we live on such a huge section.

All good fun.

[XxKiTtiExX]

Used to live in an extremely small but comfortable house. Mum kept a nice vegetable garden, had chickens a cow and a horse (perfect fertilizer for your garden and at least you know whats in it... SHIT!!)
Mum used to milk the cow, and we had home made yoghurt which I miss so much. Had an old wood stove and mum used to constantly bake scrummy bikkies and stuff. Swimming hole just down the driveway (who needs a big flash swimming pool when we had our creek and swing).
Used to go mushroom hunting as kids on a neighbouring farm, that was fun, spot something white and run. (yes the small things amused us, not like today). Blackberry hunting too and mum would make blackberry and apple crumble, or blackberry jam.
Back then everything electricity wise was run off a windmill and solar panels. So I was pretty much a real wop wops girl living out the back of heck knows where (beautiful native bush block), but I look back on it all and I miss it.
Where we are living now we don't have gardens, we have a couple of cows just to keep the grass in the paddock down. And the house sits up on a hill so we pretty much have no flat backyard up around the house where we can do much. So its a huge change in lifestyle. I did have a go at a bit of gardening but I guess I wasn't gifted with much of a green finger.
Mum has been thinking about selling up and moving again, so we did talk about writing a list of what she wants so that she can look for that in her next property. (the list pretty much matches what she once had).