How did you start being more self sufficient?

[Mraya]

What kind of pigs? I liked the guinea hogs i had.

Potbelly pigs but I like Guinea hogs

 

[henless]

I make a powder laundry I grate 1 bar fels naptha or zote ,1 box of borax ,1 box washing soda mix and use 1 table spoon per load. I'm happy with how well it cleans.

I have a question about your dry soap mix. Do you mix the whole box of of borax AND washing soda with the fels soap or do you use 1 cup each and mix with the soap?

 

[henless]

Just wanted to update about the laundry soap. I wanted to try LG's recipe, but I didn't have enough containers to keep the liquid soap in, so I went with a dry mix.

I looked online and found several different recipes. The recipe I went with calls for 1 box each of Borax, Washing Soda and Baking Soda, 3 bars of Fels Naptha & 1 bar of Zote. The soap bars are grated up and mixed with the rest of the ingredients. You use 2 Tbs per load.

After figuring up the coast of the laundry mix compared to the cost of liquid Gain, I end up paying half for the laundry mix than I did for the Gain. Now to see how I like it over the next few weeks.

 

[lazy gardener]

Your powdered mix will last much, much longer than your liquid gain, I'm guessing. How much liq. Gain were you using per load?

 

[henless]

It's a 100 oz bottle and it's supposed to be good for 64 uses, so 1.6 oz. I never did measure it out exactly. I usually just poured it straight from the bottle into the dispenser.

 

[Mama Runner]

I grew up that way, Thank God! The first thing I can remember from my Mamaw was not to toss anything.

Example: Vegetables from turnip tops to garlic. She taught me to buy things once and regrow regrow regrow. I still have celery that I started in highschool. 4 PHD's later I am still regrowing them Check out you tube videos there are tons of them.

Wait don't toss those egg cartons they make great seed staters and the card board ones can be cut and planted right into the ground.

Plastic containers can be spray painted and made into hanging baskets with a bit of string and a whole punch.

Pant legs can be cut and filled with plastic grocery bags tied at the ends to make decorative pillows or great for stopping drafts from doors and windows.

I could go on for pages. To start just think of ways to reuse or upscale things you would normally toss.

 

[GracieJ]

Spend less than you earn. Think long and hard about every purchase. Answer this question: Is this item a need, or a want. Prioritize. When you do buy, buy quality. Learn to delay gratification. Make the meal away from home a rarity, not a regular occurrence. First financial goal is to become debt free.

Grow a garden. Don't have much land? Start small. Even an apartment dweller can have a mini garden with land lord's blessing. Hay bale or container gardening can be done as long as you have adequate sun light.

Don't be big meat eaters. It's surprising how little meat it takes to "make a meal". The less processed food you use in your diet, the healthier the diet should be and the less it will cost you. Even such things as starting with a pound of dried kidney beans instead of cans of kidney beans when you make a pot of chili.

Shop the sales, and base your weekly menu on what you already have on hand, or what is on sale that week. Keep extra meals in your freezer for those nights when you just don't have it in you to cook that night.

Learn how to do things yourself. It cost less to buy power tools than it does to pay some one to do the job for you. Sure, there's a learning curve. But, I'll take the occasional mistake made during the learning curve over the never ending expense of never learning a skill and always paying some one else to do it for me. Become a scavenger. A trip to my Town Mall (aka town dump) can be a shopping experience for me. Thermopane windows and doors, wood for building projects, truck loads of wood chips.

Gardening: Feed your soil, and it will feed you. Permanent mulch will save on work, fertilizer, water. Grow what you like to eat and learn how to process it. Grow heirloom varieties and save the seeds. Even hybrid seed is worth saving. It may not breed true, but on the other hand, you might get some pleasant surprises: Case in point: One year, I saved seed from very large buttercup squash bought at a neighborhood veggie stand. Planted those seeds the next season along with my favorite: Red Kuri. The buttercups harvested from the saved seeds weighed up to 22#! I saved seeds THAT year. The following year, I harvested a lot of 22# bright orange-red buttercup squash.

Barter: Trade produce, chickens, chicks, eggs for the bounty from your friends and neighbors. Even when I give my stuff away, folks "give back".

Home made laundry detergent: I can make a years worth of detergent for less than $5.00. And it is IMO better in quality than what I would buy.

Hatch your own chicks, build your own incubator!

Every dollar not spent brings you closer to being self sufficient.

And of primary importance: Place God at the top of your priority list. Realize that it all belongs to Him in the first place. Give from what you have, and He will bless the remainder above and beyond what you can imagine.

What an amazing list!!

 

[HoopyFrood]

Wonderful thoughts and stories in this thread! Thanks for sharing!

For us... Some might call it a midlife crisis We were city folk that left our careers behind, and decided to take a six month road trip around the US. It started merely as a vacation, a writing exercise, and a chance to see more of this enormous country we live in but never see. Yet after only a week into the trip we decided it would be fun to WWOOF at the same time. So we shifted gears (hahaha) and started doing that, too.

Six months, 16,000 miles and five farm WWOOF sessions later we decided we wanted to homestead. It took six months of searching to find the homestead, but eventually we found it. We're only 1 year, 8 months into the experiment and we are not very self-sufficient yet. But as I said to a friend of mine: "Homesteading has a steep learning curve." Especially when you have zero experience gardening, building, repair vehicles, or maintaining a house! Yet we have learned a tremendous amount and are very hopeful 2018 will be the first year of a bountiful garden harvest.

Our goals are to be off grid, growing or bartering 100% of our food (including grains and milling our own flour, we are increasingly vegetarian but unsure if we will be 100% when all is said and done), managing a perennial food forest, saving all our needed seed, and using wood heat and solar thermal for all cooking and heating needs.

We had a financial crisis last year and almost all our passive income dried up. So we are limping along on savings right now and trying to solve the income riddle without resorting to full-time employment; FT employment makes developing a homestead VERY hard. Homesteading is already a 24/7 job for both of us! And way, way, WAY harder than any day job.

Who knows how this experiment will play out... But at least there's no such thing as boredom

 

[GracieJ]

Wonderful thoughts and stories in this thread! Thanks for sharing!

For us... Some might call it a midlife crisis We were city folk that left our careers behind, and decided to take a six month road trip around the US. It started merely as a vacation, a writing exercise, and a chance to see more of this enormous country we live in but never see. Yet after only a week into the trip we decided it would be fun to WOOF at the same time. So we shifted gears (hahaha) and started doing that, too.

Six months, 16,000 miles and five farm WOOF sessions later we decided we wanted to homestead. It took six months of searching to find the homestead, but eventually we found it. We're only 1 year, 8 months into the experiment and we are not very self-sufficient yet. But as I said to a friend of mine: "Homesteading has a steep learning curve." Especially when you have zero experience gardening, building, repair vehicles, or maintaining a house! Yet we have learned a tremendous amount and are very hopeful 2018 will be the first year of a bountiful garden harvest.

Our goals are to be off grid, growing or bartering 100% of our food (including grains and milling our own flour, we are increasingly vegetarian but unsure if we will be 100% when all is said and done), managing a perennial food forest, saving all our needed seed, and using wood heat and solar thermal for all cooking and heating needs.

We had a financial crisis last year and almost all our passive income dried up. So we are limping along on savings right now and trying to solve the income riddle without resorting to full-time employment; FT employment makes developing a homestead VERY hard. Homesteading is already a 24/7 job for both of us! And way, way, WAY harder than any day job.

Who knows how this experiment will play out... But at least there's no such thing as boredom

Impressive. It really sounds like you are on your way to totally living off grid and sustaining yourselves fully. What does WOOF stand for? I've seen it before but can't for the life of me remember, is it something-something organic farming?

Hope you solve your income issues - I'm sure once you figure it out you'll be back on the road to homesteading.

 

[HoopyFrood]

Impressive. It really sounds like you are on your way to totally living off grid and sustaining yourselves fully. What does WOOF stand for? I've seen it before but can't for the life of me remember, is it something-something organic farming?

Hope you solve your income issues - I'm sure once you figure it out you'll be back on the road to homesteading.

Thank you so much!!

WWOOF! - Bwahaha! I misspelled it before! Edited to fix that. I thought it stood for "World Wide Organization of Organic Farmers" but now that you asked and I looked it up... the acronym was far more informal. So "WWOOF" has been said to be a lot of things, but the name really is "WWOOF" and not a string of words. Interesting. But I digress.

But at bottom it is an international cooperative effort between organic farmers and volunteers that want to work on and learn about organic farming.

Volunteers pay to register on the WWOOF network of their given country. Once registered you search for host farms. The hosts publish what they do, what they require, and what they offer. It's kind of like AirB&B that way. Then volunteers message the potential hosts and negotiate a work arrangement.

Some hosts offer nothing more than a toilet, shower and a place to camp. Others offer full room and board for entire seasons. It all depends on the mutual interests of the hosts and volunteers.

I wish I had spent several years in my 20s WWOOFing instead of college. Oh well

If anyone is interested, check it out here:
https://wwoofusa.org/about/