down to earth

I haven't had a break from writing yet to think about the next post on food security. It will come, hopefully this week, but in the meantime I thought I would bring you up to date on what's been happening here at home lately.

Before I get into that, I have to tell you that I'm not allowing anonymous comments anymore. I don't mind constructive criticism but when I get comments about my hairdo and glasses (from an anonymous "stylist" LOL), well, it made me realise that life's too short to even read anything from people who only want to criticise. I've also had hate comments in the past. Strange that I've never had criticism from anyone who left the link to their own blog or website, hmmmm. I want to share and be a part of my community here and those comments get in the way of that. The lovely Tania over at Ivy's Nest has had a similar problem and all she was doing was writing about her new house cow. There are some very unhappy people out there who want to make others as miserable as they are. I'm sorry it's come to this but getting an ID doesn't take long and it's simple to do. I've kept anonymous comments going for the past six years but now it's time to get an ID if you want to comment here.

Our garlic just after harvest.

We've been very busy here these past few weeks. We decluttered our wardrobes and gave the charity shop a few bags of clothes. We also gave away, to a local family via Gumtree, a large cupboard we had no need of. When that went, we reorganised the living room. Hanno cleaned and reorganised the pantry yesterday. As usual, Hanno is always working along side me keeping our home maintenance on target. We're a great team. We harvested our year's garlic crop a couple of week's ago, they've been drying out since then. Yesterday I cleaned them up and now they're safely stored away. I'll write up a post about growing and storing garlic soon. It's easy to grow and worthwhile having your own crop because organic garlic is expensive and a lot of the other garlic is from China. :- |

This is the view along the front verandah.

We also replaced our seating out on the front verandah and got rid of the very old (antique) cane lounge and chairs. Now we're luxuriating on a new-to-us cane lounge we bought on Gumtree for a fraction of the new price. It's so comfortable out there now I go and sit there as much as I can. It's a great place to read and knit and it's where Hanno and I have our morning tea. Do you have a special place to sit and read?

I'm still clicking away on the needles. Right now I'm knitting a Miss Marple scarf in organic cotton, in Diligence, a dark grey, for my friend Kathleen. She is visiting her family in Texas soon and seeing as it's almost winter there, I thought a nice scarf would help keep her warm. This organic cotton is beautifully warm without being scratchy. My other project is for Johnathan, my nephew Danny's little boy. Johnathan turned one last week. Happy birthday Jono! His cardigan is also organic cotton, in Mercy, a pale blue. I just love knitting that EcoYarns cotton. It's my favourite of all the yarns.

From the road, the fence going up.

From the house, the finished fence.

The chook fence.

We had to replace some of our fences lately. A few weeks ago we had a local company come in and replace the side fence at the front of the house and later, the old chook fence. The front fence had been up for almost 15 years and had become rickety and unsafe. The chook fence had needed replacing for many years. In the past, Hanno would have done that sort of maintenance but it's too much for him now so we got the locals in. Still, it was an expensive exercise and we had to save up till have had enough to have it done.

Today we're having family lunch at Daisy's Place, our favourite local restaurant. It is our birthday gift to Sunny to take her, Kerry, her mum Sunja, Jamie and his cousin Jooa to lunch. I love Sunny like a daughter and I'm so thankful she is part of my family. It will be a real pleasure to celebrate her birthday with her mum here. Although we celebrate Sunny's birthday on 8 October, the day she was born, in Korea, it's the custom to celebrate on a different day each year, according to the full moon. They have many beautiful customs in Korea. I've been reading quite a bit about Korea lately, a country with thousands of years of traditions that are so different to our own.

I think our garden is nearing the end of its 2013 season. The chickens got in there yesterday and ate about half the new seedlings Hanno planted the day before. We still have a lot growing, and will continue harvesting for a while, but I doubt we'll plant too much more this year. I think it's going to be a long hot summer.

So, that's a bit of what's been happening in here. I hope everything is going well for you at home too. I send warm wishes to you.

When I was a young girl it was common for suburban backyards to have a vegetable garden and fruit trees; my grandma grew peaches in her backyard and my parents grew plums. They all lived in Sydney. Occasionally there would be a flock of chickens kept for eggs and meat, and maybe a meat rabbits or pigeons. I was born in the late 1940s so the second world war was still a fresh memory and the majority of people had lived through the Great Depression. People were much more self-reliant then; they had to be. There were still shortages in food after the war, and for many people, providing for themselves was just a continuation of what they'd always done. These were the days before supermarkets, people shopped for food either every day or every second day and very little food was wasted. Now, if something happened in the food chain that supplies supermarkets, most people wouldn't know how to feed themselves. Sudden unemployment also has the potential to impact on food security. We should all be learning as much as we can about our food, where it comes from, and if that source of food stopped, how we could replace it.

Climate change, peak oil, water shortages and population increases have all played a part in increasing the price of food. Unemployment, natural disasters, wars and terrorist attacks also impact on food security. No one knows what the future holds but I can't see any imminent improvements in the weather, oil prices, water supplies or population figures. I think things will get worse before they get better; but food security is something we should all be dealing with now. I have no doubt that eventually we'll learn how to live in a more sustainable way. We have no choice. The trick will be to live well during the transition and not, when food becomes much more expensive, get dragged into the changes, resenting every step along the way.

Most countries have a food security policy and while I think that's a good thing, I like the idea of being responsible for ourselves, being prepared for anything and, if possible, helping others in our communities.

As you know, we changed how we live over a decade ago and have not had one moment's regret. I can't say all of it was easy, but as a whole, the change was fairly trouble-free and straight-forward and I wish we'd done it much earlier. Our decision to simplify life also gave us the chance to learn about our food and water supply and to reduce the risk of food insecurity by learning about small scale food production, cooking, food hygiene, food storage, heirloom seeds, pure breed chickens, aquaponics, bees, water harvesting and many other concepts that make up the huge topic of food security.

Our path took us back to backyard vegetable gardening, chickens and stockpiling - all things we'd done on a small scale in the past and then stopped for some reason. But this isn't the only way to go. Community gardens, allotments, farmers markets, bartering, eating seasonly and locally can all play a big part in a transition towards food security. We still rely on our community to supply things like milk, honey, fruit and vegetables, depending on the season, and we shop at supermarkets for things such as tea, coffee, oil, sugar, salt. Our system is heavily reliant on the work we do for ourselves to produce food but as we age, I can see us becoming more reliant on our community when less comes from our own efforts in our backyard. I hope we can be a bigger part of the community system then and teach others what we know.

I guess the best way to move towards a more sustainable future and food security, is to assess what we can do right now and what we'll be capable of in five or ten years. You may need to learn how to grow some food at home while you're still doing all your shopping in the community. What you learn now can help sustain you and your family in the future. And its not all about growing and buying local food, it's also about cooking from scratch, harvesting water, saving seeds, keeping pure breed chickens and doing it all as cheaply as we can. And if you can do nothing, being okay with that and relying on your family and government to support you. Hopefully your situation will change in the future and you'll be able to do more.

Over the next week or two, I'd like to start off with the two systems of food security I know well - the backyard model and the community model. I'd also like you to discuss what your experience is and hopefully we can all help and learn along the way. I believe this collaborative approach will be the way of the future. I hope we can start right here to reduce vulnerability in our own homes and to work towards sustainability and building resilient and strong communities.

Further Reading

Australia' National Food Plan

Food insecurity in Melbourne'

Giant underground water reserves found in Kenya

Dwindling water supplies in US

When I first started living as I do now, I made lists of skills I wanted to reacquaint myself with or learn anew. It was not until I'd been working in this new way that I discovered that simple life has a way of telling you what you need to learn next. You learn something new, and then you see that it is connected to many other things, and often you must know about them too. All too often, I started learning about a new process and it opened up much more than I expected and lead me to on to a more comprehensive lesson and a deeper understanding. So I threw out my lists and just went where I was taken. For instance, when I enlarged the vegetable garden, I had to learn how to harvest properly and when the food was inside the house, how to sort out what to use fresh, what to freeze, what to ferment and what to put into jars. It seems simple but unlike the common monocultures that make up specialist farms, I wasn't harvesting an acre of lettuce. I was picking the outside leaves of spinach and silverbeet, florettes of broccoli, 12 radishes, two carrots, a turnip, six lemons, two tomatoes and half a basket of beans. What do you do with that!

Freezing wasn't just freezing. I had to learn about blanching, make up a blanching times chart, learn how to package vegetables to retain quality, and learn, through trial and error, how to store food in a freezer. Fermenting was the same. It wasn't just collecting a couple of recipes for ginger beer and sauerkraut, I had to read books about fermenting, learn about fungus and moulds and then put that into practice in a way that added value to the food we grew and bought.

Baking was certainly not as straight-forward as I expected it to be. I had to find a reliable supplier of good flour and yeast, learn about water-flour ratio, temperature and kneading, then put it all into practise. I had to make my fair share of mistakes and not be disheartened, or waste too much.

There was trial and error involved in making cleaners too. I'd make up a recipe and see if it worked the way I needed it to. If not, I'd modify it, try it again and keep modifying until I had a product I could use again and again. Once made, they also had to store well and be able to do the job after sitting on the shelf for a while.

I spent hours outside monitoring electric and water meters, recycling various items, making compost, sorting out worm farms, sowing seeds, working out the best way to water them while nurturing them to seedling stage. We've saved seeds, peeled loofahs, broken open rosellas, plaited garlic and watched on while crops were damaged by the wind and rain. We planted some plants in full sun and some on the shady side of a trellis or tall plant, I helped position Hanno's shade tunnels, stood back and watched while he built a greenhouse. We realised early that to make a success of what we wanted to grow, we had to create microclimates, extend growing periods and go beyond what we read to see how far we could push it in our backyard.

There were many hours given to mending and knitting. When I started knitting again, I undid so many stitches, but it taught me the valuable lesson of patience and that some tasks take the time they take. Over the years I felt a need to teach as many as I could the various old and new skills I'd become familiar with. This lead me to volunteering in my community and travelling out to various places to meet so many of you, to talk about this life and hopefully encourage and support others in their own transition.

We still have a lot we can do here. There is always work to do, we're not perfect and we have to always be mindful of what we're doing. The one thing I always have to watch is that tendency to slip back to convenience. I want these changes to be permanent for us. I want to continue here, living as we do now for as long as I can. I don't want to go back to mindless consumption, this is much better.

The most difficult part of this for me was the initial change of mindset and then maintaining that mindset even when it was easier not to. There are so many distractions, so many temptations. I carry on because I have been made happy again living this way, I am convinced that having everything you want is not good for the soul, I believe hard work builds character and I know that I have to give back some of what I've taken. I can't return those dozen pairs of shoes, the dresses, all the computers and TVs, but I can care for the land I live on, teach what I know to others and motivate people to live their best life. I know that the rampant consumerism we live with is killing the earth and I know that it will eventually change us. But how can you tell third world countries that they can't have the things we've had for the past 50 years because it's bad for the planet? How do you convince friends and neighbours that we should all be living with less? How do I look Jamie and Alex in the eye if I don't? They and their children will bear the consequences of what we've done. My way of answering those questions is to continue along our simple path and to show rather than preach. I want Jamie and Alex to see us living here, doing our work, making the place right for us. If we can start repairing past damage, hopefully those ripples will move out into the world.

But the message I'm really trying to give to you is to use your common sense, don't rely on others, read books, do your own research, push your own envelope and find out what works for you in your climate and in your home. Look after yourself and your family, know everything you need to know to do that and don't expect everything to be easy. Because this isn't just a few recipes for laundry liquid and orange cake; it's much deeper than that. If we're all going to make a small difference by living cleaner, greener, healthier, thriftier and by being more aware, we'll have to change our ideas about what success is, stop buying everything we want, localise our lives, connect with our communities and work hard. And that is easier said than done.

How are you coping with the transition from old ways to new?

... to be continued.

My brain wasn't working properly yesterday. Now that I've rested, I remembered that Tim at Slow magazine has given me a copy of the current edition to give away. Australian readers only please. Just leave a comment about Slow and I'll pick numbers out of a hat. It will close tomorrow - my Wednesday morning. Good luck!

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Once upon a time, self-sufficiency was a goal of mine. That was in the days before I'd thought about what it meant. When I did think about it, I knew I couldn't live that way without giving up a lot of things I didn't want to give up. I didn't want to live without tea or coffee, and although I can easily grow both tea and coffee here, I don't want the palaver of processing them to the drinkable stage. Besides, we have excellent Montville organic coffee here, there is good Australian tea, so I prefer to tap into my community to buy those two commodities; I want to be part of my community, not cut off from it. I don't want to give up salt either, or meat. We could probably run a lot more chickens here if we wanted to but I know I couldn't kill a chicken, or a pig. I don't want Hanno to do that either. He has had to kill a chicken or two over the years when they were injured, and it upset him. I can look at photos of animals being killed for food, I watched on as my grandmother killed her own chooks when I was younger, but I don't want to do it myself. We'll be happy to collect eggs from our girls and be content with that.

When I finally came to this way of living I knew would have to learn a lot but if I did I could live in an environmentally-sound manner, stretch my dollars, cut out a lot of the chemicals I once foolishly accepted with no questions asked, grow food in the backyard and home-produce bread, jams, relishes, sauces, soap, laundry liquid and all my cleaners. And while I admire those who can live a self-sufficient lifestyle, we will live as close to it as we can while making certain choices that make it impossible for us. We have chosen partial self-sufficiency.

The common idea most people have of a self-sufficient or partially self-sufficient lifestyle is that it's full of productive work, animals, fences, vegetable gardening, making wine, cheese, soap and bread. And that's a fair summation of what can go into it. One thing there is no doubt about is that you have to learn a lot of new skills. When we decided to live this way we decided there would be take-away, no supermarket bread, no over-priced soft drinks or convenience foods. You do all those things for yourself and if you don't know how, you learn. You learn to cook, garden, preserve, make jams and sauces and a hundred other things. So why would you live like this if there is more work? There are many answers to that but the one that seems to be glaringly obvious is we all need to learn how to look after ourselves. If you're looking for other reasons, there are many out there to choose from. Take your pick: climate change, peak oil, economic uncertainty, job loss, divorce or loss of a partner, retirement, or just plain common sense - it makes sense to do it. Now, and especially in the future, everyone should be skilled and self-reliant. We should aim at supplying as much as we can for ourselves. I doubt many of us could live a genuine self-sufficient lifestyle but I think partial self-sufficiency is there for most of us. The choices we all make to suit the way we live will be different for all of us, but that's fine. We should be a diverse group with differing skills and goals.

Times are changing, most of us acknowledge that, and although we might disagree on the whys and whens and hows, change is coming. I think it's already started. The many simple living and environmentally focused blogs and books that have been published in the past few years bear testament to a change. I've been told by numerous people that when the global economic crisis ends, things will return to normal, that rampant spending and unlimited economic growth will return and we'll all prosper. I don't believe there is such a thing as unlimited economic growth and even it it was a common belief in the past, those days are over. There is a good and a bad element to this for me and Hanno. We won't be here to see it. We'll be here through the transition, but I doubt we'll still be here when the changes that many people predict will be the current 'normal'.

There are many dire predictions about our post-carbon, global warming, peak oil, economic deflated world. There are also the more personal scenarios to think about. If all that is happening in the outer world, what is happening in your home? No matter what happens, it will help us all to be prepared and more capable than we are now. We've been dumbed down. We have morphed into helpless beings who can't cook, make a fire or recognise the night sky. We need to get back to being more capable and skill ourselves so we can take care of ourselves, regardless of what happens.

So what does that mean for all of us? For me and Hanno it means staying the same while we continue to learn as much as we can. Human society has lived through many changes, we can see this one through too. When you think back on the changes in the last couple of centuries - the industrial revolution, the world wars, the great depression - each of these altered daily life and challenged ideas of what normal was, yet we lived through each of them. People adapt, they change what they think is normal. They learn to get by, they reskill themselves and work towards different goals. That is my goal now - learning to adapt for the future normal and helping as many others as I can. I hope we can learn this together and pool our resources so that many more of us can lay claim to being capable and prepared for the what the future holds.

What are your thoughts on preparing for the future? What are you planning to do?

... to be continued