Author Archives: admin

Growing Our Own Mushrooms

Last Sunday was Father’s Day here in the UK. In recent years I have found it increasingly easy to buy gifts for my father due to our shared love for all things self-sufficiency. Basically I look at things I’ve been thinking of getting for myself, and then pick one of them that he doesn’t already have. This year I opted to buy him a mushroom growing kit. I knew he’d love it. It’s something that I’ve been thinking about for some time. In their excellent Practical Self-Sufficiency book, Dick and James Strawbridge have a couple of suggestions for growing mushrooms….

Our new pumpkin patch

It’s official: we now have a pumpkin patch! Well, sort of, there are currently no pumpkin plants in it, but there are some squash plants. I just think ‘pumpkin patch’ has more of a ring to it than ‘squash patch’. We were running quite late on Saturday as I ended up helping my dad at the allotment into the early afternoon, and in the end Liz and I didn’t get to work on the garden until the evening. But we made very good use of the three hours or so we spent out there. We removed the turf from a…

The season's first ripe strawberry

Yesterday (20th June), marked the official start of our strawberry season. We harvested our very first ripe strawberry of the year, and it surprisingly wasn’t the one in the basket at the front of the house that was on the verge of ripeness a week ago. Instead it was one in a pot in the back yard. We’re still yet to get round to arranging the back yard and it is currently strewn with plants in pots from the old house. Most of these pots contain strawberry runners that I have kept. It was one of these that was bearing…

Parsnip tops sprouting between the seedling leaves!

For various reasons I was late home every night this week, and so I didn’t get to spend nearly as much time in the garden as I would have liked to have done. Which of course goes without saying, even if I hadn’t stayed late once! Here’s a day-by-day summary of what we managed to get done this week: Monday After the colossal task of watering the plants that are still in pots, I focused on the vegetable patch. I dug and sieved the gap between the row of parsnips and the lawn that adjoins it. There is space either…

The Start of the 2015 Redcurrant Harvest

Redcurrants fruit on old wood, blackcurrants fruit on new wood. This affects the way they are pruned, as blackcurrants should be cut back quite heavily every year to promote new growth, which will produce fruit the next year. Redcurrants on the other hand, shouldn’t be pruned too heavily, otherwise the lack of old wood will mean no fruit the next year. When I first read of this difference in pruning requirements several years ago, my first thoughts were ‘I’ll never remember which way round they are’. However, this proved not to be the case. The fact of the matter is…

It Rained!

This weekend we didn’t manage to do anything in the garden, as we were away visiting family. We decided to set off on Friday evening, and just as we were leaving it started to rain. Understandably then, it was with great excitement that I rushed down the garden to check the water butt on our return this evening. I saw a neighbour on my way, and I asked how much rain we had had. She said that she leaves buckets out to catch the rain and that there wasn’t a great deal in them. I scurried on, quietly confident that…

The Vegetable Patch Gets Its First Vegetables

We’ve had a couple of busy evenings in the garden. On Wednesday evening my dad came round to help me prepare some space in the vegetable patch for our plants that were in most desperate need of planting. We turned over the soil, but it was so full of roots and stones that we had to dig out a row, sieve it, and fill it back in. It was very time consuming, but I felt it necessary as I had two root crops to plant. I plan to split this vegetable patch into four sections, a classic four crop rotation….

Let It Rain, Let It Rain, Let It Rain!

Another day, another step towards being (slightly) self-sufficient. Today my good friend Joe and I installed a water butt on the shed by the vegetable patch. The patch is a bit of a walk from the house, and the shed is right next to the patch, so it was something I’d considered from the start. Harvesting rainwater rather than using the mains is also of course the much greener (and self-sufficient) option. I was browsing the garden section of a shop a couple of weeks ago and saw they had water butts reduced from about £35 to £12.99. I considered…

Clearing the Vegetable Patch

It was a busy weekend in the garden! There is a section of our garden, about 53′ x 17′ (16.2m x 5.2m), that the previous tenants used as a vegetable patch. By the time we moved in it was a dense mass of mostly nettles, alexanders and cow parsley, as can be seen in the photos below. We’ve been in the house for just over a month now, and this weekend, with the help of some friends, we finally tackled this area. It’s a great feeling to have finally cleared this patch, it’s been something we’ve been eager to do…

Welcome

Hello and welcome to my blog. I’ve been interested in self-sufficiency for several years now. I’ve dreamed of managing a smallholding, read countless books on the subject, watched television programmes, chatted to smallholders and then dreamed some more. I don’t have a smallholding of my own; I live in a fairly regular house and work a full time job. However, even though I’m not currently in a position to live the good life, I’ve discovered that it is still possible to get a taste of it. I have long thought about starting this blog, but I always feared I wouldn’t…

Slightly Self-Sufficient

Tasting The Good Life