Let’s face it not only does homegrown produce taste better, but there are more than a few good reasons to try to be as self reliant as possible:

Cost: It costs mere pennies to grow your own produce. Good, fresh vegetables at the store are expensive and with the help of a greenhouse we can extend our growing season and produce more than enough to replace our need to go shopping. We have a well on the property and plenty of containers of rainwater so the cost of watering is not a factor either. The start up cost will definitely not be cheap (especially for the greenhouse) but we will try our best to do this budget friendly.

Security: There is some wacky stuff going on in the world today. Global warming, wars, pandemics and various other threats are splashed all over the news every day. Not that we plan on building bunkers like some of the other self reliance websites out there, but it doesn’t hurt to know that if the shit hits the fan or SHTF as they like to call it, you can survive on your own for a while.

Ecology: Did you know that the average yogurt has traveled more on its way from the utter to your fridge than you did last year? Well, it’s true given the different places all the ingredients have traveled from to the manufacturing plant (nice that’s where I want my food to come from) on to the store and then to your home. That is a lot of travel time for food to get to us and with global warming that is just not cool. Another issue is all of the packaging materials, no need for those either when you grow your own!

Here is what we plan to do:

Over the coming weeks we are beginning to rework the garden and plan to set up the greenhouse. While we already have a lot of stuff in mind for the garden (lettuce, tomatoes, corn, etc) we will also need to take a look at our shopping list to determine what we can grow ourselves and get locally. We already have a few things in mind which are most probably not on most people’s mind when they think about self reliance, but that will be explored later on.

The Challenge:

We want to try to replace as many store bought products as possible. While that doesn’t mean we will cut toilet paper from our shopping list, we will have to examine choices such as candy and “convenience food”, such as frozen pizza. We certainly don’t plan (or have the ability and space) to grow ALL our food ourselves so we will also allow ourselves to buy from local producers within a 10km range from the farm.

Keep reading as we embark on this adventure and let’s hope our black thumbs are turning green sometime soon!