Review: Self Sufficiency: A Complete Guide to Baking, Carpentry, (etc.)

If you’re a regular reader of this blog you might recall that I received a couple of books to review. I’ve previously reviewed The Complete Guide to Edible Wild Plants (paid link). I now turn to Self Sufficiency: A Complete Guide to Baking, Carpentry, Crafts, Organic Gardening, Preserving your Harvest, Raising Animals and More, edited by Abigail R. Ghehring (paid link) (check your local independent bookstore, or Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.).

As before, we’ve used the book for a while, evaluating it in a couple of different ways. While I’ve been looking at their layout and content in general, Michelle has consulted it for reference, keeping track of whether or not the book has been able to answer her questions.

Self Sufficiency (Image: Sanet.st).

Continue reading →

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Feast or Famine

Even though we garden, our existence often relies on hunter/gatherer mentality. Particularly, anthropologists tell us that hunter/gatherer societies operated on feast or famine. Relying on found foods, they sometimes went without. Other times they had more food than they would normally eat, but no means of preserving it, storing, or carrying it. That meant that the general pattern of life became one that vacillated between carefully conserving scarcity, and indulging in occasional excess.

This has become our pattern here on the homestead, where much of our food is “found,” fishing, gardening in our short northern season, foraging and hunting, and we have no refrigeration. Continue reading →

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