The good life...

Daisy

Bluebird and Snowy

Continuing on the theme of food this month, I thought I would blog about my aspirations to be self-sufficient!  I know this is not entirely possible, but we try our best.  What we are really lacking is a cow or goat for milk!

We are lucky that we have a long garden and so are able to have our own vegetable patch and also 5 hens.  We have had hens for a couple of years now and love it.  They are funny characters and the eggs are delicious.  We started with hybrid hens - saving 3 of them from the commercial farm nearby with 11,000 other hens - but we are now branching into rare breeds.  This is a steep learning curve: the white Leghorn hen called Snowy has been the victim of bullying by the red hens and has had to go to a friend's house for some respite with other friendly bantams!  As a result of the stress in our hen house, none of the hens have been laying, so our solution is to re-home our red hens and then expand our brood of rare breeds.  Will keep you posted!  So despite our recent hiccup, we have generally had 3 eggs a day for most of the year which means lots of eggs for breakfast, tortillas and pancakes as well as plenty of baking!

At this time of year, our veg patch looks a bit sorry for itself, but Spring seems to be creeping in now and so we will have to start planning our greenhouse crops and generally filling the beds with yummy crops to grow.  We manage with all our own veg for a couple of months over the summer, which is a start and also do well with fruit ranging from apples and pears to raspberries and grapes.  My next aim is to try and have some veg growing all year round.  I tried some winter salad this time but forgot to keep watering it!  Whoops!  It is just about surviving still.

We make our own bread - and know many people who have converted to making their own too.  It is so easy and absolutely delicious!  I used to make it from scratch and knead it etc, but a couple of years ago we moved with the times and bought a Panasonic bread maker with which we make pizza bases, rolls and regular loaves of white and brown bread.  There is something very satisfying about making your own and it saves a lot of money!

My other plans, I think will have to wait until we have a bigger garden one day.  I do have plans for keeping bees and would love a rare breed sheep or two, although I can see that for milk a goat or cow may be more sensible. We will have to see!