- The biggest mistake I see people make
on their self-sufficiency journey,
is spending too much time and energy,
trying to grow as much food as possible,
and in this video, I'm going to explain why.
To keep things nice, clear and simple,
I'm going to define self-sufficiency
as growing the vast majority of your annual
fruit, vegetable and herb needs.
And everything in this video
is going to be extremely useful,
even if you don't want to be fully self-sufficient
because the same principles can be applied to any scale.
Firstly, depending on
if you've watched this channel before or not,
I want to remind you or introduce you
to the idea of part time self-sufficiency.
So this means either choosing to grow a particular crop
that is going to last you over a set period of time.
For example, being self-sufficient in homegrown onions
all the way through autumn,
or it can mean choosing a dedicated time,
for example weekends,
which is when you can only eat produce
that has come from your garden.
The reason why this works is that
you're not being 100% strict,
you don't have to follow that rule day in and day out,
but you are setting yourself a challenge
that when you accomplish that challenge,
you feel a really deep sense of satisfaction.
One danger of being really strict
with what you can and can't eat is that
it can take the fun away from it.
And I think it's okay
that we all treat ourselves from time to time.
I think instead we should look at
what kind of techniques and strategies we can use
to empower ourselves,
to make the biggest possible difference.
Instead of going all out was trying to be self-sufficient,
which can very quickly lead to burnout,
by embracing part-time self-sufficiency
what you're doing is giving yourself the space
and the flexibility to see what is possible.
And this is going to allow you
to make far more informed decisions,
to then influence the approach
that you wanna take in the future.
I think it's vital that we know what is realistic
when it comes to self-sufficiency.
For example, you could have grown loads of chickpeas,
but then spend hours shelling them
for arguably not much in return.
One thing we forget to do as growers and gardeners,
is create a true value for the time
that we spend in the garden.
If we're going down the path of self-sufficiency,
we've got to be honest and understand and accept
that time is our biggest limitation.
And I think instead of looking at
how to grow as much food as possible,
we need to look at how can we be more clever with our time?
And also how can we look at alternatives?
So for example, instead of growing chickpeas
to make hummus, I could make a hummus alternative
out of white beans, which on an hour by hour basis,
I'd be able to shell so many more white beans
than chickpeas in terms of weight.
And you've really got to think very carefully about
if I've got a finite number of hours
to try and be self-sufficient in, which we all have,
there's only so many hours in a day,
then how can I make the most of each hour?
Self-sufficiency really shouldn't be about working harder,
it has to be about how you can work smarter
with what you have available.
If we're looking at self-sufficiency,
it comprises of two pillars,
you've got the growing pillar
and then you've got the eating pillar.
very often there's no kind of proper marriage
between the growing and the eating.
We grow a lot of food and we're like,
what do we do with this all?
And then we're trying to work out how we can preserve it,
how we can eat it, how we can enjoy it.
I honestly believe that if you spent more time
researching new recipes for certain ingredients
that you grow a lot of,
or you have available and start creating
a really comprehensive library for every single ingredient,
then that alone is going to really
make your self sufficiency journey
suddenly become much easier,
instead of trying to make sure that,
oh, I need six plum tomatoes every single week.
What you're doing is finding really exciting
and delicious ways of eating whatever is seasonal.
I could spend all of my summer preserving stuff,
ready for winter and then spring next year,
but I don't wanna do that.
I want to be able to enjoy my summer.
And I know that I have to make sacrifices.
There are sacrifices involved in self-sufficiency.
So instead of looking at how I can grow enough
to follow kind of a carbon copy
of every single month of needing X amount of tomatoes,
X amount of potatoes, for example,
instead, I wanna make the most
of what is available in the garden
at a specific point in time, during the growing season.
And a really easy way of approaching this
is to have the principle of cook what is in the garden.
The only limitation to this method
is creativity within the kitchen.
But fortunately, the great thing about
basically everything that you grow is that
there is so many ways to cook it, to enjoy it,
to pair with other ingredients and flavors and textures.
What you need is sources of solid recipes
and inspiration and information.
So as well as my blog Farmer and Chef,
which I do with my colleague, Sam Cooper,
for the last few months,
I've been making the most of Readley,
who were today's sponsors
for finding the source of inspiration
from food and cooking magazines.
Now I think the best way to describe Readley
is an all you can eat buffet for magazines,
that you can also share with all your family.
One account gives you five different users.
So for finding inspiration with recipes and ideas
and ways of using your harvest from the garden,
they have a ton of food and drink magazines.
My favorite is the Good Food Magazine,
and I love being able to look through and get ideas
for like different curries I can make,
different desserts, different soups.
The other thing is that it also has all of the back issues.
So I can look back at what kind of recipes
they had last autumn and winter,
so I can prepare some ideas in advance,
ready for when those particular crops come into season.
And of course a big part of being self-sufficient
is all of the growing and the gardening that's involved.
So they've got popular magazines,
such as Kitchen Garden Magazine and Grow Your Own.
One of my favorite things about Readley is that
there's a bookmark function.
So if I ever see a recipe or garden idea,
I can bookmark it there and then
so I can always come back to it when I need to reference it.
If you wanna make the most of this great resource,
you can do for free today.
You can use my link down below in the video description
and you'll get six weeks of Readley access for free
and that's only £7.99 a month after that.
So now is the ideal time,
now that the garden has settled down
to start getting loads of ideas and inspiration
for the rest of autumn, winter and ready for next year.
Earlier today, I was thinking,
how can self-sufficiency work with permaculture?
And then I remembered the principle of work with nature,
not against nature.
I thought it's perfect.
When it comes to self sufficiency, work with the seasons,
not against the seasons.
Embrace all of the opportunities,
but also the limitations that seasons have to offer.
For example, winter time.
Winter time is great, I've got a lot of free time
so I can prepare recipes, I can look at ideas,
I can look at how I can best preserve tomatoes
or carrots or anything like that.
So during the busier times of the year,
I have all that information ready to go.
I can just implement them straight away
and make the most of my time.
And then of course in winter, in my climate,
I have a lot of food in the ground,
they can just be perfectly happy in the ground
and I can just come and harvest when I need it.
One limitation of winter is that you might not have
as many fresh herbs or fruit.
So you've got to think, okay,
how can I prepare in advance?
For example, how can I preserve herbs ready for winter time?
And then you could think about summertime, okay.
And summer is great because
I've got so much food coming out.
I don't actually have that much time.
So I really need to, as much as possible
eat whatever is freshest,
because unlike winter, where food will quite happily
just sit in the ground, summer has a much faster turnaround.
So that's really where you've got to eat
what's in the garden first and then preserve second.
I've been thinking a lot about self-sufficiency recently
because like everyone else, my biggest limitation is time.
For example, a YouTube video
takes me around 24 hours to create,
and that's excluding all the uploading,
answering comments and all of that,
and then obviously I've got books
and other projects to write and to work on.
And so the biggest shift for me
in terms of moving towards self-sufficiency,
which I'm not 100% in,
and I don't ever want to be 100% in,
because I'll miss a lot of things, you know,
and that's okay.
But the single biggest difference has been
embracing what is in the garden.
Suddenly having this arsenal or this librarian and toolkit
of loads of different recipes
that I've been collecting and researching,
suddenly it makes it a lot more easy.
For example, for many crops,
which are it's maybe get a little bit bored of eating,
I suddenly get excited about them,
and then I start thinking,
well, I've learned all these things,
can I maybe take some ideas
for how I cook other crops that are similar
and apply these principles to this?
And more often than not,
I'm really pleasantly surprised with the outcomes.
I've been harking on a little bit about seasonality.
So I wanna give you a different aspect of self-sufficiency
to start exploring and considering,
and that's the aspect of staples
and kind of flavor profiles.
We're limited to the climate that we grow in
and we can use spaces like this polycrub
to make it more favorable
for certain conditions in certain plants.
For example, my tomatoes
which is coming to the end of the season,
but they wouldn't be able to do nearly as well
if I didn't have this space.
But even having a space like this,
I know that I struggled quite a bit
to grow something like lemons.
But something that I've been researching quite a bit
is these kind of families, for example,
the citrus family and that there were actually
different varieties of species within a plant family
that are suitable for different climates.
For example, Yuzu, which is another type of citrus,
is more suitable for a slightly colder climate.
So even though I probably wouldn't risk growing lemons,
I'm about to buy a couple of Yuzu trees
or Yuzu plants to grow in here in containers,
to see if I can grow a citrus here.
And then it means that I'm growing something
that has a similar profile to lemon or lime,
but it is local to me,
and instead of having to import things,
because I think a pig thing about self-sufficiency
is also reducing food miles.
I want to be clever about finding specific plants
and specific varieties that I can maybe
kind of push the boundaries a bit
and grow in this climate.
Now you can kind of use this technique
and go a little bit wacky and things like spaghetti squash
is a kind of a pasta alternative,
a gluten-free pasta alternative that you can grow
and that will last until at least June or July next year.
In fact, all of my spaghetti squash now
I'm saving for the hungry gap,
or you can look at things like, okay, you like rice,
is it worth if you have the land exploring
a way of querying something like wild rice,
how possible might that be?
Yes of course projects like this
will probably take up more time
than you would probably want to take up
if you're just growing a normal crop.
But on the flip side, it's something really exciting.
You're doing something you've never done before,
you were experimenting and you will know how much
I love experimentation in the garden
and having a project where you don't really know
how it's going to turn out.
And then sometimes you're pleasantly surprised
that that is worth the satisfaction.
And then you can do it again year after year,
improving your efficiency to be
just as efficient as you would growing your main crops.
And so what I want you to understand from this is that,
you can have similar related crops
that grow in very different climates,
but it means that you can have similar flavors.
And it's really exciting and empowering
being able to see all of these varieties in plants
that actually holds potential.
And I think we have the ideal opportunity now
to really explore that and share our findings
with other gardeners or other homesteaders,
so we can all help one another within our growing area,
become more self-sufficient.
Just as a side note, another plant that I think
I'll be able to grow successfully here if I do it right,
is Stevia, which is an excellent natural sugar alternative.
I think in order to be successful
on your self sufficiency journey,
you've got to pick your battles carefully.
You've got to choose things that either excite you the most
or hold the most potential and really hone in on those
and get those to a point where you're really satisfied.
You're like great I found the process,
I found the system, let's now look at a new aspect.
Let's get that to a point of satisfaction.
Great, I've got that banked ready,
let's look at the next one.
And so what you're always doing is making
lots and lots of small improvements
that are going to lead up to big changes.
And of course, one thing I haven't mentioned
is that you need something
to measure what success is to you.
So you just need to find out
what your end self-sufficiency goal is,
so you can always know where you're heading towards
and you can compare every single growing season
to see if we're getting slightly closer
or slightly further away.
Winter is quickly approaching, which is great.
I've got some more time on my hands,
I can focus on a little bit more preserving,
for example dehydrating the peppers in the polycrub,
but you've got to be cautious about the period after winter,
is called the hungry gap.
So when the winter crops finished around March,
and then up until kind of mid to late June,
you have this gap where there isn't much fresh.
The summer crops aren't ready yet
and it's really challenging,
especially if you're wanting to be self-sufficient.
So in order to have
the most productive, hungry gap possible,
watch this video here,
because it's gonna show you the most productive crops
that you can grow and eat and enjoy during the hungry gap,
and that alone is going to make such a big difference
to helping you get ever closer
to your self-sufficiency goals.
And don't forget to enjoy two free months at Readley.