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You want to be self-sufficient. Where do you start?
When I left my job after my son was born, we were faced with the decision on how to feed our family and pay our other expenses on half the income. Granted, we no longer had the large expense of daycare, but we had the added expense of health insurance.
What did we do? No, my husband didn’t pick up a second job, and I didn’t pick up a part time job from home. I tried a few side gigs, but none of them brought in significant income.
The first thing we did was to look closely at our expenses and see where we were spending our money. What were our fixed every month expenses? What were our variable expenses? How could we best manage and keep ourselves on track? We switched to the cash envelope system for our variable expenses, groceries, eating out, etc.
The second thing we did was to see where we could minimize our expenses. We canceled several subscriptions. Evaluated if the services we had was worth the money, and canceled anything that was not, including all TV services. Yes we had antenna, maybe 2 channels if the weather was good.
Once we had a good grasp on our expenses, we looked at where the big categories were that we needed to manage better. How could we minimize those? One big one for most people is the grocery category. Food is necessary for life, but how could we continue to have good quality food, while minimizing the cost? Garden!
Ever since we were married, we have had a garden of some sorts. However, up until that point, it was more of a small hobby. Now it was a serious source of food. Eventually this garden will supply most of our vegetable and fruits.
The other component of food necessary is protein. We raised cattle and sheep, so beef and lamb are readily available for us. Most people don’t have the space to raise a steer or lamb. However, chickens do not require much space and produce an excellent protein source. Eggs! Bonus is most towns allow some chickens. Second bonus is they are great bug control and love kitchen scraps.
Where are you to start your journey? Go through the same process and see what comes at the top of your category list. What can you do to bring it down? If you need help figuring it out, reach out! I’m here to help you succeed.
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Step 3. Slice the pepper in half and remove the stem, seeds, and any bad spots. For hot peppers I will use for canning recipes later, I leave the seeds and chop them in a food processor.
Step 4. Freeze the peppers. Place the peppers in freezer containers filling to the fill line. I used freezer containers last year, and plan to use vacuum bags this year. For the hot peppers, I use containers approximately the size I will need per recipe for simplicity.
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Wanting a community to lean into? Join the FREE Courageous + Purposeful Mommas group! This community is for the Mommas, mommas to be, in the midst of raising, and kids grown, looking for tips on building your family up and providing for them through natural methods. Tips include: gardening, bulk buying, caning,/preserving, livestock, homesteading, and home remedies. Your family is precious, and this group is to help you gain the knowledge and tools to keep your family well and not reliant on outside professionals. Remedies and tips are easy and simple for the busy momma, time is precious after all, including pregnancy, birth, young kids, and illness. Trust your Momma gut again! This community offers the resources + community you need to help get started on your journey and prepare for whatever future you envision.
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Wanting a community to lean into? Join the FREE Courageous + Purposeful Mommas group! This community is for the Mommas, mommas to be, in the midst of raising, and kids grown, looking for tips on building your family up and providing for them through natural methods. Tips include: gardening, bulk buying, caning,/preserving, livestock, homesteading, and home remedies. Your family is precious, and this group is to help you gain the knowledge and tools to keep your family well and not reliant on outside professionals. Remedies and tips are easy and simple for the busy momma, time is precious after all, including pregnancy, birth, young kids, and illness. Trust your Momma gut again! This community offers the resources + community you need to help get started on your journey and prepare for whatever future you envision.
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What is a fear you carry deep inside? One that not many may know about, but affects many of your everyday decisions? Me? That somehow there won’t be enough, and my family will be left short.
Why does this affect my decisions? Because the last thing I want is for my family to be short somehow. Short of food, finances, or simply time.
So what do I do? First, I try to not let the fear overtake me. I acknowledge that it is there, and then remind myself of all the ways God has continued to provide for us in the past. My heart calms, and I can clearly think towards my next step. I then thank God for His provision and ask that He continue to remind me when that fear comes up again.
This fear has also been a motivator for me. When I started staying home, our income was drastically cut. While we would no longer be paying for daycare or as much in gas, we now had to pay our own insurance and the grocery bill would be increasing. How were we going to offset the cost?
I looked around. We already lived on an acreage. I had gardened some in the past, and was getting pretty good at it. Why not take it to the next level and have the garden provide as much of our food as we could!
And so it began, in more earnest. I planted more of what I knew we would consume and less of the extra stuff. I learned how to preserve our food supply for the winter. I also started learning how to grow more of the vegetables my family liked, so we weren’t buying as much at the store.
The garden is still expanding and growing. I use the winter to learn more about the next vegetable or fruit I want to grow. I take notes and perfect the methods for our farm. I’m playing with double cropping and starting a permaculture orchard now.
What started as a fear of not being able to buy enough groceries, has turned into a huge garden with the potential to meet 80% (currently around 50%) of our family’s veggie and fruit needs when it is all mature. All this from not giving into the fear, but stepping back and looking for the opportunity in the fear.
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We are in the heart of gardening season in Nebraska. Plants are up, cool seasons done, most of the weeding is done, and the fruit of the labor is starting to show. It is honestly the best time. Water the garden and pick the produce and enjoy! The early hard work of establishing plants is done and the bulk of harvest is yet to come.
I’m often asked when people see or hear about my gardens: “How do you get it all done?” The short answer, ‘Little by little.” I started small with my garden, a few simple easy to grow plants and have expanded from there. Every year my garden has grown a bit, with more plants, more variety, and more space. Along the way I learned a few things that help cut down on the amount of work over the summer.
#1 Mulch. Not just the 1-2 inches of mulch or dusting like you do when planting grass, but deep mulch. Like 4-6 inches of mulch. Why that deep? Not only does it help the moisture stay in the soil better, it blocks much of the weed growth. Will you still have to weed? Yes, but much less. Who has time to spend all day weeding anyway?
#2 Tackle small parts at a time. This one hit hard this year. I would look at everything that needed done, planted, weeded, prepped, watered, and simply become overwhelmed. Once I reminded myself to tackle small chunks at a time, it made the job more do-able and less stressful. I divide the garden into sections for planting, weeding and watering and stick with the smaller parts. I am more likely to finish one section before it gets too hot or the kids need me that way.
#3 Try one new thing at a time. This is huge for beginners. I started with a sweet corn patch my hubby planted, some pumpkins and cucumbers that took over, and maybe a tomato plant and pepper. I cannot even count how many plants I have now without walking around the gardens. Each year I added one or two varieties to try. Became good with those and added more. I also started with small patches to experiment with so space isn't wasted.
#4 Companion plant. This took me a few years to catch on to. It actually started by accident, when I couldn’t fit all my tomatoes in one spot in the garden. The results were worth repeating year after year! There was less bug damage to the overall crop when plants were mixed together. This year I took a spin on it and planted my tomatoes all in beds together, but planted basil around them. Basil tends to repel the bugs attracted to the tomatoes and I wanted more basil. It was a win-win. Check out the list of friend/foe plants I made earlier for more details.
What are some lessons you’ve learned from your hobbies that others would benefit from?
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Tough question, but one most of us will face at some point. Something we loved doing must be put on hold for a time, sometimes known, sometimes unknown. Hobbies or passions are held or altered for different reasons: life circumstance, health, finances.
When this happens there usually is a process of grieving. You deny that you really have to give that hobby up and find ways to still include it. Then you have feelings of anger or frustration that you just can’t make the hobby work. You might try bargaining for time, money, health, to get just a bit more of that passion. Then you fall into a bit of a depression as you long to do what you used to love. Finally you accept that maybe one day you will be able to do your passion again.
Feeling like my passions are being taken away has happened to me recently. I am a strong willed, independent, woman. I love riding horses, and being in my gardens. With the addition of each child my time riding has decreased, but I am ok with that as I still have them and have continued to care for them. My garden has increased as our family has increased, filling much of my used to be riding time, because it is something else I enjoy and the kids can do it with me.
Late this winter however, I saw both of these hobbies start to be limited and felt them being taken away. I had started bleeding heavily during pregnancy and found I had a large subchorionic hematoma. I was put on activity and weight restrictions of 10 pounds, until the bleeding stopped. This made it impossible to feed hay to my horses, help my kids ride, or start yard prep for the garden. At first I was ok, ‘it’ll only be a couple weeks, then I can resume’ (denial). But the two weeks turned into a month and still no end in sight. In total I bled 7 weeks. Even after it was done, I was still advised to keep the lifting light and limit activity so nothing would reinjure.
I was angry. Angry there was no clear reason or answer to why. Angry I couldn’t take care of my portion of the chores, upset I was having to rely on everyone else to feed hay, get feed, pour the feed into the cans, and do the heavy lifting in the gardens.
I then went through a bit of depression as I realized all the things I might not be able to do this summer. Planting was going to be difficult, weeding, mulching. Planting the bushes was out of the question. Clean up in the wind break was on hold. My plants I started suffered, as I didn’t care for them like they needed.
Only recently have I been able to accept that I will not return to full normal activity until months after delivery. That has been helped by being surrounded by friends and family that are willing and able to step in and help, with the chores I cannot do (thank you to my husband, who does the bulk now with his own cattle chores). Friends who come out and help with the big garden days (Nicole and Andrew) and get the digging, mulching, weeding done.
Is it still hard? Yes. I want to do so much and don’t like relying on others to have to help me all the time. I have accepted that some things just won’t happen this year, but there is next year. I also know this is not forever and one day I’ll be back to full speed. But that buggy horse is sounding really good right now….
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The other day my beautiful mother-in-law messaged me to see if I wanted any of her chokecherries. Of course! Now what do I use them for that my kids would actually eat? How about syrup?! The mulberry syrup went over well, and was now gone, may as well try it. Recipe at the bottom.
Turns out the frost killed most of the chokecherry blossoms, so there wasn’t much, but there was enough for me to experiment with. Ivalee, James and I set out one afternoon to go pick what was there. She was actually all over the picking until the easy low ones were gone, then climbing the fence was way more fun. We did manage to get an ice cream bucket full. Which was around 8 cups. They then sat on the counter overnight until I could deal with them in the morning.
The next morning, I was in a hurry, so I dumped the bucket into the pot and added the water. No, I didn’t wash them, or sort the leaves out first. I stirred the berries around a bit and like magic the leaves and steams floated to the top! I scooped them out and let the cooking begin! The recipe I was following said to strain the juice off and and reboil the seeds and pulp to get more juice. I did not have that kind of time. But I got to thinking about my favorite red juice. It is actually a puree, so you receive the benefits from the entire berry. Why not with chokecherries?
After straining as much juice as I could through the cheese cloth (and spilling some all over the stove, the lighter on my gas stove still hasn’t recovered), I dumped the pulp and pits into the blender. Looking back, I should have done half at a time. The full amount was a little much for my blender. Once everything was blended smooth, I added it back to the juice. Heated it back up and added the sugar, orange and lemon. You can use real orange and/or lemon juice, but I didn't have any, so I used the oils I did have. Let everything cook and then pour into jars and process! I ended up with 7 pints of deliciousness. You definitely need to shake before using, but it tastes amazing!
Recipe
Equal parts chokecherries, water, sugar (example: 4 c chokecherries, 4 c water, 4 c sugar)
1-2 drops Orange essential oil (to taste)
1-2 drops Lemon essential oil (to taste)
Add chokecherries and water into a pan. Bring to boil, cover, and simmer for 30 minutes
Strain juice through cheesecloth and squeeze as much out as you can.
Blend up pulp and pits in blender
Re-strain through cheesecloth
Add sugar and orange and lemon
Stir occasionally over medium heat for 20-30 min
Pour into hot sterilized jars and process for 10 minutes
Shake before use and enjoy!
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