How Has SS Made an Impact on Your Life?

[baymule]

I found BYC first, just surfing the net, thinking I might want a couple of hens..........and we all know how THAT turns out! Then I found BYH,TEG and SS. What a mother lode of information! I devoured page after page here on SS, learning things I never thought of. At first, I lurked, not having a lot to say. I felt like I didn't have anything to contribute as others were so much more informed than I was. But BIG-MOUTH-ITUS was bound to kick in sooner or later and I joined up and started getting to know folks. This is a friendly group and every one is glad to share what they know. So to any lurkers out there, what are you waiting for? Sign up and let us get to know you!

Because of Sufficient Self, I have been prompted to do my homework, study, learn and implement what I have learned.

Milling wheat? making your own flour? Really? I thought store bought whole wheat flour was the good stuff when I made bread.........

http://www.sufficientself.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=12899

I know better than that now. I opened a thread on what kind of wheat to buy and where to buy it. I got lots of responses and there was some great discussion. I wound up buying my wheat from the Mormon food center in Spring, Tx (a tiny town swallowed on all sides by Houston)

Mills? What kind? Where to get one? Electric or manual? And there was a thread all about grain mills, so I joined in the conversation and the discussions helped me make the choice on my mill.

http://www.sufficientself.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=12897

Because of the fine folks here on SS, I now have REAL whole wheat flour that is FRESH and has flavor out of this world. Because of the fine folks on SS, I now have a Family Grain Mill that I mill the wheat with. Not only that, but this spring I planted corn and let it dry for cornmeal. Wow. Store bought cornmeal can take a hike. I am learning to love blue cornbread!

Dehydrating fruits and vegetables? Hmmmmm.......... Dehydrating your own fruit roll-ups? Oh YUMMY! I used my DD's dehydrator the first summer that I bought for her to make beef jerky. What fun! What a great way to preserve the fruits of the garden and not take up a lot of room! Now I wanted my own dehydrator, but which one? Again, I found the answer right here on SS. Because of the sharing of information here, I ordered an Excalibur dehydrator.

http://www.sufficientself.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=13731

Make your own vanilla! No way! Really? I can do that???

http://www.sufficientself.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=9155

I have my own home made vanilla bottled up in the pantry now, thank you very much! I also have another half gallon of vodka (2nd go-round) soaking in vanilla beans and a half gallon of rum with vanilla beans soaking in it.

These are just a few of the things I have learned here on Sufficient Self that has changed things in my daily life. Not earth shaking, but momentous to me. What does SS mean to you and what have you learned or what have you shared here?

 

[Joel_BC]

SS (meaning this web forum) helps me keep up with information and techniques of value for living a more self-reliant lifestyle. And it's interesting to read what people have to say about their lives, methods, etc.

I think that most of what we need to know for living more self-reliantly comes through first-hand experience. But mentors (including those here) are helpful and important.

When I first read the title of your post/thread, baymule, I thought you were asking about how the "Sufficient Self" approach to living (rather than the web site) has impacted us. If that had been the question, I'd have answered more in this way: We're on a bit under nine acres, and we don't earn money through agriculture. We tried growing garlic as a cash crop - at a time when there was too little market that had been developed locally for labor-intensive, organic growers. As that didn't work out for us, my wife and I each found jobs and developed career paths. But we wanted to keep living in the country.

We've always grown salad veggies (lettuce, carrots, kale, cabbage family, cukes, beets, etc), corn, tomatoes, onions, potatoes, apples, pears, berries, grapes, and so on. We do it for the fresh food. We have big outdoor gardens and a greenhouse. We've had chickens in the past and may have them again in the future.

You could say the SS lifestyle is to learn to multiply the value of your money, in certain ways. The point is, one household can live as satisfyingly on, say, $30,000 per year as another does on $60 or 70,000 (or more). Contemporary homesteading, as my wife and I see it, is mostly about providing a satisfying life from your own efforts - which for us definitely includes the food raising. You develop the skills to put water systems in place and keep them maintained, buildings constructed, repaired, expanded, or upgraded... all that kind of thing. And equipment built or maintained for efficient accomplishment of everyday or seasonal tasks.

The SS web site (getting back to it) helps people acquire and improve skills - which, combined with basic tools, enable you to do these things.

 

[moolie]

Great answer from Joel and I have to agree with much of what he said, although we are not at the homestead stage yet ourselves.

This forum is a great conversation between people with a shared set of lifestyle values who are trying to find their way in an increasingly complicated modern world. I always appreciate coming here and reading everyone's experiences and advice.

Living in the suburbs my family personally does everything we can to keep our footprint light on the earth and to do for ourselves as much as possible. And this forum has encouraged us to try things that neither my hubs nor I grew up with (like grinding our own flour from various grains for baking), despite the fact that we both grew up in kinda hippie families/with old-school skilled grandparents that lived off the land as much as possible. Our parents did it because it was the 60s/70s and it was the right thing to do, our grandparents did it because that was just how life was during the 30s and 40s and they lived simple frugal lives of hard work and good clean fun.

This thread reinforces our personal view that true "self-sufficiency" doesn't exist, that we need to live in community with one another to share ideas, skills, tools, etc.

 

[TanksHill]

Oh what a long story I could tell.

Maybe I'll type something up.

G

 

[Denim Deb]

G you should-especially w/what all you've gone thru the past few months.

 

[Icu4dzs]

This type of living has been a lifelong goal as well as dream for me. The other day while I was at work one of my colleagues made a comment to me that I thought was rather impressive. He said to me "you're the Greenest guy I have ever met".
The question the OP asks in the title of this post is how has being self-sufficient made an impact on your life? And I have to say that over the years the most important thing it has done for me is giving me confidence in myself, even more than I had developed as a result of my training and experiences during 40 years of military service.

I came home from the war in Vietnam and recognized that I was going to have to make a fundamental change in my entire life if I was going to be able to get old gracefully. While the government and everybody in the economic industry continues to tell us that there has been no inflation, I would remind people that when I was a young boy a loaf of bread cost $.25 and now it cost almost 5 dollars. Please don't tell me that's not inflation. I can name any number of changes in the cost of everything since I was a boy, and even since I was home from Vietnam. In those days a gallon of gas cost $.24. Now what does it cost? At the rate of inflation, it occurred to me that I would not be able to afford to eat once I was old and no longer able to work. This is where I decided that I would have to start doing something to be able to produce my own food and pretty much everything that I relied on in order to be alive.

I am also a grandchild of the "great depression" generation, many of whom I called the packrat generation. My parents grew up as children of that generation and they were taught to save everything. They threw nothing away. They were always led to believe that there was no resource that cannot be reused or repurposed when the time came to need it. Constantly and daily I fight that particular problem because it overwhelms me with the inability to throw things away voluntarily. I am a little better at it now than I was earlier in life but I assure you it does not come easily. I also find that I collect things that I know can be used for a specific purpose but that I have limited amounts of time in order to build those things. I am working harder at being able to build the things for which the materials have been already obtained. Just the same, it is a major struggle.

I firmly believe that the tendency toward being self-sufficient in this day and age is an attempt to make oneself feel comfortable in being able to survive during the years before we had all of the technical luxuries we now enjoy. Exactly why we believe those things could possibly go away is anyone's guess. But it is a certainty that all of our ancestors survived without all of the technical luxuries we now enjoy and did just fine because we are here to prove it. We often hear people say "Oh, that can't happen now" or "oh that can't happen in this country" and I always seem to giggle a little bit realizing that in my opinion "oh yes it can!" There was a saying in the special forces, "you're believing it is not required for it to be true".

I started to read the Mother Earth News when it first came out. At that time the Mother Earth News sponsored the contest called the "self-sufficiency contest". It came to me that this was a goal to achieve. I was determined at that point, to at some time in my future "win that contest".

Years have gone by and many things have happened. There has been "a lot of water under the bridge". But in all, the important part was that I have pushed myself toward that goal the entire time. What it has done over the years is instill self-confidence and more importantly has eliminated the concept of "fear". People spend much of their time attempting to make other people fear. Look at all of the things that are on the Internet and in the mainstream media news which basically sounds like "Doom and gloom" everywhere you look. Have you ever noticed that the people who are practicing self-sufficiency really don't have all that "Doom and gloom" fear?

The self-sufficient lifestyle however, does not necessarily come without a price. Obviously, people who do not subscribe to your philosophy consider you eccentric, or just plain crazy. They tend not to like you because you are different from them. Since the only thing they know is that milk comes from the store rather than anywhere else, it is easy to understand why they would come up with such an absurd attitude toward people who really do know the difference.

Despite many changes over the years, spending 40 years in the military does cause one to move many times. Each of those moves would tend to make one have to learn more and more skills in terms of being self-sufficient. This is what I did. Each time I moved to a new location I added more and more self-sufficiency skills so that when I finally got to a place where I could live without having to move every three years I would possess a unique skill set that would make me able to do what I wanted which was to be as self-sufficient as possible.

I would venture a guess by saying that many of the people who come home from a war, come home with a particular type of attitude. We no longer trust everything that we are told and we no longer are willing to allow ourselves to be completely controlled by conforming to society as a whole. Surviving a war gives you PERSPECTIVE ON REALITY and helps to make one understand that surviving anything else is significantly less difficult. Most of the folks I have met in life who are attempting to be as self-sufficient as possible have been for the most part, children of the "Great Depression" or the Viet Nam war veterans. I have, over the years, also met a number of older veterans from the Korean War but for the most part the men I have met have been like me, Green Berets or former US Marines. The concept of self-reliance is inculcated in the Special Forces and the Marine Corps philosophy and it's training. This is what I believe makes them so immensely different than most others.

In owning a home, in owning and raising the garden, and learning all of the skills necessary to maintain a home and garden, one learns many of the skills necessary to be self-reliant or as we would call it self-sufficient. More importantly, it teaches you that you will have to learn more skills in order to be successful. Skills such as animal husbandry and some of the other more esoteric skills become available only when you have a place to do them. I have been fortunate enough to be able to accumulate resources so that I could obtain necessary tools in order to do the things that I am now doing. I figured out along time ago that if I paid somebody else to do them, all I would have is the job done, and maybe not even done right. So rather than pay someone else to do the job, I bought the tools necessary to do it. This gave me the training to do the job, the experience to do the job, and if I didn't know how to actually do it at the beginning I bought a book that told me how to do it. To say the least, I would be lost without books particularly books with good pictures in them!

The more different skills I obtained and more different things I was able to learn considerably decreased my level of anxiety and increased my self-confidence tremendously. When one considers that I spent so many years of my life with my nose in a book, it is easy to understand how anxious one can feel when one has only a limited number of skills. While the skills I obtained during my education have been invaluable in terms of accumulating resources, it did absolutely nothing for me when it comes to understanding how the world and it's machines,animal and plant life work. Of importance, is the fact that I obtained my education after returning from the war in Vietnam.

So to answer the question how has being self-sufficient impacted my life, I would say that it has completely shaped my life and the direction it has taken,and in so doing, has made me a lot more comfortable with the current situation as it now stands both politically and economically in the world. The changes in the world that I anticipated back then have all come true and are getting worse. I have no doubt in my mind that the self-sufficiency skills that I have learned will be of paramount importance over the remainder of my entire life.

 

[frustratedearthmother]

How has this forum made a difference in my life? It has proven to me that there are so many ways to do the same thing! There is the right way, the wrong way, the hard way, the easy way, and the way that is best for my situation.

Pink - I'm stealing your idea and I'll be making quail cages out of shelving wire material this weekend. WBF - oh my goodness, I use your mayo recipe all the time - I've followed along your life story, I've cried and laughed at your family situations and I've even hatched your eggs! Deb is full of practicality, Moolie is a world of canning wisdom, Bee is the chicken guru.... So many people, so many ideas, so many opinions . One of the most important things that I've learned that folks with different backgrounds, be they political, economical, and/or religious can exchange ideas and learn from each other.

 

[k15n1]

All of my canning and other food preservation adventures started here. I had been gardening but the inspiration to grow a year's worth of supplies came from this forum. Eventually we moved to the country where I can have livestock and a huge garden. I probably had an inclination toward all of that to begin with but the forum nudged me to action.

 

[baymule]

Great responses ya'll, keep them coming!

My Daddy was the son of a share cropper. They were poor and his father took him out of school to chop cotton in the fields for 10 cents a day. The men made 50 cents a day, which even a 10 year old boy could see was unfair, so when the men took breaks, this little boy kept working. When the men took lunch, this little boy kept chopping cotton. He got 2 rows ahead and stayed ahead for the rest of the day. At the end of the day, the foreman raised this little boy to 50 cents a day. He had proven himself able to work as hard as the men did.

My Daddy never finished school. His father needed the money to support the family and kept taking him out of school, so finally he quit. Daddy told me about working on gangs of men digging irrigation canals by hand with shovels, all day. This was in the Rio Grande Valley, where these irrigation canals are in use still today. Whenever I think I am tired or that life is rough, I think back on the stories my Daddy told me and life isn't all that bad.

One thing Daddy took away from his upbringing was a love for growing things. He was an "organic" grower before organic was the cool thing to do. My earliest memories are of barely toddling behind him in his garden. He instilled a love of the earth and what it produces at a very early age that continues to this day. In the same manner, I sat on the ground with my tiny grand daughter in my lap, handing her squash seed. She flung it at the dirt and "planted" with Mamaw. She is 6 years old now and loves her chickens and gardening. Our youngsters need to know how to benefit from our knowledge, even if they lose it while growing up, it will still be there in the back of their mind, ready to be retrieved.

I drifted away from the teachings of my Daddy. About 8 years ago, I convinced my DH that I wanted a garden and that it must be in the front yard because of shade in the back yard. He thought I was nuts until he tasted fresh produce. Because of what my Daddy taught me, gardening is like breathing to me. My DH asks me, "How do you know that?" I just shrug and tell him my Daddy taught me.

When I found the forum here, it awakened something deep and primal in me. I knew that I wanted to do better for myself and my family, but lacked a lot of the know-how on getting there. I had canned before, but not in years. I had never dehydrated or ground grain before and it was awesome to learn how to do that. Finding all of you fine folks is a great gift. Sharing knowledge, helping one another, commiserating with our failures, celebrating our successes, where else can you get the support you find here?

 

[Denim Deb]

For me, I'm getting to where I've always wanted to be-as SS as possible. And I have a whole support group behind me. IRL, I have very few friends. I'm just too different from most people. They don't understand what makes me tick. Plus because of being on here, I've found the courage to try new things-like butchering chickens.