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The Animal Family Smallholding
Can we do this?
The Self Sufficient Dream
I remember watching ‘The Good life’ with Tom and Barbara Good (the old 70’s T.V show) years ago and being inspired by what I saw. Self sufficiency. Grow your own! Yes, it was a t.v show but I loved that they had taken life in their own hands and done something for themselves.
Little did I know, years later I’d be emulating them!
The beginning of a new self sufficiency adventure
How did we get here?
After 2020 I knew personally I wanted more from life.
I had stood in queues in shops, desperately trying to get the essentials for our family only to find I couldn’t. Everything we needed was normally in stock but now suddenly like everything, the shelves were bare.
As a family that make everything from scratch and have a whole food, plant based diet, this made it very hard. Suddenly things we relied on were gone and I have to say it made me panic.
Roll on to 2021 and I had a bit of a ‘thunderbolt’ moment.
We were lucky enough to have had an allotment coupled with our generous garden for a few years. Then at the end of 2020, we had the opportunity to get a larger bit of land. Throughly excited by this prospect, we jumped at the chance. Now we had our own garden and about half an acre of what was basically a field to play with.
Christmas came and went and we moved into the new year. 2021. I was determined to try grow as much of our own food as I could this year. But had not yet decided to try to be fully self sufficient.
I was watching my children plant some seeds one afternoon and I was looking at the land we had and thought to myself that I never wanted to be in a position again (if I could help it) that meant I worried about food and where it would come from or even be available.
Ethical sourcing, organic and pesticide free are all very important to us too and my thoughts seemed to tumble into an avalanche of chaos and suddenly I stopped what I was doing and stood there stock still and it hit me.
I‘d dreamed about the idea of being self sufficient for years but it was just that ... a dream as I didn’t have the space or even an idea of how to get started.
Looking around at the space we had now I suddenly felt like I’d been given a gift. Sounds silly, but it really hit me hard that I needed to make the most of this opportunity and I just thought, why not? That night, I ordered a few self sufficiency books, found an awesome podcast and I was away!
We worked for nearly 2 years and quickly outgrew the space - our dreams of more animals and more growing space running away with the space we had! So, I put it out there to the universe and started to search for something larger and found it. 4 acres of a blank canvas for us to truly dig into Smallholding life.
We haven’t looked back since!