Sustainable is not only about food. It is also about lifestyle.
Our house is heated by a wood stove. (We only use trees that have fallen in storms or been culled by farmers.) This means that only one area of the house is heated, the rest is just .. well .. cold.
I lay in the bath every night and you would not know there was a pale tired little body in there, the room is ALL steam. Our bed is a mound of blankets. Cats tucked into the corners. Dogs waiting for our feet.
We eat pretty much the same thing with small variations each night. The proteins are free range chicken or their eggs, lean grass fed beef, lavender lamb, or pasture raised pork. The frozen vegetables are almost all gone. The tomatoes and fruit in jars are still holding out. I also eat nuts and seeds, rice and cereals that I cannot grow out here. (Bought at the supermarket once a month – not at all sustainable.) Flour for bread, pizza bases and pasta is bought. I have used all the home grown potatoes, onions, and beans and pumpkins long ago so if it were not for frozen peas (bought from the supermarket) and my enormous stash of tomatoes in jars and my wine (there are vitamins in wine?) we would have scurvy.
The fact is that if I were a sustainably managed vegan or vegetarian (as in growing all my own food) and living out here on the prairie I would be dead. Or at the very least unwell and very thin. We eat plenty of vegetable and egg based meals. But we need to buy most of the vegetable ingredients now. Not sustainable or self sufficient at all. We have a 6 month period when the ground will grow nothing at all. A cold frame will extend the lettuce for a while. But there is very little nutrition in a lettuce. All the greens must be grown in the summer and stored. And a cabbage only lasts so long, same for the onions and the potatoes and pumpkins. So by now I am looking to the supermarket to buy my vitamins, absolutely none of which are grown within hundreds and hundreds of miles of here. Certainly not without the help of a lot of artificial heating. So thank goodness I have a freezer full of protein. Even the milk is bought from another farm until I start milking again. Not self sufficient. Flour, chick peas, legumes, split peas, kidney beans, etc, all bought from the supermarket. Not self sufficient. Flax seeds, buckwheat, rye.. all bought. 
And sustainable does not only apply to food and fires.
My hair is either ‘Just got out of bed’ Debbie Harry or ‘way out of control’ Phyllis Diller. It depends what kind of mad hair products I am making that week.
My animals are not in a heated barn.. horrors! ( gas is certainly not a renewable resource). My friend Misfit told me last night that they saw a doco about a pig farmer who was whining about the cost of propane going sky high so poor fellow had to keep his house at 64 and his pig barn at 69 (because a cold pig is a skinny pig he says) and Sheila who sleeps perfectly calmly in an unheated barn (and you know how cold it gets here) has just been told by the vet that she is indeed a Big (fat) Girl.
I am very lucky if the big room gets above 62. We will not discuss the chill of the bedrooms. But we dress for the winter. I wear winter clothes inside in the winter. Weird!
By the way – The propane shortage is attributed to the corn and soy bean farmers who had a late start in the planting season and so had to artificially dry millions of tons of GM corn/beans (that is in-edible by the way) so there was no propane left for the pig farmers who then ran into a deeply cold winter and then there was even less propane for their Houses. Poor wifey – last on the list. Shock and bloody horror.
There is a rumour around these parts that the gas companies are buying unused propane back from the farmers so they can fill the tanks of the families in the country who rely on gas for their heating. Not us thank goodness. We wear hatties inside and sit close to the fire.
Dawn is coming I must hurry. We can talk about this again another time.
But that is sustainable living. Still want to try it? I do.
Good morning. The vet told me yesterday that Sheila’s wound is deep, messy and stinky but seems to be repairing ok. She has some antibiotics that I can mix into her food anyway. But he did say very kindly that she may be too fat and too old and possibly too lonely (no boar to smell for her to cycle) to get pregnant. Now. Is that a challenge or WHAT!
I hope you have a lovely day. I tried taking her to a boar but that did not work so I am off out looking for a smelly old boar to borrow who she can parade past every day to awaken her hormones so we can proceed with the AI.
Never tell me never.
Love your friend on the farmy
celi
The Kitchen's Garden 
175 responses to “Do you really want to live sustainably – self sufficiently?”
Self sufficiency is the goal here too and we have a big wood stove (an “Englander”) that heats the entire house. Sometimes it gets so warm I have to open a window wide. The stove is an ugly thing but made beautiful by its constant and dependable service. Sometimes the back rooms get chilly but there are baseboard electric thermostated heaters as “supplements” (a nod to un-sustainable living). Your farmy endeavor is way beyond our dreams here of paleo living though and I thank you for sharing your wonderful ongoing adventure.
The farm houses here in France are designed to have a “warm room.” It’s a little warm box hanging off a hallway. Our warm room has the fire running most of the day. The doors of the room stay closed. “CLOSE THE DOOR,” we advise gently, when the children come and go. Should you leave the warm room, you suit up to get to the other parts of the house. This cold thing is so short. Most of our time is warm. So, we suffer, but it’s fun. I can’t imagine what your winter is like. I’m sure it’s colder for longer.
Oh how I wish every person would indicate what city or country they hail from. I love reading these posts but cannot begin to guess where they are residing. I mean each time they post, like news correspondents.
–Chicago, Illinois
wouldn’t that be great!
– central illinois. (Am I central? I think so)
We practice sustainable living here. I say practice because it is impossible to be completely successful. We heat with wood that we cut on our own land. We grow all our own potatoes, around 350# last year. We grow and can all of our veggies, make jams and jellies. Grow hogs for us and others, chickens for eggs and meat, turkeys, keep dairy goats for milk, cheese and the such. I also make all our soap and cleaning products. We earn money from the excess products that we use to buy baking stuffs, fresh fruit and the such. We both have outside jobs. I would love to be a stay at home farmer but it is not in the cards right now. However, I love knowing that if necessary we could survive from our farm and that is worth the hard work.
that is just marvellous, and what a wonderful feeling to know that you have all that good produce in the cellar.. and can feed yourself.. wonderful.. c
I really need to comment more often even if only to thank you for this lovely blog and your graceful words and insight. Fantastic thoughts and suggestions today. We all adore Sheila and look forward to the day you have happy news with her expecting. We just recently moved to a very small farmy in TX and I marvel at what you acomplish. I am still getting brave enough to buy a pig. I do soak my grains though and agree it is lovely and more nutrients are available that way. Also soaking and drying nuts. Im trying to figure out if a root cellar is possible in southern climates. Was it done? If not what was done to keep garden good through winter? So much to learn, a wonderful life indeed.
I don’t know about TX, but we have a lovely old root cellar in the rat house paddock, it would have been for the original house built on this property, long disappeared into the mists of time..no-one of any generation can remember it but the root cellar is still there. Do you have a basement, i have a lovely enclosed cellar on the north wall of this basement and it is very cool down there, in fact when i bring up a bottle of white it is exactly the right temp! Do you have chickens?.. c
When we started trying to be self sufficient I thought we needed to produce everything ourselves on our little farm. I have come to realise that there are simply not enough hours in the day to do that and have set a more realistic goal for ourselves. We now aim for a self sustaining homestead that produces enough surplus to cover the cost of buying in what we can’t produce ourselves. For us that means raising a few pigs and chickens each year to cover the cost of animal feed, seeds, hay etc. that we buy in. Since setting a more realistic goal we have been much more relaxed and each year we add more to our homestead. Currently we produce all our vegetables, most our fruit, honey, maple syrup, eggs, meat, firewood, building lumber and furniture.
I’ve enjoyed reading all the comments and hearing about everyone’s different experiences as well as reading about Sheila. I look forward to hearing how she is doing.
Jane