Last updated
24 January 2012
Quest for the Good Life
Blog pages
Welcome to our Quest for the Good Life web site.
This site looks at growing your own food, keeping bees and lots of other things associated with it.
Something new to look at is “Our Bee Garden” page which considers flowering times for bees.
Search Quest site
OUR AIMS for 2012
- Grow enough vegetables for our needs and increase variety
- Encourage better fruit production
- Produce some homegrown meat
- Expand our natural habitat for wildlife
- Understand and develop the holistic nature of our garden
- Improve our bee keeping and promote their importance
- Use more ways of preserving so we can keep produce longer
- Make some beer, wine and cider
Make your search more relevant by using specific words. For example, instead of “vegetable” be more specific like celeriac or Lettuce. That way your search will be more “fruitful”!
Self reliance, self sufficient, grow your own, downshifting? What does it all mean?
So many terms to describe people simply trying to produce some or all of their own food. Grow your own can mean a few vegetables in the back garden providing a few fresh meals through the summer as a bonus. This applies to many people.
To be self sufficient is the top end of the scale. To produce everything you need yourself from milk, beer and honey to meat, bread and flour is a much bigger concept and one that few people could or would want to try. Most of us strive to be somewhere in the middle.
So what’s it all about. Well you can read in our philosophy section about our concerns about food and its production. An interest in gardening helps but is not essential. Enjoying the great outdoors also helps, particularly when its raining.
More important is recognising the need to grow your own in some way.
Perhaps you have children and you worry about the modern fast food world, or you have concerns about food production and the chemical residues that you may be eating.
However you arrive at the conclusion that growing your own is better, you need to invest some time in “making it happen”. This may mean a bit less telly and more exercise. Just what the doctor ordered!
So in reality I propose a new term to describe this effort to produce more of your own food.
“Time shifting”
You simply need to shift some of the time you spend doing other things into growing and making.
Of course the more self sufficient you become, the more time you have to invest. Time is perhaps the most valuable resource we have and if we use it wisely we can learn to live a lot better.
Here’s a quote from John Seymour (The Complete Book of Self Sufficiency ).
“I am only one. I can only do what one can do. But what one can do I will do !”
Says it all really. You may be surprised at what you can do.
Our home made food section looks at making your own food, particularly bread.
It’s really easy and just takes a little effort but the results are delicious.
Compared to modern supermarket bread, home made is just completely wonderful.
Everyone should make at least one loaf of bread in their life!
And now we have looked at the economics of making brown bread too!
by clicking here
