What is Self-Sufficiency

Self-sufficiency turns out to be a profoundly political choice.

What is self-sufficiency?

Nailing down a coherent answer to this question is proving much more difficult than I anticipated. In some ways it is easier to describe some things that self-sufficiency is not. It is not, really, truly, the arduous work of keeping yourself fed, watered and shod all by yourself. The term is loaded and deceptive.

The Big Questions

(This post has nothing whatever to do with self-sufficiency or gardening or seed-saving or alternative energy or chickens. Maybe.)

A few years ago a friend was going through some tough times in her life. No money. No marketable skills. No luck. I asked her the question,

If I handed you 30-million Rand in cash right now, what would you do with your time, with your life, when you wake up tomorrow?

The amount is irrelevant (as is her answer.) I believe that most of us have a Magic Amount of money, more than which we figure we'd be "untouchable". I call it your Fuck You Value. I define it as that amount beyond which -- no matter who makes you an offer -- no matter how financially rewarding that offer might be -- no matter what the circumstances -- we have this lump of cash stashed under the bed (or whatever) that gives us the freedom to say Fuck You, I'm doing X.

Now multiply that amount by 10.

Imagine you actually have that 10 * F amount of money in cold cash, under the bed (or in a bank if you believe that's safer ;-)

I ask you, as I ask myself, "Under such a circumstance, when you wake up tomorrow, what will you spend your time doing?"

Maybe its just another way to discover (if you haven't already) your Passion.

So just today I tripped across/was reminded of another of these Big Huge Hairy Questions:

If a trusted friend could arrange a meeting between you and anyone of your choosing, who would you choose? Not for entertainment or curiosity or bragging rights. Who would you choose to meet?

I confess that I don't have any answer. I can't think of a soul so important that I have to meet them. Including dead or mythical people. More than answering the question, I find the fact that I can't think of anybody I so want to meet to be the most thought-provoking thing.

The Clock of the World

Keeping Track

Tactics is extension in space.  Strategy is extension in time.

Gardening teaches both Tactics and Strategy to the attentive student, though the emphasis tend to be on Strategy.

Tactics: Laying out garden beds. Which hoe to use for a given weed-challenge.  The pointy shovel or the straight-edged shovel for lifting that particular pile of manure?  Spade or fork for digging that bed?

Strategy: Right now, in the middle of Winter, I have no more than another month before all considerations of next Summer's crops will be before me.  Already I weigh up whether I have enough seed of the varieties I would like to grow, and seed orders take form.  Time to buy the crop netting I will need to keep Pumpkin Fly from the Cucurbits, come mid-January.  Compost heaps are a-cooking in anticipation of the Spring Rush.  It's already late to be digging new beds to increase the area under cultivation.

I usually end-up getting it wrong somewhere along the line.  Don't we all?

I guess that everyone has their own strange and unique ways to keep track of what-to-do-when.  Of course you have to remember to actually look at the damn wall-chart/spreadsheet/book/diary.

Hedgewizard describes, in a hilarious post, the soggy and disastrous end to one such system.

Detour

I have quite a few friends who subscribe to Rudolf Steiner's ideas on cultivation, summed up, codified and dogmatised as Biodynamic Growing.  Most are not Deeply Committed Members Of The Movement, merely dabblers who apply an eclectic handful of biodynamic potions and techniques -- a pinch of some or other weird concoction kept in a cow's horn added to the compost heap while dancing clockwise at full moon; Yarrow stored in a deer-bladder pouch.  A bit challenging, that last one, since the Red Deer fail utterly to be found in South Africa.

No!  I sound like I'm dissing the biodynamic ideas, and really, I'm not!  I just have trouble believing that these homoeopathic treatments of seed, soil, water and compost can have any significant effect on the growth of plants when its simply a case of not getting enough water, nitrogen or calcium, or when the soil pH is way out of whack.  In other words, the effects of macro-nutrient deficiency or imbalance vastly overshadows whether the moon was in Scorpio or Leo when you planted the seed.  Personally I don't believe I am that good a gardener that I have those large-effect inputs well enough under control for the subtle effects of biodynamic preparations to manifest.

One of the key ideas of biodynamic gardening is Sowing By The Moon.  In broad outline, we should sow leaf crops in the First Quarter of the moon -- that period from New Moon to Half Moon during the waxing phase -- fruit crops (Tomatoes, Chillis, Squashes and so on) from the Waxing Half to just before Full Moon, and root crops from Full Moon until the Waning Half.  The last quarter of the moon is no good for planting anything, and should be kept for digging beds, weeding and mulching.  Of course this is only the very crude outline; there is much, much more subtle detail; attention to astrological effects and their interaction with the nature of various plant varieties.

Whether you buy into this stuff or not (and I make no comment or commitment either way, myself) there is one very useful idea.

The Moon

The Moon gives us the perfect clock we need.  Every Moonth, sometime in the First Quarter, I know I need to plant Lettuce.  Every Half Moon its time to sow Radishes.

No need for fancy systems.  Just going outside of an evening to take a look at the sky.

The Sky

Number One Son bought an imposing reflector telescope, so we've been having lots of fun learning to use it.  Our triumph was getting good views of Jupiter, Saturn (it's awsome!) and Venus (blindingly bright) all on one evening's perfect viewing a couple of weeks ago.  Consequently we're learning a whole lot about the constellations -- the patterns of the heavens. The Clock Of The Year.

Then, too, I would dearly love to learn more about how to read Nature's clocks. Bits of folklore like, "Plant your Potatoes when the Apple trees blossom."  Anybody have some pointer to that sort of knowledge?  I imagine that huge swathes of that sort of lore has already been lost; how do we relearn it?  Reinvent it?

Yet more ways to reconnect ourselves with the Universe.  Actually, we've never really been disconnected; only in the tiny space inside our own heads have we thought so.

Self-sufficiency and Stress

The week past has been a journey back in time, back in psyche and spirit, back into a world I no longer inhabit.  It's been a worthwhile journey, sharpening my understanding of just how far outside the circle I have managed to wander.  A week performing a "code audit" of a large-ish software system.

Basically this means analysing the software using a variety of techniques and tools, knowing where to look for likely problem areas, and then writing a report on what you think of the whole mess.  Too many hours sitting chained to a PC so that the job gets completed "on time" -- whatever that means.  Too little time being physically active in the garden; too little time doing the myriad of small things that need doing around the farm; too time spent solving real challenges.  But it will bring in a little bit of money, so...

A new blog I just tripped across -- After Peak Oil: Awakening:

we had thought about "the good life" some years previously, but shelved our ideas since it felt like we would be giving ourselves additional stress and complications in return for some fanciful daydream about keeping chickens and the like.

The additional stress and complication?  Well, complication, yes.  But stress?  Looking back on the last decade of my life, I guess I have to acknowledge that there was stress involved in moving from a 9-to-5-pension-medical-annual-holiday existence to our somewhat-self-sufficient life.  Most of that stress was money stress.  Initially the stress of "where's the money going to come from", through the stresses of letting go of "normal" expectations around the "normal" flow of money in-and-out every month, every year, to my present state where, while I think its fun to have and use money, and its useful stuff for a limited number of purposes, I don't really feel it touches me any more.  Not in the way that most of humanity is hooked into the Conventional Money System.  Trapped in it, really.

But really, I think we Braamekraalies suffer far less from stress than ever before in our lives, and the reason is really very simple:

Human Beings are not built for single-tasking.

We evolved out on The African Plains, wary for the multitude of predators that think we make a tasty midday snack, keeping a sharp eye out for our own lunch.  We are intensely social monkeys who constantly touch, taste, see, hear, smell, constantly challenged, constantly problem-solving.  We are not well suited, physically, emotionally, psychologically or spiritually, to the low-input environment, the repetetive tasks provided by office jobs and suburban life in front of the desk, TV and steering-wheel.  Subjected to that sort of existence, we begin to break down.  To suffer stress.

Simply put, a self-sufficient lifestyle (at whatever level) keeps us challenged, interested, awake and alive.  The sheer variety of tasks that we face is the important thing, here.  Our brains and bodies are well adapted to variety.  Need it, in fact.

Self-sufficiency SEO

I spent some time this morning looking at getting the farm website (and maybe this blog) listed in various "directory" sites on the 'net...  "Is this really worth it?" I ask myself.

Who am I trying to reach, here anyway, and why?

For a start I love being able to interact -- even in the very limited way the 'net enables -- with other self-sufficiency nutters like myself; people who love the independence, raising their own food, healing the Earth, sustaining heirloom breeds, recycling their own "waste", managing their energy needs, exploring different ways for humans to live more sustainably on this planet.  There are few enough of us, so we gotta stick together.  (Besides, its a great way to learn new tricks and prick ourselves out of old comfort-zones and into new ways of doing, thinking, being.)

But, just as important, I want to connect with people similar to who I was 15, 16, 18 years ago.  Someone stuck in the desolate, affluenzic, wasteland called the Conventional Economy or (Post?)Modern Life.  The me of 15 or 17 years ago was starting to think of breaking out of the Two Inch Pipe that society had put him into, starting to conceptualise"something different", more connected with the Earth, but still did not know what to call it.  The me of 16 years ago could not see how to "make enough money to live" in an alternative lifestyle -- let alone the possibility of breaking free of the Money Trap completely!  The me of 15 years ago was finding it hard to summon up the courage to let go of the "safety net" of steady income, medical plan, pension plan and 20-days leave a year.  Little did I then see just how unsafe, how weak, shaky, unpredictable the "safety net" was, and what a vile and insidious trap it is.

Thus the urge to do some...

Website Marketing

(Ugh!)

I find it appalling: Not one of the website and blog directories I looked at has a category for "Environment"!

"Country Living" is a useful slot, but where do we fit people who are doing self-sufficiency in the cities and suburbs; those who cannot or don't want to live in the "country" but still want to be self-sufficient in some measure?

Would someone look under "Lifestyles"?  They almost certainly won't find anything useful there: It's all about Paris Hilton and buying the latest disposable crap.

"Health"?  Certainly some of what we do is motivated by health concerns: Our own health as well as the health of the other organisms all around us that sustain us physically, emotionally, spiritually.  And the health of our home, Earth.

"Home and Garden"?  Well, we built our own home.  And we do garden quite a bit!  But self-sufficiency -- or "homesteading" for my 'Merkin friends, though it does have an ever-so-slightly different connotation -- certainly encompasses a hell of a lot more than just Home and Garden.

It's also much more than a "Job and Career", and we certainly tackle the big "News and Issues" of the day, in our own tiny ways.  Not too many people are trying to directly and personally do something positive about Global Climate Change, (by using renewable energy sources, minimising our consumption, eating local) Corporatisation of the Food Supply (again: growing our own, saving seed, growing open-pollinated and heirloom varieties) installing and living with alternative energy supplies so that we're more resilient to the changes that will be wrought by Peak Oil.  We call it Taking Responsibility.

Lots of this self-sufficiency gig is, in my mind, about "People and Relationships" -- but that's not what the directories mean.  (One day soon I plan to write about self-sufficiency and community.  It's been much on my mind for quite a while.  Self-sufficiency is truly only possible on a community scale, and around here there's no real community to speak of, so I'd like to muse-out-loud sometime on how we might begin to build community towards self-sufficiency.  Another day.)

"Religion and Spirituality"?  Perhaps we don't talk about it much, but I, for one, am strongly motivated by the spiritual element of this life choice.

So Here We Are

All-in-all, I don't find the web directories to be much use at all.  We don't seem to fit in anywhere very well, but rather everywhere, just a bit.

I guess we never did, and that's what has brought us here, to this ever-striving-to-be-more-self-sufficient place.

The Why Of Self-Sufficiency

I met a man, recently, who, I could tell, was quite taken with our somewhat-self-sufficient lifestyle. Clearly of an age where he feels unable to job-hop – too close to retirement to risk jeopardising his pension plan, and deeply unhappy with his work situation. I can empathise. I remember that feeling: day after grey day in a multi-storey concrete box, breathing recycled air, recycled fast-food lunch, recycled office politics, endlessly recycling the same paperwork the same bits back and forth, to and fro. At the end of the month The Company arrange for some bits to get shuffled in the computer bowels of various banks, from whence more bit shuffling happens to make the mortgage payment pay the credit cards pay the car pay the taxmen pay the bank pay the healthcare pay the life-insurance pay pay pay all the death merchants to stave off their death grip on your life your breath your soul. Remember that the word "mortgage" comes from the Old French for "death pledge".

No wonder I wanted to find a way Back To The Land. No wonder he does, too. How many people complain of feeling "disconnected", "out of touch", complain of a "sense of unreality". Of course all those bits are unreal! Trust me on this; I'm a Computer Scientist! "  Out of Touch" with what? "Disconnected" from what?

Enlightenment

Once there was a well known philosopher and scholar who devoted himself to the study of Zen for many years. On the day that he finally attained enlightenment, he took all of his books out into the yard, and burned them all.

-- from "Zen and Taoist Stories"

I am often asked by people, "What do you do?".  As if the job defines the person, somehow made more mysterious by my living in the countryside, trying to be slightly self-sufficient.

A few weeks ago, on a whim, I answered, "I am a Research Gardener."

The look of confusion and perplexity on peoples' faces is worth it, since mostly they know me as a computer geek.

Last week I was in Cape Town, visiting friends, among them a Master of organic market gardening.  He was describing how he constantly questions the conventional wisdoms of the organic movement.  Applying simple logic, experimentation and observation to achieve astonishing results.  I said to him, "Ah! So you are a Research Gardener, too!"

Perhaps one day soon I shall burn my gardening books.

"Sell" isn't so Bad; Selling is!

In "Why is “Sell” Such a Bad Word?", Brian Clark muses

Sell. Selling. Sales.
Not very popular words, are they?
Quite frankly, I wasn’t initially sure whether I would be banished
from the blogosphere for daring to use the word “sell” in my tagline.

Hmmm.... let me see if I can tackle this from the other side of the fence.

It's not that I have any problem with the word "sell" or the idea of "selling" at all.  What I object to is the absolute requirement imposed on us to sell whatever we do, failing which society will punish us in the severest possible ways.

I grow veggies to a very high standard of organic practice.  I love to grow veggies.  I always grow far too much for our own use.  I am happy to give them away, because I know that people will be getting the best, tastiest, most nutritious food in the world, and because giving away beautiful, sun-ripened veggies is  a way of gifting the gift that the Earth has given.

But if I want to stay alive, to keep a roof over my head, I am forced to sell.

I'll say it again: I have no problem with the concept of sales.  I just don't want to do it.  It's not my thing.  I can "sell" if I have to, for a limited time, but in the long run I am deeply uncomfortable and unhappy doing it.  That's why, in any business venture, I make sure I seek out team members who are good at selling and love doing it.

I also love to teach people about organic gardening, programming, Java, software design, sustainable living, peak oil, alternative energy and self-sufficiency, but I have no desire in me to "sell" these things.

I know, I know; someone is going to tell me that my enthusiastic preaching on these subjects is just selling.  Nonsense, I say! Nonsense!  Selling is when someone actually pays me money for those things.  Up to that point there's no "sale", and my point is that, in the world as it is, I have no choice but to sell.  If I just keep doing things for the love of them, I'll...   well, I won't starve, since I have all those veggies, but I certainly won't be able to afford many of the necessities and pleasure of modern life - stuff like electricity, connectivity, computers, transport.

So.  Its not "sell" that's the problem, but "coerced into selling" that is.