This is my dream: To live as my forefathers once did - in harmony with the land that sustains us. A project to investigate and innovate the creation of a low impact home with methods of living in a form of permaculture designed to sustain my family and improve biodiversity. To leave the land richer than before and in doing so enable others to do so.

Only smallness can save us!

Posted 28/07/08 by Matt B in the Feeding Yourself category

Thanet is a small island district of Kent in the UK. It is one of just two ideal locations for growing cauliflower but the credit crunch has exposed a single point of failure in the current aggricultural methodology - the supply of potash and phosphates the price of which has shot up.

Kent News has an interview with one of Thanet's last few cauliflower farmers as the news slowly trickles through that the price Supermarkets pay and the cost of production do not match up. the year before [...], Peter Linlington of Birchington, who Mr Philpott called “the best cauliflower grower ever”, stopped producing caulis on his 400 acres.

It is this very problem that is addressed by the creation of "micro farms", permaculture installations and the return of the owner farmer and the family run small holding. George Monbiot suggests that the most efficient farms are the small farms. He is talking about something called the "inverse-size yield relationship" [more] which basically stats that the productivity of the farm is inversely proportional to it's size.

Big business is killing small farming. states Monbiot by developing plants which either won’t breed true or which don’t reproduce at all, it ensures that only those with access to capital can cultivate.

Yet the credit crunch is killing access to capital and with it our only reliable access to food. Now is the time to consider every way we can to take back control of our food production.

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What do we drink now?

Posted 25/06/08 by Matt B in the Feeding Yourself category

With the appalling story from the BBC "Sickness bug found in tap water, (BBC News)" echoing so closely the fears written about in "What replacements are there for main water?" (questions 20/04/08) we can no longer hide from the fact that water supply to any given area is a natural monopoly.

As a result we have a shared resource and it takes only one person to make things very bad for us all.

In "Pissing in your own well?" I addressed the issue of Thanet and the risk posed to it's water supply. Until we have mass installations of personal rainwater reclamation systems this is a warning to us all.

Water is a commons. It is at risk.

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Eat the tree

Posted 26/05/08 by Matt B in the Feeding Yourself category

Part of my personal quest has always been to be self sufficient, earth right, ecologically friendly, hi technology and happy. I still think this can be combined into a happy synergy of lifestyle and technology.

A step towards that is the growing of foods in a sustainable way. Such a way might be to plat permanent crops - that is plants that don't need to be replanted every year. This is exactly what one group are doing according to treehugger.com

The reason that the group is concentrating on nut trees is their potential to outgrow cereal crops in terms of carbohydrates, and to utilise poorer soils with fewer inputs.

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Keeping your cool

Posted 19/04/08 by Matt B in the Feeding Yourself category

off all the challenges of my dream of a back to nature lifestyle the set of problems provided by "replacing the things we take for granted" has vexed me the most. For example fridges and freezers are hungry beasts and don't sit so well with the idea of living off grid. Get a few hot but cloudy days and there might not be enough juice to keep the food cool.

Actually this has never been a problem for me as I have had a solution based on unglazed pots in my head for a long time. The theory is this - you fill an unglazed pot with water and put it in the shade. The water will seap through and eveperate and the remaining water will be very cold as a result. That should adapt to storing food nicely.

Apparently I'm not the only one that has been thinking these thoughts. The people that need it most are now benefiting from the idea. The idea is not mine - I picked it up from a tutorial on what the Bible was on about when it spoke about giving someone a "cup of cold water". So now you know too.

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What can I eat?

Posted 06/03/08 by Matt B in the Feeding Yourself category

One of the things that really interests me is the way in which we find food. It started to occur to me a few years ago that I knew so little about what was available as food that I did not even know what to buy at a supermarket. If it did not come in a tin I was not sure what to do with it.

Having done my time as a bachelor I, of course, knew how to combine a couple in tins in any one of a million ways to get something interesting. I even knew how to do a few things with a frying pan. At push I could come up with some interesting and healthy sandwiches.

There is and must be, I reasoned, more to food than sandwiches, tins and fried food.

» Read More: What can I eat?

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