A Simple Life In Canada - How To Guide Part 1

This is Part One of a Multi-part Guide.
Please check back tomorrow for the next installment. And thanks Dad for giving me a great reminder to write about things that might be useful to people. Here's photo of my dad taken on a nice hazy summers day last year. He's the best!

What does that mean to you, living the simple life? Does it evoke memories from your childhood of picking peas in your grandparents garden and chasing fireflies or frogs on warm summer evenings? Do you think of the Amish people with their wonderful farming and craft filled communities devoid of cars? Or is it something much closer to home for you, as close as growing herbs and lettuce in your garden? Because we're all individuals and at different points on the path of life we all see and experience things in ways totally unique to us. And that doesn't change if you decide to abandon the modern day rat-race and head for the country. Even out here in Nova Scotia you won't find 2 farmers who do things exactly alike. Some like chickens, some like vegetables, and some just farm trees.

My point is this; before you can even begin to make plans to move towards a simple life you need to assess what that means to you. You need to have at least a goal to work towards and then you'll be able to put the other necessary steps in order. What exactly do you want out of life? I find that the simple steps for this are as follows:

Have a Goal. It's okay if this evolves and changes over time.
     *Why do you want this?
     *How will it benefit you?
     *What steps do you need to take?
     *Can you afford it?

Decide how long you'll take to achieve your goal.
     Sometimes our dreams are tempered by the fact that we need to put a roof over our heads and food in our bellies while we're working towards something better. And that generally means for Canadians that we have to work at a paid job and work on our own projects in our personal hours. It's the trade off of hours available for work vs. a need to get paid. Sure, we'd all like endless time for our own projects but the reality is that most of us can't do that. We need at least a small income.

Make a Plan.
     Having something written down that shows the logical steps will help you to organize the work that's necessary. Just as a builder needs a set of blueprints and an understanding of the progression of a build (permits before walls,walls before plumbing etc.) so we need a plan that allows us to make the most efficient use of our resources. It helps you avoid some of the pitfalls by considering what could go wrong and making plans accordingly. Plans shouldn't be written in stone but they should provide a framework for you to build upon.

Do a realistic Budget.
     Sure we can all make our budget look good on paper, but saying you'll only spend $200 on groceries and eat lots of pasta and then actually doing it are 2 very different things. Maybe you hate pasta but didn't think it would be so bad. Who knows. I'm simply suggesting that you take into account that things may change in price, medical bills might happen, the car may break down. Be realistic and plan for some emergency funds to be set aside if you at all can.

And Last But Not Least ...




Get To Work!
     Nobody is going to feel as passionately about your goal as you do. It's your baby. You're the one with all the hopes and dreams so it's up to you to take the leap into the unknown and be adventurous! Learn new skills, try things you've never done before, make new friends and invest yourself in your project. When you can commit yourself to something it's more likely to be finished and finished well. It's not going to be easy for the most part but it will definitely be worth it.


Periodically, whether it's once a week or once a year, you need to sit down and go over the written plans and goals you have. See how you're doing and if there's anything you want to change or add. Take a look at how much you've accomplished and be honest with yourself about how you're doing. This is a good time to modify your goals and then start off re-energized and re-focused. If things haven't gone as planned figure out why and take steps to get back on track. Maybe you need to go in a different direction or get some help from a professional. Maybe you simply need more time. As the saying goes 'Rome wasn't built in a day'. The point of having goals and projects is to improve your life in some way. Otherwise why would we do them? And anything that's worth having is worth the effort to get it, even if it takes longer than you planned on. If you're getting discouraged then break down your goal into smaller goals and keep track as you accomplish things so that you can see yourself making progress.

Just remember this... every pyramid was built one block at a time.

Good luck with your goals for 2014 and beyond. Check back tomorrow for more information about starting a simple life in Canada.

Stretching your Food Budget

Everyone at one time or another has had to stretch their food budget. Some people have to do it all the time and others learn to make do when there's an emergency such as a hurricane or blizzard. Learning how to cook on top of your regular woodstove is important but then again, so is having the ingredients in the first place. You can't have 100 spices and exotic herbs sitting in your kitchen wasting space and money and not know how to use them. That's not thrifty. Better to have a dozen that are not stale and really know how to use them well.

Having some of the basic ingredients on hand and knowing how to use them can really make your food go a lot further. Having flour is all well and good but having just a little yeast, sugar and dried fruit suddenly means you've got fruit buns, or even hot cross buns if you add a little spice to them. Eggs, flour, milk and salt give you the choices to make crepes or Yorkshire puddings (I think they're called popovers in the US). And that's what we had for lunch today.

I'm trying to use up and rotate some of our food stores so the girls and I did a bunch of baking today. It was a snow day so no school and it just seemed like the perfect time to teach them another baking lesson on how to knead bread by hand and the proper way to beat eggs. We made banana bread, hot cross style buns and Yorkshire puddings with gravy and vegetables plus some of our thinly sliced lonzino for lunch. Despite the skepticism of one son, they all ate with gusto. I baked the puddings in my tortilla pans to give them an interesting shape and to make them enormous and slightly hollow in the middle, then I made up some gravy with a packet mix and a bouillon cube with flour and water and in it I cooked a half package of frozen veggies. I sliced the meat thin, placed in in the depression in the pudding then filled it with the veggie/gravy mix.

The results? Filling and Delicious! Now it's time to teach a lesson on cleaning up after you bake.

We're making a concerted effort to eat less refined sugar and flour and increase the amounts of vegetables both raw and cooked that we eat each day, but on a snowy day like today it's always good to have some comfort food too.

I've got to get going and stir my beans on the woodstove, I'm making baked beans from scratch and figured that if the woodstove was on I might as well use the heat for something extra useful. Here's my recipe if you're interested in making your own Yorkshire's.

Yorkshire Pudding Recipe

3 Eggs
1-1/4 cups  milk
2 Tbsp Melted butter or oil
1 cup flour
1/2 tsp. salt

Beat the eggs, then add the remaining ingredients and beat smooth for 2 minutes. Leave at room temp for an hour or two before cooking. You'll need to cover it and stir again before baking.  When you're almost ready to begin baking, turn the oven on to 375f (gas 6) and lightly grease your tin or tins. These can be made in muffin tins with great success. Pour in your batter and bake for 30-40 minutes or slightly longer if using a big tin. It'll be puffed up and slightly darker than golden brown. Traditionally served in our house with roast beef, gravy and vegetables.

I always double this recipe but this should make 12 mice muffin sized puffs.

Cost of todays lunch was probably $6 because I made a double batch plus the gravy and veg. It fed 6 adults. Dessert was buns and juice for another $3 so a total of $9 or $1.50 per person.  Take that McDonald's!

Uses for Old or Spoiled Hay

This time of year many farmers and horse lovers are faced with a dilemma. What to do with the old hay in their hay lofts. New hay is being cut and baled as we speak and they need the room for storing their good stuff so it's possible to get hay for free or very cheap ($1 per bale) and we recently got a whole load of unwanted bales for free that we simply had to load into the trailer and drive home. But what would you do with free hay? Well, here are a few ideas.


1. Build a hay or straw bale garden. The idea is this...you place a bale on it's side so the cut ends of the hay (or straw) are up and the strings are horizontal on the bale sides. Next you water it thoroughly for several days and possibly wait a few more days if the bale starts to heat up due to decomposition. Following this you either spread topsoil or potting mix on top of the bale in a layer a few inches thick and plant things like lettuce with shallow roots, or you pry apart the bale a few inches, fill the hole with your soil mix and plant larger plants such as tomatoes and peppers. Leafy crops are best, root crops will not work well unless the bale is watered daily and the bale is loosely packed. Don't be disuaded by people who say you cannot use straw bales. You can...they just sometimes sprout weeds which you can pick out as usual.


2. Use the bales like bricks to build a compost pile. Leave the string on for now, stack the bales to make either a 3 sided enclosure or a square one and build your compost pile as usual. The bales will act as insulating walls, increasing the heat retention of a large pile and thereby killing more weed seeds and pathogens and also absorbing a lot of the runoff from the compost. I wonder if this would be good for a humanure compost? After the last turning just water everything thoroughly including the bales, cover and let the compost mature. The bales will break down and whatever isn't composted will make a good base for the inside of the next pile you build.

3. Mulch your garden. Hay isn't usually used for mulch for two reasons....it's better used as animal food and it's full of grass seeds so it can sprout into weeds. But here is an idea we're going to try with our free hay. At our new place there's a good site for a greenhouse with one major drawback, the soil is gravel and sand so while it's well drained, there's no topsoil or humus to hold nutrients and moisture needed for plant growth. Even the hardiest of weeds can barely grow there. Obviously we have a couple of options with this land. Use it for something not requiring good soil such as a storage shed or greenhouse for starters grown in shallow pots on benches. Or we could mulch the heck out of it and gradually build up a good soil base over time through composting. It's easy for us because we have enough other arable land to not worry about the occasional patch of gravel but for other people who could really use more garden space I think amending the soil is the way to go. Lay a thick layer of hay mulch on the ground, several feet thick, tamp it down a bit and water it. It'll compost and rot in place. Just continue to add new layers periodically of other soil, grass clippings etc just like regular compost pile, water or leave open to the rain and it'll rot down. If weeds sprout then just cut them down with a scythe and consider them green manure or cover the pile with plastic, newspaper or weed blocker and kill them that way. This process takes time but can be really worth it and I know of people who have planted potatoes into such a pile and had really great crops.

4. Use the bales as seats for an outdoor event such as Calgary Stampede, a country wedding, picnic or BBQ.

5. Use them to weigh down tarps or the plastic on your greenhouse and when they rot they will release heat into your greenhouse and can be dug in to the soil at a later date.

6. Build a hot water heater using hose or water pipe inside a compost pile or hay bales that are decomposing. Lots of videos on YouTube from the good people at Permies.com and here's a Mother Earth News article from the early 80's about compost heaters.

7. Use bales as the walls of a cold frame and place the plastic or glass over the top of them.

8. A wall of round bales can both act as a wind break and help a small garden retain heat.

9. You could make a rectangular low wall of bales, put some hoops or pipe into them and put a plastic greenhouse over top, using the bales as low walls for growing plants or raising chickens.

See, even a waste product like old hay can still be good for something, you just have to be creative and think about your individual needs. That's how successful homesteading takes place...we innovate with what we've got and consider everything as potentially useful. We try out new ideas and keep doing what works while chalking the failures up to experience.

Food Shortages

As many doom and gloomers are arguing about the scarcity of food worldwide, we in the developed nations continue to over-consume both our planets resources and it's food supplies. We're feeling our pennies pinched by ever increasing prices at the grocery store for staples such as bread, flour, rice and we watch as the price of meat goes up accordingly (since the price of grains to raise animals goes up too).

But I want you to think about your total income for last year. Not what you reported on your taxes...what actually came into your house as income. Now figure out how much you spend on groceries in a year including snacks and eating out. Is it 10% of you income? 20%? 50%? On average in the developed nations it's under 15% and yet the country complaining the loudest in the US which spends a paltry 7% on food. I think this number is probably higher because of the food stamps program but I don't know how they came up with the results in the info I'll post in a moment. I do know that in our family it's about 25% on average but that will change as the kids grow up and leave home and as our income increases. Other large families are in the same boat as us, and we're not worse off simply because of good shopping habits and growing some of our own food. Once the farm is up and running again our food bills will be much less. Hooray!

Here's the information I'm referring to. It shows selected countries income to food dollars.

I know that cost of food isn't the whole story. These numbers don't take into account that maybe people in developed countries are spending 40% of their income on shelter as opposed to other countries where it's lower. What it DOES show though is the inequality of calories consumed. I'm guessing that the higher the number of calories, the higher the consumption of fat and sugar in junk foods. I wonder if we'll ever be able to strike a balance? Well...my diet continues. All I can do is my part.

I do believe that food shortages are something to prepare for. So today I'm planning my seed shopping for next years garden. I usually have a storage of seeds from one year to the next but since moving we're starting over again with many things. Seeds included. It's time to add them back into my food storage plans. I'll let you know what we're growing next year.

Saving Money on Fruits and Vegetables

This blog is read by a variety of people world wide. Both urban and rural. So how to write about saving money on veggies and things when we get them so differently? I'll just cover both topics because let's face it...even farmers in Canada like oranges and bananas and there's no hope of growing either.

Urban shopping is nearly always limited to 2 sources for produce, supermarket or farmers market. And the prices at a farmers market can be expensive. While I think the quality and whole system is better with buying direct from a farmer it just doesn't work for some people. So how do you save money on store bought produce? I know you're thinking "but I already check out the flyers and shop sales" but what about buying in bulk? No hear me out...I'm not talking about buying 40lbs of bananas and then having to either eat them all or be left with a gooey mess in the box. While our family can eat that many bananas and we often shopped at the wholesalers by ourselves, it doesn't work for most people. A much better way of doing this is to get together with a few families and friends and split things up. So if a case of bananas is $20. And you split them between 3 families and lets say 2 couples, each group would end up with a percentage of the box and a percentage of the bill. Maybe families get 25% each and the couples get 12.5% each. Can you eat 10 lbs of bananas? 5 lbs? So long as you agree and it's fair, you can work it out any way you like. We used to sell produce shares based either on a half or full share and then the entire crop for the week was just divided up accordingly. People then get what they pay for.

How can this work for you? Almost all wholesalers will sell to individuals, did you know that? The proviso is that you often have to pick it up, order a minimum quantity, and buy full cases. A local wholesaler here on Vancouver Island will sell you a minimum order of $150 but deliver it. Sound like a lot of fruit and veggies? It can be but of course if you divide it up suddenly it's much more manageable. And it's almost a festive air when you get together to divide up the spoils or pick up your shares.
I would recommend that someone be in charge of both picking things up and dividing them too. Then all everyone else has to do is pick up. You can make this as regulated or relaxed as works for you.

And this works very well for people who like to do canning or making jam because you can order extra cases of what you want over and above your regular veggies. Fruits in season can sometimes be picked up very cheaply indeed if the wholesaler gets over stocked.

The drawbacks....not everyone likes the same veggies (I HATE celery). One person does more work than the rest and has to be compensated somehow. You will get a little bit of spoiled or bruised produce occasionally and need something to do with it like compost or feed to the chickens.

Advantages....save money, try new veggies, share recipes within your group, eat more seasonal vegetables, share something great with your community.


SO....Rural Veggies

Grow Your Own!! Jeepers, how hard is it to plant some peas? Ok, Ok, I know that even we don't grow everything we want. We still get things wholesale but it's less of a regular thing. And we stick to what we're good at and then trade with our neighbours for the other stuff we want. Right now we obviously have no produce and it's driving me a bit nuts actually. So we are going to trade some wheat for rhubarb. Something we already have extra of...for something we want. Same goes for meats. If you raise pigs, farm B raises chickens and farm X raises cows, why not come to a deal and share your meat. There is something great about trading too...the sense of community and reliance is enhanced and you'll be a much happier farmer.

A way to sell your crops reliably is to sell shares in your garden. It's called Community Supported Agriculture. I've written about it before and there's a lot of info available on the web, but the basic principle is that you plan and successively plant enough vegetables to have a weekly harvest of a certain size. You divide each weeks harvest up between share holders. You get the customers for your crops and the money upfront, they get produce, everyone's happy.