The Self Provisioner: How to Grow Your Own Food and Live a More Sustainable Life in the Digital Age
By Neil M White
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About this ebook
The Self Provisioner is not just a gardening book. It is an invitation for you to join a movement of people who want to provide for themselves, living off the land in a realistic and sustainable way. You will become more connected with the food you eat and the world you live in. The Self Provisioner will give you the inspiration to live a fuller, more self sustaining life.
In the Self Provisioner you will learn:
- What is self provisioning and how is it different from 'self sufficiency'?
- How to start a self provision garden, growing food for you and your family.
- The best and easiest way to make your own compost.
- How to get your meat from sustainable sources.
- The best crops for self provisioners
And much more...
Neil M White is a father, business professional and committed self provisioner. His writing on gardens and sustainable living has helped thousands to self provide and grow more of their own food.
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The Self Provisioner - Neil M White
The Self Provisioner:
How to Grow Your Own Food and Live a Self Sustaining Life in the Digital Age
By Neil M White
This edition first published 2020
The moral right of Neil M White to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights are reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior written consent of the author. Copyright: Neil M White
Table of Contents
Foreword – By David The Good
Introduction: Everything But the Chicken
Chapter 1: What is Self Provision Gardening?
Chapter 2: Choosing a Plot for your Self Provision Garden
Chapter 3: The Low Input Garden
Chapter 4: All About Compost
Chapter 5: A Year in the Self Provision Garden
Chapter 6: All About Meat
Chapter 7: The Self Provisioner’s Crop List
Appendix 1: What I Learned About Gardening and Life from Monty Don.
Appendix 2: How to Build A Waterless Outdoor Urinal
Appendix 3: How to Reconnect with the Land
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Foreword – By David The Good
What does self-sufficiency look like?
A man alone, against the world, in a rough cottage of hand-felled pine logs, surrounded by a few acres of crops and a tall, thorny hedge to discourage wandering wildlife?
Sounds lonely to me, though I like the hedge idea.
Maybe your idea of self-sufficiency is having enough money to buy what you want and no one to take away your fridge, your car or your hand-felled pine log cabin if you miss a couple monthly payments.
For years I've contemplated the concept of self-sufficiency and come to the conclusion that it's more of an ideal than an achievable reality, unless you are very clever, healthy and strong, and live in a warm climate with rich soil and abundant rainfall. White approaches the idea and comes to similar conclusions himself. It's a great idea, it's just not necessarily something we can all make into a reality. Go ahead - produce and set aside as much food as you can. Just don't worry if you can't grow absolutely everything you need. My ancestors grew most of their own food and hunted their own meat for the winter, but they still went to the store to buy sugar and flour. In Upstate New York, it's rather difficult to grow sugarcane, though I suppose if they were ambitious they could have planted a few acres of sugar maples and then spend their early spring nights in the cold air, boiling cauldrons of sap down into maple sugar...
...but there's that ideal again. You can do it, perhaps, but do you really want to? Do you have to? Do you have to reach a level of perfect purity and have a complete, functioning biodome of a farm where all your possible needs are met?
I don't think so, and neither does White. Instead of being neurotic and attempting to reach the absolute peak of atomistic individuality, where you are a rock, and island, and a sugar baron - you work instead to provide a good amount of food for you and your family, free of poisons and fresher than anything you can purchase.
Some people want everything, right now, all at once. A friend of mine once tried to get me interested in a sketchy off-shore investment that was a sure thing,
and would bring in a lot of money very quickly. I declined and I don't believe he ever had any success with it either. As God reminds us in the book of Proverbs, Wealth gained hastily (or by fraud) will dwindle, but whoever gathers little by little will increase it. (ESV)
Many a man has attempted to climb the cliff of complete
self-sufficiency and found himself half-way up with a slipping rope, plagued by the realization that if he keeps climbing, he may never drink a lager or eat potato chips again... that is, unless he digs another potato bed, finds a way to produce a good frying oil, then travels to the sea to evaporate water for salt... and as for barley and hops...
...and then he falls off the rope, for no normal man can live forever without potato chips, and the complete home production thereof is a Sisyphean task. It is rumored that even Thoreau himself occasionally left Walden and bought himself a can of Budweiser and a bag of Mather's Hot n' Spicy Barbecue Potato Chips.
A wise man knows when to till and when to buy some chips.
In the following book, White takes us down a third path. You will be inspired to stock your freezer with homegrown produce and wild game. You will learn to walk much closer towards self-sufficiency. You will become more resilient and better equipped to deal with the ebb and flow of uncertain economics and political unrest.
Day by day, your savings and your health will increase as you diligently apply yourself to meeting the needs of your family.
One day you may even find yourself growing more food than you can possibly eat.
But if you never make complete self-sufficiency, that's okay as well. It's a dream - not something you have to hit in order to be a success. Success begins with your first home-grown tomato, your first bed of greens, your first venison stew, and it grows from there, like a savings account, bearing interest year after year, until one day you take stock and realize that if need be, you can go for months without visiting the grocery store.
Then you've made it, my friend. You've become a Self-Provisioner.
You don't have to be perfect. You just have to start.
-David The Good, 2020
Introduction: Everything But the Chicken
This book had humble beginnings. In fact, it started as a photo I shared on the internet. After sitting down to a meal of chicken fillet, beans, peas and potatoes, I realised something cool: everything on my plate had come from my garden.
Everything but the chicken.
That started a cascade of events that started with an idea, turned into a series of blog posts on my blog, ThisDadDoes.com and has culminated in this book. This is the story of how we got to where we