Self-sufficiency Verse $0 Cost Living


   I’ve written before how I set my garden and orchard up based around the food, I liked to cook most.  My strategy which has proven correct is that when you’re tired and exhausted or when people drop in you prepare meals you are familiar with, your old favourites. For me that was a good Italian pasta or an Asian stir fry or with a little more time with the oven alight and heated, real pizza or a slow cooked stew. (Planning Your Garden) Having your favourites always available reduces the desire to make a quick trip to the shop to get a few things. 

Self-sufficiency to me is about growing everything you need. Zero cost living is being able to obtain, trade, swap, sell what you can produce to afford the items you can’t produce yourself. Flour for example I can’t make but I can sell a dozen free range eggs and buy heaps of flour. Sugar try as I might I just can’t get Stevia (My Stevia Trials) to work for me as sugar to thicken jams to preserve fruit I grow but I can sell a bag of alpaca manure to a local garden and get all the sugar I need. $0 Cost living takes some work it really means you have to become part of your community, talk to people, find out what they need, look at what you can supply and set yourself up as a small supplier. 

That doesn’t mean you have to start a commercial enterprise it just means each week you look at any receipts from local stores and start to think about how you can eliminate some of the items. Coffee, Salt and Pepper are my latest 3 items to tackle. I’ve planted my own coffee trees, that’s not such an issue now it’s just waiting a few years until they are big enough to produce fruit. For salt when I can’t evaporate sea water that’s a little far away, but I have grown an Australian plant the salt bush. It is an arid plant, so I’ve had to look carefully where I plant it making sure it is very well drained and exposed to full sun. The leaves are very salty and I’m already used to extracting flavours from leaves with lemon and aniseed myrtle trees and my 5 spice tree with spectacularly flavoursome leaves. Then pepper, well it’s taken many months to source the right pepper bush for my climate but I’m under way growing it as well. (Growing Pepper)

That’s another 3 items off my shopping list and closer to that $0 cost living. 


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Location: 30 Sternberg Rd, Witta QLD 4552, Australia

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