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 p...

Some spinach can loose 90% of it’s nutritional value within 24 hours of picking. The term paddock to plate as far as I can see is just some chefs with their heads up their own bums trying to convince people their food is fresh – “more seasoning you bloody idiot, where is the salt you fool”, that’s because the produce has already lost it’s flavour.  Now I’m not a scientist I’m just a farmer these days who likes to read what scientists whom study stuff about farming have found. Following is my quick summation, main sources listed below.  Many articles with actual scientific data are from the US where methods of getting food from California to the supermarkets in New York then into the fridges of consumers has been studied.  After harvesting  plants continue to ‘live’ or  ‘breathe’ and that process is called respiration.  This process is the breakdown of materials such as carbohydrates, fats and proteins that leads to a loss of...