Foreword

IT’S BEEN A WHOLE DECADE since I sat down to write the first incarnation of this book, with all the nervous energy and excitement of a new author about to share everything he knew about his world, the world of self-sufficiency. For six months I remember I ate, dreamt and thought of nothing else. It was a magical time, and the end result, the first edition of this book, was my baby and I loved her like a child. So why rewrite it, why take something I’m so fond of and redo it? Because the world has changed, and along with it, so must we all, including self-sufficiency. Climate change has become real and urgent; David Attenborough has started a plastic-free revolution; veganism is on the rise; more people are growing their own, keeping hens, embracing minimalism, wanting to make as low an impact on the environment as possible … so if you feel part of this wave and want some inspiration, here is as good a place to start as any.

In the following pages you’ll find new ideas, new things to try and new recipes. There’s even a new focus, one that concentrates even more heavily on including everyone, no matter where or how you live. That felt really important, that inclusivity. So what if you live in a top-floor apartment? That absolutely does not mean you can’t be self-sufficient, because self-sufficiency is a concept. It’s an idea. It’s meaning has changed from the fuddy-duddy, high-falutin, ‘Well if you’re not living in a cave doing your own dentistry and hunting at night with a slingshot, you’re not really self-sufficient’, to one that means being creative with your time, doing things for yourself and being an individual. Like I said, everything evolves.

I think each of us has a different idea of self-sufficiency, and that’s cool, that’s how it should be. You do as much or as little as you feel comfortable with, and that’s what this new edition seeks to encourage. Of course space is an issue for all of us, but before you complain too heavily that you haven’t enough room to do all the things you want, do bear in mind that I currently live in a static caravan with my wife Debbie and two Great Danes, and if I can do all the things I do here, you, my friend, have no excuse.

Full disclosure – the caravan is temporary while I build an off-grid, wooden eco-lodge on my own self-sufficient smallholding, which is where the caravan is currently sited, so I’m not claiming ‘oh woe is me’. Far from it. This is just cards on the table, because with a miniscule kitchen, a little ingenuity along with some tricks, cheats and know-how, we’ve taught ourselves how to live as self-sufficient a life as it’s possible to have. We still have luxuries like Sky and broadband, but we generate our own electric, have a wood-burner for warmth fuelled by our own coppiced wood, harvest rainwater for showering and washing up, have a compost loo and live pretty much unplugged from the mains whist still being part of the local community.

Life as you can imagine is busy, with 20 acres and 187 assorted free-range animals to keep happy and fed, a polytunnel, greenhouse and veg patch, all from which we rear, grow and forage the majority of our food. We have a sewing machine for making clothes, a knife for whittling and a brewing bucket full of wine – what can I tell you, the winter nights are long down here.

All this knowledge I’m excited to share with you. All the knowhow, the tips, tricks and cheats I’ve picked up in the last ten years are going to be shuffled in this new edition alongside the old favourites. This is self-sufficiency taken to a whole new modern level, more inclusive, more revealing and more fun than ever.

So what I have written aims to be a practical guide that will show you how to approach a self-sufficient lifestyle, how to forage and eat for free, how to feel healthier with a greater sense of pride in how you live your life, how to involve children in the concept of self-sustainability, what to do with animals and how to treat them kindly, and how to help the environment.

There are 12 chapters to this book, each one focusing on a particular area with the aim of making self-sufficiency come alive for everybody. It shows you how the kids can grow lettuce, strawberries or peas; how you can make butter and cheese and keep chickens for fresh eggs. It shows you how to make your own wine and beer, forage for nuts and berries or wild herbs, how to dye material and clothes using plants, as well as how to turn to nature for useful medicinal soothers. Each chapter explains how to use the information depending on your experience, resources, equipment and how far you want to go on the scale of self-sufficiency. This means that the kitchen garden chapter, for example, will have something for you whether you have a window box, an urban back garden or a more substantial area of land.

This is a modern approach to self-sufficiency, an attempt to update centuries’ worth of old wives’ tales, rural truisms, herblore and folklore by looking for the points at which they connect with the way we live our lives today. By doing that, by taking those old life skills and bringing them into the present, the first thing you will realize is how cutting-edge it all feels. Far from feeling fuddy-duddy, it feels fashionable to learn how to turn to nature for solutions to everyday problems. Walk up and down the aisles of any supermarket and count how many times you see the word ‘natural’. It’s everywhere, on food, cosmetics, household cleaners and medicines. The modern-day appetite for natural ingredients is insatiable, and yet many people fear picking herbs and flowers to use in anything other than food, and sometimes they’re afraid even to use them in cooking. But, really, I think it’s not fear; it’s something else. Really, they would love to do it, but they’ve just forgotten how. In the following pages, I’ve provided the key to regaining those skills.

Simon Dawson