A Self Sufficient Life

Don’t You Just Love Freebies – Great Water Butt from Idealo

The world of the web is a peculiar place at times. Often we get unsolicited emails from folks. Usually they want to let us advertise their dubious products we’ve never heard of and have no interest in finding out about. Other times they simply want us to turn the site into a spam fest sending links to folks for cash. But once in a while an email is a pleasant surprise. In May Tommy at Idealo got in touch to ask if we’d like a water butt. Yes indeedy I replied, expecting not to hear back from him. But low [...]

Enjoyable Emergency Food Survival – Grow Your Own

Published by Mrs.Dirty Boots

If you want to feed your family yourself, why not simply grow your own? Mr DB’s recent look at emergency survival food supplies got me thinking (dangerous obviously). I cannot imagine having a bucket of dried prepared meals handy should zombies attack, but I do have a stash of home grown vegetables to munch on. Of course there would be plenty of potential emergencies that might actually put an end to the vegetable plot, but hopefully not in the long term. If you grow from viable seed and then collect some of those seeds produced by those plants each season, [...]

Emergency Survival Food Supply 275 Meal Pack

Published by Mr.Dirty Boots

I came across the Emergency Survival Food Supply 275 Meal Pack the other day and it got me to thinking about all manner of things. Self sufficiency is one thing but I wonder what would happen if there was no access to the shops for a few weeks. Maybe some form of a backup plan is on order. Here is the link to the product in question Emergency Survival Food Supply 275 Meal Pack As you can see it is pretty cheap, actually a lot cheaper than I would have imagined. The product itself is a bucket full of food [...]

Kindle Reader – The Green Way to Read?

Published by Mrs.Dirty Boots

Who hasn’t heard about the Kindle Reader yet? It seems you cannot get away from talk that electronic books are the future, and indeed their sales are soaring so fast Amazon has already said that US ebook sales are doing better than sales of real paper books. People love gadgets, and something that is even smaller, lighter and perhaps more convenient than a paperback is certainly a popular choice for fans of reading. I admit I have on occasion lusted after a Kindle myself. The convenience of having several books (or thousands if you want) all stored in one little [...]

Organic Shampoo for Better or Worse?

Published by Guest Poster

This is guest post and it makes for some very interesting reading, the things you learn by having a website! A friend of mine who was very proud of his luscious head of hair used to always talk about the benefits of either not washing his hair with any shampoo and only using an organic shampoo when he did. Admittedly, his hair was very impressive but I always put this down to his genes rather than his hair care routine. However, now I am not so sure. When he went overseas, my friend gifted me his stock of organic shampoo [...]

Protecting Your Garden from Genetically Modified Pollen

Published by Guest Poster

Today, at A Self Sufficient Life, we have a guest post by Ashley Warner. It’s an interesting look at the perhaps very worrying world of GM food and the implication for home grown crops everywhere: Genetically modified organisms (GMO) have sparked a hot debate in the world of agriculture. Many people scorn the usage of genetically modified seeds due to their questionable safety of consumption and potentially harmful biological effects. Others claim that this attitude is pure conservatism and that GMO crops are the future of agriculture, bringing higher yields to poorer land and allowing us to feed a burgeoning world population. Whether safe [...]

At Last New Homemade Compost Bins

Published by Mrs.Dirty Boots

Aah, we love our garden compost here at Casa Dirty Boots. But, the one thing we don’t – well didn’t love was our compost bins. Oh they were fine and dandy when first created. In fact we were rather smug that we’d used scraps of wood from the house that were good for little else to make them. Five years on though and what once was merely wood-wormed was starting to dissolve a little. The whole bin arrangement needed reinforcements to keep it all dog proof (essential when you are composting humanure). I shuffled some spare blocks that had [...]