Our Waldorf Homeschool Journey

OOOooh! We’ve had great fun, schools been good, yes, but our passion at the moment is our land and those chickens!

We’re finally making progress on our journey to self sufficiency. Not a huge amount you may think, but for me it seems miraculous. We’ve had this dream for so long, and to finally get into action and reap a few rewards is so exhilarating!

The chickens are doing so well. We went to collect 2 more last weekend, pullets so they’re not laying yet. But out of the other 3 we get 5 eggs every 2 days. I now cook and bake according to our egg supply.

The solar panels are about 1/10 of the way up but already we can use our power to light 1 room of the house, and any emergency goodies, in other words, when we have no grid power we can run the odd appliance and light. We’ve found that low energy light bulbs work best. We are now in a desperate rush to get all the panels up and working! Johns trying to get them up. We have 2 long weekends coming up this week and next so with any luck the panels will be put up then.

The stove, we have a woodburning/anthracite burning range cooker which has been installed and is finally functioning. It’s an Esse, similar to an Aga. So our electricity bill has dropped by 2/3rds. We now just need to get the boiler connected, so our bath water can be heated, which was the whole point of getting her! We’re burning anthracite at the moment, but would like to move away from it. We’re lucky enough to have trees on our property which are huge and need constant trimming so we should be able to get a large portion of our wood from there. But at the moment it’s anthracite for ease of use while we set up. Bearing in mind, this provides our cooking ability, heating and soon (with luck) our hot water.

Our vegetable garden is taking shape bit by tiny bit. There are some days I feel like I’m never going to see a return - (just all that immediate reward conditioning us humans have been through). But it’s growing and we’re expanding weekly. We’ve decided to cultivate as much of the land as possible, so slowly the grass is disappearing and food is replacing it.

John planted a mini orchard this past weekend. I’m sure our local nursery man thinks I’m daft. I order in batches. for example: Please can you send me the following fruit trees….plum,lemon, orange, lime, apple, peach, mmmhh oh and fig.

Anyway, I’ve struggled to find berry bushes. The nurseries were so unhelpful. They keep saying, just wait until july or so, then you can get them. AAAARRRGH! I was going crazy, and then phoned one in the middle of the city, as a last resort. Believe it or not, they had and we now have 2 blueberry, 2 blackberry and 2 raspberry. They go in on the weekend.

It’s been a huge struggle to get where we are today, and we’re just getting started. But we all feel that this is the way forward. There is a global food crisis at the moment, which will only get worse. We need to become as self sufficient as possible, as quickly as possible.

There is a book I’m reading at the moment, and I cannot recommend it highly enough it’s called, The Chaos Point: The World at the Crossroads. My humble opinion…if you’re human and refer to earth as your “home planet” you should read it. Bearing in mind it was written nearly 3 years ago. A lot of the indicators he speaks of as happening in the future are happening now. We’re reaching a point of global breakdown. I know it’s not what people want to hear, but sadly our life is going to depend on decisions we make now. But more on that another time!

I’m off to bed now, I have flu (boo-hoo). The kids have both had it. I had to get it I guess, but it’s not slowing me down. Maybe tomorrow, I’ll stay in bed a bit later than normal. (Wishful thinking?)

Stay warm as a furnace and many blessings to you at the beginning of this new season.

Susan

Filed under: HOMESTEADING on April 22nd, 2008