Are we self-sufficient?

Self-sufficiency.

Is it all about huge garden and barn full of farm animals? Or big machines, chainsaw and man with a beard and a flanel shirt?

Or could it be something else...?

We don't have any farm animals (yet) and I really wonder if we'll ever have them, because I am not sure if I want to tie myself to more animals than our dogs and cats. We'll see. Haven't decided yet.

Our garden is mainly too many berry bushes and too many apple trees. I'm not much of a gardener, I have to admit. And we don't really have space for a proper garden - because of those berry bushes and apple trees. But I hope this thing will change in the future and some day I would have my own half wild kitchen garden. I'm not really into flowers, I am more interested about edible things.

But as we live in Finland, we have free access to our forests. And those places are full of food. Berries, mushrooms, herbs... In the land of thousand lakes, we are able to fish and my fiance is planning to start hunting. I haven't decided about that myself yet, since I am mostly vegetarian and I really am not sure if I could hunt and shot an animal for myself. I do eat fish and our dogs and cats need meat, so it would only be good, if we could grow or hunt some of that meat by ourself.

So yes, at least some of our food can be gathered from the surrounding nature, but it still covers just a very tiny part of it at the moment.

I am not much of a sewer either, but I can knit (and I knit a lot) and do some simple repairs and such. I would love to learn how to spin yarn and one of my future plans is to learn how to dye yarn and wool. I already filled our smaller freezer with little red and orange (and smelly) mushrooms last fall for that purpose.

So, in what areas we might call ourselves self-sufficient?

Firewood. It comes mostly from this property or nearby forests and we fall and cut it by ourselves. Idea of actually bying ready cut firewood feels completely odd to me.

Water. We have our own old well, maybe from the 18th century, and we don't even want to change that to some public water suply network. Although it means we have to carry water from the well to the sauna and to the house the whole cold season (= those months when temperature is near or below 0 Celsius) because our water pump would freeze. But it warms your heart every time when you know you don't have to pay a single euro for it and that the water you are using isn't pumped from some sourse several kilometers away.

Heating. Our whole house is heated with wood. No electricity or such needed. Just wood. And when we heat the baking oven to keep the house warm, it usually means also that I bake or cook something in it too. Fireplaces and wood stove keeps the house warm too. Wood also warms up the sauna and water for laundry and washing oneself.

What else?

Well my fiance is sort of a logger (or forestry worker as here it is mostly about clearing saw work in young forests and planting new trees than actual chainsaw work), so there's always a handy man with a chainsaw around (and I can run it too, at least in simple tasks, if needed to). And living in the woods with almost one kilometer long driveway it is pretty handy that you can clear your driveway yourself after stroms. I once counted 12 fallen trees from our driveway on 200 meters distance.

I am also familiar with saw and hammer and not scared to get my hands dirty. I know pretty well berries, mushrooms and herbs and how to use them. Many little things that one might not even concider to be about self-sufficiency but when you think of it, you suddenly realize you know quite a bit to live a happy life with very little.

We also know the first aid pretty well and I am quite handy to take care of all sorts of cuts, wounds and little katastrophes that need some sort of medical attention. With five dogs always getting into trouble and myself with two right hands and a bit too fast mind (I'm leftie, hence the odd joke hehe), dealing with all sorts of accidents has become quite familiar.

Oh, and powercuts! No worries. As I told above, we have woodstove and baking oven (we don't even have modern stove/oven) and we have an old school well where you can get water just with a bucket. And if powercut is long, we have an aggregate to run our freezer. As soon as the cellar is renovated, it is also a good place to storage food that is usually kept in the fridge. Now it can be kept at the veranda on winter time or in big tubs filled with cold water if weather is warm. Phones and such can be charged in the car or with that same aggregate that can be used to run freezer - although those small solar panel chargers for hikers and such would be nice. For light there are always candles and those cheap battery led lights/lanterns.

I think this is already pretty good list to start from. Of course there are also things like outhouse, sauna, those apple trees and berry bushes and so on. But maybe I continue with this topic in some other post. And also do a list of things we are not so well prepared with. Because there's plenty of those too.