I would love to be self-sustaining. However, it would take a lot of soul searching for me to butcher my own animals. I can't even chop up a raw, dead chicken without wincing. I mean, if I had to, sure, I could do it, but I'm really enjoying the life where I get to drive to the store and have the butchering done for me. I can only Ron Swanson so much, you know?
Yeah I can't really handle food that still looks like the animal it came from. I like to think that chicken breasts grow that way, in styrofoam and plastic wrap. I can cook a whole chicken or turkey, but have to just toss it in the pan without looking at it too much. Then I cook it til all the meat just falls off.
YUP. FI keeps talking ab out going hunting and bringing home whatever animal. I told him as long as he can make it look like it came from the grocery store, I'll cook it. If I can see any kind of anything beyond muscle tissue, he's going to have to cook it over a fire in the yard like a neanderthal because I am not playing with that shit.
I feel so soul-less lol. I'm the minority here that enjoys knowing exactly where my meat came from because I then know it wasn't pumped full of hormone or other products and it's generally healthier and/or leaner. I went hunting for the first time last year and made that bird up for Thanksgiving. I truly wasn't sure how I'd handle it when FIL told me I had to 'clean' it but it wasn't really that bad, I got over it. I realize this makes me sound extermely backwoods but it's been quite an experiencing coming from me who didn't know a single person to hunt before I met DH.
I feel so soul-less lol. I'm the minority here that enjoys knowing exactly where my meat came from because I then know it wasn't pumped full of hormone or other products and it's generally healthier and/or leaner. I went hunting for the first time last year and made that bird up for Thanksgiving. I truly wasn't sure how I'd handle it when FIL told me I had to 'clean' it but it wasn't really that bad, I got over it. I realize this makes me sound extermely backwoods but it's been quite an experiencing coming from me who didn't know a single person to hunt before I met DH.
My dad was a hunter. He used to hang his deer in the garage and peel the skin off and butcher them and I'd just hang out watching. Now that I'm older I feel slight guilt/ grossed out but not to the point where I would get wincy cutting it or eating it.
Ideally, I'd be cool going half-way off the grid. Zero-houses are awesome and I'd love to own one. SO and I would love to be able to have chickens and grow a lot of our vegetables when we have a house, he also wants bees but I'm not a fan of that idea. But I like being a part of society so, no I would not want to live off the grid. Sure it's nice for awhile when we go camping but I don't want to be disconnected from the rest of society forever.
Bees are pretty cool, but you have to be careful. We had to put a little electric line fence outside of our bee boxes because a bear kept showing up and pretending to be godzilla.
Oh my god, I would have to worry about bears?! This does not make me want bees more!
Bears? Fuck to the no.
Reminds me of my favorite bar trivia team name ever: "condoms and bears: two things I don't fuck with."
Ideally, I'd be cool going half-way off the grid. Zero-houses are awesome and I'd love to own one. SO and I would love to be able to have chickens and grow a lot of our vegetables when we have a house, he also wants bees but I'm not a fan of that idea. But I like being a part of society so, no I would not want to live off the grid. Sure it's nice for awhile when we go camping but I don't want to be disconnected from the rest of society forever.
Bees are pretty cool, but you have to be careful. We had to put a little electric line fence outside of our bee boxes because a bear kept showing up and pretending to be godzilla.
Oh my god, I would have to worry about bears?! This does not make me want bees more!
It really all depends on where you live. My parents and I live on two sides of the same woods, pretty far out. We get bears, porcupines, fisher cats, raccoons, foxes, mink, possums, skunks, and all manner of wildlife out here, but it really all depends on what's in your yard to make something show up.
For example, a few weeks ago I'd been on FI's case to dump the water out of my dog's kiddie pool. He hadn't done it. Well he goes on night shift, I walk outside with the dog at about 11 and a porcupine is sipping from the pool and D went absolutely nuts trying to make a new friend. I don't know how in the hell she came out of that not covered in quills, but she did. It took his ass a couple nights but he finally did it and the porcupine hasn't come back.
Foxes come by my parents house occasionally. When I still lived there, I'd wake up at about 5 am because they'd stop by to bark at the ducks in their pen. The ducks would respond by taunting them from inside the pen. Hell, the other night, my mom forgot to latch the chicken house door and a skunk got in! Nobody got sprayed (I have no fucking idea how my mom, her dog, and the chickens all managed that because all of them are the biggest spazzes you ever heard of), and the skunk went about his business elsewhere. Woods life is weird as hell.
They've only gotten bear visits when they've kept something outside that appealed to the bears. My mom and I were out of town visiting family and we got a phone call the next morning from my dad. Daddy heard a sound like metal crunching outside at about 3am, and ran downstairs in his underoos to see what was the ruckus was. He said, "I got down there, and I saw the biggest dog I've ever seen next to the big metal trashcan we were keeping the bird seed in. Well, I keep looking at it, and it's a god damn bear! This bear is munching bird seed and staring at me like I'm not invited to lunch. So I yelled, 'GET!' at it. And it kept eating and looking at me. So I yelled, 'GET!!!!' again, and he got. Now I gotta go get some more bird seed and put that shit in the garage. I'll call you later."
Don't keep birdseed outside, and make sure you put an electric line around your bee box. Bears will leave your shit alone. If you're going to have berry patches or anything like that, it would behoove you to do an electric line there as well.
FI's and my 5-year plan is to move somewhere where we can have 5-10 acres so that there's a little distance between us and neighbors, and I can have chickens and maybe a goat, haha. I like to grow vegetables, but we're not going to be eating the chickens or anything - I still want to be able to drive to a store in 20 minutes or so. I'm tired of cookie-cutter suburbia and too-close neighbors.
I do love the grid and all the amenities that come with it. I could never in a million years see myself living off the land and/or foraging for my own food.
That being said, sometimes I get really sick of society and would just like to GTFO. DH and I have this ongoing joke that whenever anything is bothering us (parking tickets, politics, my family, whatever..) we will run off to Manchester England, and just live in the country and have a simple little life. Not that that's ever gonna happen, but I do daydream about living far away from hassle and annoyances of grid life.
@beethery Good thing I live in small town MA but not quite the sticks/ wilderness........it's bad to pour bacon grease down the drain so I always pour it off my back steps into the grass. I'm sure that smell would bring all the bears to the yard!
I'd love to have fruit trees, especially apples, and a garden. But I love grocery stores, vaccines, education and the internet. I can't live without amazon anymore.
OOH I just remembered this. If any of you are thinking about getting chickens, do your best to get girl chickens only. Tractor supply will give you only girls if you ask (you still run a risk of getting some roosters but they at least try).
I say this because my dad brought home 18 chickens and didn't ask for girls only. We had ELEVEN roosters. ELEVEN. 11. That is too god damn many. Roosters are mean as hell and they will mess your hens up.
Mom and I took an extended shopping trip the day that daddy uh... disposed of the roosters. His plan was to keep one, but another was smart and hid the whole time, so they've got two roosters now. They get really aggressive with the hens and scratch their backs up and pull their feathers out It's very distressing to the hens, and especially with winter coming up, we had to do something. Mom will not let my dad get rid of the roosters now, so she got some of this purple stuff and we slathered the hens backs with it, and then ordered some little apron things to protect them in the future. Their feathers are growing back very quickly, so they're doing alright.
My dad made bbq chicken with the rooster meat. I didn't eat it but he said it might as well have been jerky. They were probably... 7-8 months old at the time and the meat was tough as hell. We get 1-2 eggs a day from the hens during the summer, and they don't really lay many throughout the winter. Apparently it depends on the amount of daylight they get.
I couldn't do it. I live in a suburban college town and it's still too quiet for me. I have never been camping (nor do I want to) and I hate even being outdoors. Give me a loud city where I can walk to everything and be around people.
I'm all for natural holistic healing and homeschooling my future kids, but I will never live without a working toilet and a proper Internet connection.
Ideally, I'd be cool going half-way off the grid. Zero-houses are awesome and I'd love to own one. SO and I would love to be able to have chickens and grow a lot of our vegetables when we have a house, he also wants bees but I'm not a fan of that idea. But I like being a part of society so, no I would not want to live off the grid. Sure it's nice for awhile when we go camping but I don't want to be disconnected from the rest of society forever.
Bees are pretty cool, but you have to be careful. We had to put a little electric line fence outside of our bee boxes because a bear kept showing up and pretending to be godzilla.
Oh my god, I would have to worry about bears?! This does not make me want bees more!
It really all depends on where you live. My parents and I live on two sides of the same woods, pretty far out. We get bears, porcupines, fisher cats, raccoons, foxes, mink, possums, skunks, and all manner of wildlife out here, but it really all depends on what's in your yard to make something show up.
For example, a few weeks ago I'd been on FI's case to dump the water out of my dog's kiddie pool. He hadn't done it. Well he goes on night shift, I walk outside with the dog at about 11 and a porcupine is sipping from the pool and D went absolutely nuts trying to make a new friend. I don't know how in the hell she came out of that not covered in quills, but she did. It took his ass a couple nights but he finally did it and the porcupine hasn't come back.
Foxes come by my parents house occasionally. When I still lived there, I'd wake up at about 5 am because they'd stop by to bark at the ducks in their pen. The ducks would respond by taunting them from inside the pen. Hell, the other night, my mom forgot to latch the chicken house door and a skunk got in! Nobody got sprayed (I have no fucking idea how my mom, her dog, and the chickens all managed that because all of them are the biggest spazzes you ever heard of), and the skunk went about his business elsewhere. Woods life is weird as hell.
They've only gotten bear visits when they've kept something outside that appealed to the bears. My mom and I were out of town visiting family and we got a phone call the next morning from my dad. Daddy heard a sound like metal crunching outside at about 3am, and ran downstairs in his underoos to see what was the ruckus was. He said, "I got down there, and I saw the biggest dog I've ever seen next to the big metal trashcan we were keeping the bird seed in. Well, I keep looking at it, and it's a god damn bear! This bear is munching bird seed and staring at me like I'm not invited to lunch. So I yelled, 'GET!' at it. And it kept eating and looking at me. So I yelled, 'GET!!!!' again, and he got. Now I gotta go get some more bird seed and put that shit in the garage. I'll call you later."
Don't keep birdseed outside, and make sure you put an electric line around your bee box. Bears will leave your shit alone. If you're going to have berry patches or anything like that, it would behoove you to do an electric line there as well.
I like my grid living, and I like bigger cities. I'm currently living in the smallest city I've ever lived in right now, and it's still top 30 population wise. I feel like it's too small.
That being said, I've heard about "agrihoods" and it sounds like a neat concept. Essentially, the community is built around a farm, and then you get the benefit of having truly local produce, eggs, etc. without the work. Here's an article in case you are interested.
We are pretty self-reliant at our current place. We have acreage, solar, private well. We do have a propane tank, and we pay someone to haul our trash. The closest town is 200 people. We grow our own fruits, veggies, and berries, and hunt and fish for about half of our meat. We trade crops with our neighbors, and buy halves or quarters of cows and pigs raised locally.
I would like to have a similar setup somewhere other than CA. It's such a nanny state and the politics here drive me insane.
The grind, eh, not so much. But a person can conceivably move out to the country and raise some chickens without making it some kind of political statement against The Man. Like, I'm pretty sure most farms are in fact, "on the grid," taxpaying, vaccinating, electricity-using households. I'll never understand this desire to completely separate from society--society has problems, but it's what we have. It's what made us who we are. And quarantining oneself out of exasperation with society's problems seems to me like the coward's way out.
This. There are even things you can do to technically be "off the grid" without even noticing a difference in the day to day... I mean, you can generate your own power, have a well, have a septic system, and use a wood stove for heat, and at the end of the day you still have electricity, warmth, your toilets flush, and your hot water comes straight out of the tap. My in-laws do all of those things plus garden (they used to have animals as well, chickens, pigs, rabbits, horses, cows, but not anymore) and cut their own wood from the property for heat, but a casual visitor to their home wouldn't notice any difference to a regular suburban home, except for seeing the solar panels on the roof as they drove up. I mean, I guess you can have bad wells and septic systems, but theirs are excellent, you would never know they existed if you weren't told. They have the best drinking water I've ever tasted.
But the kids in that family (my husband and his siblings) took the bus to school in the city, worked part-time jobs, went to university, always had vaccines and medical care, etc. They were early adopters of home computers and internet access. I do know people who home-school and have bigger farm operations, but they don't think of themselves as radical hippies (I know some of them too...) - they're just farmers. They're still a part of society.
For my part, I live on a few acres in the almost-country, but as it happens the country is about 7 minutes' drive to downtown. We garden, can/preserve, bake, cook, knit, build some of our own furniture, are thinking about chickens, bees, and maybe a goat, and we'd love to get into our own power generation, but it wouldn't be about shitting in the woods and sleeping on straw-tick mattresses. We're big fans of science, technology, and modern medicine.
Of course, I also really hope to someday be sent on some sort of quest that necessitates hiking and horseback riding through miles of treacherous forest while living out of a pack, wearing a "cloak", and fighting off bad guys with either my sword or magical powers, I haven't decided yet. So I do have some extremism in me as well. Did I say that out loud?
We have quail in their little ark. We have top bar bee boxes. I have a crazy love for gardening. Ok, more I like playing in dirt but garden gives me rewards also.
I am not going any further. I already go outside and think we've gone insane.
Re: Would you live off the grid if you could?
I feel so soul-less lol. I'm the minority here that enjoys knowing exactly where my meat came from because I then know it wasn't pumped full of hormone or other products and it's generally healthier and/or leaner. I went hunting for the first time last year and made that bird up for Thanksgiving. I truly wasn't sure how I'd handle it when FIL told me I had to 'clean' it but it wasn't really that bad, I got over it. I realize this makes me sound extermely backwoods but it's been quite an experiencing coming from me who didn't know a single person to hunt before I met DH.
I'm the fuck out.
FI's and my 5-year plan is to move somewhere where we can have 5-10 acres so that there's a little distance between us and neighbors, and I can have chickens and maybe a goat, haha. I like to grow vegetables, but we're not going to be eating the chickens or anything - I still want to be able to drive to a store in 20 minutes or so. I'm tired of cookie-cutter suburbia and too-close neighbors.
That being said, sometimes I get really sick of society and would just like to GTFO. DH and I have this ongoing joke that whenever anything is bothering us (parking tickets, politics, my family, whatever..) we will run off to Manchester England, and just live in the country and have a simple little life. Not that that's ever gonna happen, but I do daydream about living far away from hassle and annoyances of grid life.
I'm the fuck out.
I'm all for natural holistic healing and homeschooling my future kids, but I will never live without a working toilet and a proper Internet connection.
I would like to have a similar setup somewhere other than CA. It's such a nanny state and the politics here drive me insane.
But the kids in that family (my husband and his siblings) took the bus to school in the city, worked part-time jobs, went to university, always had vaccines and medical care, etc. They were early adopters of home computers and internet access. I do know people who home-school and have bigger farm operations, but they don't think of themselves as radical hippies (I know some of them too...) - they're just farmers. They're still a part of society.
For my part, I live on a few acres in the almost-country, but as it happens the country is about 7 minutes' drive to downtown. We garden, can/preserve, bake, cook, knit, build some of our own furniture, are thinking about chickens, bees, and maybe a goat, and we'd love to get into our own power generation, but it wouldn't be about shitting in the woods and sleeping on straw-tick mattresses. We're big fans of science, technology, and modern medicine.
Of course, I also really hope to someday be sent on some sort of quest that necessitates hiking and horseback riding through miles of treacherous forest while living out of a pack, wearing a "cloak", and fighting off bad guys with either my sword or magical powers, I haven't decided yet. So I do have some extremism in me as well. Did I say that out loud?
I am not going any further. I already go outside and think we've gone insane.
I do not like crawling bugs.