The French Country Challenge

Cutting down expenses: hypermarkets

While we are a long ways from being self-sufficient, one of our main goals is to cut back on our outgoings as much as possible, as that means there are fewer things to purchase with money in our life (which will ultimately make self-sufficiency easier), as well as helping us to save money to buy a smallholding site.  In order to help us do this, I've made a detailed spreadsheet into which all our expenses are entered and then analyzed with a series of graphs breaking down our purchases by store, function, level of necessity, time of purchase, account and payment type (card, cash, wire transfer, etc).  We can't do anything about rent and bills for the moment, but this scrutiny of our other outgoings has been extremely informative and helped us see our spending patterns and where we can improve.

One of our weaknesses is when we do go to the super/hypermarket.  We try to get our fresh stuff from the local market and a local box scheme (a 10 euro bag of vegetables from a local farmer bought at the train station) and more and more our own garden, but we still find ourselves going to the big hypermarket a couple of times of month for things like toothpaste, canned food, rice, milk, etc, and then going to the nearer supermarket to pick up fresh things like cheese in the gap.  However, we have noticed that we can't seem to spend under 100 euros in the hypermarket (although we leave with a good haul of mostly sensible items) and even more distressingly, every trip to the supermarket to just pick up a few things seems to cost us 30-50 euros.  It is amazing how many things end up in our basket or cart that we didn't come for, and to be honest don't really need, and the worst is when we shop hungry (which we have now officially banned ourselves from doing).

So to try to cut down our grocery spending, we have decided to try out online/delivered to your door shopping.  This way we know we stick to our list, and you don't have the browsing through the aisles effect to tempt us into needless purchases.  There are also several other benefits to it, mainly in using less resources and having less environmental impact.  It is actually much better for the environment to have one delivery truck taking everyone's groceries to them than for each of those people to do a roundtrip in their own cars.  Hypermarkets are among the biggest users (wasters) of energy as well, with such large surfaces to cool/heat and especially light: they use extremely high wattage lights and a lot of them in order to make all the food look bright and attractive so people buy more (there have actually been studies done on this).  So shopping online cuts out all the need to waste resources on the presentation of the store, and it is more economic to have three warehouses kept at room temp, cool or frozen, than to have all the food displayed in those refrigerated shelves. 

Other advantages include not having to spend our valuable time on the weekend going to the hypermarket (which is always crowded and extremely unpleasant), which we have to do since I don't have a French driver's license to be able to go in the week (but that's a story for another time).  You can save various shopping lists on the site and literally order your usual shop in seconds. We tried houra.fr, and they also happen to have an extremely good selection of organic and fairtrade products, not just food but also the natural shampoo and things we use (which means we can avoid going to Botanic or the other health food store, more places we can't seem to leave with bank balance intact or merely sustaining minor damage).

But mainly, it saves money.  Even beyond the cutting out of unnecessary purchases, there is the savings in fuel costs from driving to the big hypermarket 20 kilometers away, and then due to all the reasons cited 2 paragraphs above, the products are actually cheaper since the company doesn't have to spend all the money on the store's aesthetics.  We just made an order of 120 euros that should have us stocked up on all our dry items as well as household stuff for a good month, saving an estimated 94 euros, all things taken into consideration.

This may not do anything to make us more self-sufficient for now, but it is helping us to save money and break the cycle of consumerism by buying only what we need, and not what marketing and advertising seduces us into purchasing.

Self-Sufficiency Cartoon

A great cartoon sent to me by my dad - thought I would share it!

Rain...ahhh

Well after a very strange, dry April, the month of May has finally brought some rain - so much for April showers!  This weekend we finally had a proper rain come through, and it is raining more today as I write.  Saturday night it actually began to pour down and we fell asleep to the pitter-patter (er, dull roar) of the raindrops on the skylight.  We realized with shock that we couldn't remember when it had last rained before that, any more than a few sprinkles that is.  It must have been very early April. 

The garden was most definitely grateful for a good soak, and we were glad to be spared watering duty on a particularly busy weekend.  In the back plot, the tomatoes seem to be hanging in there underneath the protective plastic, braving quite a cold and blustery first week out with only a slight droop.  And the moisture seems to have spurred a new round of germination, with quite a few new little seedlings coming up.  However, we are now at the difficult stage of trying to determine what is seedling and what is weed and not pull up all of our crop!  In the side plot the beans and cucumbers have yet to come through, but with the cold temperatures this past week I imagine the germination might be a bit delayed.

This week is the saints de glace, but hopefully the temperatures will improve by the end of the week and we can plant out the rest of the tomatoes, the courgettes, bell peppers, chili peppers and aubergines, and then our garden will really start to look like a vegetable plot and not just a patch of bare earth!  The tomatoes that have not gone out yet are looking a bit yellow, so I'm anxious to get them in the ground.  I did a little experiment to give them a nutrient hit with some homemade fertilizer, made from egg shells and banana peels whizzed up in the food processor, and it seems to have perked them up a little.

We are looking forward to things starting to produce finally, as for the moment our only 'harvest' has been a small handful of lettuce every few days from what we have growing in the containers indoors.  This has been really lovely - it is a nice addition to a lot of meals to have a little pile of greens (they are so crisp and sweet we eat them without any dressing or frills!) - but we are starting to get a bit antsy waiting for beans, peas, tomatoes, courgettes and all the other lovely things we are hoping to eat from our garden!  We will have to plan the winter garden well to try to address this 'hungry gap' for next year.

Dhal (lentil curry) and reflections on self-sufficiency

I absolutely love Asian food.  But I feel slightly guilty if I post an Asian-style recipe on here, as to be honest, it doesn't exactly fit in with our plans to become more self-sufficient.  In the modern food distribution system, we have become accustomed to having constant access to strange and wondrous foods from the world over, foods that would have been unheard of even a century ago.  Even before that, however, Europe has been benefiting from the spice trade for hundreds of years.  I can't help but think how bland European food must have been before the arrival of cinnamon and nutmeg and turmeric and cumin, or even simply pepper!  Now they must have used a much wider variety of herbs, so maybe we should give them a little more credit, but it still makes me think how lost we would be without modern, or even not-so-modern trade networks.

Recent events like the volcano in Iceland make it painfully clear how vulnerable our world/life/society really is, and how easily it can be brought to a standstill if air travel were to be prevented by volcano ash, or a fuel crisis (affecting cars, trucks and boats as well), or some other event.  And we would actually be in much worse shape than in generations previous, when other, slower means of transport and trade were in place.  If our modern systems break down, just how feasible would self-sufficiency be if it were forced upon us (with no cheating)? 

And I'm not just talking about not being able to get my lemongrass since very few people would be able to navigate the old trade routes in a sailboat (and it sure as heck isn't gonna grow around here).  Even if you start thinking along the lines of the American frontier, they still had to go to the trading post in Little House on the Prairie to pick up supplies like flour, salt, that calico cloth for Laura's new dress, etc.  Really we would need to rediscover the ways of living of the Native Americans, completely self-sufficient and in harmony with the surroundings.  In this more northern region of France, we'd have to go back to cooking everything with butter, unless someone with a horse and cart could bring us olive oil from the south.  The more you think about everything you use in day-to-day life, or even just day-to-day cooking, the more you realize how very little of it you could provide yourself.

Anyway, to actually get to my very un-self-sufficient recipe for lentil curry.  In cooking this, I realized that even once I get growing my own vegetables, the only ingredients that went into this recipe that I would be able to provide were onions and tomatoes, and if I had enough space, lentils (would love to grow lentils of all colors).  The rest - spices, coconut milk, rice, etc - were all illegitimate...not many palm trees in the Seine et Marne.  I had mentioned this before in the case of rice, but this leaves me with something of a dilemma: how to reconcile my love of world cuisine with my desire to be self-sufficient?  

'Quick' Dhal (Lentil Curry)

Now if you make dhal properly, you boil the lentils for a long time with just some turmeric, then you make a wonderful paste with all kinds of lovely spices and mix that in with the lentils at the end.  This is a somewhat cheaty version that you do all in one pan and leave to cook through.  Just to point out here, too, that the recipe uses vegetable oil as it is best to really fry up the spices in the hot oil at temperatures hotter than you can go with olive oil.

2 onions

3 cloves of garlic

Cumin seeds, ground coriander, chili powder, fennel seed, cinnamon, nutmeg, ground cumin, salt, pepper, dried (or fresh if you can find them) lime leaves

Yellow lentils 

Boiling water

1 large can peeled whole tomatoes

1 small can coconut milk

Mung beans (with skins removed, should be yellow)

Fresh coriander

Basmati rice

Get a large pot (or very large wok) heating up nice and hot with vegetable oil in it (don't be stingy or your spices will stick - the oil should cover the bottom of the pan) while you chop your onions and garlic.  Add the onions (careful not to let the hot oil splash up on you) to the hot oil, then add all the spices except for the lime leaves and fry until the onions start to go translucent, then add the garlic.  Once that has cooked, add the yellow lentils and fry them up with the onion, garlic and spices for a little bit, then add just enough boiling water to cover everything.  'Henry' your tomatoes in, then add the can of coconut milk.  The coconut milk and the tomatoes together will make for a rather strange (and unappetizing) color, but that will change as it cooks together, I promise.  Add the lime leaves and cook for about twenty minutes.  While this is cooking, rinse well then soak the mung beans and rinse a final time before adding them to the curry.  Cook for another 15-20 minutes while you cook your rice (in a separate pan), then simply stir in a handful of fresh coriander just before serving.  Serve over the rice with a garnish of more fresh coriander.

Fence-making, or "Let's play Robinson Crusoe!"

I've always loved survival stories, from Hatchet to Robinson Crusoe to the Swiss Family Robinson.  I hope I never find myself in such a situation (unless I decide to try out for Survivor the TV show, which I feel adequately prepared for after my experiences today - don't think I could manage the whole reality TV aspect, though, with all the bickering and back-stabbing, etc), but I find it endlessly fascinating what human ingenuity can make of the few resources it may have at hand.  I also feel the same about cultures which have managed to build so much in adversarial climatic or other conditions.

Though I may not be lost in the wilderness or shipwrecked on a desert island, ingenuity and creativity can still play a role in finding ways of saving money by reusing or converting objects, making do with what you have, etc, and ultimately in self-sufficiency.  In that spirit, I spent the afternoon today constructing a fence around the side 'flower bed' garden, one that would keep the puppies out, in preparation for sowing.  We already had a short fence, of the same type that we buried to keep the pups from burrowing under, but at that height the pups just bound over with amazing agility and grace.  A beautiful sight, but not when you are imagining that leap landing on top of tomato, bean or other plants a couple months from now.

So yesterday Henry and I put up the short fence, using some cheap wooden poles sawed in half (which were a third of the price of the metal fence posts at the hardware store), and this afternoon I added another foot and a half or so of height to it (fingers crossed that's enough!) using bamboo that was growing in the back corner of the yard.  I had originally used this technique around the back plot when I removed the grass and turned it over back in November, but we were able to take that down when we got the tall fence to cut off half the yard.  I had sawed off some of the taller bamboo poles (which also served the useful purpose of making a dent in the clump, unwittingly planted by a former resident, that is now approaching forest status), and clipped off the branches with garden shears, then lashed them together with twine while wearing a hat I fashioned from the leaves and drinking coconut milk...wait, scratch that last part (including the hat), Crusoe fantasies running away with me again.  Here is the result:

 

 

You may be thinking, "Great job, but you've forgotten one small detail...how are YOU going to get over now?"  Fortunately that did occur to me and you'll be glad to know I've got it covered - human entry is accomplished by way of concrete blocks (yeah, we use those a lot) on either side that we can use to step over (very carefully if you are a man - not much clearance, unless you are quite tall and long-legged).

And now a final photo...yesterday we also moved the tall fence in the back in order to attempt to re-grow our grass (we also put some seed down, but I think we're going to need a lot more).  If we had our way, we'd just turn the whole backyard into raised beds, but I think the landlady might find that to be going a little too far.  Anyway, the dogs are not too happy about it, now gazing wistfully at the rest of the yard and the myriad little twittering birdies it contains:

Ashley's List

First of all, my apologies for my absence.  Things have been crazy around here, and I seem to juggle several different hats at my house (Mama, baby-watcher, baby-feeder, baby-food source, house cleaner, dog walker, gardener, translator, English lesson-giver), and every once in a while something has to give, or I don't get any sleep at all. 

I liked reading Laura's list yesterday and it gave me some ideas.  I am going to make a list of goals, some long term, some short term.  Some of my goals are going to be the same as Laura's, some are different.  I am going to include whether it is a long term or short term goal in my list though, because I don't want to feel overwhelmed right away with a really ambitious list.  I look at my changing lifestyle as an evolving process.  It isn't something that is going to happen overnight, but I do think in a year or two I will be in a totally different place then I am now, and this is what I want.  Making changes that I can keep, that is my main goal.

Ashley's Lifestyle Change List

1) Start and keep up a veggie garden (goal for this year).  This is on its way to happening.  I've got the space and motivation.  I love my parents' veggie garden, keeping this in mind is keeping me on my goal of having my own.

2) In the same 'theme', I want to make all, or most of, my baby food (goal for this year).  I've looked at the stuff at the store, and it is expensive, and there is a TON of added ingredients.  Even the rice cereal is full of, well, stuff that is not rice cereal.  (I am considering skipping the rice cereal and just starting with sweet potatoes ect).  My baby is still breastfed, so according to what I have read that should be her main source of food for awhile still, but there is nothing better for her then homegrown, homemade baby food when the time comes.

3) I would like to can and preserve fruits and veggies as well (goal for this year). (Laura, let's get together and do this, ok?  I have a camp stove burner, we can even do the messy stuff outside...)  I have already done applesauce, and tomatoes, so I kind of have the basics down, I would like to start to work on things a little more complicated as well.  I include jams in this.

4) Keep up my compost (goal for this year).  I am pretty good during summer and spring, but I hate taking the scraps out when it is raining or cold.

5) Chickens!  (Long term goal).  We have the space for laying (or even eating chickens, although I am too big of a weenie to actually whack them.  If I did do eating chickens, they would have to live separately from the laying ones, which will probably have names, and I will have to find some papy out here to go lop their heads off and pluck them for me I think).  But my main goal would be laying chickens.  This will cut back a little bit on my compost, chickens LOVE table scraps, but the eggs would be worth it.  Now to convince my husband...

6) Like Laura, I am trying to cut out processed foods (general goal, if it gets broken from time to time, that's ok too, I am not striving for perfection, just to be better overall).  I want to make our own snacks and have them be more fruit and veggie based.  I do drink a coke every now and then, but I don't drink coffee, so I need the caffeine boost every once in a while.  No one is perfect!  And I hope at some point to cut it out even more.

7) I am not buying any more cleaning products (when it happens, it happens goal).  I think that with vinegar, salt, lemons, and some savon noir (more on this soon, it is a miracle natural product), I can do pretty much all of my cleaning.  And it is safer for crawling babes.

9) No more gel douche either.  Like Laura we are down to our last bottle of shower gel, I think, and to replace it I have just bought some good old bars of savon de marseille.

10) Make my own laundry detergent.  I am just waiting to run out of what I have for this.  Once my last bottle is done I am going to experiment.  I have soap nuts, savon de marseille and all I need for this, I just have to do it! 

11) If we ever have a house with more land, then I would like to tend to my own goats as well.  In the mean time I might try to find a farm that will sell me milk so I can start to experiment with my own cheese.  From what I have read, mozzarella and ricotta are fairly easy to do.

12) Buy from local people as much as possible.  If I grow my own veggies, or even just a part of them, I would like to buy meat from local people if possible.  I am reading a rather disturbing book about the meat industry, so I would like to find some local people.  I know for sure there are local chicken and pork people.  I might try to find a red meat person as well for my carnivore.  I also have a honey lady that lives down the road, and a papy that does veggies.  

13) Another kind of silly goal I have is for me to do more of our yardwork.  When we were both working all day it made sense to pay someone else to work in our yard because then we could just relax in it during the weekends.  Now that I am home, even just half an hour a day would make a massive amount of difference.  

14) I would also like to collect some rainwater for the veggie garden.  Our water consumption has gone down since last year, thanks to now having a 'real' shower.  I miss our huge bathtub, but showers are shorter and use less water, I try to cut down on water usage as much as I can.

15) This sounds silly coming from someone who just bought a new car, but this year I am going to try to buy used (or handmade) before buying new (or made in China).  And if I do buy new, it will be after a lot of research.  I would rather buy new if I have to but made in France, or at least handmade.  I am going to try to avoid things made in China.  Wish me luck on this one with a kid.  I plan on trolling Etsy a TON to find good, homemade things.

That seems fairly ambitious for now, so I think that I will leave it at that.  Looking back on the list it is mainly about being more self-sufficient, and cutting out as many intermediaries as possible.  From meat to toy purchasing, I would like to be as close to the person who raised, or made the things I buy.  To support local people, become involved in my community and to be completely conscious in how my money is used.  I would rather support a lady in the middle east that sews shirts, then buy one made in a sweatshop in China.  I would rather see the pigs I am going eat out in a field munching away on greens, then hear that they are being fed other pork by-products and kept in cages their entire lives.  How we spend our money has a big say in how companies produce and create things.  And I want to be part of this process.

Acorn Coffee

Ok, I must begin this post with a disclaimer: I am not a 'coffee person'.  I enjoy the occasional cup of joe, java, espresso, mocha, cappuccino, etc, particularly when I need that extra kick up the pants to get something done, but on the whole I find drinking coffee makes me feel like everything is a much bigger deal than it really is ("panic! I haven't done the dishes yet! quick, quick, let's do everything now! I actually don't have anything pressing to do, but I feel like I should!").  Maybe this is why everything in America seems to move so fast - too much coffee.  But time is money, right?

Anyway, I am much more of a tea person, and always was, even before meeting my English husband, I swear.  I find tea in the morning to be like awakening to a gentle melody, whereas coffee is something like a boot camp bugle reveille accompanied by a screaming staff sergeant.  That said, I do enjoy the taste and experience of the cup of coffee, just not what it does to me afterward, so I find the idea of a coffee substitute very intriguing, particularly one made from something you can get for free.

I had heard a lot about chicory as a substitute (originally in the 5th grade history unit on the Revolutionary War - what people drank when they couldn't get real coffee due to the naval blockade; why I remember these things, I have no idea), but that seems a bit more difficult to come by.  Acorn coffee, on the other hand, makes a lot of sense, particularly when I noticed acorns thickly carpeting the forest floor where we take the dogs for a run out (I noticed them at first mainly because the puppies were eating them, a lot of them, which was a tad worrying).  So last fall I filled my pockets and brought a few handfuls home to give it a try.

Apparently it is best to let them dry out thoroughly, as the most bitter part of the acorn is the inner skin under the shell enveloping the nut, and when you leave it a long time (six months in my case) this comes off quite easily (think flaky bit around peanuts).  They were actually surprisingly easy to shell, with most succumbing to a squeeze between thumb and forefinger, though some need a little extra coaxing from a nutcracker.

I then roasted them in the oven according to various 'recipes' I found, but none actually specified a time or temperature.  Apparently 15 minutes at 200°C was a tad much:

Determined to try anyway, I whizzed them up in a small food processor and then used them like coffee grounds in a cafetière (French press).

 

I then served myself up an acorn espresso, added a spoonful of sugar, and...

 Way, way, way, WAY too strong.  And not strong in a good way like normal espresso...(the bitterness in acorns is from tannin, like in wine - you know when you get that tannin-y feeling on your teeth and the back of your tongue?) so I put it in a normal mug and added about another five parts boiling water, as well as another spoonful of sugar, or two.

Ah, much better.  And, actually, I have to say, rather pleasant.  I'm not going to tell you it is a dead ringer for normal coffee.  If you are a true coffee addict, this is not going to satisfy that craving.  To be honest, it doesn't have much in common except bitterness, and color perhaps (it certainly looked convincing!).  But in itself, and despite a slight burnt aftertaste due to my overzealous roasting, I actually enjoyed it quite a lot, and enjoyed the thought that it was entirely free for the foraging even more.  Unfortunately, that used up the entirety of my acorn harvest, so next fall I will be more diligent and actually collect acorns with purpose, and maybe try not to burn the heck out of them next time (I'm thinking actually roughly chop them and toast them in a pan, but I will have to experiment).

The Self-Sufficiency Checklist

So if you have been following this blog, you may have noticed that we are not, nowhere even near, self-sufficient.  We still have to go to the grocery store, we have things like pet food that we have to buy, and we use a lot of parmesan cheese, which believe it or not I don't make myself.  But something near self-sufficiency is our ultimate goal, and our move out here to the countryside nearly a year ago now was our first baby step in that direction.  My main focus for the coming year will be to gain experience growing vegetables, as being able to feed yourself at least in some way is pretty much the most basic thing, but here is a slightly more official checklist of my goals for the next year, plus a few more long-term ones:

The Self-Sufficiency Checklist

1) Grow as much of our food as we possibly can on our small plot

This will also entail keeping track of how much food we produce and how much food we have to buy, so we get an idea of our yield, as well as the percentage we managed to provide ourselves.  It also leads me to me next few goals, which have to do with learning how to stretch those veggies as far as possible:

2) Learn to can/preserve fruits and vegetables

The neighbor Richard has hooked us up with a used stérilisateur bought for cheap from an elderly lady who wasn't up to canning herself anymore, as well as quite a few jars.

3) Try to make jam from our cherries and plums

Last year I lacked the equipment, and I admit I got a bit scared off by all the complicated talk of pectin and acidity and wax discs and things, so I just froze the cherries and stored the plums in syrup (as well as trying my hand at a little plum moonshine, which tasted and looked great mixed with vodka in a martini glass with a couple of the plums floating in it; we weren't so happy the next morning, however, but I'm blaming that on the vodka not the moonshine).

4) Experiment with storing root vegetables

I haven't quite figured out yet where we'd put them, but I plan to try to keep carrots, parsnips, etc in sand-filled boxes.

5) Use the compost we've been working on in next year's garden

6) Get free horse manure from the riding club on the other side of the village

7) Bake more of our own bread

We have already given this a try a few times with pretty amazing results, perhaps just beginners' luck, pulling off a large round loaf of crusty bread, spelt rolls, and pizza dough.  I should really do this more, though I am slightly torn as I also want to support the local boulangerie (bakery), the only shop left in the village (all the rest have closed down, unable to compete with the hypermarkets).  Come to think of it:

8) Shop at hypermarkets as little as possible

We already get our fresh stuff from local box schemes, etc, but we still use the hypermarket about once or twice a month to stock up on bulk things like canned tomatoes, rice, cleaning products, etc.  I've wondered what I would do eventually about rice as relates to self-sufficiency - would I forgo it? try to grow my own?

9) Cut out anything with E-numbers or other processed snacks

We eat very well on the whole, but we have a weakness for impulse-buying things like Malteasers.  We are thinking of setting a rule - the only snacks/sweets we are allowed to eat are those we have made ourselves.  I think I see a lot of brownies in our future...

10) Learn from Richard how to slaughter and prepare chickens and rabbits

I am the biggest softy and animal-lover ever.  This one is going to be difficult.

11) Cut out cleaning and personal care products that are toxic and full of nasty chemicals (and expensive)

So far I have switched to a natural shampoo and natural laundry detergent, but there is a long way to go on this one, and it usually means more expensive rather than money-saving and self-sufficient, so I am going to look into natural cleaning products, etc that you make yourself or just use, like baking soda and lemons. Even if you don't take into account the chemicals, normal shampoo and shower gel is ridiculously expensive.  I saw a documentary on shower gel last year and was shocked to find it is ninety-something percent water, and the rest is chemically-created scent and a petroleum-based cleansing agent.  First of all, ew, I was bathing myself in gasoline (well, not really, to get technical, but that is the mental image that was conjured up), and second of all, from that point on I refused to pay €4.35 for 250ml of shower gel, 230ml of which is water.  We now use savon de Marseille (which you can also get in liquid form).

12) Knit something (other than a scarf)

My mom taught me the basics of knitting when they came to visit last summer.  She has been making some pretty awesome stuff like slippers, mittens and hats with crazy patterns (apparently traditional Norwegian designs, I am told, see below!), which I would love to be able to do.  So far I have only managed to get a scarf halfway done.  Unfortunately this is not so easy to do now that we have the puppies, who are driven to the point of distraction by the smell of wool.  Perhaps I will create a new sport, extreme knitting: first round, trying to concentrate on your knitting pattern while two puppies are jumping at you trying to eat your yarn, second round while someone throws dodgeballs at you, third round while skydiving...any takers?  Anyway, there is just something magical about taking a ball of string and two sticks and managing to create something that fits the odd shapes and contours of the human body.

(Aren't those amazing?)

13) Forage for some of our food

You can't get cheaper than free.  Richard is also a mushroom expert, and while the whole if-you-get-it-wrong-you-could-eat-a-poisonous-one-and-die-a-horrible-painful-death thing is a little scary, we learned that the best eating mushroom, the Cep (porcini), is nearly impossible to mistake, and managed to pick a good dozen (always having Richard verify them just to be sure) last fall at the very end of their season.  Next year we plan to make the most of this, as well as other things like nettles, which are extremely good for you and can be used to make green pasta, as well as nettle beer apparently.

14) Learn more about herbal medicine and maybe try to grow some medicinal plants

Wouldn't it be great to just go out in your backyard and grab something to make a herbal tea when you've got a headache, and not have to run to the store?

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My long-term goals include:

1) Keep laying and eating chickens and maybe geese - I'm dying to have my own eggs

2) Moving on to rabbits - the ultimate sustainable (and tasty!) meat source

3) And...maybe even goats, so I could:

4) Make my own goat cheese and butter

5) Keep bees to use honey instead of commercially bought sugar

6) Have a poly tunnel to extend the veg growing season

7) Feed the dogs with scraps from the butcher and elsewhere rather than buying canned and dry dog food