Living a Life of Self Sufficiency

We wanted a self sustained life. We wanted to leave the mainstream world behind and realize a dream of living off the land as they did 100 years ago. We soon realized we had a few things to learn. We spent most of 2007 checking out books on self sufficiency at our library. Although it was "research" for our new life, it was fun to learn about growing more food organically, and raising animals. We read books on sheep, goats, pigs, and cows. I wanted goats for milk. I could use the milk in my herbal products. I could also use it to make our own yogurt and cheese. We could sell it at the farmers market. Michael wanted pigs for meat. He wanted Tamworth pigs. Finding Tamworth pigs turned out to be harder than we thought. We also did some research on the internet. Luckily, we weren't the only ones, and there are books out there to helpNext season our gardens tripled in size. We offered more heirloom fruits, vegetables and herbs. Our neighbor is renting us (for a bushel of corn) his field which will gave us almost 4 acres total. This gave us more to sell. We started selling at The Wakefield Farmers Market, and did very well. It aslo gave us more to can. I spent that fall canning, dehydrating and freezing vegetables for us winter. We made a list of foods that we couldn't grow and made a "winter survival list". We wanted to stock up and then hunker down when the snow started to fly. For the most part it worked. We only had to shop once every three weeks or so.