Growing Your Own Food to Be More Self Sufficient

One of my favorite BBC comedies is called Good Neighbors. It is about a couple who decide to be self-sufficient by growing their own food, raising chickens, and other farm animals in their back yard. This situation causes some havoc with their neighbors and many laughs.

In college, I had a professor that turned his entire property around his home into a garden. He and his wife grew their own fruits and vegetables and canned foods for their winter meals. I was so intrigued and interested in learning more and discovered a class in Florence, Italy about Sustainability. I had a fabulous time learning about agriculture, olive oil, wines, and different methods of sustainability. This is where i learned about the Slow Food Movement that started in Italy. It's also when I started putting together the lessons I was learning and began my Pilgrimage to Self and designing my Intentional Life.

Do you want to be more self-reliant? Then you absolutely must learn to be more self-sufficient. Is there a difference between the two? There absolutely is. Self-reliance is a state of mind or an attitude where you make conscious choices not to depend on anyone or anything to the greatest extent possible. Self-sufficiency is the actions that you take in order to make that decision to be self-reliant real. One is internal and the other external. One is largely mental and the other is largely physical. In short, self-sufficiency is how we make self-reliance evident in the world.

Eating fresh vegetables has always been important to me, so I started a small garden for my family. So, if you’ve made the decision to be self-reliant, here is a way for you to become more self-sufficient and show the world how self-reliant you really are when it comes to supplementing your food sources.

Grow Your Own Food

We all depend on food and nutrition to survive. It’s fact of life that we can’t ignore. While we can’t choose not to eat, we can choose the manner in which we obtain the food we require. Most people obtain their food from a grocery store or supermarket. The food in these stores is very often grown or produced hundreds, if not thousands of miles away. In order to get to the stores, it must travel through a vast supply and distribution chain of ships, warehouses and trucks. This distribution takes time, so most of the food needs to be preserved in order to survive the journey. The supply chain is also very fragile. Any man-made or natural disaster can disrupt the chain with disastrous results to the consumers on the other end.

Growing your own food is a way to insulate yourself from disaster and from the unhealthy effects of preservatives. In addition, you can also grow what you choose and what you like and not have to depend on the vagaries of supply and demand. Growing your own food is also an excellent way of not depending on others for what you eat. Becoming food independent builds your self-sufficiency skills. This, in turn, builds your sense of self-reliance. You realize that you don’t have to conform to how others choose to obtain their food. You realize that you have the innate ability to learn how to do things that allow you to establish your personal independence. You get to design your own Intentional Life. You learn that you are able to march to your own drummer and survive and thrive.

Being intentional with growing your own food is one way to be more self-sufficient.

Tell me, do you garden? What do you grow, and do you can your harvest? You can share on the link to our Facebook page: www.facebook.com/ahousewithfourrooms or in the comment section below.

Cheers!

Lisa