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Self-Sufficiency in Style

fishy alternatives

 

It has always troubled the writer that he is living and recommending a lifestyle that might be beyond the financial resources or sensibilities of many of his readers.

Dreaming is alright, but raising hopes that require large capital resources or that the reader finds morally difficult seems unfair and unhelpful.

 

The idea of eating animals that they had raised and cared for is really difficult for many.

The writer took quite a time to get used to the idea of sending animals to a slaughterhouse

...on the other hand vegetarianism is not for most of us either.

People have clung to these shores since time immemorial.

 It was Ireland that provided an answer to the dilemma, but as so often with Ireland, it came from a challenge to fixed ideas rather than from the charm of either the place or the people.

In the early Summer of 2004, we took a holiday, driving across to the wild Atlantic shores and down again to the pacific beaches and strands of the sunny South-East.

An answer to economy self-sufficiency, without acres of land or farm animals, was staring us in the face.
Mrs P always likes Ireland, from her very first visit, when her nose was high enough in the air to be an aircraft hazard, to many follow-up trips.

She adores the place.

So, when there came the rare chance of a break, the choice was obvious.

Since there is ever present possibility of a domestic rebellion and a demand to relocate, the writer has to take more than a passing interest in house prices and locations.

After making his livelihood from, and living by the sea, for so many years, from time to time he feels the urge to smell seaweed and salt.

Lingering in dockside pubs can get the better of him.

So we criss-crossed from coast to coast, and since we have been eating too much home produced meat recently, it was decided to eat only fish for a week.

 

Fish for a week!

(It was decided for him, but it is really quite surprising how many wines are the perfect accompaniment, and well... Guinness with fish...)
 

Victorian cooks put fish both on and off the menu.

 The English speaking peoples can be very funny about fish.

The Mediterraneans generally gobble it in all its many varieties, the French making it an essential and the Germans eating it for Christmas.

But the Victorians screwed the British and Irish up, insisting it was food for invalids and steaming it into a tasteless mess. Typically, they also made it a separate course.

True, some areas made a speciality of shellfish - the Cockneys and Estuarine English treated it as a great delicacy, but they became the exception.

Most abandoned fish, especially shellfish, with the single exception of the staple "fish and chips" or perhaps kippers and canned salmon.

Even Catholic Ireland with their meatless Fridays didn't go much for anything exotic, despite having a supply on their doorstep.
It was the French and Spanish that solved the problem.

Package holidays in the sun brought new ideas and customs home to the north-west of Europe.

You can now eat well on fish in Ireland; just as well as in France, Maritime Canada or New England.

Shellfish was back on the menu.

We started in the far west, trundling around the stony islands and peninsulas.

A crowded landscape of frightening cliffs and small houses, recently relieved from  abject poverty and catapulted into comparative prosperity.

Two or three days in first class hotels, well served with a variety of local fish, well presented in an international menu.
Then down to the oft-neglected, less dramatic, south-east, to small fishing ports and slightly eccentric hostelries,

but with magnificent chowders, local shellfish and the widest variety of fresh ocean fish, smoked or plain, you can imagine.

As you can see, a striking contrast in the seascape.

Whether the writer lost any weight, we will leave as a secret between him and the bathroom scales, but idea that it might be possible to substitute fish for meat in a self-sufficient lifestyle, without deprivation, was born.

We all know that you could scratch a miserable living from a rocky landscape and the sea. People on the western seaboards of Britain and Ireland had been doing it for millennia, but it became clear that you could live well this way in today's world.

So, where and how could you do it? What would it cost? What would you need?

The four fields at the top cover five acres.

 We have five acres from which we can easily feed about 4-6 people.

But only about half an acre is down to vegetables and fruit, the rest is devoted to animals: sheep, cattle, pigs, hay production....and free range poultry.

Four acres can go, three of the four fields, with no problem.

Then there are the buildings and equipment.

Stables, cow sheds, hay storage are connected with animals - they can go. Equipment too: the very expensive troughs, water supply, gates and fencing.

Keeping cattle, sheep, pigs and poultry demands much of fences, gates and equipment.

Cattle and sheep need a lot of hay through the winter.

  

Then there is the work: fencing, feeding, watering and caring for the animals.

Cutting, turning, baling and storing hay is not needed.

That can go too.
We are no longer talking about a smallholding with extensive land and expensive equipment; we are thinking in terms of a perfectly ordinary house, albeit with a large garden situated near the sea.

With care, within more budgets.

Much more easily available.

Wait!

It is not just meat, you have no eggs, milk, butter, cream, cheese, ice-cream or yogurt.

No chickens or cow means none of these things.

The "alarm clock" can go.

  

Eggs is easy!

Chickens do not need to be free range - and they still lay eggs, although do not produce chicks, without the noisy cockerel.

A small shed, adapted a little and some fencing is quite enough.
Milk is almost as easy.

Forget what they all say about goat's milk. If the goats are well cared for and the milker clean, the milk is pretty well indistinguishable from cow's and just as versatile.

We had goats for years. They need a little land, can be tethered and, although they are not indiscriminate feeders, will eat quite a wide variety of shrubs and scrubland supplemented with a little commercial feed and bought-in winter hay.

Housing can be very simple and inexpensive. Goats, given a basic understanding of their needs and moods, can be an easy animal.

Goats like to be kept dry.

You can still have an open fire, and a solid fuel central heating system with peat or turf. It is not as efficient though.

 At first glance, household heating might be a difficulty without hedgerows to supply the wood-burning stove.

But that's not always a problem. In most areas of Britain you can buy a licence to cut fallen timber from the forests - and in Ireland and Scotland, you can buy access to a supply of peat (turf) to burn in the stove.

Peat-smoked fish is also, in the opinion of the writer, superior to the more common oak smoked.

So there you are, we have started to create a blueprint for a simple, yet satisfying lifestyle.

We can do it without rearing animals for slaughter,

and within a budget that might be affordable for many more people.
...but we still have to catch the fish.

That's a subject we will tackle another day, in the meantime you can return to Finding the Money

From there you can reach other pages suggesting ways that you can make a little money go a long way to living a self-sufficient life.

OK, so how do I get into the pot?

"Catching some new ideas"

at

 the fishily named Hangman's Cottage, just to the south of Misery Corner.

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