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Self-Sufficiency in Style

second age self-sufficiency

Paying attention to the ladies.

This series was conceived with the older group of self-sufficiency dreamers in mind. There are plenty of over-careful fifty or sixty year olds who need  to pluck up the courage to throw caution to the winds and build a new life. 

The intention was to firmly discourage, the frequently disastrous, projects undertaken by younger people in their 30s and 40s.

The postbag shows, that far from being discouraged, a younger age-group seem even more determined. So, with misgivings, this article is about damage limitation with particular reference to the ladies.

You can't earn money from self-sufficiency. Well that is not strictly true, you can earn some money from self-sufficiency, but it won't be enough.

So all the ideas of herb gardens and vineyards, serving cream teas on the lawn, opening village shops and repairing cars are a road to ruin.

Any one of these activities might, with care, make a paying business, but like all business start-ups it will take time, knowledge, application and very long hours.

There will not be time for self-sufficiency as well.

You can't earn money from self-sufficiency.

You can't make it add up.

Specifically, money to buy and run a car, pay the telephone bill, taxes, whatever.

It can't be a business, so it has to be a job. Part-time self-sufficiency is the only realistic solution.

Normally, we are talking about a couple - a man and wife team, although we haven't forgotten the solo. Solo self-sufficiency will be the subject of a later article.

Workload is one problem - the other is full time availability to look after animals. So for a couple, the obvious route is for one to go out to work, the other to stay at home, look after the house, children and animals.

Normally, even in our rapidly changing society, that means the woman will be at home taking a very traditional role of homemaker and tied to the kitchen. 

Probably most female self-sufficiency dreamers would see themselves in such a role...gingham curtains and the smell of baking, but they will also acquire some additional non-traditional burdens.

putting the clock back?

..apart from the poultry

If you talk to traditional farmers' wives, now mostly in their 80s and 90s, you will quickly discover that they were not the super-human paragons of rural virtue we might imagine. There were many jobs that they did not, and probably would not do.

They had very little to do with any animals apart from poultry. They might make cream, but they did not milk. They might do the farm accounts, but they did not lamb.

They had quite a lively social life in the village and had no intention of allowing the arrival of the artificial insemination man or annual shearing interfere with their communal junketing.

They were far from being downtrodden drudges in need of rescuing from a life of toil.

Today's self-sufficiency lady might well find herself being less of the lady than her great-grandmother.

He may well have to go away on business and to work long hours at times.

Whilst his alternative life-style may well excite curiosity and envy, he is unlikely to get much sympathy by pleading priority for lambing or haymaking.

Away from the farm.

Tied to the home.

One partner, normally the woman, has to accept a very heavy and sometimes uncongenial work-load. She will have to swap glamour for a hard reality.

Both partners will have to forgo holidays away from home.

The alternative is to restrict activities to large scale gardening largely undertaken at weekends...and that can be a soft introduction to self-sufficiency. You can find some more thoughts on Financial Support

You can extend into animals at any time. Indeed, that is exactly what happened to us, but that is a story for another day.

Meantime, you can return to Finding the Money and travel on to examine other financial suggestions.

"No time for the ladies"

at the

 the very masculine Hangman's Cottage, just to the south of Misery Corner.