About Plan B, Self-Sufficiency
Rapidly rising food prices and climate change is a worry for everyone right now. Access to healthy food we can afford is no longer a given. Severe weather events that impact food supply are becoming more common, leaving lots of New Zealanders considering food security for the first time. Is it time you started thinking about your plan b? Does that plan look like self-sufficiency?
Growing your own food gives you peace of mind that you will be able to put food on the table no matter what happens. But the benefits don’t end there.
- You know exactly what has been used to produce the fruit, vegetables and meat you are eating.
- A little less carbon dioxide reaches our atmosphere because your food didn’t need machinery to harvest it or trucks and planes to get it to you.
- Eating homegrown, nutrient-rich and chemical free food not only improves your own health but the health of the soil microorganisms and beneficial insects too!
Creating our Plan B, Self-Sufficiency
We started growing our food on a 819m2 section in Palmerston North. Purchasing food that had been sprayed with pesticides and came with all those food miles just didn’t sit right with us.
Growing our own food meant we would dramatically reduce our carbon footprint. The fruit and veges we ate would be grown in healthy soil, giving us nutritious meals of the best quality.
What we didn’t know at the time was how rewarding it would be to step out of the kitchen, into our garden, and pick what we needed for our next meal. Plus, because the produce is so fresh, it tastes so much better than anything store bought!
By the time we sold our home, four years later, we were harvesting plums, peaches, apricots, feijoas, olives, passion fruit, and grapes. Our two vegetable boxes and one vegetable bed was always overflowing with seasonal produce including potatoes, salad greens, root vegetables, corn, zucchini, cucumber, strawberries, beans, peas, edible flowers and so much more.
We couldn’t believe that such a small amount of space gave us so much food!
At the end of 2019 we purchased a 1.7 hectare lifestyle block in the Eastern Bay of Plenty. The hardest part of selling up was leaving our established fruit trees behind but we were excited about having more land and continuing our self-sufficiency journey.
We are starting from scratch and want to take you along for the journey, to hopefully inspire you to gain your own food security and stop you from making some of the mistakes we have!
Keep up with our journey and get inspired to control your food supply by following us on Facebook.
