I'd like to Recommend today Country Living in a Cariboo Valley in British Columbia, Canada.
Annie has sent me some great photos but I've exceeded my upload limit (despite buying more space with Picasa, but it turns out that no, this doesn't apply to your blogs, which seems a bit misleading to say the least - any tips on this gratefully received).
So I'll leave it to Annie to tell their story.
We left a city on the West Coast in 2006 for life in a valley in the Cariboo region of British Columbia. We're in Gardening Zone 3 and even in the summers, we have to be on the lookout for frost. It is not unusual for us to experience temperature swings of 25 degrees Celsius, In the Same Day! So, we use row covers on our heat loving veggies (beans, squash, etc.) and grow tomatoes and peppers in our small greenhouse. Until I can figure out a way to grow corn under cover, it won't happen. No one here has been successful growing it out in the garden. Oh it will grow....it's just that before the growing time is over, we can be sure of a killing frost!
We are trying to be as self sufficient as possible, so we do a lot of canning and freezing. Also cold room storage. We have started saving our own seeds, which we'll be planting for the first time in 2009 (rutabaga and carrot). By the following year, we hope to be able to add mangels and sugar beets to the seed list.
We raise weaner pigs, purchasing them in the Spring and butchering them ourselves in mid-October. My husband does his own brining and smoking of bacons and hams. We also trade pork for lamb and hopefully this year also beef. We also raise meat birds (Cornish Giants) to fill our freezers and those of our families and friends. We have laying hens to provide us with eggs. We sell eggs which in turn purchases the hens feed.
We grow as much of our animal feed as possible, relying on our huge veggie garden and our two animal gardens. Mangels, sugar beets, potatoes, broccoli, cabbage, lettuce, etc. What we don't use for ourselves goes to the animals.We want to continue to expand on this, as we would like to stay away from the feed store, if possible.
We're both originally city kids, so when we moved here, we didn't really know what we were doing. This has resulted in a lot of laughter in our neighbourhood, from folks who have listened to our (sometimes silly) questions. They tell us they're glad to see some new people come and trying living off the land, and they are eager to help us with advice or if we have problems.
We are trying to be as self sufficient as possible, so we do a lot of canning and freezing. Also cold room storage. We have started saving our own seeds, which we'll be planting for the first time in 2009 (rutabaga and carrot). By the following year, we hope to be able to add mangels and sugar beets to the seed list.
We raise weaner pigs, purchasing them in the Spring and butchering them ourselves in mid-October. My husband does his own brining and smoking of bacons and hams. We also trade pork for lamb and hopefully this year also beef. We also raise meat birds (Cornish Giants) to fill our freezers and those of our families and friends. We have laying hens to provide us with eggs. We sell eggs which in turn purchases the hens feed.
We grow as much of our animal feed as possible, relying on our huge veggie garden and our two animal gardens. Mangels, sugar beets, potatoes, broccoli, cabbage, lettuce, etc. What we don't use for ourselves goes to the animals.We want to continue to expand on this, as we would like to stay away from the feed store, if possible.
We're both originally city kids, so when we moved here, we didn't really know what we were doing. This has resulted in a lot of laughter in our neighbourhood, from folks who have listened to our (sometimes silly) questions. They tell us they're glad to see some new people come and trying living off the land, and they are eager to help us with advice or if we have problems.
Annie, just one question from me which I always try and include in the data I put on the blog roll, and that's how many acres/hectares you have? This allows people to find blogs with farms/homesteads of a similar size to theirs or to what they are thinking of doing. Could you drop me a line and let me know? Thanks.
8th Feb. 2009: and the answer is....
Our farm is just over 11 acres. A fair bit of that is woodland, then a creek and very overgrown pastures, which we hope to rejuvenate once we can free up some time. We have about 7000 sq feet of vegetable garden area, which also includes strawberry, raspberry and rhubarb patches.
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