The Ultimate Update

Ah, haven't updated this blog since July. Here's the update of updates.

I've been converted.

Yes, that's right. With the help of sites like The Prudent Homemaker and Little Homestead in the City, I've decided to become as self-reliant as possible. The ULTIMATE goal is to be able to live out in the country one day, no problem, but I've got TONS of stuff to learn before I can be at that point. And most of it, I've realized, can be learned while living in suburbia, such as:

• 100% out of debt, including house, in 5 years
• Grow most of my own produce (gardening!)
• Composting
• Preserving all that food I grow: freezing, canning, etc...
• Eat a wholly unprocessed (I should say un-pre-processed) food diet: that includes homemade bread, homemade snacks/crackers/etc... MAYBE even homemade pasta, we'll see how far it goes first
• Make my own cheese..at least some types (looks really easy, but we'll see how it goes) and yogurt
• Fresh eggs from real chickens
• Energy efficiency
• Build up and use a REAL year's supply of food storage

Stuff like that. I expect to be able to chronicle some hilarious disasters as I try some of these things out. And, of course, gotta take everything one step at a time. Like the non-pre-processed foods. First, my goal is to bake one new type of bread a week for a year. 52 types. Nice. I made pita bread this week. No, they didn't puff enough to make REAL pockets, but that's okay--they were DELICIOUS anyway.

Since I'm such a beginner at gardening, I'm going to go for the square foot garden method first. I'm totally inspired by my sister-in-law's garden, which is amazing. Eventually, I'd like to transform into edible landscaping, which means you get a pretty yard and still have a garden. Nice. I'll start my garden in the spring, after I've recovered from having the baby.

Chickens will definitely be a MUCH later stage of this process... plus I have to check if it's legal here... preliminary investigation says that as long as they're not too noisy, they'd be okay. Hm.

I hate to say I want to "go green," since that's so trendy. And I don't consider myself an environmentalist. But I hate waste and, besides, the less energy you use, the more self-reliant you really can be. Most of that will happen after we've paid off the house--then we can pay cash for energy-efficient appliances and get our attic all radiant-barrier-ed or whatever we need to do.

So anyway, yeah. Going from city girl to uber-homemaker. Should be an interesting--and at times hilarious!--transformation. With lots of updates on this blog!