Your favourite fiction books with simple living characters/themes?

Posted by louisa on Wednesday 12 October 2011 in meta | 19 comments

I’m having a bit of a book week here on The Really Good Life – and on Recycle This too.

Following on from yesterday’s favourite non-fiction simple living books, I thought I’d do a run down of my favourite fiction books with simple living themes – either characters who live simple lives, or who grow or make or cook real food — but I can’t think of many. So instead, I’ll tell you the few I like and then I’m going to beg, on my knees beg, for your suggestions!

(I asked this question on UK Veg Gardeners nearly a year ago and most people suggested non-fiction-with-a-narrative books that are meant to be read curled up in an armchair in winter rather than a reference text — I do like those too but in this case, I’d prefer out and out fiction suggestions if possible.)

Ok, so here are my few:

• Drop City by TC Boyle – this one certainly won’t be for everyone as it’s half about hippies, with their free love & LSD, but the other half is about life in the Alaskan bush and it’s fascinating. I now have a collection of non-fiction books about life in Alaska to read whenever I finish Drop City because I don’t want to leave that world.
• Giants in the Earth by Ole Edvart Rolvaag – I was hesitant to include this one because I didn’t love-love-love it but it was very interesting – the experiences of some Norwegian settlers “going West” in the 1870s and their subsequent hard life as homesteaders. Apparently it’s core reading on many high school or college syllabuses in the US but it’s pretty much unheard of in the UK.
• Various post-apocalyptic speculative fiction – my guilty genre fiction pleasure — you can keep your vampires and your spaceships, I like reading about our world coming to an end ;) It might seem odd to include it on this but when humanity is all but destroyed and there is no one to delivery take-out pizza or make new ipods, people quickly fall back to simple-style living. Even if the books don’t go into lots of explicit detail about it, it’s there – and I think it’s the bit that really fascinates me, and gets my cogs working in a “what if I was in that situation?” way. The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham is one of my favourite books full stop and for this sort of thing – slowly rebuilding a farm for the group’s survival, and also a lot of discussion about how society should be rebuilt. The third part of Wyndham’s The Kraken Wakes deals with global warming-like flooding. John Christopher’s The Death of Grass is mostly about a journey but one happening because of the … death of grass (so no wheat etc or grazing land for animals) – it makes me want to run out and grow potatoes!

…And that’s it, that’s all I can muster — so please, please, please have you got any suggestions I can add to my to-read pile? This winter might be another long, cold one so I need plenty of fireside entertainment :)

My ten favourite simple living/growing/cooking/making books

Posted by louisa on Tuesday 11 October 2011 in cooking, Featured, growing, making, wild food | 5 comments

(Inspired by book-aholic buying behaviour this month, I’ve decided to have a bit of a book-themed week both here and on my recycling site, Recycle This.)

Despite living on the internet & using it/blogs for most of my day-to-day info, I’ve got quite a few simple living related books and as you might expect, some are better than others. Some were chosen after careful research, others randomly picks from charity shops & the like – but as is often the case, there is little correlation between that and which are the better books!

Here, in no particular order, are some of my favourites:

• The New Complete Book of Self-Sufficiency by John Seymour – this is a great overview book of so many different things. It’s admittedly more aspiration than practical for me at the moment – and because it covers so many different areas, it doesn’t feel like the most practical book anyway (it doesn’t have space to go into detailed how-tos/trouble-shooting on each different topic) but it’s still very useful. If I was fleeing to escape the zombie hordes*, this is probably the non-fiction book I’d grab.

Growing

• The Vegetable & Herb Expert by DG Hessayon – my first veg growing book and the one I keep going back to over & over again. Not hugely detailed on each type & some bizarre comments about only eating chillis if they’re part of “your heritage”, but very clear, with lots of pictures (very useful when troubleshooting pests/diseases) and packed with useful info.
• Grow Your Own Vegetables by Joy Larkcom – this book is almost the opposite of the Hessayon – lots of detail but not anywhere near as easy to dip into and few illustrations. I like them together but would struggle with the Larkcom on its own.
• The Edible Container Garden: Fresh Food from Tiny Spaces by Michael Guerra – I was a little disappointed when I got this as it includes a lot of whitespace, big pretty rather than purposeful pictures and a lot of general overview text — but the 30 pages on “what shall I grow?” made the book worth it – very useful reference information about varieties, pot depths etc. I would recommend it to anyone who grows more than just the basic herbs in containers – but try to find a secondhand one so you don’t resent paying for the padding.

Small steps forward

Posted by louisa on Friday 26 August 2011 in meta | 2 comments

I was in the shower the other day, washing my face with my olive oil soap when it hit me – how little changes add up.

It’s one of those obvious things that I understand on a conscious level for ages, then I attain a mini-enlightenment and it suddenly becomes super clear, I suddenly know it at a much deeper level – like with the growing cycle a few months ago.

So anyway, I was in the shower and it occurred to me that the day we started using homemade soap, we immediately removed a whole lot of synthetic chemicals from our lives. And recently we’ve been getting all our fresh meat from Swillington Farm: previously we randomly bought local or organic but not as consistently as we do now, and whoosh, another set of chemicals as well as reduced food miles and improved animal welfare. Then yesterday, we had (expensive) bacon and eggs for lunch – the eggs were from our girls and instead of my usual HP, I had the wild plum ketchup I made the other week: both local, organic real food.

Just small steps, things that weren’t big decisions in themselves – in fact I couldn’t even call some of them even little decisions, just stuff we’ve started doing without thinking about it. I do like the occasional enforced big leap but I feel these almost-unnoticeable steps are more sustainable for us – soon we’ll be running a marathon without really noticing.

Sorry if this seems really obvious but as I said, I just suddenly feel like I know it on a deeper lever and wanted to share! :)

My Really Good Goals for 2011

Posted by louisa on Monday 3 January 2011 in meta | 10 comments

I have set myself a list of goals for the year ahead – written up on my personal blog because they’re not all simple/DIY living related.

I did the same last year and found it useful – even if I did pretty much mentally abandon some mid-year. The most useful ones that weren’t a specific tick-off-done goal but one’s that helped shape my whole life – for example, I had a goal of “make a meal entirely out of things I’ve grown, raised, caught or killed” and in order to achieve that, I grew veg & herbs, raised chickens for the eggs and foraged for wild food.

My list is very simple/DIY living heavy this year! Here are the relevant ones:

• Increase the food output from our garden and cook a meal using things I’ve grown/raised/caught/killed completely off-grid
• Learn how to successfully take and propagate cuttings from every applicable type of perennial plant/shrub in the house/garden
• Make a piece of furniture for the house (woodworking)
• Make an entire outfit (to include conquering sewing patterns)
• Go fishing in the North Sea
• Buy no more than 12 items of clothing across the year*
• Specific food makery and/or eatery (because if I did them all separately it would take up half the list)
• Bake at least once a week
• Grow a sourdough starter and make bread from it
• Make a hard cheese
• Try ten vegetables (or veggie wild foods) that I’ve not tried before
• Build a cold smoking cabinet, try cold smoking more stuff & try hot smoking too
• Participate more in the real world – engage more with our local community and meet some internet people in real life

(* I’m going to explain this more fully tomorrow)

There were a few things I also really, really want to try but I didn’t think warranted goal status on that limited list:

• Keep records to track our usage of consumables – I mean, I want to know how many toilet rolls we use in a month, how much soap, how long it takes for us to get through a 10kg bag of rice etc. I might record absolutely everything we use for a month or so, and use that hardcore exercise to decide what is worth tracking longer term
• Have regular “eat only from the pantry & garden” weeks in the spring/summer, probably once a month
• Have more conscious “no spend” periods – minimum fortnights, possibly months, throughout the year
• Find a solution to the dog poo problem – something more useful than a cork up Lily-dog’s bum. Probably a dedicated wormery.
Collect and store more rainwater for use on the garden – we can’t use the main gutter at the back for rainwater but could still collect off the greenhouse, from a gutter at the front and possibly off the extension area too. To be explored and implemented.
• Make my own soap – something that’s been nagging at me for a little while
• Make my own vinegar – for some reason, I have a really strong desire to make pineapple vinegar (probably the efficiency of using up the scraps)
• UPDATED TO ADD: Make conscious efforts to reduce food waste at home – probably a period of monitoring it closely to see what we throw out (which I’ll post on here) as well as better menu planning.

It seems like 2011 will be a busy one!

I’m hoping that the last goal – getting to know more people locally and meeting internet buddies in real life – will help me meet some of my other goals — I’d love to find mentors for some of my learning-new-skills goals. If you fancy mentoring me, let me know! :)

What have you got planned for 2011?