Neil M. White - The Self Provisioner: How to Grow Your Own Food and Live a More Sustainable Life in the Digital Age

The Self Provisioner:

How to Grow Your Own Food and Live a Self Sustaining Life in the Digital Age

By Neil M White

This edition first published 2020

The moral right of Neil M White to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights are reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior written consent of the author. Copyright: Neil M White

Foreword By David The Good

W hat does self-sufficiency look like?

A man alone, against the world, in a rough cottage of hand-felled pine logs, surrounded by a few acres of crops and a tall, thorny hedge to discourage wandering wildlife?

Sounds lonely to me, though I like the hedge idea.

Maybe your idea of self-sufficiency is having enough money to buy what you want and no one to take away your fridge, your car or your hand-felled pine log cabin if you miss a couple monthly payments.

For years I've contemplated the concept of self-sufficiency and come to the conclusion that it's more of an ideal than an achievable reality, unless you are very clever, healthy and strong, and live in a warm climate with rich soil and abundant rainfall. White approaches the idea and comes to similar conclusions himself. It's a great idea, it's just not necessarily something we can all make into a reality. Go ahead - produce and set aside as much food as you can. Just don't worry if you can't grow absolutely everything you need. My ancestors grew most of their own food and hunted their own meat for the winter, but they still went to the store to buy sugar and flour. In Upstate New York, it's rather difficult to grow sugarcane, though I suppose if they were ambitious they could have planted a few acres of sugar maples and then spend their early spring nights in the cold air, boiling cauldrons of sap down into maple sugar...

...but there's that ideal again. You can do it, perhaps, but do you really want to? Do you have to? Do you have to reach a level of perfect purity and have a complete, functioning biodome of a farm where all your possible needs are met?

I don't think so, and neither does White. Instead of being neurotic and attempting to reach the absolute peak of atomistic individuality, where you are a rock, and island, and a sugar baron - you work instead to provide a good amount of food for you and your family, free of poisons and fresher than anything you can purchase.

Some people want everything, right now, all at once. A friend of mine once tried to get me interested in a sketchy off-shore investment that was a "sure thing," and would bring in a lot of money very quickly. I declined and I don't believe he ever had any success with it either. As God reminds us in the book of Proverbs, "Wealth gained hastily (or by fraud) will dwindle, but whoever gathers little by little will increase it. (ESV)" Many a man has attempted to climb the cliff of "complete" self-sufficiency and found himself half-way up with a slipping rope, plagued by the realization that if he keeps climbing, he may never drink a lager or eat potato chips again... that is, unless he digs another potato bed, finds a way to produce a good frying oil, then travels to the sea to evaporate water for salt... and as for barley and hops...

...and then he falls off the rope, for no normal man can live forever without potato chips, and the complete home production thereof is a Sisyphean task. It is rumored that even Thoreau himself occasionally left Walden and bought himself a can of Budweiser and a bag of Mather's Hot n' Spicy Barbecue Potato Chips.

A wise man knows when to till and when to buy some chips.

In the following book, White takes us down a third path. You will be inspired to stock your freezer with homegrown produce and wild game. You will learn to walk much closer towards self-sufficiency. You will become more resilient and better equipped to deal with the ebb and flow of uncertain economics and political unrest.

Day by day, your savings and your health will increase as you diligently apply yourself to meeting the needs of your family.

One day you may even find yourself growing more food than you can possibly eat.

But if you never make complete self-sufficiency, that's okay as well. It's a dream - not something you have to hit in order to be a success. Success begins with your first home-grown tomato, your first bed of greens, your first venison stew, and it grows from there, like a savings account, bearing interest year after year, until one day you take stock and realize that if need be, you can go for months without visiting the grocery store.

Then you've made it, my friend. You've become a Self-Provisioner.

You don't have to be perfect. You just have to start.

-David The Good, 2020

Introduction: Everything But the Chicken

T his book had humble beginnings. In fact, it started as a photo I shared on the internet. After sitting down to a meal of chicken fillet, beans, peas and potatoes, I realised something cool: everything on my plate had come from my garden.

Everything but the chicken.

That started a cascade of events that started with an idea, turned into a series of blog posts on my blog, ThisDadDoes.com and has culminated in this book. This is the story of how we got to where we are now:

Ive written on and off about gardening over the years but as I started to develop this concept it began to make more and more sense to turn it into a book. Like all good books, it started with that small idea - of a plate of food where as much of it as possible was home grown and sustainably sourced.

Writing on gardening has always come easily. Its easy to write about something youre passionate about. And man, am I passionate about growing stuff. But Im also a pragmatist and not particularly sentimental. So Ive never seen much point in having a garden that wasnt of practical use. And by use, I mean edible. Which is the way I garden now primarily focused on growing food.

Thats not a new thing for me either. Ive been growing vegetables since I was a very young boy five or six years old. My father even gave me my own plot where I could grow anything (and I mean ANYTHING) I wanted. There arent many Dads who would do that. The strangest thing we ever tried was a walking stick cabbage that grew to about 7 feet tall. It wasnt edible but you were supposed to be able to make the stalks into walking sticks. When we tried drying the stalks in the garage they rotted and turned to mush.

Then there were a few years when I didnt have a garden. I lived the batchelor life in a Glasgow flat, working and playing a bit too hard. I did grow a pumpkin in a pot in my inner city apartment to win a bet. Someone in work wagered I couldnt grow a pumpkin in my flat. So I did and made a pumpkin pie which I then served to the whole office.