5 Ways to QUICKLY become More Self Sufficient

it takes more than just a few weeks to establish a self-sufficient property in fact we've been working on ours since 2006 and it still isn't finished it never will be but there are things you can do from scratch to quickly get your property pumping out food in hardly any time at all g'day I'm mark from the self-sufficient men in this video I'm going to give you 5 ways to quickly become more self-sufficient let's get into it [Music] number one fast growing vegetables now I'm stealing this from one of my recent videos 8 fast growing vegetables where are details some of the fastest growing veggies you can grow in a hurry but what I didn't emphasize in that video was how versatile and adaptive many of these fast growing crops ah because what if you don't have a bunch of raised garden beds or even a vegetable plot with established furrows in ground yes it's not hard to dig a patch of ground but there are even faster ways to get growing vegetables such as in containers or pots or any type of vessel you have hanging around that will hold a growing mix most vegetables only need about 20 to 30 centimetres of medium or soil to grow in and that means things like plastic bags can be used or repurposed as a cheap alternative to containers and the beauty of growing in containers or bags is the portability you can pretty much create a growing area anywhere that gets Sun and even if you're in a place that doesn't get Sun and you have to grow indoors you could use grow lights of course if you do have plenty of backyard space then I would encourage you to use it get rid of that grass and transform it into a food growing Factory number two is poultry chickens ducks there are a couple around quail geese Turkey's etc all these types of birds are fantastic to have and fast to grow please go enjoy your new home that's it they're gonna be loving it here especially out of their brood a box now this is going to seem like huge to them so good on them poultry are cost-effective they're easy to breed they're easy to look after and as you can see they don't take up much space at all and that's just some of the reasons why we have stuck with poultry rather than larger animals see livestock for me anyway and depending on where you live for most people there's too many rules and regulations love that locking system here the rules and regulations for example pigs we can't keep pigs here on a three acre property you can only in our jurisdiction if you have an acreage of forty or over to keep pigs so that's just one example and it's not just that the rules for livestock are different to poultry poultry have very little rules and regulations yes there are numbers that loosely you have to stick to for example we're not allowed to keep more than 30 chickens 20 darks there isn't any limitations on quail whatsoever I'm not sure the regulations haven't caught up to quail keeping at the moment or why that is but I'm not saying steer away from steers and cows and even horses and other types of animals that you'd love to keep on a small acreage I'm not saying that at all what I'm saying is if you want to get self-sufficient in things like eggs and meat really quickly well then keeping poultry is definitely the fastest way to go about for example these quail here they hatched out in eighteen days from eggs they become adults in six weeks they start laying eggs around six to seven maybe up to eight weeks which is only just a couple of months and then from there they're edible if you want to meet bird like quail is primarily kept for their meat not the eggs but of course the eggs are nice too especially in Asian food they are ready to go on the dinner plate in around nine weeks which is extremely fast and the fact that they lie so quickly and become an adult so fast you can just keep replicating and breeding up your stock faster than ducks even then you can hear how excited those ducks are about that chickens are a bit different we don't usually keep our chickens for food we don't even have a rooster and speaking of regulations that is one regulation we have here in our area and that you have to have a permit even for our prop three acres you still have to have a permit to keep a rooster which is a little weird but we don't have a rooster anyway because we keep chickens primarily for eggs but we can always upscale that if we want to and if you want to keep chickens for the eggs which I highly recommend you just buy them at point of lay what about sixteen to twenty dollars a truck which is you know only about double what you would probably buy for a frozen one or one at the supermarket anyway I mean it's incredible really isn't it and you can buy them at point of light get them home so there are already a few months old and they will start laying for you in a few weeks after that and if there's no way you can say get out in a crisis and you have to live off chicken eggs well you can do that because that is your source of protein you might get sick of eating eggs but it's better than starving or it's better than having veg all the time and no extra protein number three is Do It Yourself DIY often people don't get started in self-sufficiency because they fear having to build things like this a quail pen or a chicken pen or chicken coop I have a green thumb I'll acknowledge that I'm pretty good at it but I'm not a carpenter's bumbag honestly I really find it a struggle to build any type of structure regardless I've still somehow managed to build chicken and quail runs sheds garden beds and lots more I don't strive for perfection I think a lot of you know that if you've followed me for some time but that's exactly why I'll show you all these things I don't show you then because I think I'm this Shiite carpenter I don't and I'm not I just show you them because if I could do it so can you and I hope that motivates people now I've lifted plenty of hammers and I'm handy enough I mean I've set up a lot of barbed wire as a soldier and I say I got a bit of jack-of-all-trades in me but I think the majority of people out there underestimate their skills what they could easily do these projects without much help at all from books YouTube or carpentry just by going what's logical and just getting wood hammered together to make a structure that may be over engineered in some cases or maybe not maybe have some failures but at the end of the day if the thing doesn't work or if it falls down it's not your house falling down on your kids or whatever it's just a chicken coop with a hole in it or that hasn't stood up to the elements or whatever keep going keep refining things I do this all the time there's no shame in being a budgie builder I use bits and pieces from everywhere I repurpose things and just the sheer fact that I repurpose things to make these structures makes them look a bit budging because they're secondhand materials they often don't go together very well so yeah who cares if it looks a little bit shoddy if it works and does the job that's all you should care about you might find you don't need anything from the store or the hardware store to start your projects and to get things running number four is make your own carbs instead of playing Corona roulette and going to the store to get fresh bread daily we're making our own and fresh homemade pasta always beats the dried store stuff anyway so with this extended isolation break we're all forced to take why not make your own carbs are a good source of food they're packed full of calories I weigh too many but it's that high calorie density that makes foods like rice wheat and potatoes such important food crops around the world the problem is growing your own wheat or rice in our backyard and then refining it into a food that we can use isn't practical for most people anyway and whilst growing potatoes is they take several months to grow they take up more storage space and don't last as long as rice or flour corn is an easier grain to grow for a back yada and you can easily make your own cornmeal to store and use like flour and rice however corn still takes a few months to grow therefore while still waiting for those spuds and corn crops to harvest I recommend getting some flour and rice for their excellent storage and consumption qualities for the many different high-density carbs you can make with these products number 5 is preserving now you can see this corn crop has had it but this is an old style of corn it's an Aztec type and if I can just get this husk off quick enough so that you don't get bored you'll see that it'll reveal these wonderful kernels underneath and we're not growing them to eat off the cob like that we're growing these like it's like it's wrapped so much isn't it we're growing these in here too here we go isn't that gorgeous we're growing these so that we can make cornmeal out of it like I was talking about before but the way you can preserve it you can even preserve it in the husk like that and just hangs I've seen them hung in Asia underneath huts in the husk or sometimes not and then I just dry out and they go really hard and then you can then meal them up or is that grind them up into a meal not make a meal into a like a flour if you've got a a milling machine you can get them into a really fine flour otherwise you can use a coffee grinder or something like that and still turn it into something you can make tortillas or something out of in our modern day by on-demand consume and throw away world we've become accustomed to minimalize living getting what we want when we want it from someone else instead of preserving and storing surplus to use when we need it I think that old way of lifestyle has now changed considerably for all of us the first and the easiest way to preserve is to freeze and most of us do that pack your freezers full of things and then you'll become more self-sufficient or at least have food spare if you can't go out and get some pickling in vinegar that is another very easy way to preserve food and it's also extremely tasty way I love my pickles fermenting making sauerkraut that's another one of my favorites it's a bit like pickling but it's more it's not it's still natural like using vinegars natural but fermenting and getting that sour taste the lac d'oo the silly I bacteria is it's probably a better for you type of preserving but you know that's up for debate it's whatever is a very good way to preserve food and to make tasty food as well dehydrating that again just by simply sucking out all the water and moisture from foods and then rehydrating a more eating and dehydrated is a perfect way to save food for the long term salting food like making jerky or personally I like biltong that South African dried meat and there's many other ways to preserve food I hope you enjoyed this video whether you're for sort of inter self-sufficiency or it's something now that has jolted Ewing to it because of the current things that we're all going through it doesn't matter you're in the self sufficiency club now and just because you haven't started yet it's not too late get stuck into it I encourage you to you will find out how easy it is I've been preaching how easy it is for such a long time because I know my failings and like I keep saying if I can do it anyone can and there's just so many benefits not just to get us through these times but after that force yourself to get into these tops of habits and then once this is all over you will just be doing it because you love it and it's just a good healthy and better alternate way of doing things anyway thanks a lot for watching subscribe if you haven't already me a big self-sufficient fast thumbs up bye for now

Channel: Self Sufficient Me

Views: 1,318,661

Keywords: How to be more self-sufficient, self-sufficiency, self sufficient me, homesteading, self sufficient, prepping, prepper, backyard farming, keeping quail, coturnix quail, keeping chickens for eggs, chickens, growing food at home, homestead

Id: pd0AklR4Mug

Length: 14min 34sec (874 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 28 2020