Lessons Learned From 40 Years Of Self-Reliance On A Half-Acre Homestead…

Lessons Learned From 40 Years Of Self-Reliance On A Half-Acre Homestead...

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At 80 years old, Lloyd Kahn’s home is only a small part of his half-acre homestead where he and his wife Lesley Creed believe in doing things for yourself. Besides tending the organic gardens (and dozens of free-range chickens), Creed is a natural dyer, quilter, sourdough bread-maker and believer in the “value of actually working, not just trying to figure out how not to work”.

On a visit to the homestead, Kahn showed us his wild-caught pigeons, his seaweed harvest, well-fermented sauerkraut, home-cured olives, oatmeal grinder and workshop (where he still keeps his father’s “nuts and bolts box”). We caught Creed baking her sourdough bread (from her kitchen-harvested starter) and drying “bread seed” poppies.

Years ago the couple were pushing the boundaries of self-sufficiency to include goats and harvests of wheat, but Kahn found his limits. “With self-sufficiency you never get there, you never become self-sufficient. I mean we tried back in the seventies. We had goats and chickens and bees and I was trying to raise grain. Pretty soon I realized that if I want to raise enough wheat for the bread for a year here, it’s better left to a specialist, like I can’t be my own dentist. So you do, it’s a direction self-sufficiency. You do what you can do as much of it as you can.”

Check out the video below…

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Self Sufficient Backyard

In all that time an electric wire has never been connected to our house. We haven’t gotten or paid an electricity bill in over 40 years, but we have all the electricity we want. We grow everything we need, here, in our small backyard. We also have a small medicinal garden for tough times. Read More Here...


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