Welcome to my “Recommended” series of posts. These will be weekly – for now – posts about resources and sites I have found over the past while that I found so excellent, I want to share them with you, my dear readers. 🙂 Whether or not I continue to post these, and how often they are posted, will depend on feedback. Please feel free to comment below, and if you have a favorite resource of your own, do share, and I will review them for possible future posts.

I hope you find these recommendations as useful and enjoyable as I have!

As we continue to clean up, repair and improve things here on the family farm, we do have an ultimate goal to be as self sufficient as we can. Our health and mobility requirements mean we’ll probably never be completely “off the grid”, but there is still a lot we can do.

Growing up here, we were basically subsistence farmers. We grew, raised, preserved, butchered much of our own food, and for our animals, grew most of their feed, too. When it came to gardening, there was a time when the garden was close to an acre in size. This was your typical garden of everything planted in long rows, far enough apart to run a tiller in between. In my mind, gardening meant growing food. Flower gardening was just an aside, and not something I understood as “real” gardening, for may years. Even now, when I think “gardening”, my mind always goes to growing food.

As productive as my mother’s garden was, however, it is not how I want to garden, for many reasons. Everything from the rocky soil where the garden used to be, to mobility and accessibility, leads me to wanting to do raised bed gardening.

The following resource is very much the sort of thing I have in mind. Self Sufficient Me (Website YouTube) is an Australian site, so obviously, there is a lot that won’t apply to us in central Canada! We’re not going to be growing papayas anytime soon. 😀 However, this resource has lots of information that can be used pretty much anywhere. Along with their website and YouTube channel, they are on other social media, which you can find linked here. They also have a second YouTube channel here.

It was through the videos that I discovered this resource. I haven’t been able to go back through all 8 years of them, but I’m slowly working on it. 😉

The videos include some very basic stuff, perfect for beginning gardeners.

This next video really caught my attention, as hugelkultur is sort of the method we will be using when we build our raised beds. We might not use such large stumps and logs, but will likely have lots of big branches!

I especially appreciate that he talks about what didn’t work about the raised bed, as well as showing how the soil looks after 4 years.

Also, I love his tools!!!

Of course, he covers building raised beds as well.

He’s got all my prerequisites: height, strength, easy and cheap! 😀

Don’t have the space to do raised beds? He’s got you covered there, too.

He also goes beyond growing vegetables, and has videos on raising animals, too.

He readily admits that he is no carpenter, and that’s one of the things I love about it. He’s big on going ahead and building things, without worrying about being perfect.

We don’t have to worry about snakes where we are – the snakes we have would be more in danger from the chickens than the other way around – but definitely predators are an issue.

Chickens are not the only critters he raises, and you will find videos about raising quails and ducks, as well as videos reviewing products – the good and the bad! – about pest control, composting, watering, and so much more. I definitely recommend going through the many videos available. I’m sure you will find plenty to inspire you!

The Re-Farmer