Working a few hours a week – let’s say 100 hours a year – to save $2800 a year, only makes sense from an economic point of view if you’re earning less than $28 an hour.

Only makes sense if you are taking time off work in order to manage your garden. I’d advise taking time away from television viewing which would in turn save money in health costs due to inactivity.

http://green-change.com/2009/05/23/chest-fridge-conversion/

For all the theory I’ve seen espoused on forums and in weblog comments, nothing beats actual practical measurements. My chest fridge is using 1/10th of the electricity of the fridge/freezer combo it replaced (we weren’t actually using the freezer section anyway!). Plus it only cost me $140 (AUD) to buy, including the thermostat!

The only tools I use are a spade, a fork, a set of hand clippers, and a knife. If you have to use anything more than that, then you are a farmer, not a gardener. I have been using the French Intensive method for the last ten years or so. My beds are over a foot tall now. They were originally flush with the ground. All I have ever added to them is compost from the compost pile. I’m as interested in growing my soil as I am growing my vegetables.

In the spring and summer I average an hour a day in the garden. Not necessarily because it needs an hour of work. Some days I make work for myself just to be out there. In the winter I only spend about two hours a week, messing with cold frames so that we have something fresh to supplement the stuff we canned, froze, or stored. It is true that when canning season starts I’ll be busy with it almost all of the weekends. I don’t mind. What I put up in those weekends lasts all winter long.

Last year a little over 85% of what we ate (measured in calories) came from the garden. We grew all of this in the small backyard of a small house in the middle of a city. The only things we bought at the store were salt, wheat flour, olive oil, and citrus fruit. We traded tomatoes during their peak with a few neighbors for picking rights to pear and apple trees that they previously let rot. They would have let us have the fruit for free, but I like to keep things even, and I tend to have more tomatoes than I can can up in a weekend.

If it came down to it, we could be self sufficient. All it would take is a little more work on my part. I’m in a position now where I do just enough to enjoy it without it becoming a chore. I don’t feel like growing and grinding my own wheat. Olive, orange, lemon, and lime trees don’t grow very well at all around here, but we could work around that.

If you do things right you will save money. You will save a lot of money. You will be healthier. You will be happier. Keep in mind here that I’m not a hippie or anything like that. I got into all this because I didn’t want to work forty hours a week. I made a deal with my wife where I would work twenty hours a week and supplement the missing income with an equivalent amount of food from the garden. If it didn’t work I would go back to working full time. By the end of my first year I broke even on the missing income. At the end of the second year I had a surplus.

I would love to have a crack at living off-grid. I’m looking to buy a house in the Austrian countryside soon for my family (three kids, one wife) and giving it a go. I currently know very little about off-grid life, but am reading voraciously.

I anticipate a very rapid learning curve – the thought of all the generations of peasants in history, who knew more about farming than I ever will, still suffering from periodic bouts of starvation and lean years does fill me with some trepidation. This makes me think that true self-sufficiency, even at the small community level, although certainly a worthy goal that should be striven for, is unachievable. Am I wrong?