The Life Sentence Block

The view from the hill at the back.

The 10 acre dream has always been there for me.  I’ve always wanted an opportunity to live the “Good Life” and be as self-sufficient as possible.

There seem to be many different reasons for people to do this kind of thing.  Mine is because I feel our modern society has become much like mice or guinea pigs on a treadmill.  We go to work to be able to afford to buy the things that we don’t have the time to make or do for ourselves because we’re working.  It just seems to go round and round.  As a result, many simple skills that our grandparents had are being lost.  Many things we buy can be made for far less expense than they can be bought, the difference is spending the time making them.  We also get a generation who believe that food just magically appears in a supermarket.  They have no concept that animals were raised and died for your meat, that a hailstorm can destroy a crop and push prices of fruit up or that there are many hands that these foods go through in order to get into your pantry.

Having been through ‘middle class poverty’ I learned how to do many of these things and one (particularly broke) year I managed to delight everyone at Christmas with a completely homemade personalised hamper full of goodies.  Now I live on a lifestyle block, I have more opportunities to do this kind of thing.

When I look up self-sufficiency online, I tend to find a lot of Doomsday Preppers and Survivalists.  People who believe that the apocalypse is coming and are determined to survive it.  I find the mindset somewhat frightening but having lived through several earthquakes that left us with very little of the things we take for granted for a month or more, some of the ideas are good ones.  I’m not so sure about the guns and security issues that they have, the earthquakes brought out a more neighbourly spirit in my area.  I met a lot of people nearby that I didn’t know, I saw communities banding together to help each other out so I don’t believe that the “every man for himself” idea that some of these preppers have is necessarily going to eventuate.

I created this blog with the intention of helping others who think in a similar way to me.  I’ve made a fair few mistakes in the past 18 months and I’m sure I’ll make a few more.  If I can help someone to avoid some of those mistakes, provide inspiration or just entertain those who’ve been there and done that then it’s all good.

The name came from one of my neighbours.  He's the manager of a large sheep station and made the joke that it's not really a lifestyle, it's a life sentence.  You're always working hard to make it a living, but it's not really big enough to make a living from. 

As you can see from the photo, we're mostly farming gorse and broom.  This is a constant work in progress.