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Self-Sufficient Living-15 Ideas to Improve The Quality Of Life

With the rising inflation and shortage of resources, people are looking for easy ways to be self-sufficient. In reality becoming independent is not as difficult as it sounds. You can find resources and ample opportunities to become self-reliant even in a desert. The technique is to use your resources, save some money and be more creative in your approach. To have an urban self-sufficient living, you need to be less dependent on the luxuries that are offered to you. Here, we have listed down 15 simple ways to be self-sufficient.

Growing Food:

Growing your own food is the first step towards becoming self-sufficient. You will not only get yourself basic grocery for your kitchen but also you can sell your produce in the market and earn money. Here, we will discuss few of the things that you can grow at home.

1-Growing your vegetables and fruits:

It is easy to grow vegetables and fruits in your backyard. If you are short of space and do not have a garden, then you can grow them in pots, boxes and containers that can be placed in the balcony.

2-Grow herbs:

Herbs are not only used in food and tea but are a great source of home remedies. With your own homegrown herbs, you can have natural, homemade medicines. You can even make your own pesticides to manage a self-sustainable farm.

3-Growing edible flowers:

Everybody loves to enjoy appetizing salads, delicious ice creams and desserts but they can be heavy on your pocket. But you can make your own desserts by growing edible flowers at home.

Keeping Livestock:

Keeping Livestock is a great source of fresh, dairy products, meat, and fleece and fiber that can give you ample of opportunities to start your own business.

4-Raising Your Own Chicken:

You can have or raise your own farm of backyard chickens that can give you a steady produce of eggs. If you don’t have much space you can keep 3-4 hens as one hen can lay up to 5 eggs a week. Not only you will get fresh organic eggs but also a good produce of meat.

5-Keeping Goats:

Have a self-sufficient farm living by raising your own goats and sheep. They are a great source of milk meat, fleece and fiber. Not only will you have dairy produce and meat but also  wool and yarn.

6-Raising honey bees:

 Have your own homemade honey by raising a bees in beehive at rooftops. You just need to seek permission from your local council and then you can have your own beehive farm.

 Homesteading:

One’s craft is always appreciated especially when s/he is best at it. Make a self-sufficient home living with your homestead products and run your own small, home-based business.

7-Making Homemade Jams and Jellies:

You have your own garden of fruits. Not only you can have them in salads and desserts but you can even make jams and jellies at home. Even if you don’t have ample supply of fruits for your homemade jam then you can buy seasonal fruits and use it to make preservative-free, healthy and cheap jam, jellies and marmalade.

8-Baking Bread at Home:

Get a sack of wheat flour and make your own bread at home. Not only, you can make a plain one but also add variety to it. Use dried fruit chunks, raisins and nuts to give flavor to your bread.

9-Making Your Own Yogurt and Cheese:

You can find lots of affordable commercial foodstuff but they are not always healthy as they contain additives and preservatives. But you can have fresh and healthy dairy products by making your yogurt and cheese at home. You can even add fruits to your yogurt just to add flavor to it.

10-Stitching Your Curtain:

It is always very expensive to revamp your home furnishing but if you are good at stitching, you can do it at home even. For starters, you can experiment making your own curtains as they do not require much effort and you can get done with just straight sewing.

11-Designing Patchwork Quilts:

No need to throw away your old clothes and other ragged pieces of clothes because you can make your own patchwork quilts. They are not only easy and cheap to make but also fashionable and much appreciated for their chic look.

12-Making Your Own Homemade Beauty Products:

Cosmetics and beauty kits are always heavy on pocket. They may even cause allergic reactions to sensitive skin as they contain highly reactive chemicals. Try making your own cosmetics and save yourself some money. Gram flour, yogurt, milk, and honey are few of the things that can help you make effective homemade beauty products.

Do It Yourself:

13-Making Your Own Solar Panel:

Day by day, electricity is becoming an expensive commodity. Due to higher bills, you tend you use lesser electrical appliances but why not produce your own electricity and enjoy it freely whenever you want. With solar panels, you can convert heat energy from Sun into electricity and you can even store it and use it at night.

14-Make Your Own Garden Furniture:

Every year you need to trim down your trees so that they can become healthy and fruitful next season but just don’t throw away the branches. You can cut them and make your own garden furniture.

15-Design Your Own Decoration Pieces:

With dried leaves, beads, and all other things that you consider as trash can be used for making home decoration material.

These are some ideas, the list is endless. You can come up with your own ideas to get financial independence to save cost of living.

About Farhan Ahsan

My name is Farhan Ahsan,I am web enthusiast, writer and blogger. I always strive to be passionate about my work. I started my work at the beginning of 2007 by engaging myself with detail reading and exchanging information with others. Since then things and times have changed, but one thing remains the same and that is my passion for helping and educating people, building a successful blog and delivering quality content to the readers. I always love to write about gardening, sustainable life, off grid living and homestead farming.

6 comments

  1. Mayumi Muraishi

    Thanks for the writing and sharing information which looks simple to be understood. But I still feel challenges and something is less convincing to start self-sufficiency. I would like to know examples from those who live self-sufficiently as much as possible.

    I’m Japanese and live in Tokyo, Japan. The situation here might be very different. I do have a problem with my health and that made me difficult adjusting society. I live on welfare now after I was heavily medicated at the hospital and side-effects started. It was so stressful and challenging to work for the company while experiencing my health problems. I would like to lead my life and live independently. So, I’m trying to be self-sufficient. Are there any ideas for someone with challenges like me to start living on our own with a self-sufficient skills? I am also sure that there are many unemployed people all over the world and struggling with their health conditions and financial situations in a bad economy. But if each of us know how to be independent and not rely on consumer based life, the quality of life can get richer?

    Anyways, thanks for reading and sorry if I am asking something out of your field.

    Best,
    Mayumi

    • Sorry to hear about the health problems your’re facing,may you get well soon. I would suggest you to raise your own organic food by growing vegetables and fruits and keeping livestock that is a a rich source of protein.Do It yourself whatever you can to reduce your cost of living.Find alternative source of energy such as wind and solar.Moderate your style of living;going back to the basic,live like our predecessors were lived when there was no electricity and they fulfilled all their needs by themselves.Find natural remedies to cure common diseases.This said,you can join communities of like minded people where you can learn from experts and share your own views as well.You will find so many communities online on different social networks such as Google +,reddit,Pinterest,Facebook etc. Hoping this will help you about basics to start Self-Sufficient Living.
      Google+(living off grid,the Selfsufficient living,backyard farming,hoby farms growing food and families,growing food,gardening)
      reddit(homestead,gardening,Selfsufficient living,simple living,health,livestock,backyard chickens)

  2. Hi Farhan,
    The ways suggested by you seems to be so simple to live and startwith.
    I am planning to do so and lets see where i go from IT engineer to Organic farming.
    I will be gald to receive ideas, suggestions from you about organic farming.
    To start with i am planning to have only natural fertilizers in Farm instead of chemical ones and also wanna start in small area to get the feel.
    thanks
    Satish

  3. In fact, we can do/make everything ourselves. At least, our grandparnets could.
    How they did it is collected here: http://survlivel.cultu.be/

  4. I can’t believe you did not mention the most important thing. Water.

    • You write getting your own water resource is very important to save you utility bills. Collecting water by rain water harvesting system is very useful for gardening and other household used.

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