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Could you feed your family from your farm.

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  • Registered Users Posts: 4,018 ✭✭✭davidk1394


    Used grow vegetable plots here for lettuce, carrots, onions and potatoes. Had a few apple and pear trees but they died because they weren't looked after. Have hens here aswell, put a few lambs in the freezer and half a heifer. I know how to grow vegetables but didn't do it in a fresh years because of wire worms and nematodes in the ground


  • Closed Accounts Posts: 18,268 ✭✭✭✭ Vienna Shallow Stipend


    Grueller wrote: »
    No. They live on avocados and mangoes

    That's them blow ins from Dublin giving them " notions"

    Coming from the capital myself I have veg growing and chickens. Probably enough to keep me going till spring and it's only my 1st season.

    My son planted an egg..I told him we'd get egg plants :D


  • Registered Users Posts: 6,701 ✭✭✭amacca


    I couldn't feed myself from my farm I'm ashamed to admit or at least it would be a very steep learning curve.

    Knowledge and skills would be the first barrier....they would be minimal especially when it comes to storage/preservation...I can grow some veg, I grow peas some years as supermarkets don't really seem to stock peas in the pods here that much, but butchering and preserving meat I'd only have a rough sketch of a idea, as for making cheese, butter etc and storing apples etc Id surely make a balls of that........give me a load of sugar though and Id make you a nice batch of jam.

    Seeds might be a problem if were going full metal apocalypse here

    It would depend on what time of the year civilisation shuts down too....coming into spring I might have a chance....if I had an internet connection or some survival/homesteading books

    Freezer, solar panels and some leisure batteries could come in handy.


  • Registered Users Posts: 3,194 ✭✭✭foxy farmer


    Can't remember the exact words but I remember hearing a saying once about owning an acre of land. Something along the lines of
    You'll never make a living off an acre of land but you could certainly live off it. In other words growing your own food.
    The give a fish/ teach how to fish saying also comes to mind.
    I grew up in a housing estate outside Cork city. We had a fairly substantial garden. Both parents came off farms. We had a few drills of spuds cabbage parsnips peas beans lettuce onions rhubarb apples.
    Now I have land aplenty and cattle aplenty and every scrap of food is bought. Not a single item in the house is home produced. Bloody sad state of affairs.


  • Registered Users Posts: 1,555 ✭✭✭kerryjack


    Your not late yet foxy, start small is the key to success a few raised beds 8 by 4 and away you go.


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  • Closed Accounts Posts: 18,268 ✭✭✭✭ Vienna Shallow Stipend


    amacca wrote: »
    I couldn't feed myself from my farm I'm ashamed to admit or at least it would be a very steep learning curve.

    Knowledge and skills would be the first barrier....they would be minimal especially when it comes to storage/preservation...I can grow some veg, I grow peas some years as supermarkets don't really seem to stock peas in the pods here that much, but butchering and preserving meat I'd only have a rough sketch of a idea, as for making cheese, butter etc and storing apples etc Id surely make a balls of that........give me a load of sugar though and Id make you a nice batch of jam.

    Seeds might be a problem if were going full metal apocalypse here

    It would depend on what time of the year civilisation shuts down too....coming into spring I might have a chance....if I had an internet connection or some survival/homesteading books

    Freezer, solar panels and some leisure batteries could come in handy.

    My wife is eastern European and her dad has a small sheep farm.
    She has knowledge of wild herbs and flowers that are edible. Some mushroom skills and know how to milk a goat, make cheese, look after chickens and preserve veg in jars.

    Her dad also kills his own sheep and makes sausages.


  • Registered Users Posts: 1,725 ✭✭✭lalababa


    You can't butcher anything here AFAIK. I think you can kill a pig with a permit .... anybody know?


  • Registered Users Posts: 3,888 ✭✭✭Hard Knocks


    Her dad also kills his own sheep and makes sausages.

    Do they have the same red tape there as we do here for slaughtering?


  • Registered Users Posts: 11,066 ✭✭✭✭Base price


    I used to enjoy (yet at the same time cringe) watching the RTE/TnaG ? programme (can't remember the name) about the ICA trying in vain to educate young women (men weren't allowed to participate cause it was the ICA) on how to prepare and cook meat/fowl/game/veg for the table, knit and stitch a button on a blouse/shirt etc.
    Maybe it's time for a new TV programme like it but targeted at the next group of youngsters.


  • Closed Accounts Posts: 18,268 ✭✭✭✭ Vienna Shallow Stipend


    Do they have the same red tape there as we do here for slaughtering?

    I'm sure they do but the traditionalists just ignore it.


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  • Registered Users Posts: 3,205 ✭✭✭kollegeknight


    Have some basic skills in growing veg it I’m trying new things when I can and can rear animals. My dad was great for rearing animals but the one thing he couldn’t do is kill them. (Although he used kill turkeys) A lad called the captain used come to kill the pig for us. I’d be the same. I would find it difficult to be the executioner.

    I plant berry bushes and fruit trees whenever I’ve money, at moment it is for the birds but when they are plentiful, I will take some too.

    I have a friend who is unreal at jams, preserves and ciders. Her black pudding is divine.

    My FIL in Australia butchers a pig he buys and makes sausages and salamis but I know very little of that also.


  • Registered Users Posts: 6,701 ✭✭✭amacca


    lalababa wrote: »
    You can't butcher anything here AFAIK. I think you can kill a pig with a permit .... anybody know?

    I don't know for sure but I heard you can't be stopped killing a pig for personal use...........apparently its EU law ??????

    could be nonsense but if true it would mean much less red tape....id imagine if it was a case of providing for yourself nobody would pay too h=much heed to regulations anyway.


  • Registered Users Posts: 876 ✭✭✭bb12


    if society got that disrupted you'd also have to have a plan in place on how to protect those veg you're growing and cows your milking etc. the starving hordes wouldn't allow you to carry on regardless.


  • Registered Users Posts: 6,666 ✭✭✭CelticRambler


    You'll never make a living off an acre of land but you could certainly live off it. In other words growing your own food.

    Could certainly feed a family of six off it! Been there, done that (up to a point). But as someone said above, it takes a lot of time.

    After a few years of working away too much, I put a about 500m² to the metaphorical plough this year, and despite the (severe) drought, it's been great to see kilos of veg coming through the back door every few days. Having lost a lot of (shop-bought) stuff due to powercuts while I've been away, I'm making a determined effort to improve my non-electricity-dempendent storage. Plum chutney is all bottled, currently pickling a load of beetroot, have a batch of figs sun-drying for the last week or so, early spuds are bagged up and in the dark, late spuds will stay in the ground till October or November.

    The farming genes skipped over my parents, but somehow I managed to absorb a "feel" for the land from the cousins&uncles, and my mother was a great wan for making jam. So between that and a good gardening book and a decent cookbook and fair knowledge of science, I reckon I'd be grand without th'internet. Now if I could just land a job that allows me to work from home, I'd get a few chickens - really miss having them around. :D


  • Registered Users Posts: 6,701 ✭✭✭amacca


    Ill start whittlin a good knobbly hawthorn stick/club for myself

    theres a birch tree in a nearby field I've being eyeing up as a possible long bow candidate


  • Moderators, Society & Culture Moderators Posts: 4,980 Mod ✭✭✭✭Genghis Cant


    amacca wrote: »
    Ill start whittlin a good knobbly hawthorn stick/club for myself

    theres a birch tree in a nearby field I've being eyeing up as a possible long bow candidate

    Forget about the birch. Elm was the wood of choice for the English Longbow.
    I used a beaut of a selfbow ( home made bow) made from native Ash. Lovely bow it was too.


  • Registered Users Posts: 13,101 ✭✭✭✭Danzy


    Forget about the birch. Elm was the wood of choice for the English Longbow.
    I used a beaut of a selfbow ( home made bow) made from native Ash. Lovely bow it was too.

    Black alder is great as well.

    The Irish short bow was often made with it


  • Registered Users Posts: 6,701 ✭✭✭amacca


    Forget about the birch. Elm was the wood of choice for the English Longbow.
    I used a beaut of a selfbow ( home made bow) made from native Ash. Lovely bow it was too.

    interesting ...theres lots of ash around here....I thought it wouldn't be great for a bow at all.

    haven't seen elm locally.


  • Registered Users Posts: 11,183 ✭✭✭✭Nekarsulm


    I always thought yew was the ultimate wood for a long bow?


  • Registered Users Posts: 2,031 ✭✭✭Who2


    Nekarsulm wrote: »
    I always thought yew was the ultimate wood for a long bow?

    Yew holds the cursed souls in a graveyard , or so I was told but beautiful timber. Elm is extremely hard got here due to Dutch elm disease. I could see ash being suitable but I know nothing about bows.


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  • Moderators, Society & Culture Moderators Posts: 4,980 Mod ✭✭✭✭Genghis Cant


    Nekarsulm wrote: »
    I always thought yew was the ultimate wood for a long bow?

    It was indeed. I mixed up elm and yew. Elm sure was used but yew was the king of them all.
    Schoolboy error on my behalf!


  • Registered Users Posts: 734 ✭✭✭longgonesilver


    Yes ash Dom and yes we're the woods of choice.

    Elm that grew up as suckers from the trees that died 30? Years ago were getting nice and fall but a new wave of Dutch elm cheese is killing them all over West cork.

    Ye do realise that the disaster the OP was talking about already happened and most of the population survived with out having to loot and kill each other.


  • Registered Users Posts: 18,441 ✭✭✭✭_Brian


    We have a small polytunnel and have been working with the kids to grow a variety of veg and greens, not what would feed us but learning the skill at least. We have apple trees in the garden and maybe 20 fruit bushes, some crowns of rhubarb.
    We keep chickens, rear a few pigs for the table.

    This could all be scaled up quick enough.

    We bake bread maybe 3 times a week. Kitchen is always on the go here cooking and baking. We can make our own sausages, have done home made pasta etc.


    Access to basic ingredients like flour, sugar, tea and coffee would be important, but once we’d have those we’d be fine.


  • Registered Users Posts: 3,756 ✭✭✭Dakota Dan


    mariaalice wrote: »
    This is connected to another thread.

    If technology got distributed or society started to collapse some way.

    Would you have the knowledge skills and abilities to feed your family from your farm?

    Is there still a race memory of how grow potatoes, keep chicken, and a few pigs or is all to specialised for that.
    Society will collapse when the green new deal kicks in.


  • Registered Users Posts: 18,441 ✭✭✭✭_Brian


    Dakota Dan wrote: »
    Society will collapse when the green new deal kicks in.

    What deal is that ?


  • Registered Users Posts: 18,996 ✭✭✭✭gozunda


    _Brian wrote: »
    What deal is that ?

    The new socislist state of greta thunberg and friends. Basically the government will run the economy pretty much like china/ the former USSR. Fossil fuels will be left in the ground and everyone will be employed in collectivised labour gangs working towards green energy production, energy efficiency etc . Private vehicles will be history, ditto anything deemed in the public good will be taken by the state. No doubt we will all be eating just veggies. But thankfully no avocados or quinoa . That and the hipsters are for sure in for a shock when they cant fly to Bali for their annual de-stess yoga lifestyle breaks...

    Google Green New Deal and Alexandria Cortez


  • Registered Users Posts: 11,183 ✭✭✭✭Nekarsulm


    gozunda wrote: »
    The new socislist state of greta thunberg and friends. Basically the government will run the economy pretty much like china/ the former USSR. Fossil fuels will be left in the ground and everyone will be employed in collectivised labour gangs working towards green energy production, energy efficiency etc . Private vehicles will be history, ditto anything deemed in the public good will be taken by the state. No doubt we will all be eating just veggies. But thankfully no avocados or quinoa . That and the hipsters are for sure in for a shock when they cant fly to Bali for their annual de-stess yoga lifestyle breaks...

    Google Green New Deal and Alexandria Cortez


    Luckily, we don't have an apparatus of State capable of imposing such control at the moment.
    The Gardai only operate because of public goodwill.
    Start confiscating private resources and trying to operate collective labour camps/kibbutzes and they would find themselves powerless.


  • Registered Users Posts: 6,666 ✭✭✭CelticRambler


    Sounds like someone's been drinking the GOP coolaid. :pac:


  • Registered Users Posts: 18,996 ✭✭✭✭gozunda


    Sounds like someone's been drinking the GOP coolaid. :

    That was a parody btw - just in case you missed it ;)

    GOP? as in
    The term "Grand Old Party" is a traditional nickname for the Republican Party and the abbreviation "GOP" is a commonly used designation.
    Are we the 51st State or something? :pac:

    But if you think Ms Cortez and the Green New Deal supporters are joking - take a read of the greta in the new world thread. You may need more than a glass of "cool aid" afterwards lol...


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  • Registered Users Posts: 18,996 ✭✭✭✭gozunda


    Nekarsulm wrote: »
    Luckily, we don't have an apparatus of State capable of imposing such control at the moment.
    The Gardai only operate because of public goodwill.
    Start confiscating private resources and trying to operate collective labour camps/kibbutzes and they would find themselves powerless.


    Yesh I appreciate that there is reality and then there is the lunatic greens - unfortunately doesnt stop the GND rubbish being pushed as the wonderfull new panacea to cure all our problems.


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