Tomorrow We Begin

     As you can tell by the title of this post it is now time.  Tomorrow I should be headed home from the rig but the work is just beginning.  In order to go to a more frugal self-sustaining lifestyle you must first go with a plan of some sorts.  I have already listed a plan on what needs to be done with our land and some various ones on the household, now we get into the nitty gritty as Nacho Libre once said.
     So for what I see it.  The first plan is budgeting hard.  Don't spend money on services that you really don't need.  I mean do you really need a $250 Satellite TV bill?  Do you really need the top of the line organic food from your grocery stores when you can grow it yourself?  I imagine there is probably a study going around by many top executives of the mainstream society trying to determine the gullability of todays youth to see just how far they can stretch their dollar into ones mind for spending money on things that they really don't need.  This where we learn to be wiser and save instead of spending.  Use some of the money for other gains that are not momentary and stray away from the instant gratification into something that takes awhile to be satified.  Something at which you can look back on in years to come and say "You know while everyone else was spending the money on new power tools I built this with my own strength and determination"
      Now your probably saying "No power tools!" and thinking man this blog is going to last forever.  I can garantee you that this blog will not be an overnight here is some pictures of when I am finished.  This will probably go into the years but if you follow me through the weeks and months, failures and triumphs, you will see where I am eventually coming from.  Nothing good comes out of a quick fix and by what I have learned most of the time it ends up back coming to bite you in the ass later.
     For now we are just going to stick with a simple plan revolving around stuff that we actually need.  The list is pretty simple also.  What do you need to be more self-sufficient that you use everyday that you really don't have to buy?  Food of course!  Lets start by calculating how much produce we actually buy that can be grown ourselves in a greenhouse year around or in a planting bed most of the year and the excess dried for winter months.  How many onions, potatoes, carrots, cabbage, garlic does one go through in a week and calculate it by 52 to give an accurate estimate of what needs to be grown.  Herbs are one of the most expensive things you can buy besides certain protein and that needs to be taken account of.  This one is a little bit more difficult because we are measuring in fractions and having to take that on a dried amount.  Fresh herbs generally call for more since their oil is not concentrated on a dehydrated level.  Case in point you will see a lot of estimate calculations based solely just on the herbs and produce itself because it is such a vital role in this coarse of action.  Once all final estimates are in then we have to figure out where and how we are going to properly grow the produce to where we get maximum yeild without artificial stimulants and growth hormones.  We are going to save all that for a later post when we go into to lab work testing out different concentrations of natural fertilizers and creating the fertilizers.