Selfsufficientish

Friday, 18 May 2012

It's very easy being Green - The Selfsufficientish Life

Written by Andy Hamilton Friday, 19 February 2010

About 6 years ago myself and my twin brother Dave started a website called Selfsufficientish.com. We both had alltoments and the idea of the site was to share our experiences with anyone who would listen. It seemed obvious to us that a move towards self sufficency would have the least amount of impact and be far more sustainable than a "normal" life. We could never hope to be self sufficient we decided, as we could not afford the land and try as we might council tax and other bills have to be paid with money. As we were both students this was in short supply! We also did not want to give up the trappings of every day life, espeically the pub!

"... we could be self sufficientish", Dave retorted one afternoon as we were thinking of what to call our website. We both agreed that this name would be perfect and within a few hours I had bought the domain name and started putting up some very crude webpages. The site focused on articles about growing food in flats, getting allotments and tips for people who live in rented accomodation. We felt that this was important as we knew that there were other people out there like us.

We carried on posting up articles about what we were doing and within a few months we started to get emails from all over the world, people loved the idea that they could learn skills and lead a much greener lifestyle. The website soon started to recieve a few thousand visits every day, many of them sharing their plans, tips and ideas on our web forum.

Various national press were interested in our ideas of self sufficiency for everyone and we even started doing the odd interview. It was fairly surreal at first. I was unemployed and not claiming any benefits (As I couldn't) and was therefore penniless. So I wrote to a few agents. We signed up with one of them and ended up writing a book called "The Selfsufficientish Bible". It was full of everything that we had been doing over the last few years, gardening tips, home brewing and foraging to name but a few. It had always been a dream to be published author and the whole time from when we signed up with our publisher has been pretty magical (and hard work at times). I know make my living from writing, teaching people about wild food and teaching home brewing. Whilst still working on my allotment and leading as green a life as possible. I still don't own any land, still live in a rented house and if I am honest I am still pretty skint more often than not. However, I live a very happy life and hope to share some of the things that make it so with you on this blog over the coming months.

Andy Hamilton