Why - "Living the Good Life"?
Back in the mid 1970's in the UK there used to be a TV series called The Good Life. It starred Felicity Kendal and Richard Briers as Barbara and Tom Good who, in the midst of a mid-life-crisis, decided to quit the rat race and try to be totally self sufficient in their suburban home in Surbiton - with hilarious albeit often predictable results.
It was a sit-com, actually voted 9th best ever British sit-com of all time and it must have sowed a seed in the deep dark recesses of my mind.
Liz and I quit our safe and secure jobs on 1st July 2016 in order to travel from our home in Hastings, New Zealand to the UK and Europe for a 6 month backpacking holiday - finally ending up in Minneapolis, Minnesota USA for our oldest sons wedding on New Years Eve.
During our time away, as well as having fun, seeing the usual tourist sights as well as a few off the beaten track places, meeting some interesting, kind and wonderful people along the way, we also came to realise that you don't need a lot to be happy and healthy.
You can only carry so much in a backpack, so soon get used to doing without most of your posessions (left at home), and managing quite nicely in the process. We all have too much stuff!
Even though we only had a backpack each full of stuff - we found we had too much and only ever used about half of what we carried around on our backs. Less is more.
Most importantly though we learned to shop for and eat locally grown, seasonal produce. It's much cheaper, not to mention healthier and fresher eating something grown today or yesterday just around the corner, than something grown last week, or even last month, and transported thousands of miles by sea and truck in refrigerators. It saves on fuel to transport the produce and therefore saves on pollution.
Localisation makes much more sense, to me at least, than globalisation.
Along the way, we came to the conclusion that the 9 to 5, or 8 to 5 that we used to work was extremely over rated. We knew that we couldn't do without money completely as there are still things like insurance, rates and power bills to pay and vehicles to keep on the road, even though
we were mortgage free.
We decided that on our return to New Zealand we would work hard in our garden to get it up and running as quickly as possible to produce most of our fruit and vegetable needs and we would both look for part time jobs of up to 20 hours a week to enable us to keep the garden going, pay the bills and hopefully have a bit left over to put into a holiday fund for our next trip.
We would have the best of both worlds - living off our land, while still having the safety net of a part time job - and truly start to live "the Good Life".
Just like the sit-com of the 1970's though, things haven't quite gone to plan. We did manage to get the garden up and running and after 8 weeks, we are starting to get a regular feed from what we planted.
Lettuce, silverbeet and spinach, beetroot, runner beans, cucumbers, zucchini, rhubarb, strawberries, raspberries and peaches from our garden are all doing well and have provided us with food. BUT, because we only started planting on our return home in January we were well behind in getting most plants into the ground. Had we been home, we would have started many of our veggies off in September - Spring time.
So the upshot of all this is that we have probably got plants growing in the garden which are not going to come to full maturity before the first frosts of late autumn/early winter and so any work we put into them will be for naught.
And the other thing that hasn't gone to plan is that we are both currently totally jobless - something that needs to be remedied quick smart as our bank account is starting to haemorrhage.
However, we will not admit defeat. We are going to make the most of our situation, of what we can grow, learn from our mistakes and move ever closer to being self sufficient in organically produced food, water and eventually - hopefully - power.
We'll also be reducing our waste, recycling and upcycling, cutting back on our electric power and petrol bills, making our own herbal teas, home brewed wine, cider and beer and learning lots of new things along the way.
Lizzie has done a number of courses and is an avid reader when it comes to health and nutrition so I'm relying on her to keep us on the right track with following a healthy diet and lifestyle.
This blog and our website will follow our progress. Please share with us in our journey in pursuit of the Good Life. Learn from our mistakes, share the triumphs and hopefully the seed of the Good Life may also take hold in you.
P.S. if you'd like to take a look at our travel blog which covered our trip around the UK and Europe the link is below.
http://frostphotos.wixsite.com/eurotrip
