Introduction: The Self Provisioner

This is the full introduction from my new book: The Self Provisioner: How to grow your own food and live a self-sustaining life in the digital age. 

This book had humble beginnings. In fact, it started as a photo I shared on the internet. After sitting down to a meal of chicken fillet, beans, peas and potatoes, I realised something cool: everything on my plate had come from my garden. 

Everything but the chicken. 

That started a cascade of events that started with an idea, turned into a series of blog posts on my blog, ThisDadDoes.com and has culminated in this book. This is the story of how we got to where we are now: 

I’ve written on and off about gardening over the years but as I started to develop this concept it began to make more and more sense to turn it into a book. Like all good books, it started with that small idea – of a plate of food where as much of it as possible was home grown and sustainably sourced. 

Writing on gardening has always come easily. It’s easy to write about something you’re passionate about. And man, am I passionate about growing stuff. But I’m also a pragmatist and not particularly sentimental. So I’ve never seen much point in having a garden that wasn’t of practical use. And by use, I mean edible. Which is the way I garden now – primarily focused on growing food.

That’s not a new thing for me either. I’ve been growing vegetables since I was a very young boy – five or six years old. My father even gave me my own plot where I could grow anything (and I mean ANYTHING) I wanted. There aren’t many Dads who would do that. The strangest thing we ever tried was a ‘walking stick cabbage’ that grew to about 7 feet tall. It wasn’t edible but you were supposed to be able to make the stalks into walking sticks. When we tried drying the stalks in the garage they rotted and turned to mush.

Then there were a few years when I didn’t have a garden. I lived the batchelor life in a Glasgow flat, working and playing a bit too hard. I did grow a pumpkin in a pot in my inner city apartment to win a bet. Someone in work wagered I couldn’t grow a pumpkin in my flat. So I did and made a pumpkin pie which I then served to the whole office.

 A year or so later I was living in Uganda in rural east Africa and grew almost all my own food (with the help of my full time gardener and mentor, Okethi). Gardening in Africa was easy – you put something in the ground and it grew – bananas, tomatoes, beans, corn, squash – whatever you wanted, you could grow it. I learned a lot from that old man with a quiet voice and dancing eyes.

Another few years down the line and I read the cult gardening book ‘Grow or Die’ by David the Good. Before reading this I’d been fascinated by the idea of growing vegetables for survival. If our world went into meltdown, how would we survive? We’d need food wouldn’t we?

This fascination was compounded by reading further and more widely with writers like Steve Solomon, who invented COF: Complete Organic Fertilizer and others who promote permaculture and ‘no-till’ types of vegetable growing. Self sufficiency seemed inviting and romantic. But was it realistic or attainable?

A couple of years after that I got my rifle licence and became a trained deer hunter (you need this in the UK to put venison into the food chain). This added a extra dimension to my ‘self provided’ diet of vegetables from my plot. Although this book is really about gardening, I’ll talk about meat in the last chapter. 

Just so you know, there’s a full list of all the books I mention in the appendices. I’d recommend reading all of them. You’ll learn a lot, and understand self provision gardening and where its roots really are.

Everything But the Chicken – A Journey Away from Self-Sufficiency

A few years ago we moved out of the city and into the country. We ended up in a house with plenty of land and I was quick to start growing our own food – potatoes, beans and squash. After my first harvest  I was sitting down to a meal of chicken, broad beans (Yanks call these fava beans – I’m not sure why), potatoes and peas. I realised with some surprise that everything but the chicken had come from my garden. 

This was a big moment – a few months earlier when we’d moved into our new house and the garden had been a semi frozen wasteland of mature shrubbery, bark mulch and weeds. Over the following weeks we’d hacked, slashed and dug, bringing a vegetable patch into being through the sweat of our brows.

In this patch of Scottish dirt, I’d grown my first food since leaving Africa seven and a half years before. This plate of chicken and vegetables tasted sweeter than anything I’d eaten. It was the taste of success. So was this ‘Everything but the chicken‘ moment a route on the way to complete self-sufficiency?

My main experience of a self-sufficient lifestyle was through re-runs of the BBC comedy ‘The Good Life‘ in which a young, jet-setting couple left their London city careers to start a self sufficient life in the suburbs. It was hilarious, mainly because they failed at nearly every turn. Now, whenever anyone says ‘self sufficiency’ that’s what I think about. Though I liked the idea of self sufficiency, I knew the reality was near impossible.

Another step in that journey was when I read the gardening and philosophy book by Monty Don (Monty is the slightly eccentric but loveable presenter of BBC’s Gardener’s World programme). His book, Down to Earth was a watershed moment in understanding what I wanted from my garden. Reading the book cover to cover, I came across this quote about the joy and satisfaction of growing your own food:

“You become nourished by the earth, by your labour, by the intimate and unbroken connection with the ingredients themselves, and by the profound satisfaction of knowing that no one in an office constructed that meal as part of a profit-forecast spreadsheet – let alone used and abused labourers and abased them for a pitiful wage.

Whilst self-sufficiency is doomed to humiliating failure, self provision elevates the grower to self-esteem and a world of small but profoundly influential pleasures.”

This phrase ‘self provision’ stuck in my head. What did it mean? And could you shape an entire lifestyle and philosophy around it? Obviously I believe you can, that’s the whole point of this book. But then if you got this far, you’ve probably figured that out by now.

Looking back on the months preceding this, I believe I’d been following the ‘Self Provision’ philosophy without realising it. And certainly without being able to name it. But how would you define Self Provisioning? Maybe what you’re about to read describes how you garden and how you live. If so, that’s great. If not, have a think – maybe this is a good way to follow.

The focus of this book is Self Provision Gardening or SPG for short. And we’re going to split that idea into broader concepts that I’ll elaborate on as the book progresses. But before I do that, I want us to understand what Self Provision Gardening is (and isn’t). We’re going on this journey together – this book was as much about distilling the essence of SPG as anything. 

I should finish this chapter with a vote of thanks to Monty Don who really is one of my gardening heroes. Without him, this book would still be called ‘Everything but the Chicken’.

Self Provisioning will be out some time in 2020. Check back here for updates or sign up to my newsletter.