Sindy's Blue Garden Cottage - suburban homesteading and self-reliance content

How Planning and Doing Can Solve The Global Crisis... At Least, in your own life. By Sindy Wakeham  It's easy to be carried away in the fear, speculation, uncertainty and obvious consequences of corruption, greed and wars on a globally connected world. What happens in one place can affect a country on the opposite side of the planet.  People in 'The West' generally aren't personally involved in the current wars (yet) and we only see updates via news and other media which nobody really trusts anymore. So it can feel like it's a world away and not affecting us directly.  The first place we begin to notice it is in the fuel prices as we've already seen. This quickly translates to food prices followed by every other product and service we use even if it has nothing to do with 'the war', or so it seems. We know all this and it's beginning to bite closer to home and feel more real. We can't avoid it but WHAT CAN  WE DO to prepare for and minimise the e...

  What Does Closed Loop Mean and is it Possible in Suburbia? By Sindy Wakeham What is a closed loop? I’m not talking about going ‘around the bend’ in a never ending circle. Though, we could go around the bend in a never ending cycle of guilt feelings and beating ourselves up for not being more ‘eco’ in our lives. The purpose of this article is to let you relax about your situation and be ok with making choices that best suit your own needs without punishing yourself for not having a perfectly ‘closed loop’ as far as resources go. As far as a home and garden are concerned, a closed loop is where nothing is brought in from outside and nothing leaves when we are talking about resources but it also applies to other things. It’s one of many principles in self-sufficiency. For example, I can now make all the compost for my garden from my garden without having to buy any in so I’m not letting any waste leave my property into landfill, either garden ‘waste’ or the bags compost c...

By Sindy Wakeham   You get it. You know WHY you may want to homestead or a cottage garden and live the ‘good life’. But WHERE is the best place to do that? Here’s the thing; A homestead (garden and home working toward providing SOMETHING for you and yours), can be whatever you want it to be! Where depends on a few options and possibilities. If you’re in the UK like me and my family, your first consideration is cost. Let’s face it; land of any size in the UK is priced at a premium. No point thinking about it until you know what space you have. Location wise, all southern parts of England and Wales are famous for being the best places, but I have seen fantastic edible gardens as far north as north-east Scotland and even some in Northern Ireland. In my Observations blog , I cover how you can observe your location and situation to inform the type of garden you grow. There are different ways of living a homesteading life in the UK and I’m going to suggest a few options. SMALL...

Part of Provident living By Sindy Wakeham How can any preparations done in and around the house be complete without the use of a garden? Have you ever lived on store cupboard food, on its own, for any amount of time, short or long? My family have, for a very short time! Not going to lie, to make basic store cupboard food thing that our pampered tastebuds can endure out of those kinds of basics, takes a lot of creativity and a VERY diverse collection of added ingredients! What are those basics and ‘added’ ingredients? I’ll be going into that in other articles and videos between both   blogs and YouTube channels; Blue Garden Cottage and Escaping the Dole with Sindy .  For now I’m concentrating on the importance of the garden as part of emergency and production and preservation of home grown produce. The Store Cupboard This week I've been focusing on the UK Government’s re-release or rather update of their Prepare website.  It encourages citizens to store 3 mont...

Drudgery or Joy? By Sindy Wakeham You want a garden paradise that meets all your desires for beauty, food production, connection with  nature and enjoyment. You have a garden space but not acreage. You want your own Eden, a version of homesteading or small holding in the suburbs. You DON'T want Tom and Barbara's version of The Good Life. The lack and drudgery can be a turn off. You don't want back breaking slog in all weathers. You don't want muddy boots on carpets. You don't want the cost and responsibility of animal husbandry and besides, your local council won't allow anything more than a couple of chickens and NO cockerels. Maybe you do want a couple of chickens. You don’t have a fortune in the bank and only have a tiny budget if any. I love The Good Life TV series. I love the humour and the idea of self-sufficiency, as in living off the land and escaping the ‘system’. It was what started my husband and my journey toward growing our own and yearning for ou...

A light hearted Guide by Sindy from Blue Garden Cottage . Hey there, fabulous folks of the internet!   This quirky council house homesteader is here to sprinkle some cheer and hopefully micro-homesteading wisdom of sorts into your day. Today, we're diving into the delightful world of romance and fairy tale cottage gardening. Picture this: you're in your cozy little cottage garden (council house or other), surrounded by chirping birds and the sweet scent of freshly picked herbs. You've got your gardening gloves on the table next to your cup of fresh herb tea, a twinkle in your eye, and a determination to conquer the world one radish at a time. That, my friends, is the essence of micro-homesteading; and that’s exactly what a suburban homestead in the UK is...micro. Micro-homesteading makes it possible for most of us who dream of a country life but are in the suburbs with a home/work/family life and budget that to a degree prohibits the reality of living in the country a...

  'Homestead'  Predates Homesteading act of 1862  Forget everything you think you know about homesteading ! The words homestead and homesteading isn’t even originally American and dates way back in Europe including the United Kingdom, which wasn’t actually united back then. Sometimes you have to look back to move forward. Let’s explore that then. I'd like to open your mind to a totally different idea about what homesteading actually is, where the word actually comes from and what it meant then. You’ll learn how to say hello in a very old language and gain some bragging rights. Since the creation of the Homesteading Act of 1862 in America, the information is freely available on the internet but generally, it included land up to 160 acres and the claimant had to subsist on that land for 5yrs to claim the deeds to it.   Those who subsisted off the land were homesteaders. That technicality evolved over the generations since to include smaller parcel...