These are the blogs of our lives...

Hi!
We are Trystan and Julia, two crazy forest critters on a mystical journey towards Self Sufficiency! (If any of you have seen the now defunct British TV series "Good Neighbors", please read the words "Self sufficiency" with the inflections of Tom Good)

Ok, so its not always mystical and we aren't forest critters, but this is our new blog chronicling our journey towards doing more stuff for ourselves.

We hope to use this as a tool to help others who are seeking real life answers to their questions about gardening, composting, recycling, raising chickens, brewing beer, growing fruit trees/bushes, and hopefully many more things to come!

This is not to say we have all the answers, far from it in most cases as we are amateurs, but in the past year or two since we sowed the first the seeds (I couldn't resist that pun!) of sustainable living in our brains, we have realized the value of learning from other peoples' experiences. It will also serve to help US to remember all the little treasures of knowledge we glean along the way.

It is also our hope that this blog will help us to share our deep love and appreciation for our natural world. All of these activities serve a purpose, to fill our bellies and sustain our bodies, but as we have watched our fledgling seeds transform into veritable living sculptures, or marveled at the patterns on our 3 day old baby chicks feathers, we have felt a deeper connection to the food we eat and the earth that is our home.

We hope that anyone who is reading this will join in the conversation! Give us your thoughts on the subjects, discuss alternative solutions, share helpful books or web links, vent frustrations on uncooperative plants or animals...whatever! The sky's the limit! I'd pop in a few more cliches here, but....I just don't really feel like it.

I'll leave you with a quote from the German poet and critic Heinrich Heine:

"Like a great poet, Nature is capable of producing the most stunning effects with the smallest means. Nature possesses only the sun, trees, flowers, water and love. But for him who feels no love in his heart, none of these things has any poetic value. To such an individual the sun has a diameter of a certain number of miles, the trees are good for making a fire, the flowers are divided into varieties, and the water is set."