Aboutifesto

April 2015.

Selfandroots, where did that blog name come from ? It was fairly simple, I said it to myself out loud as I walked home on a surprisingly warm April evening. It sounded right, the idea of oneself and the ideas I wanted to nurture. Ideas are like plants, with love and the right conditions they can turn into incredible things. This is the story of these ideas.

I have wanted to work out for a while and write about why I had been reading so many books on homesteading, self-reliance and food. I thought on that walk home about the garden I was tending to and the plans in it, the fact that my home had become a place of sustenance and learning, the weekend before I had built a hot smoker and the weekend ahead I planned to go to bake sourdough bread. Little steps and roots to a more enhanced life.

I knew my garden wouldn’t feed my girlfriend and I all year round, but I knew I could develop my learning and have some impact on the world I was living in. Urban life or countryside, it didn’t matter I realised as long as I thought hard about these thoughts and tried to do my best.

I have become slowly over the years a person who wants to learn new skills and interests. Self-sufficiency ideas have crept up on me slowly, a hobby and interest has become a way of thinking to hopefully philosophise about on this blog. This hunger to know more, develop and become more ‘efficient’ at self-sufficiency and in turn slightly egotistical I felt that this journey could be worth sharing. So here it is, ‘selfandroots’, a blog, a personal
manifesto of sorts that (I hope) has its feet firmly in the ground.

Tom