Small Projects in a Big World: A path to Self-reliance in Energy, Food, Home, and Life

“To introduce ourselves, we are a micro holding based in NE Derbyshire, we make a variety of traditional crafts, keep sheep for wool, grow willow, make cider, amongst other things and generally try to lead a sustainable life which has little impact on our environment, and relies on us – not outside agencies to provide our heat, fuel, and hot water.” Over the last 30 or so years, we have developed our self-reliance projects, and this book is the story of what we did and how we did it, we hope the book will help other families and individuals who want to move in the same direction as us to proceed with their own projects and experiment with new ideas and concepts. We are keen to pass on our thinking as well as practical skills to inspire and give confidence to others wishing to follow the same route in life. I thought I would share some of the other things we do and our thinking behind them, to become less reliant on the system, exploit resources less and have an alternative lifestyle to the mainstream. To me, personally, this has been the right way to go for many years, and when I met Bev, the whole thing started to happen, throughout most of my working life, I have been involved with working the land, one way or another, so I had a good basis to start on. We’ve made mistakes and learnt from them and had successes and we’ve learnt from them as well. Andy Alder, February 2025.