I quite like this idea

I’m in the process of finding out how much food I can provide for myself. I weigh what comes in from the garden and also record the weight of food I buy (that’s easy because the weights are all on the supermarket docket).  I don’t record herbs grown and other small quantities of foodstuffs, or the things (like alpine strawberries), that usually get eaten in situ.

I sum up the total food entering the house and work out the % coming from the garden. I’m doing this over one full year.

This doesn’t give me any idea of what other resources I’m providing for myself—things like firewood, water and fertiliser.

So I like Sharon Astyk’s idea of the Bullseye Diet.

Sharon writes a couple of peak oil/self-sufficiency blogs. One is Casaubon’s Book and the other is The Chatelaine’s Keys. She’s written about the bullseye diet at both blogs—here and here.

The idea is a spin-off from the 100-mile diet, which you probably already know about. With that one, you try to source all your food from within 100 miles of your home (or kilometres, if you live in a metric country).

With the bullseye diet, you draw a series of concentric circles. The inner one represents your home. The outer ones progressively can represent your town, bioregion, state, country or whatever you choose. In each circle you list the things that you can source from that area. It gives a more accurate idea of how you’re going with self-sufficiency and energy use.  (When resources travel from where they’re produced to where they’re consumed, they use energy. With oil supplies in decline, we want to try and use less energy).

I going to draw a set of circles on a large sheet of paper. The inner one will represent my home property and inside that I’ll list what I can provide from there. I’ll add non-food items as well.

The next circle, I’ve decided, will be a 50 km radius from home, which I’ll call my bioregion. That will take in all the eastern and south-eastern areas of Melbourne’s suburbs and beyond, right down to Bass Strait. Quite a lot of the outer area is still farmland.

After that, I think my next circle will encompass all of the state of Victoria. The next one will be Australia and the outermost one will take in the rest of the world.

I’ll try and include all the resources I use regularly. I won’t know where some of them come from so I’ll have to do some research or make an enlightened guess.

I’m hoping it’ll give me  a better idea of where I’m at, self-sufficiency-wise and where I can possibly make changes, i.e. can I source a distant product closer to home, and so on.