A desire for self-sufficiency isn’t the only reason people are taking a bigger role in looking after their own needs when it comes to food or energy production.
Whether growing food, retrofitting homes or using solar power, more and more people are thinking about what they can do at home to save money, conserve power or reduce their environmental footprint.
It’s no secret that costs are rising. Data from Statistics Canada, presented by the Government of Alberta, suggests groceries bought in February 2024 cost four per cent more than they did the year before. Over that time, fresh vegetables went up almost eight per cent.
Additionally, the COVID-19 pandemic and other issues like the Rogers Sugar refinery strike brought home the reality of shortages at the grocery store.
Of course, grocery bills aren’t the only area where consumers are feeling the pinch. Energy costs in February were over 20 per cent higher year-over-year, according to Statistics Canada data.
Backyard gardener
Renee Miller grows food in her backyard garden and taught herself to preserve it. She also keeps a few hens that produce eggs at her home in Okotoks.
“I proudly say I have an urban farm,” Miller says. “I can eat all of these things all winter long and all summer long.”
Learning skills like growing and preserving your own food is as good as printing money, she adds.
“We're facing economic uncertainty, and we're facing environmental uncertainty, so I think this is probably one of the most valuable (skills),” she says.
The benefits go beyond cost savings, she says, and include knowing where her food comes from and that no antibiotics or pesticides have been used, important factors to her.
Her self-described urban garden is fenced to keep deer out, and careful consideration goes into what she grows, focusing on permaculture plants or perennials.
“All of those things that are really easy to grow in Alberta,” she says. “They're drought tolerant, they're not as finicky as some of our annuals, and they're going to grow reliably.”
She has turned her garden bounty into fruit leather and tomato paste, and has dehydrated beets, rhubarb and zucchini for soups, using YouTube as a source of knowledge.
“You’re limited only by your collection and your preserving abilities,” she says.
Although she didn’t have much of a green thumb at first, and has been growing food for a handful of years, she got a bumper crop of 42 squash from half a dozen seeds and was able to share with family and friends.
It all began with a container-grown strawberry plant that she put on the patio and promptly forgot about. Miller lived in B.C. then, where the climate was milder.
“I didn't think about (the plant), didn't water it, didn't care about it at all,” she says. “As a non-gardener, I just literally abandoned this little plant.”
She was shocked to see green leaves growing in January on the plant she had neglected.
Coping with a loss at the time, she thought, “This has something to teach me about resilience, which was exactly what I needed to learn at that point.”
Her interest in growing food took off from there and she became fascinated with the possibilities. As Miller learned more, additional benefits of gardening became apparent.
“Growing my own food helps me appreciate the very hard work of farmers and how important it is to protect that work from being monopolized by corporations,” she says.
Backyard hens
More recently, Miller added a small flock of backyard hens that produce four to six eggs a week, she says.
“My hens get to socialize and dust bathe and forage for bugs,” she says.
With water shortages looming in Alberta due to drought, the Okotoks gardener is taking steps to conserve water by using mulch and collecting rainwater.
Her rainwater storage capacity is 6,000 litres, which she admitted doesn’t last long, and that is why she plans to add another 10,000 litres of capacity this year, and more later.
This will be her fourth season gardening in Okotoks and as the fruit trees and berry bushes become established, she anticipates watering them less.
“My garden, as it grows, will need less water and I'm very careful about my mulch,” she says.
The time commitment for watering and weeding isn’t huge for what she harvests, adding she has no problem fitting it in around her work schedule.
In the beginning, gardening on a patio, she was shocked at the amount of food she could produce.
“I think when you're surprised at the abundance that you can produce for yourself, then it gets you that much more curious (about what else you could grow),” Miller says.
A large garden isn’t needed to get started. Growing a few herbs in the kitchen is a brilliant way to get into gardening, she adds.
“Gardening is accessible,” she says. “If you have a patio, you can grow some of your own food, you can be part of a community garden.
“It really starts with a strawberry plant from the checkout in the grocery store, I mean, I was shocked at how much that little plant had to teach me and is still teaching me.”
Solar array
Emile Rocher grows a fair bit of food on his acreage near High River. The semi-retired engineer also built his house with an eye toward sustainability and energy efficiency, adding solar panels and other features to increase savings.
His solar array produces “somewhat more power than we use in the year,” he says, including enough juice to power the Rochers' two electric cars about 16,000 kilometres per year.
“I can't think of a better investment that we've made that you can feel good about,” he says.
Installing solar panels and taking other steps to be energy efficient makes a difference, and Rocher says the payoff last year was a $1,000 gas bill and a $100 electrical bill.
The property is connected to the power grid but gets electricity from solar year-round. The monthly output varies, ranging from 305 kilowatts to a little more than 900 kilowatts, he says.
The lowest monthly output is enough to power a winter-driven electric vehicle 1,500 kilometres, and the system is reliable, straightforward and user-friendly, he says.
“It's kind of odd in a way how much hostility there is to renewables, and it’s fed mostly by disinformation.”
His solar equipment was bought 10 years ago, and costs haven’t risen a whole lot since then, Rocher says, adding a system that cost $11,000 then would be about $13,000 today.
“That's the only thing that inflation has not struck, really,” he says.
Rocher spent 50 years in the design and construction industry, working on energy efficient buildings, including those certified to the R-2000 standard, a program developed in the early 1980s by Natural Resources Canada and other stakeholders.
According to the federal government, R-2000 homes are 50 per cent more energy efficient, on average, than typical homes that are built to code.
“I stayed involved in that and tried to do a little more each time when we built this house,” Rocher says.
Back then, hot water was about the only thing you could get that was solar-powered, but today’s equipment is easier to deal with and more efficient, he says.
His house is designed to make the most of passive solar heating from windows and cooling from shade.
“When we used to do the computer simulations for the R-2000, it wasn't unusual to have about half of the space heat covered by gains through windows from properly oriented glass,” he says.
Simple design principles, like glass in the right places, heat-recovery ventilation and good insulation are important, he adds.
“My partner and I, over 40 years, never built a house that needed air conditioning,” he says. “That might be changing though.”
The spring of 2023 was the first time he thought the house might get uncomfortably hot when warm weather hit before the shade trees leafed out.
Overall, he says aiming for energy efficiency just makes sense.
