KATRINA MacAllan said she’s not a doomsdayer, just realistic and practical and whatever natural disaster mother nature throws at her next, she’ll be ready.
“Up here we are quite vulnerable to the weather and power outages. We should all have a bit extra in our cupboards, so we are not in an emergency crisis,” she said.
“I didn’t want to be in a position where I couldn’t feed my family.”
Katrina is what some call a “prepper” – basically, she aims to be as self-sufficient as possible.
And while she admits people used to think she was crazy and she was coy about revealing her lifestyle choices, that is no longer the case.
“The idea of prepping used to be considered crazy and paranoid, but now I think, ‘why would you not prep?’,” she admitted.
“It helps mitigate an immediate crisis.”
Katrina and her husband, lawyer Ian MacAllan, have been on the mountain for 25 years and raised their four children here, with the youngest one still living at home.
“We like everything about the mountain – the climate, the sense of community. It’s been a beautiful place to raise kids. We have a solid community of friends,” she reflected.
“I grew up on the Gold Coast and we’d come here as kids for picnics. When Ian and I got together we decided to buy a house here.”
Back then she said Clancy’s was a Swedish restaurant, and she laughed remembering coming here with Ian and eating at what was about the only place open on a Monday night.
“It was very quirky, a bit Faulty Towers,” she recalled.
Katrina’s ability to juggle raising four children, growing and producing their own food, making soap and working is enough to send anyone into a dizzy tailspin.
“It’s fun. It’s a lot of work but you have more control over your food. It reduces waste and is kinder to the environment,” she explained of her reasons for choosing a self-sufficient lifestyle.
“It was great for the kids growing up to know where the food came from and the work involved in producing food.
“We have learnt a lot over the years and now it’s interesting seeing others set up and try to do it.”
Her current passion is bottling meals and preserving food.
Utilising her degrees in science and naturopathy, she has taught herself to preserve food in shelf-stable ways with meals in a jar ready to heat up.
“When there is a power outage we have food on hand. It makes life a lot easier and preserving our harvest, so things don’t go to waste and we don’t have to work as hard and making the most of what we have got,” she said.
Narrowing down what they grow and what we like to eat has also helped reduce wasted time and wasted food.
She has blog on Substack called the Apple and Radish Chronicles providing tutorials and creative projects.
“I have to do something creative otherwise I go a bit crazy,” she laughed.
