The meter says 0.0. Here's what's underneath it. Carbs & veg — 0.0. The potatoes are in the ground and growing. Growing isn't stored. Until they come up and go into the cellar, this row is honestly zero, and it's the row that sets the whole headline. Six months short. Protein — 0.3. A couple of kilos. Two fish traps bought (€130), one already here, and ammunition. Both of those are a bet on future protein, not protein. Eggs — 2.2. Five hens and a rooster, €150. Three or four eggs a day. Nine chicks in from the incubator. This is the only purchase on the list that reproduces itself, which is why it's the only row that started above zero without help. Fat — 0.0. Nothing. No stored fat of any kind. This is the row I've thought least about and I suspect that shows. Berries & mushrooms — 2.5. One hour in the forest, two people, 15 kilos, into the freezer. The most efficient hour of work on this list by a wide margin, and it needed no money and no skill. Firewood — 4.2. Seven cubic metres were already here when we arrived. That's inherited, not earned. The trap: wood needs about 12 months to dry. So anything I cut now is for next winter, and I'll probably have to buy some this year to cover the gap. This row is where being late costs you a full year. The till: €5,226 left of €6,000. Where €799 went — hens and rooster €150, incubator, wire for the coop (predators here will take the flock), two fish traps €130, a new chainsaw €300 because the 35-year-old one finally died and I couldn't fix it. That's €680 of kit — things that stay and produce rather than get eaten. Then €119 on ammunition, which isn't food yet but is meant to become meat. The old broken chainsaw sold, and that goes back into the till. Where the €6,000 comes from: roughly €1,000 a month at the shop, six months. Finland is expensive. It isn't a fund somebody handed me. It's the bill we're trying not to pay. What I notice looking at it: four of six rows are critical, the two that aren't are the two that came free — a forest and somebody else's woodpile. Nothing I've built is on the board yet.

I spent twenty years running companies where somebody else decided what a good year looked like. I was good at it. I never once picked the thing I was being measured against. So I picked one. Six rows — carbs and veg, protein, eggs, fat, berries and mushrooms, firewood. Each measured in months of winter it covers. Six months means self-sufficient. The headline number is the weakest row, not the average, because a cellar is only as good as the thing it runs out of first. As of 25 July, that number is 0.0. Carbs and veg are 6.0 months short. Firewood is the only row not marked critical, and it's at 4.2. Spent so far: €680 on kit, €119 on food. The question is whether two people can get from there to a repeatable six months in one year — for roughly the €6,000 that six months of winter food would have cost us anyway. Not living cheaply for a winter. Paying a bill once instead of every year forever. I don't know if it works. It goes backwards more weeks than I'd like. This room is where the meter gets posted every week, including the bad weeks, and where you get to tell me the plan is wrong. I'd rather hear it here than find out in March with an empty cellar. No course, no system. I'm not ahead of you. I'm at 0.0. Introduce yourself — two lines: 1. Where are you right now? 2. What's your three days? The thing you'd run out of first if the supply stopped — food, money, heat, whatever it is for you. Mine was three days of food and an impressive quantity of coffee. I read all of them.