More advice, this time from Donna Williams in the American Chronicle.
Even in California, where people rarely use public transport let alone grow their own food, the governor announced CA officially drought effected. And that means water restrictions like we have here in Australia. In time anything outdoors you won´t be able to water. So get the bins and tubs now, catch the water now, as and when you can use it for plants.
Get or make stepping shelves and place them along your back fence. Cover them in flower pots and fill with organic soil enriched by the organic waste you now have (mulch it in the back garden). Seriously, food has gone up 20% here the last month, rice has doubled.
Petrol is around $6.95 a gallon here in Australia (June 2008) and in the UK already $10.45 a gallon… yes all you Americans who are lobbying your government to reduce your small $4.00 a gallon fuel cost you imagine will cripple your economy… thanks to wars like Iraq we are all in fact paying a far higher price than any of you. The US has among the world´s cheapest fuel and if the American government foolishly subsidised it´s fuel even further you´d never prepare for the end of oil (the independent experts relay that we´ve already reached peak oil), you´ll never build the public transport infrastructures which could save you, and in the end a government bankrupted by subsidising fuel will only have to throw its hands up sooner or later and your leap in price would be an even bigger catastrophe when you are paying what the rest of us do.
Good point. Americans are upset at their oil prices, but they are still cheaper than elsewhere – and Americans are still the most wasteful society.
High fuel means food will rocket in price. You CAN grow food in your garden, safely, with good nutrition, even later feed the scraps to a couple of chickens. Those who have no garden, consider growing on your window sills, balconies, flat roofs. Even if you only grow herbs, you would have something to barter with others growing other things.
But a good growing food garden takes 2 years to really get established. Your own urine is one of the greatest nitrogen rich fertilisers but water it down 10-1 so you don´t burn the plants and use it within 24 hours or you´ll overdo it on the ammonia. Unless you´re a vegetarian, don´t put faeces on your plants unless you want to get seriously ill.
We are endeavouring to publish plenty of helpful information about growing etc here. If you compost it, humanure is perfectly safe – but it must be composted.
Now is the time but water storage is key. Do you have hard rubbish curbside collections? People putting out plastic buckets, containers, pots etc for rubbish? Grab them, grab all you can. Plastic pots are now $1.50 each but people remember them as useless. When we have to grow our own food to subsidise shopping costs and the fuel to get there, those who threw all these pots and tubs out will kick themselves. If you see them out in the rubbish, collect them, seriously. They will pay you back.
Collect bottles and jars too and calico and cloth bags and good quality lidded tins. Plastic containers will become very expensive (they´re made from petrol) and those jars and bottles will help you store your own food when out of season, the cloth bags will help you carry shopping and wrap food and the tins will help you store larger foods.
All the things that people take for granted, and throw away, will become more expensive and scarce. Hoarding other people’s rubbish is good sense.
Are you prepared? Without income what are your housing plans? How will you make most use of the accommodation and skills you have? What do you have to barter? Food will be the new gold.
Already word is leaking that the overuse of soil, fast growth commercial fertilisers (and who knows re GM crops) our food has 75% less of the minerals and nutrients of the same foods grown in the 60s and 70s. Without these essential minerals, we can´t metabolise many of the vitamins in our food… they are just wasted. That means even if the starch, fat and protein levels are high, a mass of starving brains. Could this add to the burden of those who inherited tendencies toward gut, immune and metabolic disorders?
Today we have 1 in 150 children on the autism spectrum (2008), a percentage of which have these health issues (note, there are also those with autism who don´t have significant health issues). And then our societies have never been so polluted, fueled largely by our own consumer greed driving manufacturers to pour formaldehyde, lead, mercury and fluoride into our waterways, the same one´s which feed the foods we eat. Fluoride is sold commercially as a rat poison. It strips the lining of the gut. Yet we´ve bought propaganda that it´s ok to stick it in our mouths daily on the basis that it can harden tooth enamel. Sure, minimally, but at what cost if we swallow it? An epidemic of gut disorders? Vulnerable groups with metabolic disorders whose already vulnerable detox functions are overwhelmed and end up brain starved and over run by stored toxins? Twas greed which did it guv…ours.
We can change these things, if we understand them, if we know we are not pawns in this, we are active participants and we can choose what we support, what we buy, how we adapt. We are not powerless.
Get to know your neighbours. If you can work with them, and share resources, great. If not, consider moving while you still can.
Stop listening to the lies of corporate industrial civilisation. If you have food and shelter today appreciate it. Forget greed and selfishness. Sustainable local living is really not easy on your own, the days of people not knowing their neighbours are numbered.
