Part One:
Part Two:
Plants for a future website and database of edible and medicinal plants. Very useful.
gardening
independence days challenge
What are you doing towards making yourself food independent?
I challenge myself and all of you to work on creating food Independence Days this year – that all of us try to do one thing every day to create Food Independence. That means in each day or week, we would try to:
1. Plant something. Obviously, those of us who live in the Northern Hemisphere and having spring are doing this anyway. But the idea that you should plant all week and all year is a good reminder to those of us who sometimes don’t get our fall gardens or our succession plantings done regularly. Remember, that beet you harvested left a space – maybe for the next one to get bigger, but maybe for a bit of arugula or a fall crop of peas, or a cover crop to enrich the soil. Independence is the bounty of a single seed that creates an abundance of zucchini, and enough seeds to plant your own garden and your neighbor’s.
2. Harvest something. From the very first nettles and dandelions to the last leeks and parsnips I drag out of the frozen ground, harvest something from the garden or the wild every day you can. I can’t think of a better way to be aware of the bounty around you to realize that there’s something – even if it is dandelions for tea or wild garlic for a salad – to be had every single day. Independence is really appreciating and using the bounty that we have.
3. Preserve something. Sometimes this will be a big project, but it doesn’t have to be. It doesn’t take long to slice a couple of tomatoes and set them on a screen in the sun, or to hang up a bunch of sage for winter. And it adds up fast. The time you spend now is time you don’t have to spend hauling to the store and cooking later. Independence is eating our own, and cutting the ties we have to agribusiness.
4. Prep something. Hit a yard sale and pick up an extra blanket. Purchase some extra legumes and oatmeal. Sort out and inventory your pantry. Make a list of tools you need. Find a way to give what you don’t need to someone who does. Fix your bike. Fill that old soda bottle with water with a couple of drops of bleach in it. Plan for next year’s edible landscaping. Make back-road directions to your place and send it to family in case they ever need to come to you – or make ‘em for yourself for where you might have to go. Clean, mend, declutter, learn a new skill. Independence is being ready for whatever comes.
5. Cook something. Try and new recipe, or an old one with a new ingredient. Sometimes it is hard to know what to do with all that stuff you are growing or making. So experiment now. Can you make a whole meal in your solar oven? How are stir-fried pea shoots? Stuffed squash blossoms? Wild morels in pasta? Independence is being able to eat and enjoy what is given to us.
6. Manage your reserves. Check those apples and take out the ones starting to go bad and make sauce with it. Label those cans. Clean out the freezer. Ration the pickles, so you’ll have enough to last to next season. Use up those lentils before you take the next ones out of the bag. Find some use for that can of whatever it is that’s been in the pantry forever. Sort out what you can donate, and give it to the food pantry. Make sure the squash are holding out. Independence means not wasting the bounty we have.
7. Work on local food systems. This could be as simple as buying something you don’t grow or make from a local grower, or finding a new local source. It could be as complex as starting a coop or a farmer’s market, creating a CSA or a bulk store. You might give seeds or plants or divisions to a neighbor, or solicit donations for your food pantry. Maybe you’ll start a guerilla garden or help a homeschool coop incubate some chicks. Maybe you’ll invite people over to your garden, or your neighbors in for a homegrown meal, or sing the praises of your local CSA. Maybe you can get your town to plant fruit or nut producing street trees or get a manual water pump or a garden put in at your local school. Whatever it is, our Independence days come when our neighbors and the people we love are food secure too.
I’m not suggesting you should do all these things on any day (heck that’ s impossible) – but every day try and do one of them – or every week, or every weekend, if that’s what your schedule allows. It takes practice to live and grow and eat this way – so let’s do it now while we’ve got the time and energy and each other for support.
I’m going to try to do this, starting now, and running all year long. If you sign up in the comments section, I’ll try and set up a cool sidebar thingie, like all the funky challengers do. We’ll do weekly updates, and I want to hear how you are doing too! Who’s in for in Independence Days?
This is a great idea set up by Sharon Astyk. The majority of ‘civilised’ people have little connection to the land, their food, the skills required to survive without our industrial supermarket foods. As oil gets scarcer and more expensive, pushing up the price of foodstuffs more of us will need to learn all this stuff – and as we have said many times, a lifestyle connected to the soil is far healthier, happier and sustainable than the world the corporate heirarchies would have us live.
What have you done today towards food independence?
what organic homesteading is all about
An article by Gene Logsdon (originally written in 1973).
I’m sure if I had to cultivate gardens ten hours a day every day for someone else, I’d think of it as work. But the beauty of the organic homestead is that “work” is self-willed, not commanded from on high or dictated by economic necessity. “Work” becomes creative, individualistic, done out of love, not someone else’s sense of duty.
But beyond the activities that might be termed play-work or work-play, the successful homestead provides opportunity for pursuits of a purely recreational nature. If your home schedule does not provide time for simple reverie in a fence corner, you’ve failed somewhere. If a hammock—well-used—is not among the accessories of your homestead, you’re doing something wrong.
Surely this is a far far better way to live? To embrace life with open arms, to work for yourself doing something that you love so much it could barely be called work. To have time for joy, peace, friends, family…. taking each day as it comes, and doing what you wish, when you wish (but obviously mindful of the jobs required to produce the food you need). The changes to society that climate change and peak oil are forcing could actually allow us to live our lives more fully. As Richard Heinberg has said, it is up to us how the future plays out. Wouldn’t it be fantastic if huge numbers of people returned to homesteading lifestyles, of their own volition, making use of civilisations infrastructure as it powers down to create a new society, where people have time for tranquility.
But the organic homestead means something deeper than either the nobility of work or the pleasantness of leisure. What it must provide—if the homestead is to have true success—is a shrine to tranquility, an island of calm sanity to which you can retreat each day from the hectic outside world.
And what is tranquility?
Most visitors to our home become alarmed when we proudly point out a huge gray hornets’ nest hanging from the porch ceiling uncomfortably close to the entrance to the house. But when my sister visited us (she’s a country woman who knows a thing or two about hornets and such like), she made a different observation, which I consider the best compliment I’ve ever received. “You must have a peaceful environment around your home,” she mused, staring at the nest, “or those hornets wouldn’t have built a nest on your porch. They know there is not much fear or strife here.”
Tranquility – sadly lacking in todays busy civilised society. Often it is hard to hear yourself think, or to be able to give yourself time out. A world without the incessant sound of engines would indeed be an improvement. This unfolding ‘crisis’ is truly an opportunity to slow down and live at natures pace.
A culture built on fear and violence cannot acquire a true morality. Without peace with nature, there can be no tranquility among human beings. Men who can for economic gain bombard a forest or a field with a poison that can indiscriminently kill the insect life therein can easily be brainwashed into believing there is a necessity to drop bombs on other people. The man who will shoot wild animals for no reason other than to prove his skill at aiming a gun can readily be trained to shoot other people. The man who brags that he has worn out three farms in his lifetime is brother to the man who brags he has worn out three women in his lifetime.
This is why it becomes important to the organic homesteader what kind of fertilizer he uses on his beans. This is why he will risk ridicule of the worldly wise to ask: “What else will your new product do besides make profits for everyone?”
mr. potato heads off food crisis
Another inspiring article about food and the wonders of hemp.
The latest “crisis” spreading throughout the world, the food crisis, may actually backfire on the giant capitalists reaping great profits from all they have sown without mercy for nearly a century. The US food crisis is in part being experienced because during the past 80 years, our government slowly formed partnerships with huge, profit-seeking corporations. Local food production was taken away from small family farmers who could not compete with big industry. The critical responsibility of providing food for the masses then fell into the profit-seeking hands of conglomerates that were heavily armed with chemicals, plastics, pesticides, fossil fuels, and topsoil-destroying machinery.
Like a microcosm of what would eventually occur throughout most of the world, people in the US became increasingly dependent upon the agricultural, chemical, and petroleum industries for the production and delivery of “food.” Diets that were once healthy became unnatural and based largely upon processed, powdered, light-weight, (easily shipped and stored) grains instead of locally grown, nutrient-dense, fresh organic vegetables and fruits. This dependency began in earnest around the 1930s, the years referred to by some as “the Dirty Thirties.” Those were years when corporate profits at all costs seemed to take precedence and business became more important than people.
Within this civilisation the needs of the few at the top of the heirarchy have always taken precedence over the well being of the masses, whose needs take precedence over ‘heathens’, nature and slaves.
The grain foods created by synthetic practices, are clearly not natural. After foods are processed with pesticides, chemicals, plastics and fossil fuels, they become, in part, synthetic, many with additives to hide or enhance taste or appearance and to “extend shelf life.” Throughout these years of dependency on “agro-giants,” the health of Americans has steadily declined until we have become the top consumers of pharmaceuticals on earth. We who live in this plastic, synthetic kingdom that was born in the 1930s are now a nation completely dependent not only upon synthetic foods, but are now seeking relief from our toxic symptoms via expensive, synthetic drugs.
With the food supply lying in the hands of a few corporations, manipulation and price gouging have apparently been made easy, but these tactics would have little impact on any of us if we began independently growing our food locally as it should be grown. According to the Washington Post, global food prices rose 83% during the last three years, partly due to the rising costs of fuel for shipping. We have paid the price in many ways, poisoning ourselves with synthetic chemicals, then waiting unknown days or weeks while products are shipped over the hemispheres, or stored indefinitely thus losing more nutrients with each passing moment. This food crisis could turn out to be a godsend for the world if the situation is addressed individually and quickly.
For those of us who have grown tired (sick and tired) of supporting the pseudo and synthetic food industry, there is a simple way out of this giant mess. Anyone who has access to a little dirt can reclaim the responsibility of growing at least a portion of our foods right in our own yards, and we can begin today and start out very simply.
If people reduce their reliance on the corporate food market they reduce their reliance on the monetary system and so those at the top make less profits from us and have less power over us.
The potato has more potassium than a banana, and comes in a delicious rainbow of different colors and types, offering a wide variety of nutrients from a natural, fresh, whole and very satisfying food. It now appears that the lowly spud, long ignored or completely dismissed as a joke or a mere starch bomb, is far superior in nutrients to the cheap powdered grains, chemicals, and plastics found in many industrialized breads, cereals, pastas and other processed foods that form the sad bulk of Americans’ diet at this time. In addition, while grain foods tend to create an extremely high acid pH residue in the human body, it appears that potatoes do not.
It generally makes sense if you are trying to grow your own food to look at altering your diet too. Root crops such as beetroots are fantastic health-giving and liver-cleansing foods. At least 50% of your diet should be raw, salad crops are very easy to grow, and many herbs and salad veg grows wild.
The importance of taking our food back and establishing organic gardening practices can perhaps best be observed by noting two other microcosms in our world that are right now showing us again extraordinary examples of cause and effect, as though another profound message is desperately being offered to us if we would only stop and notice. As though to make this message as clear as possible, these two opposing microcosms are a mere 50 miles from one another. They are Haiti, and Cuba.
Find out about both countries. They are examples of ‘how to’ and ‘how not to’. Cuba isnt perfect, but it is a great example of grassroots action to combat a difficult situation (similar to what we are all now or soon facing).
For those of us throughout the world who are tired of paying the price for, and helping fuel the synthetic kingdom, it is time for each of us to arm ourselves with potatoes and join together in a global revolution that will remove food production from the synthetic kingdom and return it locally to the green kingdom and to the people who are born with an inalienable right to have decent food. Think of Cuba. Pray for Haiti. Join the revolution.
building raised beds
Ok, its not specifically about bringing down civilisation, or even news about what our industrial society is doing to the planet. But, the more people who learn how to grow their own food, reducing their reliance on capitalism, the better. We plan to publish and create links to a wide variety of ‘how to’ information – with out own comments and thoughts.
There is no need to secure the corners, as Dave says. And no need to use that good quality, new timber. We simply use old timber, found on building sites, junk heaps etc and we hammer short lengths of wood into the ground front and back of the plank, to secure it in place. This way with varying lengths of old floor boards (stuff ‘normal’ people throw away) secured to the ground with ‘pegs’ you can create all kinds of interestingly shaped beds, around trees, paths and walkways. Far more interesting and natural than all those straight lines. Once the beds are built you never again dig or walk on them, just simply add more compost or mulch on top, around any perennials in place. Some vegetables can be seeded straight into the beds, while others are started in trays, and planted out in the beds later.
As Dave says you dont need much space to grow food for a family, but why not grow extra and sell, swap or barter with your neighbours? Go on, have a go – the rest of the world cant keep growing your food while you work for a meaningless job, or watch someone elses life on television. And there is no greater joy than eating a meal made up of things that you have watched grow in your garden!
