Barter Networks: Deal or No Deal?

I received a $100 coupon the other day to cover the cost for our home-based business (family entertainment) to join the Hometown Barter Network in our area. Now, we rural homesteaders and small producers in several counties here in the southern Appalachians have been practicing informal bartering since forever, negotiating our trades of goods and services for other goods and services without any formalized valuation system. Meaning that what a person who has something I need will take from me in “fair trade” is something we work out for ourselves the old-fashioned way.

This has worked well on many occasions, and we’ve even been known to make good use of the area’s Freecycle network and even Craigslist freebies when we can. But things come and go on those lists and I still haven’t been able to obtain the metal fence poles I need to properly repair bear damage to the garden fence done two years ago.

Continue reading »

Curses! (Morel Season) Foiled Again!

See those lovely, begging-to-be-harvested morel ‘shrooms in the photo? We eagerly await the first part of April every year here in the wilds of western North Carolina, just for these tasty beauties. But just as Morel Hunting Weekend was called, when dedicated mushroom hunters and able chefs were to converge on the homestead for the annual harvest…

…this happened. Yep. Yet another spring fire, scheduled at exactly the wrong time. Took me by surprise this year, as we’d been getting plenty of rain – it had rained at least an inch just the night before. But the odd spring ritual of train engineers riding the brakes uphill once again sent molten metal (from the brakes) flying into the tinder-dry old kudzu vines and the leaf-fall took off.

Now, the forest loves this kind of fire. It’s too wet to get burning really good, isn’t going to take any trees more than a few years old. It’ll just add some ash to the forest loam just before the underbrush and kudzu gets going, in another month everything will be so thickly green you won’t even be able to tell there was a fire. But alas, we got no morels this year.

Morels are wonderful freshly cooked, but they also dry nicely for use in gourmet dishes later on. But with none to feast on over the weekend of April 9-10 this year due to the fire, we had to make due with some portobellos. These actually worked well as the main ingredient, rubbed with sesame oil and grilled, but if you eat meat this same dish made with morels sliced lengthwise, or thinly sliced portobellos would work as well.

As the portobellos were grilled, in the grill-plate on the second level we put some chunky-cut red onions, green and yellow bell peppers and fresh strawberries, some fresh basil and sage and a short shake of good chili powder, all drizzled with sesame oil and tossed. To this you’d add the morels if you were lucky enough to have any. I know this sounds weird – who in their right mind would grill strawberries? But when it all gets grilled soft and is well tossed, this ‘salsa’ (chutney?) is unbelievably delicious spooned thickly onto the grilled portobellos, or it would be spectacular on lamb or slices of good roast beast if you’re into such things.

For a side we had grilled halved brussels sprouts tossed in olive oil and cracked pepper tossed with fresh raw peas from the garden, over a bed of noodles. I admit I got ‘extra’ strawberry salsa and mixed it in too…

So we got our gourmet meal out of the deal even though the fire got this year’s morels. Sigh. The goldens will be up soon, so all is not lost. Besides, the red kale is almost ready to start picking, beets, salad greens and bunching onions are up, potatoes are in, and the tomato seedlings are up in the window. I figure if I just keep digging, there will be food enough this year.

Earth Day 2011 – What’s Your Project?

Earth Day 2011 is officially marked for Friday, April 22. There are events scheduled all over the place, through the Earth Dar organization and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

In my region – the Southeast – there are a host of events planned in Alabama, Florida, Kentucky and elsewhere, but in my own neighborhood [North Carolina} the closest event takes place downtown Asheville in conjunction with the WMCA, where grandson works. The focus will be healthy living (and a lot of fun and games. And music!). I encourage readers to check on events in their area, or renew their efforts to ‘green’ the planet within their own circles by sponsoring community gardens or joining a CSA or helping populate a local tailgate farmer’s market.

While I need to go ahead and plant potatoes and corn this week despite the continuing plume of errant radiation still coming from the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan, today I’d like to talk about resources for community gardens. There are often grants available from community funds, corporate set-asides and governmental agencies that can help establish community gardens. For homesteaders offering or hoping to offer CSA memberships or Agritourism adventures, it can be a great promotional asset to be part of such a project in your local town, especially in conjunction with your homesteading neighbors.

Continue reading »

Okay, Had to Plant Anyway

Despite what my trusty Geiger counter tells me about the presence of radioactive isotopes in my air, water and ground, it’s in the 80s here in the mountains this week and things really must be planted. After several days of steady rain when levels were up around 10 mcrem/hr here on the mountain, we got a break yesterday when it fell back to entirely undetectable. Today it’s up again to an average of 5 mcrem/hr, which I’m guessing is going to be our new ‘normal’ background. At least until Fukushima stops dumping, and that may take months.

So I’ve turned some beds, busted up the clods, and scattered seed for salad greens and bunching onions. I figure what we’re getting here of airborne radiation is primarily iodine-131, which has been showing up in milk in various states closer to Japan than mine. We can live without fresh milk, dry works just as well for baking and cooking, was processed long enough ago to be free of radioactivity. Butter is a bit more worrisome because we go through a lot of it here on the ‘stead, cheese less so due to the fact that it tends to get aged pretty well. After 4-6 weeks even relatively high levels of iodine will decay away, since its half-life is 8 days. Nothing that I can plant right now would have detectable levels left of iodine by the time it’s ready to eat, so I feel pretty good about that too. Cesium is a bigger problem (134 with a half-life of 2 years and 137 half-life at 30 years), but that will be much more of an issue at and near Japan as well as in seafood and seaweed. What will make it here won’t be more than after a Chinese bomb test.

Continue reading »

Value-Added Agriculture

…teaching farmers to be business CEOs

In these times of Wall Street collapses, banking bankruptcies, massive unemployment, homelessness and increasing deprivation, we in the rural sector are already living in Great Depression-II even as the city folk and DC denizens keep talking about mere recession. We have a new President who has promised “hope” to Americans, and who appointed a Monsanto apologist to be Secretary of Agriculture, thereby slapping every struggling small farmer and ardent homesteader in the face.

Hope is all very nice in a made-for-TV movie or light novel, but we all know you can’t eat it, live in it, pay your doctor with it or drive it to a day-job. We’re going to need more than hope and slaps in the face to get through all this piper-paying. And despite Obama’s lousy choice for SecAg, there are some people in DC who do seem to understand that while cities are where the bread and circuses are distracting the population from their deprivations, if we allow the rural backbone to disintegrate people won’t just be deprived. They’ll be starving to death.

Many of us modern homesteaders came to our lifelong labors of love from those cities and megaburbs, once living large with boom economy jobs and the whole rat race. Then gave it all up very much on purpose so we could build new lives for ourselves and our families that really mean something. Those of us with college degrees (some quite advanced), may have even taken a few courses in basic business management and/or economics and/or marketing to help us get those city jobs we left behind when we moved to the hinterlands where the farmers live.

Continue reading »

Disconcerting: Tom Vilsack at USDA

As President-Elect Barack Obama has been very busy selecting key cabinet people and meeting with House and Senate leadership to ensure everyone’s ready on January 20th to begin implementing the Changes he promised, some of us out here on the active lifestyle progressive fringe are not happy with a few of the important choices.

By appointing Iowa Governor Tom Vilsack to head the USDA (Department of Agriculture), committed homesteaders, small landholders and organic farmers like me now have to be concerned that efforts by our own government to make us extinct may NOT change when the leadership in DC changes hands.

In the diary Tom “I Heart Monsanto” Vilsack, This One’s For You, kossack OrangeClouds115 lists everything that’s wrong with GMOs and Monsanto Corporation’s tireless efforts to own and control every aspect of agricultural production in the world. Note I said “world,” because it’s not just Big Corn Country like Iowa and Nebraska and Indiana that Monsanto seeks to own with its grotesque genetically-altered cultivars. It’s everyone’s ability to obtain seed and farm the land, from the US to Canada and South America, Africa, Europe and Asia as well as Australia. They want it all, they don’t need it all, and right here in Homesteading-USA we are the front and foremost line against this obscenity.

Continue reading »

The Every-Six-Month Soap Job

Awhile back I wrote about making your own soaps, and how much fun that can be even though it’s a lot of work. Besides, who are we dedicated homesteaders if we’re not people who actually enjoy working around our homesteads and doing for ourselves? It’s officially late October now, which means I’ve got a different soap job to do at my homestead.

I do this soap job every spring and fall, mostly just because I can. Besides, it saves my hard-strapped household of four adult-sized humans about $120 every six months on a single necessary household item, even after the not too high costs of ingredients and processing. Since some of the ingredients are also used to make bathroom and kitchen scouring powders, good ant and mouse repellants, and insect sting/burn/rash treatment, I figure the savings to the homestead overall for a year is pretty close to $300.00. That’s nothing to sneeze at, even though my labor is donated free!

This soap job is all about getting our clothes clean. Yes, I do way too much laundry – I still think my daughter and grandson pull clothes out of the drawers or off the shelves and toss them into the dirty clothes hamper if it’s not what they want to wear today instead of refolding and putting them back where they belong. They were gone out of state all of August and September and I didn’t wash more than three loads a week for just hubby and I. But I can’t seem to catch them at it, so I just do the washing (and the drying, and the folding, and the putting away…). It’s a dirty job, but somebody’s got to do it!

Continue reading »

Preparing for Winter

After the hard rains of leftover hurricane Fay flooded the basement and caused hubby and I to have to sleep on the living room floor on a fouton (and we’re still there, since it’s just us for a few more weeks), we got our first real cold front yesterday. Nights are down into the 50s and scheduled to stay there for at least a week, reminding us that it’s now time to think about winter heat.

So in between harvesting concords and muscodines, I’ve prepared the stove pipe cleaning mechanism. No, it’s not a nice English chimney sweep brush, it’s an old holey towel tied around other old rags and a large round river rock, onto which I tie a long piece of rope. We get up on the roof and remove the chimney hood, then drop this thing into the pipe so it will scrape down any accumulated soot. Which falls into the stove in the basement. The pipe runs straight up through the main floor and loft, so there are no bends and kinks. This is good if you’re heating with wood, as bends tend to accumulate more creosote and are difficult to clean. The tall pipe is the “central” part of our central heating system, giving off a lot of heat when it’s cold and making the single wood stove very efficient.

Continue reading »

Feeding The Hungry – Part 3

The Rural “Shares” Project

At last, we come to our current hunger project, begun some years ago and still going quite strong. It’s not something governmental or bureaucratic, it’s not something designed to guard food against anyone deigned to be “undeserving,” and it gets a lot of help here and there from community groups. All without publicity, without bragging, without self-importance, without insults to the hungry, without too much time and trouble by anyone. It’s just a project people here know about and many of them contribute to in their own quiet ways – a bit like stashing bags of food (then also clothes and toys and blankets) behind the dumpsters in a sneaky sort of way so the Dumpster People were taken care of and nobody talked about it at all. It just happened, because…

“This Is America. No One Should Go Hungry.”

We call it “Shares.” Because sharing is really what it’s all about. Our personal end of it only works in growing/harvest season, the off-season stuff is handled by actual community groups (Chamber, Ruritan and a few church-lady groups), but still quite informally. They took that over all on their own, and I’m just fine with that. Heck, I never told them not to make it formal, they figured that out on their own too. They just wanted to keep it going through the winter and spring, so did.

The way it was conceived to work was to simply enlist the aid of the people in our area who always grow a nice veggie garden in their ample yards. Here along the slow end of the Blue Ridge it seems like everybody gardens, some more than others, in or outside of town.

At first I approached my immediate neighbors, nice folks who live this far out in the woods as I do on purpose. The leave us alone, but are always on hand in emergencies (blizzards, forest fires), and not stingy on good advice about what to do for apple blight, what’s eating the grape vines, the best heirloom tomato seeds, etc., etc. After the county locked up the dumpsters I approached 4 neighbors the following spring and asked if they’d add a row to their normal garden, seed it with any extra seed they had after planting their usual rows, and donate the produce to my “shares” project.

I told them I’d collect the food, bag or box it, and get it to those I knew in town (at that little grocery store) who could get it out to poor families. I wasn’t really surprised when they enthusiastically said ‘yes!’ but I was quite encouraged that this might work. The really amazing part is that I didn’t actually have to do the organizational work at all, even in the first year! Before spring was over those neighbors had convinced more neighbors, who convinced more neighbors, who got the word out in town, which started the little old church-ladies going, which got the Chamber involved, and the extension service jumped right in with both feet and started donating seeds – just pick ‘em up, free to all. It sort of just made so much sense that it took on a life of its own.
Continue reading »

Feeding The Hungry – Part 2

Some Innovative Hunger Projects

Welcome to Part 2 of this series on feeding the hungry in your neighborhood. Before I get into the current homestead project, my family has been involved in some rather innovative hunger projects over the years in a number of places, both urban and rural, local as well as international in scope. We’ve found that while it’s nice to volunteer once or twice a year at the local soup kitchen or deliver Meals on Wheels to homebound and elderly folks in your town or city, there are things you can be doing on a constant basis that don’t require a lot of paper-pushing, government approval or desperate efforts to convince the hungry to swallow their pride.

And that last issue is one that homesteaders should understand better than most. There is a certain amount of shame attached to poverty and hunger in our society, so it’s a sure bet that formal programs are not going to reach all the people who are actually going hungry during any given week of the year. We’ve found that an individual approach, and an attitude of joyful sharing will reach more people than any amount of scary bureaucracy can. It’s just crazy how hunger programs can get so bogged down in trying to make sure nobody who might be able to afford food doesn’t ever get a bite of free food. THAT seems positively designed to thwart good efforts and leave way too many people out in the cold. Our current project manages to get around this pretty well by simply NOT means-testing anybody who comes for food. They wouldn’t be there if they didn’t need the food, so who the hell cares? But more on that in Part 3.

First, our background is that we had become involved in a grant-funded hunger project out of Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1983 called “The Whole World Family Supper.” We were the promo team and designed the brochures, wrote the letters, maintained the contact lists, etc. for the project. It didn’t get that far before the grant ran out (and we moved away), but my favorite aspect was that it chose a day – Thanksgiving – and enlisted missions/NGOs in many countries and depressed areas of the US to sponsor a giant pot-luck get-together on that day, the price of admission being a dish for the meal and at least two “guests” who could not afford to feast.

When we moved from Tulsa we located in northeastern Florida. There we became fast friends with a retired Air Force officer who maintained a boatyard in Saint Augustine. He loved the family supper idea so much that he became official host for the Thanksgiving pot-luck every year, setting up sawhorse and plywood tables end-to-end the entire length of the roofed dry-dock shelter (which made the spread at least 100 feet long). He also pit-roasted three huge turkeys and two ample hams every year, which were donated from two local grocery stores and the owners of the boatyard. The crowd was always colorful and culturally diverse, the smorgasbord piled with vegan dishes, every kind of vegetable dish you can imagine, more pounds of mashed potatoes and yams than should be allowed by law, veggie and turkey gravy in two-quart pitchers (constantly refilled), rolls and homemade bread loaves by the dozen, cranberry sauce and fruit dishes by the bushel, one 4×8 tabletop completely full of piled pies of every variety, and enough tea, lemonade and fruit juice to quench an army’s thirst! Again, price of admission was at least one dish of food and at least 2 people who otherwise would not eat a feast on Thanksgiving. There were often well over a hundred people present, and the feast lasted the whole weekend (lots of campers in the yard).

Thus for us, getting good food into hungry people’s mouths is sort of a “personal mission.” This is America, there’s just no excuse for chronic hunger. Thus shortly after we moved to the mountain I was appalled to discover one day while taking the trash to the county dumpsters that in this rural area where almost everybody’s got a garden going and there are always trucks full of produce in summer in parking lots or by the side of the road, there were whole families of “Dumpster People.”
Continue reading »