Most homesteaders know as well as anyone that the current state of the US economy isn’t very good. Are probably aware enough to see that it’s not getting better any time soon, either. Hopefully the homesteader has been wise enough to purchase his/her chunk of land far enough away from the ‘boom’ cities and regions that they got a good deal on it, as it probably represents the only real assets that family has.

Of course, there are the other assets related. The house and outbuildings, the farm and garden equipment and tools, the vehicles that get the homesteader to markets or trade-meets, auctions, etc., and the food (and energy) supplied by the property and proper investments in the property. Outside of actual transportation costs, the wise homesteader should weather the recession and coming depression better than most stuck-in-the-city folks. Our homesteads aren’t rollover investments – they’re our HOMES and security, even in hard times. Especially in hard times.

But there are some issues to be considered as the retail marketplace takes as hard of hits as the banking sector is taking. If there’s a shopping mall within 20 miles of your homestead, it’s likely to be an empty eyesore before the end of the year as retail outlets fall. So far this year the standard mall shops that have filed for bankruptcy include Linens n Things, Sharper Image, Mervyn’s (in California), Shoe Pavillion, …and ever increasing numbers of less universal retail shops.

Then there are the “downsizings.” Starbucks is closing 600 shops, Foot Locker will close 140, Lane Bryant/Fashion Bug plans to close 150 outlets, Ann Talor will close 117, and Zales Jewelers is shutting down 100 outlets. Circuit City is nearing bankruptcy, and even Target is lowering expectations dramatically.

This has so far translated into the loss of roughly 100,000 retail jobs. Not the best paying jobs and usually without any benefits, but homesteaders often get such day jobs to make ends meet as they’re developing their overall self-sufficiency. We can count on the loss of at least that many more jobs before the year’s over.

Luckily for wise homesteaders, we’re not too proud (or too rich) to go ahead and bargain or barter for the things we need. I wrote not long ago about homestead tools, and getting the best you can afford, even if you buy them used. Below are some sources for further strategies making use of established means of barter, recycling, buying used, or getting free. These can prove to be very useful in getting your family through the hard times with both yourselves and your property intact.

Links:

Credit Crunch: How to Survive the Recession
15 Real Ways to Conserve (and save money!)
Living On Less: The Alternative Economies
Putting Old Clothes to New Use
Thrifting: It’s an Art Form!
Craig’s List: Great Resource or Scary Place?
The Payoff: Thrifting and Re-Selling
It’s Better Than Cheap… It’s Free!

In honor of Earth Day (April 22) and Earth Week (April 20-26), I went on over to EPA’s Earth Day Events & Volunteer Opportunities page to see what’s happening in my neck of the woods. I live in region 4, which includes the entire southeast plus Kentucky. If you’d like to pick up on some opportunities in your region, just click on the map and the list comes up.

In Atlanta the Children’s Museum is sponsoring one of the biggest regional events for kids. EPA has a character called “Mother Earth” who will distribute vegetable seeds and help children plant them in pots, and she’ll be giving away sun visors for the “SunWise Parade” through the museum. Sounds like fun, but I’ve no little kids and it’s way too far to drive.

Lots happening in Florida, but I won’t be there until Saturday – for a funeral, alas. Knoxville isn’t that far to go for their Earthfest event on Saturday, but I’ll be in Florida then. Oh, well. Looks like there’s just not much happening – at least, nothing government sponsored – in my Western North Carolina mountains. But wow! I’m looking out my window right now at the new green baby leaves on my hardwood forest, at gorgeous sprays of white-white dogwood scattered throughout, the red azaleas are in full dress around my garden bench, the tulips and cala lilies and jonquils are everywhere, wildflowers are popping up in the garden terraces where I didn’t plant them…

There are some great ideas available on the International Earth Day site, and interesting news and projects on the EarthdayNetwork website.

Hmmm. I’m guessing the best thing I could do today is sip some nice fresh mint tea while sitting on my garden bench planning all the hard work I need to do to get the place in order. It’s a perfect 72 degrees and the sun is intermittent. Happy Earth Day and Earth Week, all you hopeless nature-lovers!

Links:

Earth Day goes political and corporate
International Earth Day
EarthdayNetwork
EPA’s Earth Day Events & Volunteer Opportunities

I’ve been looking around at vacation ideas, delighted to discover a nifty partnership and grant program involving folks like the Ag department, the cooperative extension services, the park and forest services and even state and local arts councils, which they’re cleverly calling “Agritourism”. It’s really quite the innovative way to put some capital and ideas to work in the rural sector. Innovative, that is, unless you’re old enough to remember the Great Depression and FDR’s New Deal.

I know that a lot of committed homesteaders spend their vacation time working on the ‘stead instead of jaunting off to ski in Switzerland or tromping through the Amazon, but it’s really nice to take a few days off and at least get off the property for awhile. And the best part of supporting initiatives like agritourism is that it’s really, truly Green!

Even better, it’s Green without costing a bundle. It always seems kind of funny to me when things show up in my searches (this time it was “green vacations”) that simply don’t apply to anybody I know or hope to know in the idle rich jet-setter category. Ah, well. Maybe “Green” jet-setting is a new fad like bottled water – you know, the dumb things people do to look really cool without a thought to whether it’s actually cool or not. For instance…

From About.com I got a return entitled Top 10 Green Vacation Ideas. I’m advised to use the Swiss train system when I go skiing in the Alps. Check. Then a suggestion to book an eco-friendly hotel – with link to The Tides Riviera Maya Resort & Spa in Mexico. Check. The best advice is to skip the Galapagos and Amazonian rain forest even though ‘everybody’ wants to go there, because they’re “ecologically fragile.” Check. Somehow I don’t think these suggestions were meant for people like me…

So I checked a return on MSNBC that informs me ecotourism might be just as environmentally damaging as regular old everyday tourism. Once again the primary subject is how much actual travel is required to get to those “…lush national parks [in other countries] and exotic islands that attract the environmentally minded.” Odd, that. Every homesteader I’ve ever known was “environmentally minded” long before the rich and beautiful jumped on the bandwagon. Huh.

Green Living Ideas had some quite good ideas, still aimed at the jet-setters who jaunt off to the Himalayas or Machu Picchu for the weekend. Seems like my own ideas to take advantage of the clever “Art and Farm Trails” in my own state are better. We can stay at a nice small rural town B&B or even camp in a state park (all trails include at least one), go from there to a local arts and crafts festival or seafood fest, visit organic farms and wineries, pick our own apples or peaches or blueberries, take some cool lessons on the best cheap feed for free range chickens and how to best separate the cream from goat’s milk, then make cheese without using genetically engineered bacteria. Then on to ride a ferry and tour a lighthouse or two, take a hike or go fishing at the park. Sounds like a perfectly lovely week to me.

Some of my grandkids think this homestead is the perfect vacation spot. They’re right, but that doesn’t mean I’m on vacation when they’re here during the summer! The grandson who lives here doesn’t ever seem to want to go anywhere else, but I’ll bet we can talk him into it. He’s quite artistic, and one of the trails has potters’ studios and artists who will let him dig right into the clay!

At any rate, it’s good to start thinking about getting away from it all for a few days this summer if you can. And I’m thinking that by supporting the agritourism initiative in my state I’ll also get the chance to meet and exchange knowledge with other farmers and homesteaders and artists and crafters close enough to where I live to maybe share ideas and work together.

Check out some of the more innovative agritourism partnership projects at Homegrown and Handmade. Then do a search on it in your state, see what the offerings are. We can’t lose here, and I’m thinking I’ll have to do more research on some of the grants. Like one that will pay me not to mess with the mountainside of black cohosh because it’s endangered (I wasn’t messing with it anyway, so I might as well get paid!). Maybe sign up to host some tourists eager to learn how to manage ginseng and goldenseal in native forest as cash crops, how to make basalmic wine vinegar from native muscodines, or charge ‘em a buck or two to tour the culinary herb operation I’m planning to establish…

Not to mention the fact that some of those grants might just pay for the culinary herb operation too. You never know, I might someday BE an agritourist trap in the eco-tourism trade!

Links:

Ag Marketing Resource Center: Agritourism

Tennessee Agritourism Initiative

Agritourism in Kentucky

Oklahoma Agritourism

UC: Agritourism and Nature Tourism in California

NC: HomegrownHomemade

Agritourism Partnerships in Illinois

In Part I of this series on being prepared for the storms of nature and humanity that may require us to take care of ourselves and our families for days or weeks at a time, we looked at the idea of “Survival Kits” and where those should be kept so that we’re never far from them if ever we need them.

On a scale of likely types of emergencies or disasters homesteaders (and the rest of society) might face, it’s best to be prepared for the ones that would present the most significant survival challenges when planning on what to put into our survival kits. That way the lesser emergencies will seem positively trivial in comparison, and the whole family will become ‘expert’ at getting through tough times. Some examples on that scale -

• Short term local utility outages. Usually resolved within hours or a couple of days, sometimes these last weeks if storm damage to the infrastructure is severe.
• Major earthquake. These can cause extended utility (including water) outages and make it very difficult to evacuate due to road and bridge damage or earth/rock slides.
• House fire that destroys all or part of the home and contents. Definitely a “disaster,” and the one thing you’ll wish most to have saved on your way out are the family photo albums. I know this because it happened to me!
• Getting stranded in your car in a remote location. Both heat and cold can be deadly in these situations. Be prepared!
• Widespread, extended power outage. Major regional storms or a serious breakdown of the grid infrastructure could cause the power to go out for weeks or months.
• Flu pandemic. We’ve heard quite a bit about this one as Bird Flu starts crossing from fowl to humans. In this situation you’ll want to keep your family isolated so long as they’re not themselves sick with flu.
• Larger neighborhood or forest fires. These can be fast-moving and take out large swaths of property.

Some considerations on things to keep in your evacuation bag or do ahead of time just to ensure survival of things you might not be able to save if you must leave home quickly include those family photo albums I mentioned. It’s a terrible feeling to lose your family’s entire history – baby pictures, family portraits, candid snapshots of junior’s 4th birthday party, your wedding album. Such precious items can seldom be replaced. The well-prepared homesteader will have the albums in an easily accessible spot where they can be quickly grabbed and tossed into the car trunk as you’re leaving. Some people keep negatives in their safe deposit box at the bank, or in a fireproof safe in the home.

If you have a safe deposit box, do keep copies of all your important paperwork in it. Birth certificates, wills, deeds and mortgage paperwork, marriage license, vehicle titles and insurance policies. Now that home computers have become fairly indispensable for household recordkeeping and such, make backups regularly of your necessary files and put those in the safe too.

What Needs to Be In the Survival Kits?

There are some things that you’ll want to have with you at all times no matter where you go, to be on your keychain or wallet, or taking up space in your everyday purse or fanny pack. Among these will be your photo ID (usually driver’s license), your cell phone, an LED flashlight, Swiss Army knife and some sort of tweezer thing. You should also carry a basic magnetic compass, a few band-aids and a little tube of antibiotic cream. I also carry a coach’s whistle (good as an alarm system and not too big to put in the purse), a little zip lock bag with matches, a travel-size bottle of aspirin and a few bubble-pack tablets of Benedryl.

I’ve also purchased a few of those little plastic packs of rain ponchos and mylar “space blankets” and have divvied these up between the car kit and purse. My purse doubles as a back pack, so it goes with me on all hikes through the National Forest that borders our homestead.

In the car (which for us is actually a pickup truck) we keep a cell phone charger that plugs into a lighter socket and has replaceable phone jacks that fit a variety of cell phones – since we can’t seem to ever get cells for all of us at one time that all use the same jacks! Got it for not much at Radio Shack. In the glove compartment we keep twine, a roll of duct tape, a little sewing kit with small scissors, and the basic first aid kit along with a couple of space blankets still in their tiny folded and packed state and those cheap folded plastic ponchos with hoods – dayglow orange – in a zip lock bag. In the truck bed there’s a 2-gallon plastic jug of water bunjee’d in a front corner along with a couple of quarts of extra oil and a little socket wrench and tool kit in a metal box.

There are bill caps behind the seats, along with a couple of sweaters and some leather gloves plus towels and rags. A box beneath the passenger seat holds some flares and a good sized crank flashlight/radio. These things are totally cool, and never need batteries! My husband always carries his “Man-Tool” multi-purpose tool he got for Christmas and would never be without. It’s got a saw, a nice file and pretty much any other tool you can think of built right in, and fits in his pocket.

What I need to add are a metal camp-kit, some candles and sterno, and some basic survival food. Granola bars, Ramen noodles, high vitamin dried drink mix and such. There’s a deck of cards and 5 dice in my purse, so if we’re stuck we won’t get too bored. Now, I realize that what I’ve described isn’t exactly a “kit” all packed into a single container put somewhere specific in the truck. But that’s sort of the story of my life… stuff here, stuff there, all of it’s somewhere.

Everyone in the family has taken – and passed – the basic Red Cross first aid and CPR training course, but the first aid kit has that information in a little booklet too. I also keep a field guide to edible plants in the glove compartment and several similar type books in the house. Did you know that you can eat kudzu? It’s officially an “invasive species” in my region, but it’s also a high-protein legume that can be eaten raw like salad greens or steamed for side greens. Jerusalem artichokes and ground nuts grow wild in much of the country as well, and these can add some potato-like chewable substance to a little pot of greens.

Some experts insist you should carry at least a couple of hundred dollars in bills and coins in a little cash box, but I’m pretty sure those experts aren’t as cash-strapped as my family is. It would be nice, but if we’re caught out in the wilderness in a broken down vehicle, I’d be surprised to find a grocery store, restaurant, motel or ATM anywhere close by anyway.

Insect repellant is a must for most of the year in the southern Appalachian region where we live. We use whatever’s on sale at home (and I have a net shirt-hood combo thing I wear in the garden because those bugs will bite no matter how much repellant you wear). In my pack-purse I keep a little container of straight DEET repellant. Only need a tiny bit of that and you’re bug-free for hours. Yes, it will eventually cause cancer (if you live long enough), but given the diseases you can get from bugs (Lyme and West Nile and Encephalitis are big around here), I figure the trade-off is reasonable. Kind of like chlorine, which also causes cancer ‘someday’. Carrying chlorine water purification tablets as well as some patches of filter cloth in your first aid kits is a good idea – the diseases you can get from contaminated water are nasty too!

I mentioned in my last post that you should double up on prescription medicines in the most you can get at one time from the pharmacy, then divvy those up between your home and car kits. I keep medicines I take frequently (aspirin for headaches or other aches, Benedryl because I have allergies) in my purse, replenish regularly because I find I need them whenever I’m away from home.

You’ll also want some toiletries in your kits or vehicle or somewhere within reach in an emergency. Motel-size soaps, shampoos, lotions and tissues are great for this. I have a friend who travels for work as a nursing home inspector, she always takes her own toiletries but collects the freebies from where she stays. Twice a year she gifts me with a shoebox full of stuff, and I always carry a full set in my purse. The box full is right there in the bathroom for anyone to raid any time, so I haven’t bothered to put these toiletries anywhere but the evac bag.

An extra toothbrush or two or three is a good idea, along with travel size tube or two of toothpaste. In a pinch you can use baking soda, which I keep in a zip lock in the first aid kit because baking soda paste is the best treatment I’ve found for insect stings.

In the household kit (or cabinet) you’ll of course want the duct tape, tie wire and plastic sheeting Homeland Security told us will protect us from the terrorists (and we all laughed about). At least 50 feet of good nylon rope is a good idea along with those water purification tablets and filters, and a manual can opener. People tend to forget that last one, though we use a manual Swingline opener on a daily basis at this homestead. Having some canned goods on the shelf in the basement or root cellar won’t help you if you can’t open them.

Another thing most people don’t think of is a regular plug-in land line telephone. When the electricity’s out your cordless phone won’t work even if your land line is just fine. I keep one in a drawer of the treadle sewing machine that normally holds our cordless unit. When the electricity goes out I just plug it in and can call to report the outage.

Some experts advise a battery powered lantern, but the batteries don’t have a long shelf life and seldom get replaced if you don’t use the darned thing regularly. We like oil lamps, in which we burn kerosene instead of expensive scented lamp oil. I keep extra wicks in a drawer in the shed where the lamps and kerosene are stored, as they burn rather quickly if the lamps are your only light for days or weeks. The light is lovely, the lamps are pretty, and kerosene in a proper container doesn’t go bad.

I have also been collecting those nifty solar powered yard lights when they’re on sale. These can go anywhere, give some nice white light, and emit no heat at all. Keeping a roll of aluminum foil near your survival supplies is also a good idea. You can make good light reflectors out of it that will magnify the output, and of course there’s a million other things you can do with foil that you can’t do with anything else. A roll of kitchen-sized garbage bags too, these can be used for lots of things if you put your mind to it. Your homestead tool kit(s) will also be handy, and don’t forget that you need a basic tool kit in your vehicle at all times too!

In part III of this series we’ll look carefully at survival food choices for your home, vehicle and evacuation kits. There are specialty foods made just for the purpose, but who really wants to eat something processed not to go bad in your lifetime? There are choices from the supermarket or discount outlet that will serve fine, and only need to be replaced on a yearly or semi-yearly basis (rotate ‘em out).

And do check out sarahnity’s Frugal Fridays diaries over at DKos for great information. Her post Disaster Looms is particularly useful, a collection of expert advice and sensible extras that could well save your and your family’s lives one of these days!

Links:

Disaster Looms

USAToday: Survival planning starts at home

Survival Unlimited: Supplies

Emergency Essentials

CPR Savers: Emergency Kits

It took the government six days to get water to storm refugees in New Orleans while people were dying. How many people know that many sectarian relief organizations were trying hard to get into the city with trucks full of supplies, food, water and preparation trailers the moment the rain stopped? FEMA wouldn’t let them in, confiscated the supplies and sent the volunteers home. I recall wondering at the time if perhaps the government was doing this on purpose – using the opportunity of the Katrina disaster to teach us all a lesson about taking care of ourselves. Then I came to the conclusion that they were simply incompetent and just didn’t care. THAT, I strongly suspect, is the most valuable lesson any of us can learn!

My family became homesteaders late in the fall of 1992 when we moved to these beautiful mountains. Four months later we got hit hard by the “Blizzard of the Century,” which dumped 4 feet of snow and ice on us and cut the power for two solid weeks. We luckily had a portable radio and a few extra batteries, listened as reports came in daily of people dying up and down the Eastern Seaboard. Freezing in the dark mostly, or dehydrating, going without necessary medicine, unable to get to the shelters, the few open stores or even to the hospital.

Meanwhile, we had plenty of nice oil lamps, extra wicks and 2 gallons of kerosene in a container in the shed. We had plenty of wood for heat, the wood stove being our ‘central heat’ in this cabin even when the electricity’s on. Food from the fridge and freezer was stacked neatly on jury-rigged shelves on the second-story back deck, which has no outside access so animals couldn’t get to it. And of course you can cook just fine on a wood stove. I kept a big pot of beans-from dry or veggie soup on during those long days, and rigged an oven out of an old metal box without a lid, in which I baked bread and cornmeal. Had a 5 pound sack of Masa too, so I got to put my wood stove tortilla talents to good use and we ate very well.

We’d bought an old Land Cruiser a month after moving here for $1500. One of those crusty old 4-wheel drives with the removable top and rhino-proof doors, that looked beat-up enough to actually have encountered a rhino or two in its day. So we had no trouble getting down the driveway or to open stores in one of our local towns for bread, dog and cat food, and yes – beer. Problem was that even with 4-wheel drive we couldn’t get back up our driveway with the groceries. So we parked down by the road and hiked it in using the tire tracks as our path through snow so deep we’d been pushing it with the grill on the way down. It’s half a mile long – half of that nearly straight up – so it was quite the workout. Living and working on the land had us in good shape, though.

In fact, the only real problem we had was water. The cistern is more than 200 feet down the mountain, and without electricity the pump didn’t work. That meant we had to melt snow and ice for wash and flushing water. So we did, and it worked just fine even though it was a hassle I’d like to avoid in the future by installing an old fashioned hand pump in the line where it enters the house.

Nine days after the storm a National Guard helicopter finally came along to check on us. We must be near last on the county’s list. It hovered low over the garden checking on signs of life. We went out on the back deck and waved. They saw smoke coming out of the stovepipe, saw food neatly stacked on the deck, and quickly moved on to check on others who weren’t so lucky. We were warm, dry and well-fed. We’d transported one of our elderly neighbors to town the day after the storm in our Land Cruiser because she had no heat.

Two months later we had our first forest fire. The trains using this grade over the Continental Divide tend to lay on the brakes through these loops, and this literally melts the metal-asbestos brake pads. They throw this molten material off the tracks around the curves, and that causes forest fires. Luckily centrifugal force tends to throw the molten metal to the other side of the tracks, which means the fires are usually in the National Forest rather than on our property. We did learn about the wisdom of keeping our property well-raked and clear of underbrush, cleared trees growing close to the house. Thus in 15 years – with an average of one fire per year until recently when the feds came down on the railroad for bad use of brakes – we haven’t lost our cabin or any of the stately forest trees, fruit trees, grape vines or berry stands on our property to fire.

In this series I want to look at what kind of supplies a homesteader should keep on hand at all times, how to organize and store them, and how to weather the storms of nature and humanity that are likely to come your way over the course of years. There will of course be different types of dangers in different areas of the country. Some places are prone to hurricanes and floods, some are prone to tornados or wind storms, some places get a couple of big blizzards a year, some have forest fires or mud slides or earthquakes. If the homestead doesn’t get washed away or destroyed, the survival kits for getting through the times of no services and no help are all basically the same. Things you’ll need, and things you’ll want to have on hand.

Before we get into the various items everyone should have on hand in case of emergencies, we should consider the kinds of survival “kits” we’ll need to put together and where they should be kept. Most of us know enough to keep first aid kits in our cars, homes and offices, but emergency survival kits should be kept there as well. These are:

• Evacuation Bag. This is a bag or pack containing the most vital things you need. It should be kept in a convenient location near an exit so you can grab it quickly if you have to evacuate your home in a hurry. This kit won’t contain enough to survive for days, but should contain things you can’t do without and can’t easily replace if you are in a shelter. And keep your family photo albums in a single convenient place so you can grab those on your way out too.

• Home Survival Kit. This kit should contain everything you’ll need to keep your family healthy and well for at least 3 days (a week is better). Or, in the cases like I mentioned above for homesteaders out in the countryside, a month is even better yet. This kit can be kept on a particular shelf or in a particular cabinet in your house or one of your easily accessible outbuildings.

• Car Kit. This kit should contain everything you need to keep yourself and your passengers alive if you happen to get stranded in your vehicle somewhere for hours or days, in the heat of summer or the cold of winter.

• Work Kit. If a disaster strikes while you are at work away from home, you might be stranded there for a day or more before you can get back to your family. Having necessities stored in a desk kit can save your life.

For all of these kits it isn’t necessary to spend a lot of money. Remember that what you’ll need in an emergency are pretty much the same things you’d need every day. The most salient consideration should be prescription medicines if you take any on a daily basis to treat a chronic condition. If you can double up on the largest supply (30-90 days’ worth) you can divvy the supplies up so you’ve a week or more worth of medicine in each of your kits. Rotate these every 6 months or so to make sure the medicines don’t lose their potency. Most everything else will keep for a year or more (including foods if you’re careful about what you include), and some of the supplies will never go bad!

In my next post we’ll look at the essentials that should be in each of these kits. It’s more than just duct tape, tie wire and plastic sheeting, no matter what Homeland Security tells you! If we’re all good scouts we’ll come out the other end of occasional disasters just fine by relying on ourselves instead of the government to do for us what we should all be capable of doing for ourselves!

During this 2007 holiday season, it seems the children are all nestled asleep in their beds, with visions of sugar plums dancing in their heads… oh, wait. You say the “children” are all teenagers now, terminally bored with Christmas and expecting a 10-gig iPod loaded with every album too objectionable to be played in public, plus keys to your a car and $400 worth of “Prison Chic” pants that hang somewhere around the thighs and show off their underwear?

Did the fudge never set, so you had to run to the store to buy enough ice cream to disguise the un-set fudge as super chocolate syrup? Were those tollhouse cookies hard as a rock, breaking grandpa’s dentures with the first bite? Did cousin Jim finish off the entire bottle of rum you’d brought for eggnog before passing out under the tree? Did the dog eat that perfect glazed ham before you could get it into the oven to heat? Did it snow during the night and hide all the firewood you’d stacked somewhere in the yard for the Christmas Eve fire? Are the in-laws insisting on watching Enemy of the State as a “Christmas Movie” instead of It’s a Wonderful Life for the 16th time?

Be of good cheer, enjoy yourself anyway, and…

Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night!

It’s now just one week until Christmas Eve. Have you found and installed your Christmas tree yet? The holidays around this homestead require a tree that must go up the week before Christmas and come down a week after Christmas, so let me lend a few homestead hints on that particular subject…

Our family stopped buying commercially produced Christmas trees as soon as we moved to our homestead in serious Christmas tree country. They’re a regular Big Cash Crop here, but take years to grow and a lot of work trimming so they’ll have just the right thickness and shape. Heck, there are Christmas tree farms in our immediate region that’ll let you come in with a hand saw and cut your own!

But that’s not what we do. We do have a cathedral ceiling in our little living room from when the loft was built, so we like our trees to be 15 feet tall. But even though Scotch pines and hemlocks and Frasier Firs grow wild on our property and in the forest around us, they’re rangy and thin from growing in a forest. You’ll have this if you don’t carefully trim your growing trees in view of future Christmases.

A tree that’s only going to be in your living room for two weeks isn’t required to be seriously fireproof and isn’t likely to catch fire before the New Year’s bonfire (when you burn it on purpose). This is good, because commercial trees don’t burn worth a darn no matter how long you keep them, and who really likes the solid cone effect anyway? I like some real depth to my tree – ornaments and silk flowers and bows and ribbon and lots of lights deeply into the tree, branches that stick out far enough to shade a lot of presents.

Because our tree is up against the wall, it only has to be half-round. The room is too little to accommodate a free-stander, so this is a plus for those rangy Scotch pines on the property that look good on one side, but have nothing on the other. If you put your tree in a corner you need even less fullness! Pre-planning is essential, and the most important thing to remember is…

Duct Tape Is Your Friend. Yes, we duct tape two or three rangy trees together (and add trimmed-out branches to the front wherever needed) in order to get a tree tall enough and full enough to decorate our living room. Yes, the taped-on parts will dry quickly because they aren’t in water, but as I mentioned, it needn’t last long. Once you’ve got the perfect thickness of branches and fullness of shape and height of tree, you can disguise the trunk’s duct tape sections easily with crumpled tissue paper, big ribbon bows and other such decorative tricks.

String those lights in layers from interior to exterior, don’t skimp! We love lots of little white and colored lights on the tree, use lots of strings. The tree itself is attached with cable to eye-hooks in the trim atop the wainscoting, so we just cover the base trunk and under-tree area with skirts. We don’t use plastic or metal icicles – these get everywhere, aren’t good for the environment, and don’t burn. We’ve been collecting plastic and glass icicle ornaments over the years and use those instead. They come off as easily as the regular ornaments do, to be packed away for next year, and don’t hide around the baseboards or in the rug.

So. If there are evergreens on your homestead, particularly scraggly young ones competing for growing space with all the younger ones, make your own Christmas tree and don’t forget to light it up at midnight on New Year’s Eve out in the backyard fire pit! It’ll decorate your holidays twice and warm you up too. What more can anybody ask of a Christmas tree?

When our son and daughter were children barely starting school (and long before MTV or cable, VCRs or DVDs), I tossed our television down the basement stairs one evening in total disgust.

It had been some adult-like (English speaking) company for me when they were in diapers and my husband was often out at sea, I’d somehow become addicted to it to the point where it was turned on first thing in the morning and stayed on until bedtime. No matter what the actual quality of programming might be.

Back in those days there was a dinnertime contestant program called “The Gong Show” that was a forerunner to current terminally awful “American Idol” audition segments. I’d prepared a nice dinner and sat down with the children to ingest when I suddenly realized the television ‘background noise’ accompanying our meal was an obese, middle-aged woman burping the national anthem.

Talk about totally disgusted! So I unplugged that sucker and tossed it. It smashed satisfyingly on the concrete at the bottom of the stairs and I wasn’t even the slightest bit rueful that I’d have to clean up the mess after the kids went to bed. It felt really good. And apart from a few short months over the years since, we have never had broadcast or cable television in our home since.

You’d be amazed at how many people in checkout lines, in grocery aisles, at informal and formal gatherings, and in workplace water cooler enclaves can think of nothing else to talk about than what’s on television. Who’s getting kicked off “Survivor,” how funny the last “Friends” episode was, who’s slated to become the new “American Idol.” It’s like they live their shallow, couch-potato lives vicariously through hypnotic programming that gets electron-beamed straight into their empty heads, and they think that’s somehow “normal.”

Even worse, they will scrimp on food, clothing and shelter in order to afford $100 a month cable packages – 400 channels of nothing worth watching. They pay dearly for the dubious ‘privilege’ of having their tastes and desires manipulated by advertising that comprises half of what they see. They have children who end up being raised by television, watching an average of 100 gun murders a week in prime time from the time they’re 2, and their parents can’t seem to figure out why junior is a discipline problem at school. I firmly believe television is directly responsible for at least 20 points off anyone’s IQ.

People are shocked when we tell them we don’t have television. “What in the world does your family DO in the evening,” they inevitably ask, as though everybody knows that without television people will die of immediate isolation and boredom. It always makes me laugh. We listen to music, we read books out loud to each other, we talk about what’s going on in the world, and we develop our creative skills by writing, doing art and craft projects, taking nice hikes in the woods, putting on plays and concerts, building a warm campfire in the back yard, playing frisbee golf, real golf, softball, world-ball, chess or other games… all those things people can do if they weren’t glued to the electron beam all the time.

We did get a VCR 15 years ago, and now have a DVD player too. So we rent movies, or watch some of the many classics and other fine programming we’ve collected over the years. So it’s not like we don’t keep up. We’ve got internet too, so can even keep up with the news in a more timely fashion than television allows.

Advice for my readers who are planning or trying to make a go of homesteading: drop television (broadcast or cable) immediately. Keep the unit and its VCR/DVD accessories for watching occasional movies, put strict limits on video gaming time. Don’t waste your money paying to be brainwashed and manipulated. You’ll be too busy living your life anyway to have time for keeping up with this terminally dumb TV show or other, and you’ll quickly find that you don’t care anymore WHAT happens to those fake people! You won’t miss them at all, and you won’t end up having missed your children’s childhoods and the best years of your own life.

You’ll never get the time back if you waste it, believe me. Best not to waste it in the first place!

Useful Links:

Kill Your Television

We All Know That TV Is Bad For Us

Things To Do Instead Of Watching TV

Your Child: Television

People who choose to live close to the land, to do for themselves as much as possible, and to learn to live in harmony with nature will also tend to want to assume some responsibility for their own health maintenance whenever they can. This commitment may play out in the garden by growing a variety of healthful foods and culinary herbs, and many homesteaders will also cultivate a variety of useful medicinal herbs while they’re at it – because they can.

Those who have chosen a rural environment and have managed to gain control over several acres of land will also want to become familiar with the many useful wild herbs that grow in their region and perhaps even on their property. Some of these are endangered in the wild due to over-harvesting (ginseng roots, for instance, are worth their weight in gold in the medicinal market), so you’ll be happy to learn that a good many homesteaders are making good economic use of their patches of shady woods and forested acres to cultivate these wild herbs as cash crops or homestead medicines.

There is a good deal of information out there about cultivated garden herbs, some linked below. Here I’d like to talk about the usually wild, forest-grown offerings, particularly Mayapple, goldenseal, ginseng and black cohosh.

Black Cohosh

When we purchased our 10-acre ‘stead here in the southern Appalachians, all but a bit over an acre of cabin, yards and garden terraces were still in hardwood forest, last logged back in the 1930s. This means some of our tulip poplars, oaks and maples are stately, interspersed with a lower level of dogwoods and sassafras as well as saplings that keep the forest floor well shaded for most of the year. We were also lucky enough to have some significant natural growth of useful and endangered botanicals.

In fact, we have an entire slope on the eastern side of the ridge that is blanketed with black cohosh and ferns amidst median growth hardwoods with a few 100-foot poplars to form the upper canopy. A local conservation society would pay me a fee every year not to harvest the roots, as black cohosh is becoming seriously endangered in the wild. I don’t take the money for a couple of reasons. First, I’m not fond of the idea of having ‘inspectors’ roaming my woods, when it’s enough of a pain in the neck to have agricultural ‘inspectors’ wandering my garden every other year to make sure i’m not cheating on my organic certification. Secondly, I can manage the stand just fine on my own, while cultivating the plant for harvest at the shady edges of my yard.

In crowded patches I dig a few of the smaller plants in the fall, cut away any remaining greenery stem, and replant them where I want them. They come up nicely the very next spring, and the wild patch has room to generate more. So far this has kept us in enough fall-harvested roots to sell some to local dealers and enough to make tinctures for the women in my life who are still experiencing womanly health issues. Black cohosh is an estrogen precursor useful for treating menstrual cramps, PMS symptoms and the frustrating issues of menopause.

Ginseng

Some of the wild ginseng plants down in the bottomland on both sides of the ridge were more than 25 years old, and the “big mamas” stood an impressive 3 feet tall. The way ginseng grows, there is usually an elder “mama” plant in the middle of the patch, with younger daughters growing around it where the seeds that don’t get consumed by deer fall and get covered by fall leaves for the two years it takes the seeds to sprout.

My habit was to plant 5 or 6 of the seeds out from the mama, then bring the rest up to the woods near the garden and plant them in marked-off beds. Sometimes I did harvest some of the smaller 3-4 year olds from a wild patch and replant the small roots in the cultivated patches. Ginseng is seriously endangered in the wild, worth as much as $650 a pound for dried roots from one of the licensed ‘sang brokers. An elder “Man-Root” may go for a thousand dollars on the black market in China, though ginseng roots older than 15 years (or younger than 5 years) are illegal to sell in the United States.

Ginseng (Asian or American) has legendary healing properties. It’s tonic as an immune system booster and stamina enhancer, a traditional treatment for erectile dysfunction, hepatitis C and menopausal symptoms, and research has demonstrated its effectiveness for lowering blood glucose levels and blood pressure. Some of my beds are 6 years old now, which means the seed-grown plants are 4 years old. I start a new bed every fall, which means I now have 6 ginseng beds. I won’t sell any roots until at least a year after the plants havev started producing seed, at which point they’ll be closer to 10 years old than 5. It’s a long-term investment, but I do enjoy watching them slowly grow.

Goldenseal

Goldenseal [a.k.a. Yellow Root] grows in abundance on our property in thick stands among the trees in the bottomland near the spring-creeks on both sides of the ridge. It is not yet endangered, but its popularity has driven up the price and its survival in the wild is becoming a concern. I manage this resource much as I manage the more endangered wild plants – by carefully planting mature seeds in managed forest beds and occasionally thinning the natural stand by moving younger plant roots to managed beds. I do use some of the wilding harvest – I like to keep a jar of powdered goldenseal roots on hand for general purposes – but never enough to threaten the stand’s regeneration.

Goldenseal was used by the Indians to treat skin diseases, ulcers, liver ailments and gonorrhea. More modern uses are for control of bleeding and hemorrhage, colds and upper respiratory infections, diarrhea, eye infections and vaginitis. It also seems to have some effectiveness in treating cancers and canker sores.

Mayapple [a.k.a. American Mandrake] grows in the early spring, often the first green-green to appear in the root-line of trees. They resemble foot-tall green umbrellas blanketing the root spread of a tree or group of trees and sport a single white blossom that develops into a green fruit. Also called “Cancer Root” in some herbals, a powder ground from the dried yellowish roots is called podophyllum. This powder is usually mixed with Benzoin (from a tree grown in the far east) and used for removal of warts. It is also used in a beeswax/olive oil salve with cleavers and poke root for treatment of basal cell carcinomas of the skin.

Mayapple is difficult to cultivate, but is in no danger from overharvesting in the wild. Just take what you need and leave the rest, which will regenerate the following season. If you have it growing beneath trees on your property, careful management will ensure there is plenty every season.

There are many other useful plants that grow wild in my mountains. Mountain Mint, also known as “Heal-All” is gathered in mid-summer, as is wild-growing St. Johnswort. The ubiquitous poke plant not only provides tasty greens (must be double-boiled) in the spring, but their tuberous roots and berry juice are useful for treating skin eruptions, cancers and warts. There’s plenty of small witch hazel growing along the driveway and trails. I harvest the small branches and flowering twigs in December and January, chop them up good and steep them in alcohol as a fine astringent.

We’ll talk more about medicinal plants from the woods, yard and garden in future posts, so stay tuned and do check out some of the links below!

Links:

Where Have All the Flowers Gone? Preserving wild by cultivating your own

Medicinal Herb Plants Nursery

eMedicinal: Medicinal Herbs, Herbal Formulas

Healing Herbs Guide