In this unusually mild winter where it’s looking a lot like it’s not going to freeze after February (actually, February itself is starting off in the 60s day and 40s at night), my recent attempts to clean out the beds so they can be prepped for early plantings has taken on a bit of urgency. Moon is waxing (rising) for the next 8 days, so I’ve been folding newspaper pots by the dozen while sitting here at the desk.

Waxing moon is for above-ground plantings, so I’ll be starting peas, collards, bib lettuce, spinach and kale over the next week. The little pots fit tightly into glass cake pans, which makes it easy to evenly water from the bottom, which encourages early root growth. These will go onto shelves built to the big south facing window in the library. From there the seedlings can go straight into the ground (paper pot and all) by mid-february. If it freezes after that the pea cage can be covered with plastic at night, and milk jugs with the top end cut off fit nicely over the new greens. A new rush of peas should be planted as soon as the moon turns waxing again.

Once the moon has passed full it will be time to plant seeds for root vegetables. Which for early spring are beets, bunching onions, leeks, potatoes, carrots and radishes. Now, radishes are best planted to ‘mark’ rows of direct-seeded crops beginning in April because they grow so quickly and can be harvested early as the primary seedlings get established. But I like to grow a row of radishes for the spicy little seed pods they produce after flowering, so those I’ll start in paper pots indoors and interplant in the bed with leaf lettuces around the first of March.

Now’s a pretty good time to start the summer’s tomatoes and peppers as well, so the seedlings will be sturdy, well-leafed and quite full by the time they go into the cold frame in late March to early April. I’ll wait another six weeks to start the cukes, squashes, beans and pumpkins, as they don’t go out until May. Won’t need many new seeds this year, just carrots and more beets. Going to try Johnny’s “Atlas” carrots this year because long carrots tend to come out of the ground looking like man-roots in my soil, and the Atlas carrots are short and round like beets.

As for beets, I have to say I’m impressed enough with the hybrid “Moneta” I planted last year. Nice red roots that peel and slice easily and greens that are excellent in salads or as side greens. They also keep well and are vry juicy. In these days of leftover radioactive contamination from Fukushima, beets are about the best food-derived blood tonic anywhere. And since the blood/lymph system is where radiation does its most immediate damage, that’s something to think about. High in antioxidants, vitamins A, C. B1 and B6, beets are reported to have anti-cancer properties and also contain ample amounts of iron, magnesium, potassium and calcium.

Beet juice is also a fine health drink, always with a sweetness that is very palatable. I’ve been slicing those and the leeks I finally finished harvesting last week for drying, as they’re too old to make good side dishes or salads. I’ll powder the dried slices when I powder dried leeks, celery, carrots and tomatoes to use as soup broths and veggie-based table salts. As they are sliced I’ve been popping them into a bowl of cold spring water with ascorbic acid (powdered vitamin C) until I’m ready to line them up on the trays for drying. The water turns the most gorgeous shade of deep red, and I’ve been using that water to make lemonade (from bottled lemon juice). It’s redder than cranberry juice, but pretty and the sweet allows me to use less sugar. So far nobody’s complained, and it just makes the juice healthier than it otherwise would be.

Because so much of the garden was allowed to go fallow last year due to a constant excess level of fallout from the Fukushima nuclear accident’s plumes, I’m hoping to make good use of the extra months this year. Will plant twice as many beets and peas, spring and fall. More leeks, more bunching onions, more carrots and squashes. And yes, I am going to once again attempt eggplant and artichokes, even though that never seems to work out well. You never know what the weather’s going to be like, and global warming isn’t making things any easier to predict. But a peach tree ‘volunteered’ from the compost bin last year and is already over 10 feet tall, I’m hoping it’ll bear this year. Apples, pears and grapes all suffered miserably in the heat last year, I didn’t get enough out of any of ‘em to bother harvesting. If the peach does fruit I’ll get more, along with plums and figs.

And it’s not just me. The USDA [United States Department of Agriculture] just last week released a brand new Plant Hardiness Zone map (pictured above) which reflects changes due to warming climate. I’ve gained a whole zone, so peaches and figs should do fine. If I gain another one I’m going for oranges!

Do check out the new zones for where you live [Map Link], because for many of us this represents a whole new plan for how we go about growing our food. We can start relying on the extra weeks and/or months of growing season to plan our crop rotations, and even choose different cultivars we may have always wanted to grow but couldn’t.

Since this is one of the warmer winters in many regions, get busy right now making those plans. If I waited until 6 weeks prior to last frost in my old zone (May 10), I’d lose 10 entire weeks of growing time. So Happy Paper Pots all you homesteaders out there! Let’s make 2012 a super-abundant year for our yards, gardens and croplands in the hope that this year, none of our neighbors – far and wide – go hungry.

I don’t know about you, but here at my homestead we’ve been watching the goings-on in New York City, Boston, Chicago, St. Louis, Dallas and elsewhere across the country (including our own small city 20 miles up the road) that comprise the burgeoning and growing Occupy Wall Street protest movement. As the authoritarian servants of the richest 1% of the nation’s population have moved to isolate and abuse the professional activists, the unemployed, the homeless who have gravitated to the encampments, the juxtaposition with astroturfed, billionaire-funded “Tea Party” demonstrations where denizens were allowed to openly carry guns and assault members of Congress is dramatic. I admit I feel a little guilty to be so enjoying the gorgeous fall colors while people are putting their lives on the line to demand equality and an end to taxpayer bailouts of the criminal 1%.

It is glaringly obvious that the well-funded astroturf ‘movement’ enjoys a far greater share of our supposed First Amendment freedoms than the downtrodden 99% of people who just want to make the rich share in the suffering they order our political class to impose on the rest of us as ‘austerity’. So far the demonstrations have remained entirely peaceful even when police officers start pepper-spraying demonstrators (and their fellow police officers), or when the riot squad barrels into the crowd to choke and fling demonstrators to the ground. Reminds me of 1968. I know ‘they’ say that if you can remember the 1960s you probably weren’t really there, but that was one action-packed year full of billy-clubs and fire hoses and cracked skulls… and that was just the Democratic National Convention. It was still a bit less than 3 years before the Powers that Be started killing college kids wholesale for rudely NOT volunteering for that generation’s dirty big war, but let’s not fool ourselves. The very same thing is possible in 2011, and I’m pretty sure those doing the demonstrating across the country are aware of that possibility.

Homesteaders like us long ago gave up the idiot-box hypnosis drug, get our news from other sources – internet around here, along with the region’s college newspapers and the several alternative rags produced in the nearest city. We have moved physically to take as much charge of our own sustenance as possible, and forever plan and work for more. We’re ahead of the “income inequality” game because we care much less about being filthy rich than we care about or families, friends, environment and self-sufficiency regardless of what happens on Wall Street or Pennsylvania Avenue in D.C. We don’t watch FoxNews propaganda or MSNBC’s endless prison-porn when we could be out there prepping the beds for winter, or digging the new spring to power the ram pump, or simply sitting on a log on the ridge and quietly watching the leaves change color.

We’re a different kind of ‘elites’ in the current sociopolitical struggles. We’re not the money-hoarders or the Snidely Whiplash home-stealers or even The Donald making a big show of firing hard working people just because we get a kick out of cruelty. I think that makes us members of the 99% who are not The Donald (or Tim Geithner, or JP Morgan or MERS or the day-traders on Wall Street). So while we certainly aren’t planning to close up the ‘stead and head for the city to camp out on somebody’s public lawn, I have gotten together with a few friends to discuss things we might be willing and able to do in support of those who have put their bodies on the line to say things that desperately need saying.

I remember the tales of apple-sellers from my grandparents who struggled through Great Depression-I back in the 1930s. Mom’s parents had to leave Miami when no one could afford haircuts anymore (grandpa was a barber), moved to my great-grandparent’s farm in Georgia to wait it out in a meager sharecropper’s shack. Aside from the vegetables and two pigs a year my great-grandparents raised for their own sustenance, there were peaches. Acres and acres of peaches in a well-kept orchard my mother remembered most fondly as a young tomboy with no financial woes to trouble her childhood. Grandpa would take bushels of peaches – his ‘share’ for helping with the harvest – to Atlanta in a mule-drawn wagon, where he sold them like apples on the street for a nickel apiece. Mom and her siblings looked forward to spending their dollar gift from grandpa’s annual efforts on big stashes of penny candy and an occasional pair of shoes. Well, not Mom on the shoe thing, she preferred going barefoot and remained that way her whole life.

Dad’s family lived in Cincinnati, grandpa was a railroad man charged with [not quite] policing the many teenaged ‘hobos’ who rode the rails in those days from city to city looking for work. Sometimes he’d bring a particularly lean teen home with him, granny would feed him well, put him to work in the back-lot garden, feed him again and gift him with bagged leftovers after a night in the barn before grandpa took him back to the rail yard the next day. Dad was 7 when the Depression began. Got a job with the newspaper hawking the late editions on the sidewalks. The paper wanted a nickel, so he charged seven cents so as to make two cents a pop. Told me people would often give him a dime then refuse change. Helps to be really cute, I suppose.

At any rate, it was clear to me all my life listening to the family tales of hardship that we are not and never were among this society’s elites. As Great Depression-II sweeps the country it seems clear to me that what the visibly courageous demonstrators need most is some of that good old fashioned food that us country folk can help to supply (since we’ve no money to send).

Which brings me around again to apples. The apple harvest here in the southern Appalachians is mostly finished for this season, but there are still orchards open to gleaning, will be until they’re bare or hard freeze, whichever comes first. A few very good apples still in the trees if you’ve got a kid or two to do the climbing, lots and lots of slightly bruised fruit under the trees for picking up. These make fine cider, and at least half an apple to slice and dry now that the wood stove is working nights. A group of neighbors and friends from the city – most kids from the community college where grandsons are enrolled – gleaned an orchard outside of Hendersonville week before last. Netted three bushels of good apples, and ended up with a full dozen gallons of pressed cider.

For a change, we didn’t donate the fruit and juice to the regional food bank where gleaned and ‘extra’ produce has been going all summer. This time we loaded it into the trunk and back seat of a little car scheduled to transport a couple of the college kids to New York so they could join the demonstration during their week of fall break. They got home Monday but still haven’t uploaded their pictures. They said they gave the apples away to demonstrators, didn’t last long but it got them a preferred place in line for when the pizzas ordered by supporters all over the world showed up. The cider made them several fast friends, heated over a little sterno stove to help take the chill off during long nights.

They said they talked up the gleaning projects and promoted the great homesteading and grower’s market ‘scene’ in our beautiful region. Don’t know if they managed to convince any of the big city dwellers to consider choosing this kind of life, but they did plant some seeds. Apple seeds, to be exact. If it all falls apart people are going to have to rearrange their lives accordingly. There’s still a lot of resistance to the idea that the 1% (millionaires and billionaires) would really let that happen, but at the point when job-insecure police forces are ordered to start bashing the heads of those who champion union contracts and middle class job security it’s darned foolish to believe they won’t. There is no social conscience where there is obscene wealth and greed for more. Never will be.

And so the pendulum swings. I don’t know any billionaire homesteaders. Would bet you don’t know any either, though there’s no doubt a few billionaires that own country estates and working farms. The economic situation is obviously not scheduled to get any better any time soon for the impoverished masses and winter’s coming on fast. Even after the demonstrators break camp there will still be great need in this country. I hope that all my homesteading readers, and all wannabe homesteaders out there growing a few tomatoes and maybe some beans in their yards, will bear this in mind when planning for next spring’s production. There is opportunity here to help, we should be at the forefront of that. No one should go hungry in this country, though millions do. Every day, even as politicians are busy slashing budgets for things like food stamps, school lunch programs, and WIC.

Politicians work for the 1%, not for the 99%. They and their paramilitary forces will continue to abuse the 99% on orders from the overlords. And no, they don’t care how many of us starve or freeze or die from simple lack of health care. The real change that must happen will come bottom-up, not top-down. Solidarity.

Occupy Wall Street

The current collapse of the world financial system has revealed some structural problems in our national economy that have flourished over a period of decades as corporate interests bought politicians and lobbyists to craft legislation to remove legal roadblocks to mass theft and market manipulation. And despite some changes in the D.C. political landscape, our government remains apparently helpless to do anything about corporate malfeasance on any level. With all the bad economic news dominating the public consciousness, some issues in the food supply sector are having a difficult time being properly correlated and attended to despite the serious level of danger they present to public health.

The food supply issues didn’t begin with the market manipulations on Wall Street and from there to exchanges all over the world. Though for many people the first alarms went off as the CDS fraud crashed the economy in 2008 and the financial players went looking for other markets to wreak havoc on. They seized on commodities – staple foods from the agricultural sector increasingly dominated by multinational corporations like Monsanto, ADM and Cargill. As a traceable beginning in 2008 to what this year became the “Arab Spring” movement across North Africa and spreading to the Middle East and southern Asia, food riots broke out in Egypt and Syria and portions of India as well as elsewhere when people could no longer afford to feed themselves and their families. Things have only gotten worse in the years since, and Americans are slowly waking up.

In 2011 a full quarter of the U.S. population are dependent on food stamps. As unemployment keeps on rising, the government strangely keeps slashing the food stamp budget to appease nutty Republican radicals who insist those hardest hit by the Great Recession are just “lazy” and undeserving of aid that might require corporations and billionaires to pay taxes. Why one of the political parties in our nation believes that Americans will quietly and without complaint starve to death in the streets in order to protect billionaires from paying as much of their income in taxes as their chauffeur does has never been explained by the financial sector’s pundits at the New York Times or Wall Street Journal. Major cognitive disconnect.

But serious food supply issues encompass much more than just market manipulation and governmental paralysis. Consider some of these issues while attempting to get a picture of how dire the overall situation is…

Honey Laundering: China’s at it again – Adulterating pet and human foods with melamine wasn’t bad enough – though one corporate scapegoat was executed by the Chinese government hoping to save its place as cheap ingredients supplier to the world – the latest food scam involves honey. Not just fake honey in those little bee-shaped plastic bottles, Chinese honey brokers are creating honey by mixing sugar water, malt sweeteners, corn/rice syrup, barley malt and a variety of unrefined sugars. Failure to police storage requirements has resulted in heavy metal contamination as well, primarily lead.

If you’ve been thinking about beekeeping for honey (and handy pollinators), this is the year to get busy on it. Extension services in many rural counties offer literature, evening classes, and instructions on building hives. Agents often know who in the area builds hives for sale, and aren’t shy of giving out that information. Many people who are trying hard to eat better and healthier are being taken in by the Chinese honey scam, and big food processors using that fake honey in their supposedly ‘natural’ food lines are risking their markets. Grow your own honey or buy locally from someone honest.

Time to re-engineer the meatpacking sector – Late July brought the second largest tainted meat recall so far, when Cargill’s meat packing division recalled ~36 million pounds of ground turkey products tainted with a multi-drug resistant strain of Salmonella. The biggest recall was in 2008, when a slaughterhouse in California recalled 143 million pounds of beef due to allowing downer cows into the mix. The dangers to public health from e.coli, salmonella, listeria and other bacteria, and from adulterants and contaminates are high, yet our government doesn’t give the Food and Drug Administration [FDA] the power to force food recalls. Companies have to do this voluntarily, and they don’t often volunteer until people start dying and CDC tracks the source down.

If your family eats meat, now is the time to seriously consider raising your own or contracting with a neighbor who raises meat animals. A side of beef from a calf pastured for a year, dressed whole chickens raised happily free range, maybe rabbit stew meat, a slab of locally smoked bacon and/or ham… buying from known sources or doing it yourself could easily save your family’s lives. The more that control of our commercial food supply gets concentrated into the greedy hands of a few, the more danger is present overall. Avoid it like the plague it truly is.

The Nation has a good article looking at How change is going to come in the food system despite united resistance of the big corporate players to cater to public demands for better, less adulterated and far less fattening foods. There is a lot of good information in this article’s analysis to arm yourself with when next you try arguing with a friend, relative or acquaintance about the importance of healthy food and the severe shortage of it in our commercial food supply.

And finally, the good news. The New York Times informs us that vegetable gardens are booming in a fallow economy. We homesteaders have of course known this all along – and have done more than our share to get more people digging and grow the local markets – but we should always welcome mainstream coverage that helps to spread awareness. Recent movement in many states to allow the use of food stamps at farmer’s markets and bulk purchases straight from farmers are helping more people to get more and better food than they could purchase in the grocery store.

Many localities are also sponsoring seed exchanges through the Lions or Ruritan, sometimes through local Chambers of Commerce, 4-H and FFA clubs at high schools. These have committees in charge of getting open-pollinated seeds from local gardeners and farmers, packaging them, and then distributing them free in the late winter and early spring to local residents planning their season’s garden crops. Local schools and civic clubs are offering gardening classes and contacts to suppliers of tool exchanges, equipment like chicken coops and bee hives, and farmers who sell chicks, calves, kids and kits to those wishing to raise their own meat animals. Local butchers are making a comeback, and in many states the Extension Service offers classes all the way up to Master Gardening certification. So get busy, and get your neighbors busy making best use of all these developing local alternatives to Big Ag and Big Food, Inc. We will be a much happier and healthier nation for it, and probably much smarter as a people for our awareness and direct involvement in this most important aspect of everybody’s lives.

Links:

NYT: Vegetable Gardens Are Booming
How Change Is Going to Come in the Food System
Time to re-engineer the meatpacking sector
Honey Laundering: tainted and counterfeit Chinese honey
Risks of tainted food rise as inspections drop

In my last post, Hunger in America, I mentioned several ways we homesteaders could participate in helping to get food into the bellies of our neighbors who are going hungry, and whose supplemental aid is being slashed wholesale by the government. The situation is not going to get better any time soon, so an expansion on the notion of gleaning fields in your rural area is timely.

On a visit to my sister who lives south of our homestead near the South Carolina border brought the situation home to us graphically last week. I’m sure most have heard about farm labor shortages in a number of states this season, which have left fields planted in the spring and early summer to rot in place. On our drive to Sis’s we go past a fairly extensive truck farm with acres of tomatoes, cucumbers, squash, melons, pumpkins, sweet corn, etc. that until last year supplied area groceries with fresh local produce and a big produce stand managed by the Mexican-American family who owns the land. We noticed with some shock that the crops were literally rotting in the fields right next to the road and going back for half a mile in both directions – something we’d never seen before.

When we got home I fired off an email to our regional food bank about the situation, suggesting ways to get in touch with the owner of the crops and perhaps setting up a gleaning operation that would salvage what can be salvaged. Even volunteered myself and at least a couple of grandkids for the operation if I could have a bushel of too-ripe tomatoes out of the deal to preserve.

I heard back early the next morning from the Gleaning Coordinator regionally for the Society of St. Andrew, and the mission’s on asap (still waiting to hear). Have the grands out raiding the grocery store back alleys for boxes and crates, so we’ll be ready. Another farm a few miles south has offered its potato fields for gleaning as well, so we’re hoping for a big turnout. I’ll be bringing garden gloves, snippers, a big straw hat and lots of spring water, luckily the heat is back down into the 80s during the day now that the 95-100+ heat spell has broken. Will bring the pitchforks and spades as well for the potatoes if we get that far.

Seems that farmers who are suffering the shortage of field workers are beginning to hear about gleaning, and are offering their idle fields to those who are willing to work for free just to make sure the food gets to hungry people. Most of us live in rural regions and know our neighboring farmers well enough to keep up with what’s happening locally. I encourage my readers to start keeping track of harvests and contacting their neighbors about gleaning what the machinery leaves behind to be donated to food banks. Some areas have fraternal organizations like Ruritan and such with women’s auxiliaries who will get together and can up quite a lot of the donated fresh produce so the very ripe food can still be salvaged.

And don’t forget to allot some time out of your own busy schedule to help out in gleaning the fields. It’s time spent with neighbors and new friends on the front lines of fighting hunger, it helps establish some new working coalitions that will be important as things get worse in the political world, and it can be quite a lot of fun. The apple harvest starts early next month in the next county over, and many of the big orchard owners encourage gleaning once their main crops are in. People bring their big cider presses and keep a steady liquid supply coming from slightly bruised fall that the children gather, and sometimes bluegrass bands will set up in the shade to pick and grin and keep us singing on the job.

If you find some fields that are either not being harvested or are freshly harvested with leavings, please do contact the Society of St. Andrew or organize through your own local food bank and/or civic club to salvage the food. Don’t forget to let your local high school and community colleges know that gleaning operations are ongoing, these can be an excellent source of able volunteers. Some schools will even give the kids credit for their work as part of social service requirements!

For those of us fond of The Clash and their music, these past few days of London Burning for real have been… surreal. Pushing austerity to its most absurd limits, the government has slashed educational funding, jobs training programs and basic welfare – including for food – across the board just as is happening in this country with radical right-wingers holding the nation hostage in order to secure massive cuts to all forms of social aid – including medical access – in order to keep our several resource wars going indefinitely without having to tax the people making the most money off those wars. Rioting in Greece over austerity measures, in Israel over hard right-wing policies, and the “Arab Spring” that has so far brought down several governments in the Middle East and North Africa while getting NATO involved in Libya, the now 3-year old meltdown of the world economy has things on hair trigger in some rather surprising places.

Americans have not yet hit the streets violently, though things economically show no signs of easing up as markets plunge and hunger raises its ugly head all over the place. ABC News offered a rather amazing article August 8th touting Dumpster Diving as a way to get no-cost food – featuring New York City – that raises far more questions than it could ever possibly answer. Is dumpster diving okay? Is it a threat to public health? Is it acceptable for people to be getting their food this way? My God… what have we come to in this country?

ABC makes it sound like a voluntary “movement” among people who just don’t WANT to spend money on food. But for those of us who have some real idea of the actual time and energy expended in a “hunter-gatherer” lifestyle, this new version doesn’t suggest that these people have any actual money to be saving by raiding dumpsters all day long. In fact, despite ABC’s portrayal of this “Freegan” lifestyle as some sort of “movement” to be weighed for existential value, it would appear by their own admission that these people have no means of transportation aside from their feet and maybe an old bike, are “squatting” in old buildings without indoor plumbing or electricity, and are long-term unemployed in one of the most expensive cities on the continent.

I cannot imagine having to raid dumpsters just to eat, though I have in my life picked up aging produce from the back of the grocery to feed to my guinea pigs and rabbits. I’ve gleaned fields of neighbors with larger, more mechanized farms for leftover potatoes and other veggies I could preserve or donate to the food bank. There’s a big tomato field near my sister’s place that is literally rotting in the sun right now because the illegal immigrants who used to pick the produce have all been deported. I’m taking a few baskets and boxes down this evening to gather what I can for preserving. Heck, I even accepted a couple of bushels of old onions from a passing truck once when we were camping on the Rio Grande. He was going to a dump, the onions didn’t look that bad to me. Spent the entire afternoon cutting out rot and slicing the rest into a water bath canner pot over a wood fire, and cooked up the largest pot of onion soup anybody’d ever seen. As campers smelled the bounty and wandered over to see what was cooking, I soon had carrots and potatoes and celery and herbs and some stewing meat and a few other things to toss into the pot – which quickly grew to two pots – and by dinnertime we had a grand community feast and told stories well into the night.

…but it’s not what I’d care to do for a living. And I’m sure you wouldn’t either. We who have chosen to live outside the urban danger zones and have committed ourselves to being as self-sufficient as possible cannot sit by and presume things won’t get very, very bad in our cities and towns too when people come to the end of their cut-off ropes and find they have nothing left and nowhere to turn. Things will not be getting better for the foreseeable future unless fundamental changes occur. And fundamental changes are not going to come from D.C. or from our state houses, where the political game of high dudgeon is played primarily for cash contributions from corporate lobbyists and we the people count for nothing.

Here in the Wise Living Journal’s hunger archive there are quite a few articles about hunger in America and how homesteaders can escape it themselves as well as help out their neighbors. A 3-part series titled Feeding The Hungry lists and describes some innovative anti-hunger programs we can not only contribute to, but could expand to include our friends and neighbors to help out regional food banks that are currently running very low on food, and supply feeding programs in our larger towns and cities where people don’t have the means to grow their own food.

We can be part of a new way of seeing things, helping to change a harsh and hopeless reality bottom-up. Politicians will come around eventually if we go ahead and make necessary changes for ourselves. Or be left behind when new politicians from among the ranks of the people rise to prominence by virtue of leadership in making those necessary changes.

A word to my homesteading readers, rural, semi-rural and urban: Don’t you dare neglect to harvest everything you possibly can this year. If you can’t use or preserve it, get it to someone who can, while it’s still fresh. Volunteer to glean neighbor’s fields, and get that bounty to those who will give it away or preserve it for later. Sign up to teach a preservation class to others in your area. How to can various things, how to build solar food dryers, how to use the preserved food. Education is always useful to those who don’t know what you have to teach. And please don’t neglect that fall garden this year just because it’s a lot of trouble. Chances are that the price of fresh food is going to go through the roof this fall and winter as the conditions that have led to entire fields being abandoned such as is happening in my area hit the market with drastic shortages. A lot of people will be going hungry. Even more are losing their means to prepare foods or even stay warm when winter hits as those subsidies are stripped systematically as well.

Don’t wait for the politicians, they are doing just fine and their families aren’t hurting at all. It’s going to be up to us to help our our neighbors and communities, and we need to spread the word. It’s bad enough that people in this country die every year because they have no access to medical care (45,000+, and the figure is growing). Do we want to live in a country where they also starve to death or freeze to death if disease doesn’t get them first? It’s up to we the people because our leadership won’t do anything to help. We need to get down to business right now.

Following a useful group series called Living Simply: Zero Waste has me thinking about what goodies from the kitchen gets tossed into the compost pile and how much of it might be useful for some other purpose. The series deals with all kinds of waste, of course, the things that go into our trash cans versus what goes into recycling, etc. And readership includes mostly people who live in urban environments. Things like food packaging and general trash items, getting those down as far as possible by recycling things like used batteries, those ‘planned obsolescence’ disposable electronics, plastics, glass, etc.

We homesteaders who have to haul our own trash and recyclables to the “Inconvenient Center” whenever we’ve got time while the darned dumpster station is actually open are pretty good at doing the separating. Especially for things like metals that can not only be recycled, but which we get paid for by the pound. But the question of food waste is quite pertinent this time of year, as crops start coming in and spring beds are cleaned out for fall crop planting. Which I definitely need to do, and would have already done by now if it weren’t so blasted HOT. At any rate, let’s look at the various compostables for what they might be put to best use for, considering how valuable compost actually is for purposes of growing things.

Right now the peas from spring are done and the fall crop hasn’t yet been planted. But beans are coming in fast in large rushes. If you are growing pole beans like I am (take up less room, are way more abundant than bush beans), you may be growing varieties best purposed for shelled beans than your basic green bean. I have for many years tossed the pods from shelled peas and beans into the compost bucket, but it turns out you can fry them up into a nice finger food once you’ve removed the seeds.

Another good idea is to maintain a good tight-lidded container in the fridge to hold scraps from various vegetables – carrot, leek and onion tops and ends, broccoli and cauliflower stems, those pea/bean pods, tomato cores and skins, the tough stems of kale, collards and chard, potato and/or eggplant skins, fresh corn cobs, pretty much any actual food-food waste generated when processing for canning, freezing or drying. When the container nears full, put it all into a stock pot and boil it up with the addition of some fresh but less-than-presentable herbs (like older parsley, spotted sage, holey basil, etc.) for veggie soup stock. This can be strained and canned to keep all through the winter and used instead of water for meat-based soup stocks, gravies, etc., or just by itself as veggie stock for soups or for cooking dry beans and such.

You can salt it before canning so it’s ready-to-use, or omit the salt and add it later when you’re making something with it. Once the good flavor and valuable nutrients have been boiled out into stock, the leavings of course go right back into the regular compost. It’s like getting twofers from your hard gardening work, and well worth the effort. If you do the hot processing outside on the grill so it doesn’t heat the house, it saves energy and money as well.

If your homestead boasts some dogs – as mine does – you also know that dogs love vegetables as much as we do, and love leftovers even more. There are vegetables dogs shouldn’t eat, but about a quarter of their regular diet should be vegetable (and is in most dry dog foods). Vegetables for dogs should be cooked or steamed, though some like ‘em raw. Remove tomato and onion parts from your unsalted soup stock leavings and your dog will scarf it down no problem. Here’s a good source for pet nutrition, and another with info for home made pet foods.

When all is said and done, kitchen scraps can go into the compost as-is, along with the rest of the yard and garden trimmings, weeds and leaves in the fall. It all makes very good mulch and additions to our gardens, allowing us to grow more food. But the idea of us or our pets getting every bit of nutrition from our food crops is very good, and makes the entire system a whole lot more efficient.

As the economic situation gets steadily worse – the second recessive ‘dip’ is already upon us and once the economic indicators are recalculated we may already be in negative GDP territory. Now that the Congress has passed their very ill-conceived austerity program and put a “Gang of 12″ in charge of slashing and burning, we should be all the way into major depression by Christmas, with real unemployment pushing 20%. We need to be even more attentive than usual to getting the most out of our gardens and livestock, go ahead and plan for those winter crops we could grow in cold frames, preserve every last bit of food however we can, and hang on tight. It’s going to be a rough ride.

Toward that project, I’ll be blogging about grains this month. Grain is getting more and more expensive to buy, but few homesteaders without lots of flatland acreage and a tractor grow any of their own beyond sweet corn or field corn for the livestock. Grains being an important part of our (and our pets’) diet, I’ll be looking at the best and most productive grains to grow in the garden or along the edges of our yards and fallow fields, and how to process and use them. I’ll also be looking at wild grains that we may have access to, as well as local grains you may be able to barter for from a neighbor who grows wheat or barley. It will be important for us to have some poundage of whole grains carefully stored away to make it through until next summer. We are lucky, as many people will be going hungry before things get better. We have to be realistic, plan for this future, and get all our ducks in a row. So please stay tuned!

Useful Links:

Living Simply: Zero Waste
Foods Scrap Cuisine
Home Made Pet Diets
How to Compost Food Scraps
CalRecycle: Food Scraps Management
Frugal dilemmas: food scraps, or more food?

As my family begins work to re-engineer our water system by tapping a new spring and installing a ram pump to a new cistern on the ridge, I am once again thankful for our semi-abundant supply of clean, fresh water on our mountain homestead via two clear-running creeks draining the National Forest uphill to the continental divide. I realize that we have something real and valuable here to work with that way too many people who aren’t lucky enough to live here do not have – a nearly endless supply of water pure enough to drink without filtering, fresh and cold enough to host ample populations of native trout, and fast enough to escape the winter freezes on its way to the piedmont’s rivers and lakes.

Serious shortages of fresh potable water across entire regions of the Middle East, Africa, central and south Asia have long been in the news as conditions grow worse with the advent of global warming. Extended droughts have caused increasingly destructive wildfires in Australia, Russia and here in the United States, where fires so far this year in Arizona, New Mexico and Texas have charred millions of acres of land.

To get a picture of how bad the situation is getting – and how agricultural policies, municipal waste and unsustainable consumption levels affect the clean water we Americans tend to take for granted, consider the fact that the mighty Colorado River no longer flows to the sea because every drop is diverted along the way. Running 1,450 miles through seven U.S. states and two Mexican states, the river and its tributaries have been impounded by 20 dams along its length to provide water to cities in the parched southwest and water for irrigation, golf courses, desert green-spaces and such. Some researchers are saying that Lake Mead, the source of water for 22 million people, may be dry by 2012.

With the human population growing at an increasingly unsustainable rate, irrigation for growing crops around the world has also increased by millions of hectares, more than doubling from less than 150 million to 300+ million hectares since 1960. As the climate changes more rain will fall in some places while other places turn to desert, and no one seems to be paying enough attention to our bad agricultural practices and lousy dietary choices that pretend clean water is something we can all take for granted forever. It’s not just the fabled Colorado that is running dry – China’s Yellow River, which used to flood so severely every year that my childhood never saw a year when hundreds of thousands of people weren’t drowned, no longer reaches the sea and has been known to go completely dry. One of the two rivers that feed the Aral Sea is now completely dry for part of every year, even as the Aral itself shrinks alarmingly.

Lake Chad in central Africa has shrunk by 95% in the last 40 years, and the Punjab region of India is facing a vastly diminished water table, as is our own Great Plains breadbasket region as the vast Ogallala Aquifer is drained steadily to irrigate genetically engineered crops used to feed livestock raised in unhealthy CAFOs for meat rather than human beings.

As we here at the homestead move through the summer being very careful to ration our water usage due to the cracked cistern, it’s not hard to see how it’s not just our bad farming practices that waste and pollute the earth’s water supplies, it’s also ourselves. Why doesn’t everyone have low-flow toilets and showers by now? Why do we still fill big bathtubs high for lengthy soaks when a few inches of water would do the job of washing away the grime just fine? Why do we insist on those ridiculous manicured lawns that serve no purpose at all, when a nice veggie or flower garden would be much more inviting, and local, well-acclimated wild plants would make for a much more interesting landscape?

UK’s Independent published an article citing details of the World Water Development Report released this week, and the outlook isn’t good. Right now 1.1 billion people lack access to clean water, and nearly 2 and a half billion lack proper sanitation. Inertia among the world’s political leaders means that necessary efforts for conservation aren’t even starting despite the ever worsening situation. The projection is that by the middle of this century at least 7 billion people in 60 countries will face water scarcity. This adds up to hunger, disease and death.

What little fresh water the planet does have is being polluted unmercifully. Much pollution comes from chemically dependent agriculture, but in our haste to exploit energy sources the practice of fracking for natural gas is shocking in its gross disregard for environmental preservation. In some places water coming out of taps actually burns, and the chemical stews used in the process don’t even have to be reported for toxicity. The pollution is so shocking that the state of New Jersey this month passed a statewide ban on franking in order to protect their water supplies. Pennsylvania is considering its own ban, and more states are sure to follow.

At present more than 1,100 U.S. counties face water scarcity issues. That’s a third of all counties in the contiguous 48 – this is a very, very serious situation we should all be paying attention to. For homesteaders out here working hard to become as self-sufficient as possible, we might well begin to consider our own water supplies to be the most valuable natural resource of all in our efforts to protect and defend the land and our chosen way of life.

I know that our current water troubles here on my own homestead have certainly made me more aware of just how precious this resource really is, even though I do not irrigate my crops at all because there is no shortage of rainfall in these Great Smoky Mountains. I have been following the various models for projecting what is to occur as the climate changes, and have been somewhat gratified to see that while we can expect up to 4 degrees overall rise in annual temperature means, we are slated to also get about 4 inches more rain every year. I can always plant peaches, figs and pecans in the orchard if it gets too warm for good apples and pears, grow more watermelons and pumpkins for market. But ensuring the purity and continued flow of water through my land must become a passion that I’m as willing to pursue as my lobbying against GMOs to neighboring farmers in order to protect the value of my organic crops.

They attempted a couple of years ago to carve out sections of the National Forest we abut, so developers could create fancy log McMansion gated communities for wealthy people’s vacation comfort. These developments had carte blanche to divert the natural mountain streams that drain the eastern side of the divide for their own lakes and golf courses and such, which would discharge chemicals along with their sewage back into the streams uphill of us that then flow through my property. Every conservation group in the region got together, and with help from us landowners lobbied hard to the federal agencies who thought they could sell portions of our collective natural heritage to rich people just because there was lots of money involved. The very best thing to come out of the nationwide financial collapse – and real estate bust – was that this plan got shelved when nobody was buying. Though we are watchful, because once things pick up again they’ll be right back to buying up tracts of National Forest for their own amusement and dumping their waste on us.

This can happen anywhere there are state and federal lands, way too close to our beloved little plots of land we cherish so much. Even during times of economic distress like the current Great Recession bureaucrats may be moved to sell the water and mineral rights to irresponsible corporate interests for exploitation, and our water woes will get steadily worse. Look around closely at what’s happening in your state and area, and get involved with the conservation groups that are fighting this rape of the land and water. Don’t feel safe just because you no longer live in a city, or because your land abuts set-aside tracts of wilderness. We homesteaders must get active to protect it all, or one of these days we’ll wake up and it will all be gone.

Links:

Frack and ruin: the rise of hydraulic fracturing
FAO Water: water scarcity
EPI Eco-Economy Indicators
Water Scarcity Could Affect Billions
Global Warming: Water scarcity scares US counties
Regulation: an acceptable cost for frackers
N.J. legislature passes ban on fracking

Sigh. As the Kabuki in D.C. continues into yet another week/month of grandstanding on the budget and raising the debt ceiling, a good many of us homesteaders are watching our state governments engaging in the same kind of bad budgetary theater as summer hits hard (and early). This year it looks a lot like neither the weather nor government policies care to offer any help to rural America, where the ‘Great Recession’ is a whole lot more like a Great Depression.

In Washington the drastic budget cuts are of course not hitting ADM or Cargill or any other giant Agribiz subsidies – mostly used to grow bioengineered corn, soy, etc. for animal feed. Rather, cuts in the USDA, EPA and FDA budgets are targeted at conservation, extension, research, renewable energy and rural development programs. Less money for inspections and enforcement, less for policing big livestock operations, less for wetland set-asides, etc., etc., etc. The slashing goes on and on, and bodes ill for just about everything that counts in this world. As if this wholesale gutting of all programs geared towards sustainable agriculture, responsible land use, regulation of pollutants and development of alternative crops isn’t bad enough, they’re also slashing food assistance programs like WIC and food stamps.

The Rodale Institute has a very good overview of how the Republican’s scorched earth policy is targeting small-scale farmers, organic growers and specialty farm/homestead programs that have been important to those of us actually engaged in trying to live sustainably on the land. With $39 billion in cuts to conservation programs aimed at protecting environmentally sensitive areas and $350 million for the Organic Transitions Research Program, it seems quite obvious that today’s politicians don’t have much of an appreciation of what it takes to grow and market nutritious food.

Meanwhile, here at my homestead where the summer crops were planted late due to too much rain and some concern about fallout deposition of cesium from Fukushima (which was high in this area), the rain finally did slack off. To nothing. Haven’t had more than a few drops in over a month, and issues with the cistern have us on water rationing in the household – there’s nothing to irrigate with. That hasn’t been an issue most years given that average rainfall here is ample, but this year’s shaping up to be hellishly hot and dry. I can do nothing but wait and see which crops make it through to the next rainy spell, keep some potted seedlings in reserve to plant REALLY late if need be. If it’s to be a super-hot summer, it could last well into November. That’s enough time for most things, even if planted late.

Below are some good articles and resource collections so that we who will be most affected by what Washington (and our state governments) do about the coming second dip of the Great Recession. I urge all my readers to educate themselves to what’s happening nationally and locally, and get involved. Call your representatives. Write letters to the editor. Bring up the important issues at the farmer’s market and at church and at any other community meetings where people who are also affected can be found. Money is just paper and computer data these days. Wall Street’s paper is even less than that. But everyone has to eat, and if there are no food producers people will starve. Our land, our labor, our crops are much more imp We must speak out. We must speak loudly. And we must enlist all the help we can get.

Links:

Agri-Pulse Communications
Rodale Press
Rural Resource Guide [NC]
American Farmland Trust

I read an announcement today in our local paper about the 12th annual Blue Jean Ball, a yearly fund-raiser for our regional food bank. It’ll be happening on the river on my birthday, so yes, I am planning to attend. There will be food from 20 of our best local eateries and four of our excellent regional bands to keep things lively. Should be great fun.

We relied upon the food bank for snacks and cooking class supplies some years ago for the state funded after-school program we managed for at-risk and adjudicated teenagers. On food-run days we often encountered people we got to know who managed other charity programs, houseparents from area children’s homes, and even state workers for the various social welfare agencies in the region, gathering supplies for bags and boxes of emergency food and toiletries to give to abused women, poverty-stricken families and the recently-dispossessed. The number of people in need goes up every year, even as the U.S. government has been gouging necessary aid like food stamps and WIC so they can keep on lowering taxes on billionaires in the midst of the worst recession since the 1930s.

I live in a region of the country – southern Appalachia – that is labeled “Economically Depressed” even in the best of times for the rest of the nation. Our only decent-sized city (Asheville) ranks 7th in the nation for percentage of the population going hungry. The surrounding, mostly rural counties are much worse off, and the situation has been deteriorating steeply since 2007.

The World Hunger Education Service provides an overview of statistics from 2008, including an increase in “food insecure” households in the U.S. from 15.8 million in 2007 to 17 million in 2008. They also do a good job of tying this increase directly to the increase in poverty over that year and every year since. Feeding America conducted a hunger study in 2010 showing a 46% increase in hunger in America since 2006. Its network of food banks across the country is feeding an average of 1 million MORE people a week than in 2006, and it’s not slowing down as the price of food skyrockets along with the cost of fuel.

The New York Times reported in 2009 that hunger was at a 14-year high, an increase over those years of 13 million people, putting their figure from the USDA at 49 million American citizens without consistent access to food. Given the deep cuts in state and federal support for food programs this year as Republicans strive to make good on their campaign promises to their corporate sponsors, everyone paying attention is expecting the 2011 numbers to be much higher.

We who grow, lovingly tend and harvest, then faithfully preserve as much of our family’s food supply as we possibly can tend to be more aware of some of the issues involved in rampant hunger outside the D.C. beltway, in ways politicians just can’t match. We are known to often give a lot of our own produce away, trade it with others so we’ve got more variety, and don’t mind sharing what we’ve got with friends and neighbors. I’ve been known to donate boxes of squash and peppers to the food bank, and helped to establish a “shares” food program geared for a rural county where almost everybody’s growing a garden and doesn’t mind planting a little extra for free seeds and feeding the hungry.

I urge all my readers to check in with their local and regional food banks, see how they can contribute to the good efforts, either in produce, time or money. Food banks need all the help they can get, so if your homestead is big enough to be growing some acreage in food crops, most food banks will happily organize teams of volunteers to glean your fields when you’re done harvesting. Just get them to sign a liability waver (in case somebody steps on a rusty nail or something). They will gladly take your leavings and give them to people in need. Heck, you could mention this sort of thing to your farming neighbors next time you have a get-together, see how many will join the effort. Too much is wasted in this country, too many people go hungry.

We can all be part of the answer to that pressing issue.

There is a resurgence of hope across America in the wake of Tuesday’s election of Democrat Barack Obama as President, promising a new direction of change for the future of our nation. Those of us who have been paying attention to the global financial meltdown, increasingly severe food shortages in the wake of global warming, and the outrageous poisoning of our citizens and livestock/pets by corrupt Chinese producers (a glaring example of globalization’s failures), are hoping that a new dawn in America will bring with it the serious changes to our agricultural policies that have grown increasingly necessary through decades of decline.

Now, politicians don’t generally talk much about agricultural policies while they’re stumping for votes in big cities. And they’re often so ignorant of agricultural issues that even rural dwellers – actual farmers – get nothing but pablum and platitudes in response to their questions. Luckily, journalist Michael Pollan wrote a great ‘open letter’ in the New York Times in October entitled, Farmer in Chief. This is a must-read for all of us committed to self-sufficiency, locally grown foods, the viability of family farms and homesteads, and the future health of an environment we all depend upon for life.

Pollan begins his letter to “Dear Mr. President-Elect” with an honest caution -

It may surprise you to learn that among the issues that will occupy much of your time in the coming years is one you barely mentioned during the campaign: food. Food policy is not something American presidents have had to give much thought to, at least since the Nixon administration — the last time high food prices presented a serious political peril. Since then, federal policies to promote maximum production of the commodity crops (corn, soybeans, wheat and rice) from which most of our supermarket foods are derived have succeeded impressively in keeping prices low and food more or less off the national political agenda. But with a suddenness that has taken us all by surprise, the era of cheap and abundant food appears to be drawing to a close. What this means is that you, like so many other leaders through history, will find yourself confronting the fact — so easy to overlook these past few years — that the health of a nation’s food system is a critical issue of national security. Food is about to demand your attention.

Pollan goes on to explain issues like climate change, energy independence, health care and the general health of the economy in terms of our dependence on food depend crucially on sound agricultural policies. He explains very well what ‘went wrong’ with our food system over the past several decades, and how the antiquated, fossil fuel dependent system cannot be sustained. We no longer have cheap fuels and unlimited water supplies, our policies are haphazard, our subsidies unfair, our planning non-existent. Pollan then offers his particulars in this 9-page article, and the reasoning behind them is fascinating reading. He offers a complete rationale for organic farming many of us have been promoting and practicing for years, in three not at all ‘simple’ steps…

1. Resolarizing the American Farm
2. Reregionalizing the Food System
3. Rebuilding America’s Food Culture

I’ve added my voice to the growing calls for our leadership to pay serious attention to the many complex issues of our food supply – which IS our ‘national security’ – by sending this article as a link in a congratulatory email to President-Elect Obama. This is an immediate action issue, as Obama is right now choosing his cabinet and advisors. Agriculture and food policy issues must not fall to the back of the line. So add your voice to the calls for sane policy and firm leadership today!

You can also sign petitions and keep up to date on incoming news at the Organic Consumers Association. Don’t forget while you’re there to sign up for their email newsletter too!