Posted on 07/24/2009 3:37:21 AM PDT by nw_arizona_granny
Weekly Roundup - Living On Nothing Edition Category: Roundups | Comments(15)
Did you hear about the guy that lives on nothing? No seriously, he lives on zero dollars a day. Meet Daniel Suelo, who lives in a cave outside Moab, Utah. Suelo has no mortgage, no car payment, no debt of any kind. He also has no home, no car, no television, and absolutely no creature comforts. But he does have a lot of creatures, as in the mice and bugs that scurry about the cave floor hes called home for the last three years.
To us, Suelo probably sounds a little extreme. Actually, he probably sounds very extreme. After all, I suspect most of you reading this are doing so under the protection of some sort of man-made shelter, and with some amount of money on your person, and probably a few needs for money, too. And who doesnt need money unless they have completely unplugged from the grid? Still, its an amusing story about a guy who rejects all forms of consumerism as we know it.
The Frugal Roundup
How to Brew Your Own Beer and Maybe Save Some Money. A fantastic introduction to home brewing, something Ive never done myself, but always been interested in trying. (@Generation X Finance)
Contentment: A Great Financial Principle. If I had to name one required emotion for living a frugal lifestyle it would be contentment. Once you are content with your belongings and your lot in life you can ignore forces attempting to separate you from your money. (@Personal Finance by the Book)
Use Energy Star Appliances to Save On Utility Costs. I enjoyed this post because it included actual numbers, and actual total savings, from someone who upgraded to new, energy star appliances. (@The Digerati Life)
Over-Saving for Retirement? Is it possible to over-save for retirement? Yes, I think so. At some point I like the idea of putting some money aside in taxable investments outside of retirement funds, to be accessed prior to traditional retirement age. (@The Simple Dollar)
40 Things to Teach My Kids Before They Leave Home. A great list of both practical and philosophical lessons to teach your kids before they reach the age where they know everything. I think that now happens around 13 years-old. (@My Supercharged Life)
Index Fund Investing Overview. If you are looking for a place to invest with high diversification and relatively low fees (for broader index funds with low turnover), index funds are a great place to start. (@Money Smart Life)
5 Reasons To Line Dry Your Laundry. My wife and I may soon be installing a clothesline in our backyard. In many neighborhoods they are frowned upon - one of the reasons I dont like living in a neighborhood. I digress. One of our neighbors recently put up a clothesline, and we might just follow his lead. (@Simple Mom)
A Few Others I Enjoyed
* 4 Quick Tips for Getting Out of a Rut * Young and Cash Rich * Embracing Simple Style * First Trading Experience With OptionsHouse * The Exponential Power of Delayed Consumption * How Much Emergency Fund is Enough? * 50 Questions that Will Free Your Mind * Save Money On Car Insurance
You can get essential oils from these folks:
http://www.youngliving.com/en_US/index.html
They have a natural hand sanitizer called Thieves, too. It’s good stuff.
A goat from a local farm in Buckeye, Arizona. They have pictures on Facebook of all the 2011 kids and their mothers, but I can't figure out how to easily post them here.
What do they do with the little bucks?
Hi TAC,
Well, you asked for it.....
“What do they do with the little bucks?”
Chevon Meat Chili Recipe (makes about 14 cups)
2 T cooking oil
1 T salt
2 c chopped onions
3 lbs ground goat meat
1 T ground oregano
1/2 c + 2 T chili powder
2 T ground cumin
1/2 c masa flour
1 t garlic powder
8 c boiling water
In heavy pot, saute onions in cooking oil, add oregano, cumin, garlic powder and salt.
Stir and saute until onion is almost clear, then add ground meat and cook and stir until crumbly and almost gray.
Add chili powder and then flour, stirring vigorously until thoroughly blended.
Lastly, add boiling water, bring mixture to a boil, and simmer. Seasonings may be adjusted to individual taste. Pinto Beans are optional.
That’s just for starters.....
yea they are cute as heck
tasty too
yea they are cut as heck
taste good too
In case you check in, Granny, Happy Easter to you. Because He lives, we can face tomorrow.
Hugs from all of us...
Garden As If Your Life Depended On It, Because It Will
By Ellen LaConte
Spring has sprungat least south of the northern tier of states where snow still has a ban on itand the grass has riz. And so has the price of most foods, which is particularly devastating just now when so many Americans are unemployed, underemployed, retired or retiring, on declining or fixed incomes and are having to choose between paying their mortgages, credit card bills, car payments, and medical and utility bills and eating enough and healthily. Many are eating more fast food, prepared foods, junk foodall of which are also becoming more expensiveor less food.
In some American towns, and not just impoverished backwaters, as many as 30 percent of residents cant afford to feed themselves and their families sufficiently, let alone nutritiously. Here in the Piedmont Triad of North Carolina where I live its 25 percent. Across the country one out of six of the elderly suffers from malnutrition and hunger. And the number of children served one or two of their heartiest, healthiest meals by their schools grows annually as the number of them living at poverty levels tops twenty percent. Thirty-seven million Americans rely on food banks that now routinely sport half-empty shelves and report near-empty bank accounts. And this is a prosperous nation!
In some cases this round of price hikes on everything from cereal and steak to fresh veggies and breadand even the flour that can usually be bought cheaply to make it will be temporary. But over the long term the systems that have provided most Americans with a diversity, quantity and quality of foods envied by the rest of the world are not going to be as reliable as they were.
Whats for Supper Down the Road?
As they move through the next few decades Americans can expect
§ the price of conventionally produced food to rise and not come down again,
§ prices to rollercoaster so that budgeting is unpredictable,
§ some foods to become very expensive compared to what were used to
§ and others, beginning with some of the multiple versions of the same thing made by the same company to garner a bigger market share and more shelf space, to gradually become unavailable.
Tremors in food supply chains and pricing will make gardening look like a lot more than a hobby, a seasonal workout, a practical way to fill your pantry with your summer favorites, or a physically, spiritually and mentally healing activity, or all four. Gardening and small-scale and collective farming, especially of staple crops and the ones that could stave off malnutrition, could become as important as bringing home the bacon, both the piggy and the dollar kind. Why?
Whys Gardening So Important Now?
There are at least five reasons why more of us should take up spade, rake and hoe, make compost and raise good soil and garden beds with a vengeance, starting this spring and with an eye toward forever.
1) Peak oil. Most petroleum experts agree that we shot past peak oil in the US around 1971. Lest youve missed the raging ( http://www.postcarbon.org ), thats the point at which more than half the readily, affordably retrievable oil in reserves has been used up, what remains is more expensive to retrieve, and the dregs are irretrievable. Weve shot or are about to shoot past peak worldwide, estimates of when ranging from 2007 to 2013, with many oil company execs agreeing to at least the latter. There are no new cheap-easy oil fields coming on line. Any new fields you hear about or new methods, like tar sands drilling are expensive, water guzzling, dangerous, environmentally disastrous and unlikely to produce more than a few years worth of oil, and that a decade or more down the line. That means abundant, cheap oil is about to be history. What difference does that make?
For one thing, there is no replacement for oil that can do all that oil has done as cheaply and universally as oil has done it. I offer an exercise in Life Rules, The ABCs of Peak Oil which helps readers imaginatively subtract from their lives everything that depends in one way or another on cheap easy oil. It doesnt leave much. (See Beth Terrys website ( http://myplasticfreelife.com/plasticfreeguide/ ), for example, for what subtracting plastics may entail.)
Emergency Kits - Affordable and Customizable. Stay Safe!
The global economy that presently supplies us with our food, runs on cheap oil and lots of it. It runs slower and less predictably on expensive oil thats hard to get because its located in hard-to-reach or high-risk conflict-ridden zones. Cheap, abundant food on the shelves of grocery and big box stores and food banks, on our tables and in our bellies depends on cheap abundant oil for fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides, and to power farm machinery and transport food from fields to processors and packagers and then to purveyors and consumers, around the world. Past peak, that systems going to have the half-life of the strontium 90 thats escaping the Fukushimi Dai-ichi reactor: 29 years, or there abouts. One good global crisis, and not that long.
2) Peak soil & space: A couple of links between peak oil and peak soil: First, it matters that one of the proposed alternatives to oil is biofuels. Acreage around the world is being converted from production of corn, wheat and soy for human and animal consumptioni.e., foodto production of ethanol and biofuels to put in trucks and cars and . . . Which makes remaining corn, et al, more expensive. Some energeconomy geniuses are proposing that Afghanis, for example, convert the fields of opium poppies that are their primary agricultural export, not to growing grains or legumes or other staple foods, but to biofuel ( http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/03/putting-poppies-in-the-gas-tank/8379/ ), which would, not coincidentally, make the gasoline that goes in American military equipment much cheaper and provide Afghanis with a profitable market item rather than food.
According to a 2009 National Geographic staff report, ( http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2009/06/cheap-food/bourne-text ), The corn used to make a 25-gallon tank of ethanol would feed one person for a year. Tell that to Archer-Daniels-Midland, Al Gores deep-pockets friend and mega-ethanol and corn products producer.
Second, the huge oil-gluttonous machinery that has made factory farming possible has compacted soils, literally crushing the life out of them.
Arable land in the developing or so-called Third World has been at a premium since time immemorial, thanks to geographic location and/or persistent plundering by empires old and new. Revolutions in north Africa and the Middle East are occurring not just to obtain more democratic governments but also to obtain more food and more affordable food. Revolutionaries are barking up a tree thats seen better days.
In the United States and elsewhere in the developed, read First world, arable land has reached peak production. All those petroleum-based products that fueled the Green Revolution of the last century, also produce so many crops, constantly, with support from toxic chemicals and without concern for the microbes that make soil a live, self-regenerating system, that most American farmlandif its farmers didnt go organic a while backis comprised of dead soils. Peak oil makes a repeat of the petroleum-driven 20 th century Green Revolution impossible ( http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2009/06/cheap-food/green-revolution-illustration ), which is good for soil and other living things, not so much for food prices and supplies.
After peak, in soil like in oil, comes descent. Adding insult to injury, every year farmers lose thousands of acres of arable land to urban and suburban sprawl and more tons of topsoil than they produce of grain and other field crops to attrition. Half the Earths original trove of topsoil, like that which once permitted the American Midwest to feed the world, has been lost to wind and erosion. Millions of years in the making, it has been depleted and degraded by industrialized agriculture in only a couple of centuries. Chinas soils ride easterly winds across the Pacific to settle out on cars and rooftops in California while the American Bread Baskets soils are building deltas and dead zones at the mouth of the Mississippi. Like oil, that soil isnt coming back. We can only build it, help it to build itself and wait.
3) Monoculture : We can cut to the chase on this one. The food we eat is produced on industrial-strength, fossil-fuel-driven super farms. Those farms practice monoculture: the planting one crop, often of one genetic strain of that crop, at a time and sometimes year after year over vast landscapes of plowed field. When thousands of acres of farmland are sown with the same genetic strain of grain, uncongenial bout of weather, disease or pest to which that strain is susceptible can wipe out the whole crop. At present the Ug99 fungus, called stem rust, which emerged a decade ago in Africa, could wipe out more than 80% of the worlds wheat crops as it spreads, according to a 2009 article in the L. A. Times ( http://articles.latimes.com/2009/jun/14/science/sci-wheat-rust14 ). Recent studies follow its appearance in other countries downwind of eastern Africa where it originated, including Yemen and Iran (where revolutionaries are already protesting rising prices and shortages), which opens the possibility of its emergence further downwind in Central and Eastern Asia. The race is on to breed resistant plants before it reaches Canada or the U.S. But it can take a decade or more to create a universally adaptable new genetic line that is resistant to a new disease like stem rust that can travel much faster than that. The current spike in the price of wheat is due in part to Ug99 which might properly be renamed Ugh.
4) Climate instability. Bad uncongenial weather has lately devastated crops in the upper Midwest, Florida, Mexico, Russia, China, Australia, parts of Africa and elsewhere. Many climate scientists believe weve passed the equivalent of peak friendly and familiar weather, too. And while increasing heat will bedevil harvests ( http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2009/06/cheap-food/stanmeyer-photography ), intense cold, downpours and flooding, drought and destructive storm systems will make farming an increasingly hellish occupation if profit is whats being farmed for. The transitional climate will be unpredictable from season and will produce more extremes of weather and weather-related disasters which means farmers will not be able to assume much about growing seasons, rainfall patterns and getting crops through to harvest. If the past is precedent, the transition from the climate weve been used to for 10,000 years to whatever stable climate emerges out of climate chaos next, could take decades, centuries or even millennia. Especially if we keep messing with it. When a whole nations or regions staple crops, especially grains, are lost or on-again-off-again, everything down the line from the crops themselves become more expensive, from meat, poultry and dairy to every kind of processed food. I.e., the food we shop for as if supermarkets were actually where food comes from.
5) The roller-coaster economy . This isnt the place for me to offer my explanation for the probability of global economic collapse. (See ( www.ellenlaconte.com/excerpts-from-life-rules/#chpfour ) for that.) No pundits, talking-heads or economic analysts (well, very few) deny there are rough economic times ahead. Even many of the cautious among them acknowledge that we may be looking at five or six years of high unemployment and many of the lost jobs wont be coming back. The less cautious, like me, predict the collapse of the whole fossil-fueled, funny-money, inequitable, overly-complicated global economic system in the lifetimes of anyone under 50. Well, at the rate were going in all the wrong directions politically and economically, I hazard the guess, anyone under 80.
Clearly, depending on the present system to provide us with most or all of our food reliably or long-term, is unwise in the extreme. Which is how we get back to why we need to garden as if our lives depended on it. Bringing food production processes and systems closer to home is going to prove vital to our survival. We need to take producing our own and each others food as seriously as weve taken producing a money income because growing numbers of us wont have enough money to buy food in the conventional ways and there will be less of it to buy. So whats our recourse?
Gardening Like Everybodys Business
Under the influence and auspices of the prevailing economy, most Americans have forgotten how to provide for themselves. Weve become accustomed to earning money with which we buy provisions. That process is about the have the legs kicked out from under it. Instead of earning money (or its funny-money kin like credit cards) to buy the things we need, well need to start providing more of those things for ourselves and each other locally and (bio)regionally. Gardening and small-scale farming while they will need to be undertaken in a businesslike fashion will be less about doing business than about everyones having something to eat and more people being busy providing it. And while not everyone will be able to garden or farm, we are all able to get up close and personal with those who do.
In a subsequent column Ill review five variations on the theme of gardening to counterbalance the five reasons I think we need to.
§ Back-yard, back-porch, back-40 gardening
§ Community gardens
§ Community Supported Agriculture
§ Urban gardening
§ Taking the
Ellen LaConte, an independent scholar, organic gardener, freelance writer, speaker and editor, living in the Yadkin River watershed of the Piedmont bioregion of North Carolina, is a contributing editor to Green Horizon Magazine and The Ecozoic and Advisory Board member at the EarthWalk Alliance. She was assistant to the late homesteader and bestselling Living the Good Life author, Helen Nearing, and as Nearings executor helped found The Good Life Center at Forest Farm in Harborside, Maine. Her memoir of Nearing, On Light Alone was published in South Korea as well as the US. Her most recent book is the controversial Life Rules: Why so much is going wrong everywhere at once & how Life teaches us to fix it (Green Horizon/iUniverse, 2010) can be examined at www.liferules-thebook.info . LaConte publishes a quarterly online newsletter, Starting Point, and can be reached at ( www.ellenlaconte.com ).
Original at: http://pecangroup.org/?p=1503
Poultry - If you'd like to get started with chickens, here are the basics - Kepple Poultry - Start your own chicken flock - Charles A. Sanders Rabbits - Raising rabbits for meat and making money it's hard to beat this creature on the homestead - Thibodeau Rabbits - Waising wascally wabbits for din-dins - Don Fallick
Food Preservation - Slaughtering and butchering - Dynah Geissal
Oh, and if you want some other reading say George Orwell's 1984 - Yep, it's there too. I have saved quite a few very good books from his listings... Saved a bundle instead of buying the books (and it is free too!)
Check it out, I think you will like it. (remember changes daily!)
We’ll bake our potatoes on the hot ash of a fire pit. Start a nice campfire, and once you get a nice bed of hot glowing ash going, throw your foil-wrapped potatoes on them and turn them occasionally.
All of you all, hope your wkd. was lovely. Thread’s within 500 plus change of hitting the big ten thousand, wow.
I am posting despite a migraine or some such, to say “howdy” to you hardy ones that do not have your heads buried in the sand.
As I rested earlier today I wondered where planet earth will be a year from now, the next time “Resurrection Day” is celebrated.
I guess this headache/queasy tummy is tending me toward maudlin.
FYI, here’s a thread might be of interest, to which I was pinged today:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2709980/posts
Love, Joya
(p.s. 10AChamp, nice to see you on this thread, I have missed you & I surely hope you are well.)
Midwest Eats program to re-create Depression food(Booyah)
Chicago Sun Times ^ | April 20,2011
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2709980/posts
THX
U
R
Welcome
Hello Joya and all, I am fine - just busy!!
More DOOM!
China Proposes To Cut Two Thirds Of Its $3 Trillion In USD Holdings
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2709808/posts
Love your tagline.
REF:
‘(Darwinism is to Genesis as Global Warming is to Revelations.)’
Ok, I wanted to get to the articles you listed.
How do I do that on that site?
I’m sorry, it is the eBookDownload button down the left side, or you can click on the link below...
http://survival-training.info/ebookdownload.htm
I don’t know where he finds them all, but there is usually something there I find interesting. If you want it, grab it, because tomorrow it will be gone and something else will be up there. Sure keeps you coming back...
Hmmmm, wonder what the Fed will be saying Wednesday? (I don’t EVER remember them holding a press conference before...)
Thank you Joya, and thanks for the welcome. I’m glad to be back.
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