Independence Days Challenge: April 4 - 9

I've been reading chapter 8, "Eating From Food Storage Every Day," in Sharon Astyk's book, Independence Days. One of the things she addresses in this chapter, is food stigmas. I have experienced this.

When my children were small, I told their Louisianan great-grandmother that I wanted to have a summer garden and preserve as much as I could from it. Since she had done the same for many, many years, I thought she would be pleased to hear this. Instead she was shocked and disapproving. "Why in heaven's name would you want to do that!" she asked. "You can afford to buy food."

My first husband, who grew up in her home, carried this attitude into his adult life. Not in regards to gardening and preserving food, but he would buy things simply because we could "afford" to. Whether it was gas at a more expensive gas station, or eating at an expensive restaurant, it was important to him to show that we had money to do things. In fact, when I wanted to cut up our credit cards, he refused because we could "afford" to be in debt. Of course, this went against my frugal grain, and as you can imagine, was the primary source of disagreement between us. It's probably no surprise that he was never interested in having a garden.

Sharon speaks of a slightly different food stigma, that of "poor people's food." Her point is that as Americans, we see a staple diet of basic foods as something only poor people eat. We are accustomed to food variety via our grocery stores, to the point where this is our "normal," even though such luxury is quite recent in the history of human civilization.

Food stigmas are stumbling blocks to creating a food storage. That and the idea that only radicals and doomsdayers stockpile food. But consider this. What if the breadwinner in your family were to lose their job and couldn't find work for several months. This has happened to Dan and me.

The first time he was unemployed, we had no food storage and it was horrible. It lasted long enough that I started skipping all but one meal a day in order to have enough food for my kids. Our cupboard got down to having only a jar of peanut butter and a box of stale ice cream cone cups. That was breakfast for about a week. Canned pork and beans and 25 cent boxes of mac and cheese were our dinner.

The second time was while we were preparing for Y2K, and we did have food storage. DH was out of work for several months, but we ate well. Well enough to not notice that we couldn't afford to buy food. What a difference.

Those experiences are why the Independence Days Challenge is meaningful to me. It's motivating me to get serious about our food storage once again, and weekly blog updates help keep me on track!

Here's what I did this past week:

1. Plant something –

• red Pontiac potatoes
• Fordhook Giant Swiss chard

2. Harvest something -

• cabbage leaves
• carrot
• beet leaf thinnings
• lettuce thinnings
• spinach thinnings
• radishes
• wild onions
• sheep sorrel
• broccoli

3. Preserve something -

• wild onion "pickle," putting fresh, peeled wild onions in leftover pickle juice

4. Waste Not–

• Used an old cardboard box, wood ashes from the woodstove, and some sandy soil to make a dust bath box for the chickens.
• mulched blueberry bushes with pine needles from woods

5. Want Not –

• found organic pasta for an excellent price and bought several packages for food storage. It's made with unbleached white flour, so should keep well

6. Build Community Food Systems –

• Blogging about it (0f course)
• drew seed giveaway winner this week
• talked with neighbors about chickens and gardening

7. Eat the Food –

• Had our first salad with ingredients solely from the garden: included raw broccoli; thinnings from beets, lettuce, & spinach; a few cabbage leaves; grated carrot & turnip; and sliced radishes.
• Ate the last butternut squash, halved, seeded and baked with honey and butter. Yum.

To read what other Independence Days Challengers are doing, click here.

Independence Days Challenge: April 4 - 9 copyright April 2010
by Leigh at http://www.5acresandadream.com/

Related Posts:
A Self-Supporting Homestead?
Re-establishing A Food Storage

Re-Establishing A Food Storage

Opening the box UPS delivered and finding this...

... was kinda like receiving an early Christmas present. What is it? It the beginnings of our re-established food storage: 5 lb raw hulled sunflower seeds, 5 lb natural process cocoa powder, 5 lb organic spelt flakes, 5 lb split green peas, 5 lb organic wheat bran, and 1 lb organic alfalfa seeds. To start.

As a long time gardener and food preserver, growing and storing a winter's worth of vegetables always made sense. It's what I enjoyed doing, it saved money, and we liked any aspect of being self sufficient. I suppose if we had raised animals for meat, butchering and storing at least a season's worth of meat would have made sense too. It wasn't until Y2K that I actually started to think of food storage in a broader sense.

It was in the mid 1990s that we first started hearing about Y2K as a potential impending disaster. You probably recall that there were many opinions about its expected effect as well as what to do; everything from the doomsdayers who claimed that civilization as we know it was coming to an end, to those who pooh-poohed the whole thing as utter nonsense.

Somewhere during that time, one of the local churches was going to show the C-SPAN video of the congressional hearings on Y2K. Dan and I had some questions; officially, our government was saying that there was no problem and that citizens need do nothing, but there were too many trustworthy sources voicing concerns. We decided to go. After a presentation of the facts, the congressional committee's conclusion was that Y2K was a real problem which required real answers. At the end of the video, the church's pastor got up to speak. I assumed he would take the opportunity to preach, but he didn't. All he said was, "If you want to know what to do next, read the book of Proverbs."

OK, I thought, I can do that. Proverbs is a book of sayings which contrast wise and foolish living. As I read through it, I thought about what to do in regards to Y2K. The wise, I read, are diligent, hard working, well prepared, self-controlled, generous, not given to get rich quick schemes, but gradually save and store up in preparation for winter. The example was the ant, neither influential nor prestigious, but hardworking and prepared. That made sense to me and I decided to start a serious food storage, including things that we couldn't grow for ourselves.

At the time I belonged to a food co-op (buying club), so it was easy to get good prices on good bulk food. I admit that I miss that. But I also stocked up on sales at stores, canned as much as I could get my hands on, and bought the food dehydrator too. We only had a few dollars each week to put toward food storage, but slowly we were able to store up several months worth of food.

Do you remember exactly what you did after the stoke of midnight on January 1, 2000? I do. After exclaiming that the lights were still on, we picked up the phone to see if there was still a dial tone! In the days that followed, I remember quite a few folks were angry because nothing had happened. These were the ones who felt "duped" after investing thousands of dollars in food supply kits and survival supplies. And then there were the I-told-you-so-ers, gleefully crowing because they hadn't bothered to prepare anything at all.

For myself, I thought it was a positive experience and I learned things which made me realize that we always needed a food storage. One was that Dan was out of work for a time and we were able to eat well without worrying about how to pay for groceries. The other was a friend whose husband was out of work. Now, I could never have afforded to buy her a week's worth of groceries, but I could easily give her a week's worth from our food storage, which I did.

Then came September 2004, when the western Carolinas were hit with the remnants of hurricanes Francis, Ivan, and Jeanne. By the time they reached us in the Appalachian foothills, they had been downgraded to tropical storms, so while we didn't get the hurricane force winds, we did get torrential rains, flooding, and extensive road and bridge damage. Like most others, our basement was ankle deep in water (and we did not live in a flood zone!) Even though we had a some damage, we were fortunate because many in our county had their basements cave in from all the water and ground saturation. Everyone was without electricity for a number of days and our food storage was a life saver. The grocery store shelves had long since been wiped out by folks buying up whatever they could get their hands on before the storms hit. We fared very well because in addition to food, I had been stocking up on matches, paper plates & napkins, toilet paper, and water. The biggest problem we had was because we had well water which required an electric pump; we had no running (nor flushing) water. We did have a 55 gallon drum filled with water, so by rationing we were alright.

In 2005 we had to move twice, great distances both times. Our food storage was already depleted, and we used up the rest of it getting reestablished. The next several years of apartment were basically storageless. When we first saw this place and I saw the pantry, I was delighted because it was one of the things on our "must have" list.

To me, buying food cheaply in bulk, preserving the harvest, or taking advantage of a good sale to stock up, just makes sense. Not only because of the economy, but because of my personal experience. So, we're in the process of re-establishing our stocks of foodstuffs. Happily, I recently found out that there is a food co-op in the area, which I plan to inquire about this week. I found it via the internet, and there are several sites you can check to see what's near you.

To find a local food co-op or buying club (includes international listings):
Food Co-ops & Other Co-op Resources
GreenPeople.org (Food Co-ops, Health Food stores, Natural Food Stores)
Co-op Directory Service

To find locally grown produce and products:
Local Harvest

To buy bulk online:
Bulk Foods Consumer Online Market (where my stuff came from)
Honeyville Food Products
Something Better Natural Foods
Walton Feed

Finally, for more information on food storage
Food Storage FAQ - Captain Dave's Survival Center
Food Storage Made Easy

Re-Establishing A Food Storage photos & text copyright 

27 October 2009 by Leigh at http://www.5acresandadream.com/

Honest Scrap

Awhile back, Benita awarded me the Honest Scrap. I confess that I havn't had much time to think about it, until Sharon mentioned that she would have awarded it to me if Benita hadn't.

Many of you have already received this award, but in case not, here are the rules:
1. Choose a minimum of 7 blogs to give this award to that you feel to be brilliant in content and design.
2. Show the 7 winner’s links on your blog and leave them a comment informing them that they have been given the “Honest Scrap.”
3. List 10 honest things about yourself that people may not know.

So, what ten honest unknown things about myself should I share? The answer to that came when I found this old photo of myself....

This is of my dad and me, taken in the mid-1970s. What's it all about? That's where my ten honest things that folks don't know about me comes in!

1 - I used to be a hippie.

2 - My dream for a simpler lifestyle was born in the early 1970's. Back then, "homesteading" referred to something American pioneers did when they settled the west, and "footprints" were something left by one's feet. Terms like "sustainable" and "self-sufficiency" weren't part of the vocabulary. Back then, it was "going back to the land." My desire was to "live off the land" and that's what I wanted to work toward.

3 - After one year of college and three different majors, I dropped out and met a group of like minded folk. We each went our own way for about a year to make and save some money. Then we headed out together to find land to buy.

4 - Eventually about eight of us or so, bought 140 wooded acres deep in the Ozark Mountains. The closest paved road was 13 miles away. Since the land had no access, everything had to be backpacked in. We had no electricity, no clocks, and no keys.

This second photo of me shows the only access when the river was up (unless one didn't mind wading). I am crossing a swinging bridge with my backpack and guitar.

5 - We made two tipis for shelter. One was sewn completely by hand, the other with a foot-treadle sewing machine. We lived in these year-round for several years.

6 - We cleared about an acre(?) of land on the side of the mountain and terraced a large garden.

7 - All of our cooking and canning was done over a campfire. The photo of my dad and me above shows the summer kitchen. It's not an especially good photo, but if you look closely, you see my dad standing near a pile of rocks, tending a coffee pot. The rocks made up the base for a fire, our "stove". Behind us you can see rough tables and shelves. There is a water faucet and basin there, furnishing cold running water which was gravity fed from a spring higher up on the land. In cold weather, we cooked over the fire in the tipi.

8 - I lived there for two, going on three years. Toward the end it was off and on, and problems started to develop. While the group was looking for the land, we had a common vision, a common goal. Once we got the land however, we had different ideas about what to do with it. Most of the problems and strife were stirred up by the women and eventually I was asked to leave.

9 - In spite of the interpersonal problems, this was in some ways, one of the happiest periods of my life. However, life doesn't always take us down the path we choose. Even so, the simple, hardworking, close to creation lifestyle suited me and I have carried much of it with me in the life I've lived since then.

10 - I am fortunate now to have a life partner who believes and feels the same way I do. Readers may wonder why we waited until we had an empty next to finally get our own piece of land, as though making a late entry into this lifestyle. That had much to do with the financial choices we made along the way. When we decided to homeschool, it meant living on only one income, and not a large one at that. We were fortunate to be able to rent in a fairly rural area however, and our children were raised in a much simpler lifestyle than most and with many homesteading values: raising and preserving our own food, food storage, utilizing what we had or doing without, not going into debt, chopping wood for that woodstove because who in the world could afford electric baseboard heat.

It is interesting to me that thirty years after those photos were taken, so many people are still longing for the same thing we did then. Oh, we couch it in different terms, but there is just something within some of us that sees the futility of the direction the world seems to want to go.

Hopefully, the years have made DH and me more realistic about our goals and how to obtain them. Sometimes it's hard not to think that if we'd only been able to start on our own homestead years ago, how much farther along we'd be. Still, neither of us regrets the choices we've made along the way. Being older and hopefully wiser now, I understand that there is more to life than simple reaching the finish line. There is joy and value in running the race as well.

Let's see, I'd better get back on track. To whom shall I award the Honest Scrap? That's a tough one to decide! Here are a few of my many regular reads, in no particular order. I benefit from reading them all. I invite you to visit each of them and see for yourself.

Homespun Fiber
Woolly Bits - Everything Textile
Camp Runamuck
A Handmade Life
Dot's Fibre To Fabric
Cottage Homestead
Flow of Love
MamaStories

Honest Scrap photos and text copyright October 2009 

by Leigh at http://www.5acresandadream.com/