GardenBanter.co.uk - View Single Post - Self-Sufficiency Acreage Requirement?

13-12-2003, 10:12 PM

In article ,
(Edgar S.) wrote:

(bob peterson) wrote in message
. com...

If you translate this to a real life situation where you have 10 hours
a day worth of other work to do just to survive, its clear that this
type of arrangement is only for desperation mode,

Nope... Not really. Growing your own food makes more or less sense,
depending on the economy. Our dollar is getting weaker. We are having
both inflation and deflation at the same time. Money is harder to get
(deflation) but worth less and less over time (inflation).

If one can meet most of their needs without using dollars, they're
better off. Of course, this presupposes they can raise the food
efficiently.

Even just a dozen tire stacks with home raised potatoes would be nice
to have and takes little effort.

You almost convinced me but then you created this image of the sort of
trashoids who have worn out tires stacked up in their yards as planters --
no doubt lined up in front of the rusting vehicles up on blocks with those
very tires removed, in front of a doublewide that's settling at an odd
angle with a roof that goes BANG! on hot days.

One likes to fantasize living an aesthetic & ascetic life in concert with
nature, bathing in pure-water streams or a beaver pond, gathering
pine-nuts & wild blueberries, gathering douglas-sugar from the tips of
firs or tapping a maple tree, a veggy garden out behind a two-bedroom log
cabin very expertly put together like a giant Lincoln Log set. The rudest
thing ever done would be perhaps killing an occasional blackbear if you're
not a vegetarian & can make good use of every part of the animal. Might
have a sun-panel to run the PC off of, or to read past sundown. With such
an existence one would simply not to be so polluting & dollar-dependent
in order to live in a pleasing manner, while every hour of every day
learning first-hand about woodlore, herblore, & natural history of one's
extremely immediate environment. O!, how lovely that would be to just be a
good little Girl Scout or Boy Scout right up to the age of 93, friend to
birds & squirrels, then die smiling & buried out back under a favorite
madronna.

Sadly what one encounters instead is crackers squatting on public lands or
with some unperkable cheaply obtained property that could not be legally
built on nailing "do not trespass!" & death's-head warnings to every tree,
a growing pile of beer bottles in front of a tar paper shack housing
paranoids ready to shoot park rangers or, if even slightly legally
ensconsed, shoot at tax assessors & housing inspectors, on guard against
the police who might find out about the lab some Hell's Angels buddies
dashed together in that broken-down old postal truck -- & ultimately no
closer to nature than is that row of ugly-ass tires with dried up potato
vines poking out.

It's true, though, an unbathed paranoid with diptheria living in a shanty,
even with his open sess-hole just out the back door, is polluting the
world a lot less than those of us with our hot showers & a dumbass
lawnmowers, microwaving Hungry Man dinners three or five times a day, &
driving two miles & back just for a twenty-ounce latte. It would perhaps
be better for the earth overall if more of us just stopped bathing & went
out on the fringes of the forest & tried to get some of our sustenance
from shedded fir needles & owl scat. But it's a bit like hoping to save
the earth with some new strain of TB that properly takes out most of our
own harmful species, & from then on surivalism will mean going without
elevators while gleaning the emptied skyscrapers for useful stuff &
warring against other survivors for possession of the biggest piles of
rusted cans of peaches or pork & beans in the ruins of Safeway or the A&P.

-paghat the ratgirl

--
"Of what are you afraid, my child?" inquired the kindly teacher.
"Oh, sir! The flowers, they are wild," replied the timid creature.
-from Peter Newell's "Wild Flowers"
See the Garden of Paghat the Ratgirl: http://www.paghat.com/