On Mon, 15 Dec 2003 01:41:00 -0800,
(paghat) wrote:

If you care about the environment, give up
your car & whatever else generates huge amounts of difficult-to-recycle
waste, but don't convince yourself that leaving parts of your car in the
garden & trying to hide it with rhubarb is ecofriendly. Eco is not spelled
u-g-l-y.

Got to love this girl. Retarded in many ways..but sharp in others. I
think this is called idiot savant.

Gunner, who lives in beautiful So.California..where all the beautiful
homes are sterile and look like ticky tac and have no charector.



" ..The world has gone crazy. Guess I'm showing my age...
I think it dates from when we started looking at virtues
as funny. It's embarrassing to speak of honor, integrity,
bravery, patriotism, 'doing the right thing', charity,
fairness. You have Seinfeld making cowardice an acceptable
choice; our politicians changing positions of honor with
every poll; we laugh at servicemen and patriotic fervor; we
accept corruption in our police and bias in our judges; we
kill our children, and wonder why they have no respect for
Life. We deny children their childhood and innocence- and
then we denigrate being a Man, as opposed to a 'person'. We
*assume* that anyone with a weapon will use it against his
fellowman- if only he has the chance. Nah; in our agitation
to keep the State out of the church business, we've
destroyed our value system and replaced it with *nothing*.
Turns my stomach- " Chas , rec.knives

In article , "Fran"
wrote:

"paghat" wrote in message
In article "Fran" wrote:

[clips]

I've grown spuds in tyres and I live in a house that friends who live in
the
city think is quite posh.
So how often do you encounter this sort of thing? Or more to the point,
why
do you live in an area with such slummy places or go to such slummy
places?

Hey, YOU'RE the one who lives where it's "posh" to stack used tires in
your front yard.

You aren't reading what I wrote. I don't live where it is "posh" to grow
spuds in tyres. I live in a house which others have described as "posh". I
also happen to have grown potatoes in tyre stacks.

I don't put these tyre stacks in my front yard. The previous poster did not
mention growing spuds in tyres in his front yard either.

You are the one that assumes that anyone who DOES grow spuds in tyres is a
"trashoid".

And you've reinforced the truth of it. When you said you "hide" the tires
with other plants (such as rubarb, I'm sure that's a year-round disguise
of a wondrous sort) you pretty much admitted even you can tell that a
stack of tires in the yard still looks like garbage & needs to be hidden.
So you lack sufficient aesthetic to care; I'm not saying people SHOULDN'T
live like that, I'm just saying it takes trashoids to do so. But when I
make a planter, or a trellis, or any garden ornamentation, it doesn't need
to be hidden; if it slowly does vanish behind vines or shrubs, it wasn't
because it was butt-ugly & needed hiding. As you said "spuds don't care
where they grow" -- they certainly don't grow better because someone put
them inside some trashy tires. Get the trash out of the yard & the plants
will do just as well. Did you know old tires can leech enough zinc to kill
some plants? Used tires are an enormous hazard to the environment -- but
stacking them up in the gardens is not the answer to that problem.

Spuds don't care where they grow

The garbage dump wouldn't mind a few spuds either, or even some toxic
waste for that matter!

That comment is simply adding hysteria to stereotyping.

Just in case you aren't aware of it, many tips (or dumps) around the world
are now becoming very well cared for and have permananet tip attendants.
These tip attendants often shred garden waste dumped in the tip and then
compost it and either resell it to keen gardeners who know the value of
recycling green waste or reuse it on beautification schemes in the dump.

I know a great deal about recycling, but if you think keeping piles of
tires in the yard is comparable to municiple composts, then there's just
no easy communication between the earth I'm living on & your Tireland
residence on Alpha Centauri.

No one is compelling you to recycle anything but there is simply no call to
leap to the worst possible scenario simply because someone does try to make
use of discarded items.

Keeping garbage in your yard is NOT recycling -- no more than tossing
whiskey & beer bottles out your back window means they're "recycled" into
a lovely pile that bindweed can "hide" for a couple months out of the
year. Our household uses as little as possible of anything that even needs
to be thrown out or recycled by any means other than our own compost -- so
in our case we don't have the city cart off very much (our weekly garbage
pick-up is rarely more than a third full can, sometimes entirely empty, &
it's mildly annoying that those of us who DO NOT GENERATE much garbage
have to pay the same rates as people who cram their cans full every week,
most of it for a landfill). If you care about the environment, give up
your car & whatever else generates huge amounts of difficult-to-recycle
waste, but don't convince yourself that leaving parts of your car in the
garden & trying to hide it with rhubarb is ecofriendly. Eco is not spelled
u-g-l-y.

They do not become your "trashoids" simply because
they have discovered a good method to use for growing something in a tight
space. The trashoids are in your mind.

A couple things are just not rationally deniable, such as anyone who lines
up "fancy" whiskey bottles of colored water in their window sills as
"decorations," or uses tires for planters in their garden, really are
going to be trash, even if most won't be able to know they're trash (or
they wouldn't've mistaken old tires for a garden decorations to begin
with). Some few are proud to be trash & good for them; if one's life is a
living satire & that person knows it, that's just about admirable. But for
most, the only question about the matter would be whether or not they are
even MORE pathetic by having painted their garbagy tires white to
"improve" the look. As well to stick little cocktail umbrellas in the
dog's turds never cleaned out of the lawn, to make those nice yard
decorations too. The only possible exception would be a garden
intentionally automobile oriented. I visited a garden decorated with
vintage gasoline pumps with lovely winding paths amidst beautiful shrubs.
Being aesethetic people they did NOT include tire planters nor even rusty
cars up on blocks -- but I could imagine how tires MIGHT have been used
in that context (in a satiric manner at least) given their collection of
gas-station kitsch & the gorgeous old gasoline pumps.

-paggers

--
"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/

In article ,
wrote:

On Mon, 15 Dec 2003 00:58:11 -0800,
(paghat) wrote:

[clips\
I live in the middle of an ag area, where its far cheaper and
easier to buy 100lbs of Red Russets for $5USD right off the loading
dock.

Gunner

The reason I now grow mostly ornamental gardens is because I'm less
inclined in my middle years to do a shitload of work to end up with
something I can buy way too cheaply with no work at all -- yet I don't
mind doing the same amount of work for the sake of unusual shade plants or
flowering shrubs. But in the past when I was a veggy-gardening fiend it
was because the activity itself was joyous, canning was such great fun, I
loved the company of my aunty who had the space & devotion for keeping
these activities on schedule, & the resultant meals were much, much, much
better than ever could be store-bought. There may also have been times
when a dollar saved meant something too, but mainly it was for the intense
fun of it all. I do remember a year when finances were so tight that
harvesting in the forest was necessary rather than merely fun -- I threw a
party & fed a great many people a spectacularly good borsch made of
gleanings & the only part of it that wasn't wild was the beets, & those
were free at closing-time in the farmer's market. Mostly it was never from
need; & today I only ever do that sort of thing because I get a charge out
of having free stuff to eat even when I don't need to save mere nickles.
And experimenting with stuff that is edible but not often harvested by
anyone else is an inexplicable pleasure. There are many local berries
people will swear are poisonous, & which sometimes do taste nasty raw, but
they can be cooked, sieved & mixed with apples & spices to taste very
wonderful -- though even if something comes out mediocre I had fun giving
it a try. I'm sure it's in great part a biologicial "gatherer" response &
there're so many attendant pleasures to doing one's gathering in the woods
or in a personal garden than in grocery ailes. Not everything in life is
related to the price tag, & the reward is not quite quantifiable as cash
earned or saved. I can't today imagine spending the whole damned week
doing nothing but cold-packing tomatos, or canning free pie-cherries, but
I do some very occasional canning if my sweety & I can get it all done in
one day -- it's become a "break" from the important things instead of the
main thing it once was. When someone proposes the idea of doing it as a
"survivalist" or to be totally self-sufficient, I think that's admirable &
I don't believe it is difficult to do successfully.

Lately I'd rather grow species tulips or write a monograph on an obscure
Victorian author or dick around on the web or watch Japanese films on DVD,
but when my aunt was still alive, a lot of that energy went into growing
stuff to eat & canning as much of it as we had jars for. Life changed ten
times since then, but if life had been less dynamic & I still lived on my
aunt's land hoeing rows of veggies & pruning fruit trees, I can imagine
many a life spent at dumber things.

-paggers

--
"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/

"Fran" wrote:

Oh for Heavens sake! You are being patronising and heading off the track
into pure fantasy. Bucket asked about a self sufficient lifestyle. Bucket
did NOT ask about a vegan lifestyle or what the many froot loops at
misc.survivalism go on about when they congregate for a fantasy session.

Sorry, Fran. I don't know who the hell "Bucket" is nor do I really
care. I was replying to Dan, Linda, Noah, Gunner etc.

Snipped a bunch of useless bullshit....

I remember once asking how many gardeners there were in misc.survivalism and
there were about 3 who admitted to it

Ask how many gardeners in your group know how to treat a colicky mare
or how to go about butchering a hog and I'd venture a guess that not
many care to know. One such as yourself could argue that it's "a part
of farming"....

In misc.survivalism, only the absolute hardcore folks bother to plan
or prep for your Doomsday....most, plan and prep for the next blizzard
or thunderstorm etc.

Snipped more useless garbage....

Right about now, someone on the gardening groups will be typing out an
irate "but my family did it during the Depression and I grew up just
fine".

Nuff said.

More garbage snipped....

No mention of eating only spuds or even adding the odd cauliflower or bit of
corn. Fantasy can be fun at times but all you are doing is restricting the
topic to one hobby horse involving a restricted set of annual vegetables.

No....I was answering a fellow who made the implied claim that growing
a year's worth of food in a garden was easy. Was I wrong?

ral

On Mon, 15 Dec 2003 00:58:11 -0800,
(paghat) wrote:

In article ,
wrote:

On Sun, 14 Dec 2003 15:00:17 -0500, "rick etter"
wrote:


Who the hell eats 4 thousand calories a day?
=======================
Obviously not the lard butt that sits on the computer all day. There are,
however, many occupations/activities that will burn off far more than 2000
calories in a days work or a few hours a day workouts.
That you are too lazy to actually work/exercise doesn't mean that others
are

Hummm anyone up to a bit of research? When I was working above the
arctic circle for an oil exploratation company, I was eating (2) 1
pound bags of Craft Carmel candies, and a 12pack of Coke, along with 4
large bologna and cheese sandwiches, every 10 hours. And was loosing
weight.

Anyone want to calculate how many calories I was consuming in those 8
hours? This of course did not count a big dinner at the end of the
day.

Gunner

Otherwise you'd've had a really great Arctic garden, eh? Ice-carrots
pulled from the soil & fresh-frozen blackberries right from the bushes --
if only it were enough calories.

Blink blink....huh? Darlin..at -40...I needed as much fuel as I could
get into me as possible, both to keep the internal furnace stoked up
and to keep the hard manual labor possible.

The daily caloric intake for a fellow taking a dog team to Sitka would
make someone living in Jersey weigh 400 pounds within one year, but the
musher will lose weight chomping down whole sticks of butter as a major
part of a diet.

A temperate garden would not have to be large to feed a family (& some of
the neighbors to boot). When great-aunt Cora & I gardened what must have
been a mere half acre, what grew on that well-sunned land we couldn't give
away fast enough to be certain none went to waste. We dried foods & we
canned like crazy; we went years never buying veggies; we traded or gave
away bags & bags of stuff; we gave away canned stuff to whoever would
bring us a box of good jars. Even at that we ended up composting a great
deal of from the garden season by season, which always seemed a shame, but
it just overproduced food & there were only on average eight people to
feed on three adjoining properties. When we overestimated some crop by
factors of a hundred I had to find recipes that called for vast amounts of
garlics or radishes or zucinnis -- lord do I still love radishes baked in
coals, & fortunately garlics don't taste like garlic if you cook the hell
out of them so they make a pretty darned good soup. For some tubrous
things plus broccoli we could still be harvesting fresh in winter so it
was almost a year-round thing.

The only thing we could never quite get TOO much of was tomatoes, because
even making them a big priority by cold-pack canning scores of jars &
eating them off the vines like they were sweet apples, I loved the
cold-packed ones so much I used them up quickly in soups & stews & baked
things. Cold-pack canned tomatos are even better than fresh, there's no
way to duplicate that amazing taste without actually canning them
personally, then very hard to restrain oneself from using them immediately
instead of waiting until there's no more tomatos in the garden.

A honeybee hive would be nice to include as part of the garden, & a number
of berrying shrubs (not just summer fruits but bitter autumn berries too),
a hazel tree or two so one can press one's own oil. We had four Italian
plum trees -- can four trees worth of plums in just one year, you'll be
eating them for six years there's so many. One year we got so carried away
canning everything in sight that when we finally ran out we decided to
pickle watermelon rinds -- they were great pickled! When there was nothing
new growing to harvest, we were so addicted to the canning process that we
harvested crabapples from up & down the street & pickled those in the
prettiest jars -- they made great holiday gifts.

If I wanted to go all survivalist about it I already know from youthful
experimentation that earthworms, crickets, & snails are good eating -- so
the critters are also part of a garden harvest. No kidding about worms,
the only trick is to clean them properly, & really no stranger to eat than
clams & mussels, but with more uses, like they're good in muffins ("What
kind of berries are in this?"). As a vegetarian I'd be reluctant now; but
I don't think it's icky (to me eating cows is much ickier & eating pigs
unthinkable). I would also count as part of my harvest anything I could
get in walking distance right out of the wild (for a couple years "the
wild" for me meant harvesting from buildingless lots inner city).

In the countryside it's even easier, & not just blackberrying along
railroad tracks in summer. What you can do with a mudhole full of cattails
for might surprise many people -- cattail parts can stand in for potato,
flour, asparagus, & corn on the cob -- & that's just one of a couple
hundred things one can spot worthy of harvest. When I was eating mostly
only what my aunt & I grew, plus whatever I could harvest at odd moments
in the nearby woods, I was eating better than I do now that I mainly shop
in grocery stores, & cooking way better than now that I have a microwave.
I wasn't quite fully vegetarian back then though, so I did also eat
rabbits from time to time -- stewed, alder smoked, or fried -- & guinea
hens & chickens. No one could ever tempt me to eat redmeat again (not that
I'm dissing elk sausages), but sometimes I do get a hankerin' for alder
smoked rabbit which seems now to be a food of a bygone era & has taken on
a mythic immensity of flavorful greatness in my memory.

-paghat the ratgirl

Shug..given Frans comments in an earlier post..I guess Id better not
talk about guns or my garden, as it would put her off her feed. Or the
fact I live in the middle of an ag area, where its far cheaper and
easier to buy 100lbs of Red Russets for $5USD right off the loading
dock, or grapefruit off the tree for free, or my Thompson Seedless
grape arbors..or....

Gunner

" ..The world has gone crazy. Guess I'm showing my age...
I think it dates from when we started looking at virtues
as funny. It's embarrassing to speak of honor, integrity,
bravery, patriotism, 'doing the right thing', charity,
fairness. You have Seinfeld making cowardice an acceptable
choice; our politicians changing positions of honor with
every poll; we laugh at servicemen and patriotic fervor; we
accept corruption in our police and bias in our judges; we
kill our children, and wonder why they have no respect for
Life. We deny children their childhood and innocence- and
then we denigrate being a Man, as opposed to a 'person'. We
*assume* that anyone with a weapon will use it against his
fellowman- if only he has the chance. Nah; in our agitation
to keep the State out of the church business, we've
destroyed our value system and replaced it with *nothing*.
Turns my stomach- " Chas , rec.knives

In article , "Fran"
wrote:

"paghat" wrote in message
In article "Fran" wrote:

[clips]

I've grown spuds in tyres and I live in a house that friends who live in
the
city think is quite posh.
So how often do you encounter this sort of thing? Or more to the point,
why
do you live in an area with such slummy places or go to such slummy
places?

Hey, YOU'RE the one who lives where it's "posh" to stack used tires in
your front yard.

You aren't reading what I wrote. I don't live where it is "posh" to grow
spuds in tyres. I live in a house which others have described as "posh". I
also happen to have grown potatoes in tyre stacks.

I don't put these tyre stacks in my front yard. The previous poster did not
mention growing spuds in tyres in his front yard either.

You are the one that assumes that anyone who DOES grow spuds in tyres is a
"trashoid".

And you've reinforced the truth of it. When you said you "hide" the tires
with other plants (such as rubarb, I'm sure that's a year-round disguise
of a wondrous sort) you pretty much admitted even you can tell that a
stack of tires in the yard still looks like garbage & needs to be hidden.
So you lack sufficient aesthetic to care; I'm not saying people SHOULDN'T
live like that, I'm just saying it takes trashoids to do so. But when I
make a planter, or a trellis, or any garden ornamentation, it doesn't need
to be hidden; if it slowly does vanish behind vines or shrubs, it wasn't
because it was butt-ugly & needed hiding. As you said "spuds don't care
where they grow" -- they certainly don't grow better because someone put
them inside some trashy tires. Get the trash out of the yard & the plants
will do just as well. Did you know old tires can leech enough zinc to kill
some plants? Used tires are an enormous hazard to the environment -- but
stacking them up in the gardens is not the answer to that problem.

Spuds don't care where they grow

The garbage dump wouldn't mind a few spuds either, or even some toxic
waste for that matter!

That comment is simply adding hysteria to stereotyping.

Just in case you aren't aware of it, many tips (or dumps) around the world
are now becoming very well cared for and have permananet tip attendants.
These tip attendants often shred garden waste dumped in the tip and then
compost it and either resell it to keen gardeners who know the value of
recycling green waste or reuse it on beautification schemes in the dump.

I know a great deal about recycling, but if you think keeping piles of
tires in the yard is comparable to municiple composts, then there's just
no easy communication between the earth I'm living on & your Tireland
residence on Alpha Centauri.

No one is compelling you to recycle anything but there is simply no call to
leap to the worst possible scenario simply because someone does try to make
use of discarded items.

Keeping garbage in your yard is NOT recycling -- no more than tossing
whiskey & beer bottles out your back window means they're "recycled" into
a lovely pile that bindweed can "hide" for a couple months out of the
year. Our household uses as little as possible of anything that even needs
to be thrown out or recycled by any means other than our own compost -- so
in our case we don't have the city cart off very much (our weekly garbage
pick-up is rarely more than a third full can, sometimes entirely empty, &
it's mildly annoying that those of us who DO NOT GENERATE much garbage
have to pay the same rates as people who cram their cans full every week,
most of it for a landfill). If you care about the environment, give up
your car & whatever else generates huge amounts of difficult-to-recycle
waste, but don't convince yourself that leaving parts of your car in the
garden & trying to hide it with rhubarb is ecofriendly. Eco is not spelled
u-g-l-y.

They do not become your "trashoids" simply because
they have discovered a good method to use for growing something in a tight
space. The trashoids are in your mind.

A couple things are just not rationally deniable, such as anyone who lines
up "fancy" whiskey bottles of colored water in their window sills as
"decorations," or uses tires for planters in their garden, really are
going to be trash, even if most won't be able to know they're trash (or
they wouldn't've mistaken old tires for a garden decorations to begin
with). Some few are proud to be trash & good for them; if one's life is a
living satire & that person knows it, that's just about admirable. But for
most, the only question about the matter would be whether or not they are
even MORE pathetic by having painted their garbagy tires white to
"improve" the look. As well to stick little cocktail umbrellas in the
dog's turds never cleaned out of the lawn, to make those nice yard
decorations too. The only possible exception would be a garden
intentionally automobile oriented. I visited a garden decorated with
vintage gasoline pumps with lovely winding paths amidst beautiful shrubs.
Being aesethetic people they did NOT include tire planters nor even rusty
cars up on blocks -- but I could imagine how tires MIGHT have been used
in that context (in a satiric manner at least) given their collection of
gas-station kitsch & the gorgeous old gasoline pumps.

-paggers

--
"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/

On Mon, 15 Dec 2003 01:41:00 -0800,
(paghat) wrote:

If you care about the environment, give up
your car & whatever else generates huge amounts of difficult-to-recycle
waste, but don't convince yourself that leaving parts of your car in the
garden & trying to hide it with rhubarb is ecofriendly. Eco is not spelled
u-g-l-y.

Got to love this girl. Retarded in many ways..but sharp in others. I
think this is called idiot savant.

Gunner, who lives in beautiful So.California..where all the beautiful
homes are sterile and look like ticky tac and have no charector.



" ..The world has gone crazy. Guess I'm showing my age...
I think it dates from when we started looking at virtues
as funny. It's embarrassing to speak of honor, integrity,
bravery, patriotism, 'doing the right thing', charity,
fairness. You have Seinfeld making cowardice an acceptable
choice; our politicians changing positions of honor with
every poll; we laugh at servicemen and patriotic fervor; we
accept corruption in our police and bias in our judges; we
kill our children, and wonder why they have no respect for
Life. We deny children their childhood and innocence- and
then we denigrate being a Man, as opposed to a 'person'. We
*assume* that anyone with a weapon will use it against his
fellowman- if only he has the chance. Nah; in our agitation
to keep the State out of the church business, we've
destroyed our value system and replaced it with *nothing*.
Turns my stomach- " Chas , rec.knives

"Fran" wrote:

Boy, I don't think I've ever seen anyone drop so quickly into stereotyping
about such a simple thing.

I have. Happened in one of the subs of this thread just above. Think
it was written by you, in fact.

ral

"North" wrote in message
...
On Sun, 14 Dec 2003 22:34:07 -0600, "Bob Peterson"
said:


"North" wrote in message
.. .
On Mon, 15 Dec 2003 02:10:31 GMT, KB9WFK said:

On Sun, 14 Dec 2003 19:50:33 GMT, (dstvns) wrote:

On Sun, 14 Dec 2003 01:42:22 GMT, (Richard A.
Lewis) wrote:

On a 3,000-4,000cal diet, you'll need to eat approximately 12 pounds
of potatoes per day just to maintain your body weight. Add in the
artichokes, if they're of a comparable cal level as the taters, and
you got just over two days of food before you start starving.

Who the hell eats 4 thousand calories a day?

And of those that did, how many would try to get all of those calories
from a single food source like potatos? I just pray for their sake
that they don't try to raise a lone crop of Habanero peppers. I don't
know how many pounds of those you would have to choke down per day but
I think spontanious human combustion would be the result. :-)


There is a way to get your cals from taters and other veggies, simply
fry them in lard, or fat, even veggie oil.

Another way is to eat some taters with a hamburger.

By frying the veggies in fat, you change everything.


The problem is where do you get the fats? the nuts that think you can
live
off a small garden are just dreaming. you can't do it without a lot of
back
breaking work, and even then the diet is poor and you run the risk of
health
problems from poor diet.

better to figure in a lot of animal protein and fat as a big chunk of
your
diet. much easier than trying to eat 20 pounds of cauliflower every day.

A small garden, NO. A small farm, doable, however you are not going
work a 40/hr per week job and run a farm alone. With a spouce and kids
(helpers) maybe.

Anyone who would try to eat 20 pounds of cauliflower would be foolish,
but a 1 or 2 cup sized serving of cauliflower with butter and topped
with cheese would cover the CAL needs and be very tasty.

The reason I say that living off a small farm would be doable is:
A garden and livestock can provide enough food but is very hard work.
You would not be able to produce enough butter and cheese out of 3
goats, however you could with 10. You could not produce enough eggs
with 2 or 3 chickens, but you could with 20.
Its all in how you prepare your veggies as to the CAL count.
As far as potatoes, it would take 17 pounds of potatoes to meet to
2000 or so CALs needed for daily life, however you would only need 2
or 3 pounds of potatoes friedinfat to meet the same CAL count.

Another reason why I say a small farm is doable is because most
familys 100+ years ago lived soly off of the things they grew and
produced from their small farms.

Adding butter and cheese to veggies is the best way to increase the
CAL count, and its how the irish and others made it.


However, the OP (and several subsequent posters) seemed to indicate no need
for animal products. This is just totally unrealistic in my view.

On Mon, 15 Dec 2003 00:58:11 -0800,
(paghat) wrote:

In article ,
wrote:

On Sun, 14 Dec 2003 15:00:17 -0500, "rick etter"
wrote:


Who the hell eats 4 thousand calories a day?
=======================
Obviously not the lard butt that sits on the computer all day. There are,
however, many occupations/activities that will burn off far more than 2000
calories in a days work or a few hours a day workouts.
That you are too lazy to actually work/exercise doesn't mean that others
are

Hummm anyone up to a bit of research? When I was working above the
arctic circle for an oil exploratation company, I was eating (2) 1
pound bags of Craft Carmel candies, and a 12pack of Coke, along with 4
large bologna and cheese sandwiches, every 10 hours. And was loosing
weight.

Anyone want to calculate how many calories I was consuming in those 8
hours? This of course did not count a big dinner at the end of the
day.

Gunner

Otherwise you'd've had a really great Arctic garden, eh? Ice-carrots
pulled from the soil & fresh-frozen blackberries right from the bushes --
if only it were enough calories.

Blink blink....huh? Darlin..at -40...I needed as much fuel as I could
get into me as possible, both to keep the internal furnace stoked up
and to keep the hard manual labor possible.

The daily caloric intake for a fellow taking a dog team to Sitka would
make someone living in Jersey weigh 400 pounds within one year, but the
musher will lose weight chomping down whole sticks of butter as a major
part of a diet.

A temperate garden would not have to be large to feed a family (& some of
the neighbors to boot). When great-aunt Cora & I gardened what must have
been a mere half acre, what grew on that well-sunned land we couldn't give
away fast enough to be certain none went to waste. We dried foods & we
canned like crazy; we went years never buying veggies; we traded or gave
away bags & bags of stuff; we gave away canned stuff to whoever would
bring us a box of good jars. Even at that we ended up composting a great
deal of from the garden season by season, which always seemed a shame, but
it just overproduced food & there were only on average eight people to
feed on three adjoining properties. When we overestimated some crop by
factors of a hundred I had to find recipes that called for vast amounts of
garlics or radishes or zucinnis -- lord do I still love radishes baked in
coals, & fortunately garlics don't taste like garlic if you cook the hell
out of them so they make a pretty darned good soup. For some tubrous
things plus broccoli we could still be harvesting fresh in winter so it
was almost a year-round thing.

The only thing we could never quite get TOO much of was tomatoes, because
even making them a big priority by cold-pack canning scores of jars &
eating them off the vines like they were sweet apples, I loved the
cold-packed ones so much I used them up quickly in soups & stews & baked
things. Cold-pack canned tomatos are even better than fresh, there's no
way to duplicate that amazing taste without actually canning them
personally, then very hard to restrain oneself from using them immediately
instead of waiting until there's no more tomatos in the garden.

A honeybee hive would be nice to include as part of the garden, & a number
of berrying shrubs (not just summer fruits but bitter autumn berries too),
a hazel tree or two so one can press one's own oil. We had four Italian
plum trees -- can four trees worth of plums in just one year, you'll be
eating them for six years there's so many. One year we got so carried away
canning everything in sight that when we finally ran out we decided to
pickle watermelon rinds -- they were great pickled! When there was nothing
new growing to harvest, we were so addicted to the canning process that we
harvested crabapples from up & down the street & pickled those in the
prettiest jars -- they made great holiday gifts.

If I wanted to go all survivalist about it I already know from youthful
experimentation that earthworms, crickets, & snails are good eating -- so
the critters are also part of a garden harvest. No kidding about worms,
the only trick is to clean them properly, & really no stranger to eat than
clams & mussels, but with more uses, like they're good in muffins ("What
kind of berries are in this?"). As a vegetarian I'd be reluctant now; but
I don't think it's icky (to me eating cows is much ickier & eating pigs
unthinkable). I would also count as part of my harvest anything I could
get in walking distance right out of the wild (for a couple years "the
wild" for me meant harvesting from buildingless lots inner city).

In the countryside it's even easier, & not just blackberrying along
railroad tracks in summer. What you can do with a mudhole full of cattails
for might surprise many people -- cattail parts can stand in for potato,
flour, asparagus, & corn on the cob -- & that's just one of a couple
hundred things one can spot worthy of harvest. When I was eating mostly
only what my aunt & I grew, plus whatever I could harvest at odd moments
in the nearby woods, I was eating better than I do now that I mainly shop
in grocery stores, & cooking way better than now that I have a microwave.
I wasn't quite fully vegetarian back then though, so I did also eat
rabbits from time to time -- stewed, alder smoked, or fried -- & guinea
hens & chickens. No one could ever tempt me to eat redmeat again (not that
I'm dissing elk sausages), but sometimes I do get a hankerin' for alder
smoked rabbit which seems now to be a food of a bygone era & has taken on
a mythic immensity of flavorful greatness in my memory.

-paghat the ratgirl

Shug..given Frans comments in an earlier post..I guess Id better not
talk about guns or my garden, as it would put her off her feed. Or the
fact I live in the middle of an ag area, where its far cheaper and
easier to buy 100lbs of Red Russets for $5USD right off the loading
dock, or grapefruit off the tree for free, or my Thompson Seedless
grape arbors..or....

Gunner

" ..The world has gone crazy. Guess I'm showing my age...
I think it dates from when we started looking at virtues
as funny. It's embarrassing to speak of honor, integrity,
bravery, patriotism, 'doing the right thing', charity,
fairness. You have Seinfeld making cowardice an acceptable
choice; our politicians changing positions of honor with
every poll; we laugh at servicemen and patriotic fervor; we
accept corruption in our police and bias in our judges; we
kill our children, and wonder why they have no respect for
Life. We deny children their childhood and innocence- and
then we denigrate being a Man, as opposed to a 'person'. We
*assume* that anyone with a weapon will use it against his
fellowman- if only he has the chance. Nah; in our agitation
to keep the State out of the church business, we've
destroyed our value system and replaced it with *nothing*.
Turns my stomach- " Chas , rec.knives

In article ,
wrote:

On Mon, 15 Dec 2003 00:58:11 -0800,
(paghat) wrote:

[clips\
I live in the middle of an ag area, where its far cheaper and
easier to buy 100lbs of Red Russets for $5USD right off the loading
dock.

Gunner

The reason I now grow mostly ornamental gardens is because I'm less
inclined in my middle years to do a shitload of work to end up with
something I can buy way too cheaply with no work at all -- yet I don't
mind doing the same amount of work for the sake of unusual shade plants or
flowering shrubs. But in the past when I was a veggy-gardening fiend it
was because the activity itself was joyous, canning was such great fun, I
loved the company of my aunty who had the space & devotion for keeping
these activities on schedule, & the resultant meals were much, much, much
better than ever could be store-bought. There may also have been times
when a dollar saved meant something too, but mainly it was for the intense
fun of it all. I do remember a year when finances were so tight that
harvesting in the forest was necessary rather than merely fun -- I threw a
party & fed a great many people a spectacularly good borsch made of
gleanings & the only part of it that wasn't wild was the beets, & those
were free at closing-time in the farmer's market. Mostly it was never from
need; & today I only ever do that sort of thing because I get a charge out
of having free stuff to eat even when I don't need to save mere nickles.
And experimenting with stuff that is edible but not often harvested by
anyone else is an inexplicable pleasure. There are many local berries
people will swear are poisonous, & which sometimes do taste nasty raw, but
they can be cooked, sieved & mixed with apples & spices to taste very
wonderful -- though even if something comes out mediocre I had fun giving
it a try. I'm sure it's in great part a biologicial "gatherer" response &
there're so many attendant pleasures to doing one's gathering in the woods
or in a personal garden than in grocery ailes. Not everything in life is
related to the price tag, & the reward is not quite quantifiable as cash
earned or saved. I can't today imagine spending the whole damned week
doing nothing but cold-packing tomatos, or canning free pie-cherries, but
I do some very occasional canning if my sweety & I can get it all done in
one day -- it's become a "break" from the important things instead of the
main thing it once was. When someone proposes the idea of doing it as a
"survivalist" or to be totally self-sufficient, I think that's admirable &
I don't believe it is difficult to do successfully.

Lately I'd rather grow species tulips or write a monograph on an obscure
Victorian author or dick around on the web or watch Japanese films on DVD,
but when my aunt was still alive, a lot of that energy went into growing
stuff to eat & canning as much of it as we had jars for. Life changed ten
times since then, but if life had been less dynamic & I still lived on my
aunt's land hoeing rows of veggies & pruning fruit trees, I can imagine
many a life spent at dumber things.

-paggers

--
"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/

On Mon, 15 Dec 2003 01:41:00 -0800,
(paghat) wrote:

If you care about the environment, give up
your car & whatever else generates huge amounts of difficult-to-recycle
waste, but don't convince yourself that leaving parts of your car in the
garden & trying to hide it with rhubarb is ecofriendly. Eco is not spelled
u-g-l-y.

Got to love this girl. Retarded in many ways..but sharp in others. I
think this is called idiot savant.

Gunner, who lives in beautiful So.California..where all the beautiful
homes are sterile and look like ticky tac and have no charector.



" ..The world has gone crazy. Guess I'm showing my age...
I think it dates from when we started looking at virtues
as funny. It's embarrassing to speak of honor, integrity,
bravery, patriotism, 'doing the right thing', charity,
fairness. You have Seinfeld making cowardice an acceptable
choice; our politicians changing positions of honor with
every poll; we laugh at servicemen and patriotic fervor; we
accept corruption in our police and bias in our judges; we
kill our children, and wonder why they have no respect for
Life. We deny children their childhood and innocence- and
then we denigrate being a Man, as opposed to a 'person'. We
*assume* that anyone with a weapon will use it against his
fellowman- if only he has the chance. Nah; in our agitation
to keep the State out of the church business, we've
destroyed our value system and replaced it with *nothing*.
Turns my stomach- " Chas , rec.knives

"Fran" wrote:

Oh for Heavens sake! You are being patronising and heading off the track
into pure fantasy. Bucket asked about a self sufficient lifestyle. Bucket
did NOT ask about a vegan lifestyle or what the many froot loops at
misc.survivalism go on about when they congregate for a fantasy session.

Sorry, Fran. I don't know who the hell "Bucket" is nor do I really
care. I was replying to Dan, Linda, Noah, Gunner etc.

Snipped a bunch of useless bullshit....

I remember once asking how many gardeners there were in misc.survivalism and
there were about 3 who admitted to it

Ask how many gardeners in your group know how to treat a colicky mare
or how to go about butchering a hog and I'd venture a guess that not
many care to know. One such as yourself could argue that it's "a part
of farming"....

In misc.survivalism, only the absolute hardcore folks bother to plan
or prep for your Doomsday....most, plan and prep for the next blizzard
or thunderstorm etc.

Snipped more useless garbage....

Right about now, someone on the gardening groups will be typing out an
irate "but my family did it during the Depression and I grew up just
fine".

Nuff said.

More garbage snipped....

No mention of eating only spuds or even adding the odd cauliflower or bit of
corn. Fantasy can be fun at times but all you are doing is restricting the
topic to one hobby horse involving a restricted set of annual vegetables.

No....I was answering a fellow who made the implied claim that growing
a year's worth of food in a garden was easy. Was I wrong?

ral

On Sun, 14 Dec 2003 19:50:33 GMT, (dstvns) wrote:

On Sun, 14 Dec 2003 01:42:22 GMT, (Richard A.
Lewis) wrote:

On a 3,000-4,000cal diet, you'll need to eat approximately 12 pounds
of potatoes per day just to maintain your body weight. Add in the
artichokes, if they're of a comparable cal level as the taters, and
you got just over two days of food before you start starving.

Who the hell eats 4 thousand calories a day? A thanksgiving dinner is
2000. Are you going on personal experience with calorie intake? I
would hate to have you as a dependent.

American nutrition labels are based on a 2,000 cal/day diet, which is,
I presume, a *very* rough average for a moderately active adult --
i.e., not bedridden but not out plowing, either. Tour de France
bicyclists consume 5-9,000 calories per day just to stay even. 3 to
4,000 calories for someone engaged in 8 or more hours of vigorous
physical activity, like farmwork, is more than reasonable.

BTW, the edible part of an artichoke contains practically no calories
at all. It's the melted butter or mayonnaise sauce. :-)

"Fran" wrote:

Boy, I don't think I've ever seen anyone drop so quickly into stereotyping
about such a simple thing.

I have. Happened in one of the subs of this thread just above. Think
it was written by you, in fact.

ral