Finally, A Useful Post Again

Here's another freebie for the frugal semi-employed among us to keep you in productive reading material as long as you have battery power for your computer. The USDA has put our tax dollars to good use creating the Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education section of the Cooperative State Research, Education, and Extension Service. Go to http://www.sare.org/ and click on Publications, then Whole Catalog. It is geared toward farmers wanting to transition to organic or more sustainable methods of farming (like Integrated Pest Management), but it has good stuff for the gardener, too. That includes fact sheets, bulletins, and PDF files of entire books for the cost of your already-paid taxes. Want to grow veggies or do small scale dairy or pasture-raised beef for a profit? They have examples of farmers who do these things, with CONTACT INFORMATION! I'm starting on Building Soils for Better Crops by Fred Magdoff and Harold van Es now. It looks basic and good so far. It is out of print, but the magic of PDF makes it accessible. Cool stuff.

Seed Saving and Starting Resources

If you've always bought your tomato seedlings at the local mart, but this year or next you want to do something different, there are plenty of resources out there. A particularly good and pretty comprehensive one is The New Seed Starters Handbook By Nancy Bubel.  I checked it out from the library during the winter, and it was a very worthwhile read. An illustration-free PDF version is available somewhere online, but the book is in print, so it may not be available in PDF anymore. I would highly recommend it, as it is pretty comprehensive in telling you how to start seeds indoors, what containers and soil to use, how to transplant, what works and what does not, how to save seeds, etc. I'm still referring to it as I save those radish and lettuce seeds.

40 Acres and No Mule Quote

Here is a quote from close to the end of the book:

"If you are hardy enough to strip life down to its simplicities you may be able to create an environment in which you can gain perspective. Certainly you can provide yourself with the opportunity for profound and reflective thinking, and you can give yourself a rest from the tense, nervous expenditure of energy demanded of you every waking moment of your life in the city. ... The nostalgia for a simpler life is perfectly healthy and understandable, and in some cases even necessary."

This was written in 1952. Imagine what she would say now!

Reading Again

Now that the candidacy meeting is over, I'm back to reading about canning, gardening, preserving food, etc. Now I am reading Forty Acres and No Mule by Janice Holt Giles. My family had a lot in common wiht the Kentucky Appalachians she describes in the book. We are devout Christians, and we used to have close-knit communities based on family ties and long-standing land ownership going back to Revolutionary and War of 1812 grants. Even the food described in the book is familiar (including a lack of asparagus- I do not remember eating it until adulthood). The manners of treating others are similar, though the verbal expressions are different. It is a fascinating look at how an outsider adjusts to a small, family-based community.

Fat of the Land, Continued

This book is starting to get a bit discouraging. Even in 1904, this person had to invest over $100,000 to get his farm going, with income running about $4000 per year in the first few years. Of course he had a large country house, with servants, and money was no object to him (built a forge for his daughter on the place), so he could do that. 

The question is, at manageable scales, can farming be practical and profitable enough for a person to live who is not already independently wealthy? I know that if you grow your own food, and just enough of a niche crop (fresh greens for fancy restaurants, fashionable veggies or value added stuff for the "farmer's market" in an upscale neighborhood of carbon-guilty urbanites, etc.) to pay taxes and insurance, you can survive, but even then initial inputs will be necessary to optimize soil, improve drainage, build house and outbuildings, etc. A lot of "modern heroes" of the back to the land/organic movement (Helen and Scott Nearing being the example that comes to mind) were actually independently wealthy people. My ancestors left the land because they could not survive and keep it (property taxes went too high and farm product values went too low), and my Dad was not interested in a hardscrabble existence tilling the soil. He actually became a maintenance electrician, still getting plenty dirty every day, but getting a dependable paycheck-until the factory shut down. Then he had to search for (and found) a new job.

I guess this book has me thinking, for all its good points, about how farming has become a big business. Streeter's "factory farm" vision has turned into a nightmare, and we cannot fix things with fairy dust and gourmet restaurants.