No question straight out of the backyard vegetable garden is the best
food available, even Farm Fresh to You is in 2’nd.
OT: “2016 Keep TBP Fighting Meter”? Last check, it’s 2017
Maggie
January 6, 2017 8:44 am
For some, it will always be 2016.
Taking seeds and water and the weed-pulling hands of children not enslaved to electronic mind-fodder for their daily bread in order to produce real food in order to provide nutrition for your family and for livestock (and giant dogs) promotes healthy relationships between family members, neighbors and animals in a way that is SOOOOOOOO 1930s… Good grief, it is 2017!!!! Get with the program.
There are online services claiming to deliver (within an hour some say! With drone delivery, who knows?) packaged food easily prepared for consumption for a small, um, fee. Why spend ANY time understanding how your world actually WORKS when you can consume all the information and propaganda about how you should live your life from the screen I’m typing these words onto now?
Well, you shouldn’t. In fact, I don’t understand why the meals can’t be delivered HOT now that cars can drive themselves to deliver your food and overtaxed sodapop. Walmart Supercenter’s shelves and produce bins refill perpetually, why shouldn’t there be 24/7 Drone Delivery meals for the free shit army?
I’m almost positive a Firmly Scrambled Syrup Rancher would agree*. But, thanks to razzle reminding me that even my own preconceived notions might be founded on faulty premises, I will be conclusion hopping no time soon.
So, I’m positive I can feed my family and livestock. Also sure my expert marksman hubs can protect us all if the guns and ammo are dry. That is empowering.
And, even a few salads from a window garden is a great start.
* When I was in second grade, my cousin asked my father to speak to her second grade class on “ask a peculiar relative to class day” at the big city school she attended. My father, ever the “entertainer” when called upon, agreed to take a morning off and tell the city kids about life on the farm. When she introduced him as a “Bee Farmer” he never dropped the name. He had about a dozen hives on our land and a few others loaned out to various friends who wanted honey with a particular flavor or needed them for crops hard to pollinate. My father raised about a hundred head of beef cattle, pigs, chickens, turkeys and, briefly, mules for grinding the old-fashioned sorghum grinder for his refurbished sorghum mill. Cornfields, clover, soybean and milo (look it up) grew in my childhood, with crews of migrant workers picking cotton in my earliest memories of people knocking on the door to ask to refill their water thermos. Dad’s interest in bees grew from his own farming background coupled with a keen interest in how to feed oneself during his three-and-one-half-year internment in a Japanese POW camp during WWII.
When I remember him now, I remember his huge calloused hands gently lifting the honeycombed slats dripping with golden clover honey and how the smoke-addled bees would drop in little clumps onto the ground at the edge of the garden, where my sister and I would be either playing in the shade of apple trees or picking peas or beans. A rare and fine science in beekeeping exists in fewer minds all the time.
People who knew my father would drive the hundred miles from St. Louis to buy the sorghum and the honey, strained. Some of the comb was strained into jars, but most was simply dropped into a carton and weighed, the honeycomb being a very delicious and useful item most people now do not realize exists. It wasn’t maple syrup, but a wonderfully sweet contender.
I did not possess a camera then; I was perhaps three years old, but the images remain intact.
What a wonderful memory of your childhood. (Except the internment part. Roosevelt again!)
In some ways, I wish we were still in the past. Life was so much simpler then. I sometimes wonder if I was born at the wrong time. But then again, my main historical interests are the Middle Ages, the English Restoration and Victorian London, in that order, so if I lived then, I’d be dead. 🙂
But I have to admit, I like having the Internet so I can read the news I want and research anything I want. If it weren’t for the Internet, freezer/refrigerator and washing machine, I could live without electricity easily.
James
January 6, 2017 9:09 am
I will say before the first supermarkets there were still butchers/baker shops ect along with markets for produce,vegetables ect.,still see local open air markets a lot.That said,to best of ability grow some yourself/if you can have chickens/perhaps milking goats ect.Local law tries to fight this ,well,fight back.
I get that many do not have the land/space/time to grow a lot but look into vertical hydroponic/perhaps small herb gardens ect.Beyond that were possible shop from local farmers as much as possible,support your local food growers not only with your monies but also to fight back nonsense regulations.
Don’t forget the general store. They had them in the cities and out west. They were a stable in Europe. In many small villages, they still are.
In Europe, they still have the individual butcher shops, cheese and wine shops, vegetable and fruit shops, poultry, eggs and dairy. They also still have street stalls. And you can sell food on the streets, which many cities in the U.S. won’t allow.
I wish those would come back. Unfortunately, I think the big-box stores are starting to make a dent, even in dairy.
What I wish for is the return of the milkman. I’d love to have my milk and yogurt delivered to my door daily. But I’m sure there’s a law against it.
Maggie
January 6, 2017 9:10 am
Ironically, I can’t stick around because I am taking a load of Chubby Bunny Farms Turf-Building Pellets to my friends resting place today, anticipating a good freeze before we put the Tulip Bulbs in for the remainder of the winter.
The fifth anniversary of her transition into Eternity will be resplendent with beauty.
Tulips. Worth their weight in gold at one time.
[img&sp=dc8b5576fa06386764eb992d8c5a0f2f[/img]
Anonymous
January 6, 2017 10:06 am
During WWII something like 40% of all vegetables in America were produced in “Victory gardens” which were everything from home back and front yard gardens to window boxes in apartments to roof top gardens in the high rise dominated large cities.
I don’t know if that could be done again, or if it would even be legal in most places.
Rob
January 6, 2017 10:18 am
Oh no it definitely would not be legal. Not that you should care but the big box stores have made it impossible for you to compete with them. You are just so unsanitary you know.
Dutchman
January 6, 2017 10:20 am
In 1930 the US Population was 123 million. Today it is 330 million.
What worked then, won’t work now. I know, I know.. rejoice you Luddites!
ILuvCO2
January 6, 2017 10:40 am
For those in the NH area, Joel Salatin will be giving a speech and several workshops at the NOFA NH winter conference on January 28 in Concord. I even hear that HSF may be giving a talk, probably on Climate Justice or some such thing.
Before supermarkets, people paid a lot more for food. A recent TBP published chart showed this clearly. Having said that, I do miss the little neighborhood markets that were common in pre-suburban cities. Fuck convienence stores.
That’s because the big guys buy so much in bulk they get a better deal and can offer lower prices. Small mom-and-pop stores have a hard time competing.
Remember “The Andy Griffith” show when Aunt Bea went to the new supermarket and bought a “bargain” bundle of meat and her freezer went out? The kindly neighborhood butcher let her keep the meat in his freezer, even though she didn’t buy the meat from him. That’s what you miss about the small, family-owned neighborhood stores.
Unfortunately, in fictitious Mayberry, the butcher was probably out of business within 5 years due to the rise of supermarkets (the big-box stores of today.)
Montefrío
January 6, 2017 1:13 pm
Supermarkets are where you buy laundry detergent, floor wax, bags of coffee beans, but not food if you can avoid it. In my tiny village, we have a butcher, baker and ye olde candlestick shoppes where the candles give off a sickly scent that makes me want to find the candlestick maker (probably in Fujien province) and have the mystery solved: Montefrío in the factory with the lead pipe. As for fruit and veggies, grow my own and am about to eat some with genuine chicken. Ah, the smell of a freshly pulled carrot when it’s peeled!
Maggie
January 6, 2017 10:19 pm
It was a frigidly cold day to be spreading compost in a graveyard, but with a gentle snowfall to keep me company, my dear old friend and I determined Tulip placement for the spring.
Some people plant rosebushes on or near their loved one’s grave, which provide a lovely reason to be near their final resting place, grooming the rosebushes. However, since no one else is going to take care of the thorny vine, neglected rosebushes quickly become overgrown snarled messes of weeds with trash shoved into the base of them by vagrants. I found an empty Jose Cuervo bottle on a comrade’s grave shoved into the roots of the stupid rosebush I TOLD his wife NOT to plant there. I knew good and well she wasn’t gonna care for it. Tulips are better; Even if they get out of control, they only show up for a short time and look stunning even in disarray.
And, no thorns.
Speaking of plants, my Pyrenese appears to be cured of his seizures by CBD oil derived from cannabis. My son ordered it off the internet and it came to him in his mailbox. The dog has been a lot better, but after two weeks of taking the oil, he seemed to tremble tonight so I gave him a few drops extra, he calmed and the seizure was averted. It could be coincidence. I doubt it.
Before supermarkets, people understood about the relationship between seasoning food and mental health. Now, taste buds and pleasure glands are desensitized by processed foods and chemicals. Out here in my little piece of paradise, we are relearning what real flavor is and what constitutes a good reason to be joyful.
Of course, I reside in a world where we grow our own food and we bury our dead in cemeteries where you don’t have to have permission to plant a flower bed for a loved one and we mind our own business until asked. That could all change in a second.
[img[/img]
RHS Jr
January 7, 2017 12:31 am
I remember the many small stores: milk & butter from dairies, chicken from poultry stores, fish from fish stores, vegetables and fruit from our garden and woods, big and small vegetable markets, push carts, service stations (gas, kerosene, air, repairs etc), and each type of salesmen: Fuller brushes, encyclopedias, brooms and pencils from the blind, pots, insurance, seeds, the Avon lady etc. I remember the first supermarket built around 1955 near us (3 miles away on Normandy Blvd near Cassat Ave, Jacksonville Fl) and we would push a wheelbarrow there every week or so for supplies. Slowly bigger stores replaced them. Now I’m living to see whole malls being replaced by Amazon etc. I expect to see total Urban Jungle Collapse and chaos to be replaced by the survivors gardens and small stores again.
Before this is over, it will be again.
No question straight out of the backyard vegetable garden is the best
food available, even Farm Fresh to You is in 2’nd.
OT: “2016 Keep TBP Fighting Meter”? Last check, it’s 2017
For some, it will always be 2016.
Taking seeds and water and the weed-pulling hands of children not enslaved to electronic mind-fodder for their daily bread in order to produce real food in order to provide nutrition for your family and for livestock (and giant dogs) promotes healthy relationships between family members, neighbors and animals in a way that is SOOOOOOOO 1930s… Good grief, it is 2017!!!! Get with the program.
There are online services claiming to deliver (within an hour some say! With drone delivery, who knows?) packaged food easily prepared for consumption for a small, um, fee. Why spend ANY time understanding how your world actually WORKS when you can consume all the information and propaganda about how you should live your life from the screen I’m typing these words onto now?
Well, you shouldn’t. In fact, I don’t understand why the meals can’t be delivered HOT now that cars can drive themselves to deliver your food and overtaxed sodapop. Walmart Supercenter’s shelves and produce bins refill perpetually, why shouldn’t there be 24/7 Drone Delivery meals for the free shit army?
I’m almost positive a Firmly Scrambled Syrup Rancher would agree*. But, thanks to razzle reminding me that even my own preconceived notions might be founded on faulty premises, I will be conclusion hopping no time soon.
So, I’m positive I can feed my family and livestock. Also sure my expert marksman hubs can protect us all if the guns and ammo are dry. That is empowering.
And, even a few salads from a window garden is a great start.
* When I was in second grade, my cousin asked my father to speak to her second grade class on “ask a peculiar relative to class day” at the big city school she attended. My father, ever the “entertainer” when called upon, agreed to take a morning off and tell the city kids about life on the farm. When she introduced him as a “Bee Farmer” he never dropped the name. He had about a dozen hives on our land and a few others loaned out to various friends who wanted honey with a particular flavor or needed them for crops hard to pollinate. My father raised about a hundred head of beef cattle, pigs, chickens, turkeys and, briefly, mules for grinding the old-fashioned sorghum grinder for his refurbished sorghum mill. Cornfields, clover, soybean and milo (look it up) grew in my childhood, with crews of migrant workers picking cotton in my earliest memories of people knocking on the door to ask to refill their water thermos. Dad’s interest in bees grew from his own farming background coupled with a keen interest in how to feed oneself during his three-and-one-half-year internment in a Japanese POW camp during WWII.
When I remember him now, I remember his huge calloused hands gently lifting the honeycombed slats dripping with golden clover honey and how the smoke-addled bees would drop in little clumps onto the ground at the edge of the garden, where my sister and I would be either playing in the shade of apple trees or picking peas or beans. A rare and fine science in beekeeping exists in fewer minds all the time.
People who knew my father would drive the hundred miles from St. Louis to buy the sorghum and the honey, strained. Some of the comb was strained into jars, but most was simply dropped into a carton and weighed, the honeycomb being a very delicious and useful item most people now do not realize exists. It wasn’t maple syrup, but a wonderfully sweet contender.
I did not possess a camera then; I was perhaps three years old, but the images remain intact.
Empowering.
What a wonderful memory of your childhood. (Except the internment part. Roosevelt again!)
In some ways, I wish we were still in the past. Life was so much simpler then. I sometimes wonder if I was born at the wrong time. But then again, my main historical interests are the Middle Ages, the English Restoration and Victorian London, in that order, so if I lived then, I’d be dead. 🙂
But I have to admit, I like having the Internet so I can read the news I want and research anything I want. If it weren’t for the Internet, freezer/refrigerator and washing machine, I could live without electricity easily.
I will say before the first supermarkets there were still butchers/baker shops ect along with markets for produce,vegetables ect.,still see local open air markets a lot.That said,to best of ability grow some yourself/if you can have chickens/perhaps milking goats ect.Local law tries to fight this ,well,fight back.
I get that many do not have the land/space/time to grow a lot but look into vertical hydroponic/perhaps small herb gardens ect.Beyond that were possible shop from local farmers as much as possible,support your local food growers not only with your monies but also to fight back nonsense regulations.
Don’t forget the general store. They had them in the cities and out west. They were a stable in Europe. In many small villages, they still are.
In Europe, they still have the individual butcher shops, cheese and wine shops, vegetable and fruit shops, poultry, eggs and dairy. They also still have street stalls. And you can sell food on the streets, which many cities in the U.S. won’t allow.
I wish those would come back. Unfortunately, I think the big-box stores are starting to make a dent, even in dairy.
What I wish for is the return of the milkman. I’d love to have my milk and yogurt delivered to my door daily. But I’m sure there’s a law against it.
Ironically, I can’t stick around because I am taking a load of Chubby Bunny Farms Turf-Building Pellets to my friends resting place today, anticipating a good freeze before we put the Tulip Bulbs in for the remainder of the winter.
The fifth anniversary of her transition into Eternity will be resplendent with beauty.
Tulips. Worth their weight in gold at one time.
[img
&sp=dc8b5576fa06386764eb992d8c5a0f2f[/img]
During WWII something like 40% of all vegetables in America were produced in “Victory gardens” which were everything from home back and front yard gardens to window boxes in apartments to roof top gardens in the high rise dominated large cities.
I don’t know if that could be done again, or if it would even be legal in most places.
Oh no it definitely would not be legal. Not that you should care but the big box stores have made it impossible for you to compete with them. You are just so unsanitary you know.
In 1930 the US Population was 123 million. Today it is 330 million.
What worked then, won’t work now. I know, I know.. rejoice you Luddites!
For those in the NH area, Joel Salatin will be giving a speech and several workshops at the NOFA NH winter conference on January 28 in Concord. I even hear that HSF may be giving a talk, probably on Climate Justice or some such thing.
http://www.nofanh.org/wc-presenters
or the moon landings.
I have several of Salatin’s books.
Before supermarkets, people paid a lot more for food. A recent TBP published chart showed this clearly. Having said that, I do miss the little neighborhood markets that were common in pre-suburban cities. Fuck convienence stores.
That’s because the big guys buy so much in bulk they get a better deal and can offer lower prices. Small mom-and-pop stores have a hard time competing.
Remember “The Andy Griffith” show when Aunt Bea went to the new supermarket and bought a “bargain” bundle of meat and her freezer went out? The kindly neighborhood butcher let her keep the meat in his freezer, even though she didn’t buy the meat from him. That’s what you miss about the small, family-owned neighborhood stores.
Unfortunately, in fictitious Mayberry, the butcher was probably out of business within 5 years due to the rise of supermarkets (the big-box stores of today.)
Supermarkets are where you buy laundry detergent, floor wax, bags of coffee beans, but not food if you can avoid it. In my tiny village, we have a butcher, baker and ye olde candlestick shoppes where the candles give off a sickly scent that makes me want to find the candlestick maker (probably in Fujien province) and have the mystery solved: Montefrío in the factory with the lead pipe. As for fruit and veggies, grow my own and am about to eat some with genuine chicken. Ah, the smell of a freshly pulled carrot when it’s peeled!
It was a frigidly cold day to be spreading compost in a graveyard, but with a gentle snowfall to keep me company, my dear old friend and I determined Tulip placement for the spring.
Some people plant rosebushes on or near their loved one’s grave, which provide a lovely reason to be near their final resting place, grooming the rosebushes. However, since no one else is going to take care of the thorny vine, neglected rosebushes quickly become overgrown snarled messes of weeds with trash shoved into the base of them by vagrants. I found an empty Jose Cuervo bottle on a comrade’s grave shoved into the roots of the stupid rosebush I TOLD his wife NOT to plant there. I knew good and well she wasn’t gonna care for it. Tulips are better; Even if they get out of control, they only show up for a short time and look stunning even in disarray.
And, no thorns.
Speaking of plants, my Pyrenese appears to be cured of his seizures by CBD oil derived from cannabis. My son ordered it off the internet and it came to him in his mailbox. The dog has been a lot better, but after two weeks of taking the oil, he seemed to tremble tonight so I gave him a few drops extra, he calmed and the seizure was averted. It could be coincidence. I doubt it.
Before supermarkets, people understood about the relationship between seasoning food and mental health. Now, taste buds and pleasure glands are desensitized by processed foods and chemicals. Out here in my little piece of paradise, we are relearning what real flavor is and what constitutes a good reason to be joyful.
Of course, I reside in a world where we grow our own food and we bury our dead in cemeteries where you don’t have to have permission to plant a flower bed for a loved one and we mind our own business until asked. That could all change in a second.
[img
[/img]
I remember the many small stores: milk & butter from dairies, chicken from poultry stores, fish from fish stores, vegetables and fruit from our garden and woods, big and small vegetable markets, push carts, service stations (gas, kerosene, air, repairs etc), and each type of salesmen: Fuller brushes, encyclopedias, brooms and pencils from the blind, pots, insurance, seeds, the Avon lady etc. I remember the first supermarket built around 1955 near us (3 miles away on Normandy Blvd near Cassat Ave, Jacksonville Fl) and we would push a wheelbarrow there every week or so for supplies. Slowly bigger stores replaced them. Now I’m living to see whole malls being replaced by Amazon etc. I expect to see total Urban Jungle Collapse and chaos to be replaced by the survivors gardens and small stores again.
That would actually be a nice change.