Homestead mailing list

[Clansgian AT wmconnect.com]

>  I like to write and  
> > read and
> > have a job, so I don't have the time for homesteading. 



> No common model for all. Yours is as good as anyone's. Many find the  
> old homestead model too limiting, including me.
> 
> 

I suppose there are homesteading models I'd find too limiting too.  I don't 
consider market gardening as necessarily a homesteading model although many 
do. 
 I'd consider it more of a job model.   But going to the farmer's market once 
saw us begin preparations on Thursday and working quite intensively and 
continually on it until we left for the market very early Saturday morning.  
By 
late Satruday we'd spent 25 to 28 hours, more than half a "work week".  
That's 25 
hours for two adults not including the work done by the children.  At that 
rate we'd have to make over $250 to make minimum wage.  We did a couple of 
times, but it was rare.  In talking with other large families there, the most 
experienced and most involved were making about $300 per market day.

That's too limiting for me.  Any produce sold from our gardens now is from 
people showing up on site and asking for it and even that is incidental.

I have come to view homesteading as an economic model, the basis of a 
personal or family economic system.  I know homesteading is often viewed as 
reclusing 
oneself into a cloistered monastary taking vows of poverty and stability 
('stability' in the monastic sense of agreeing to never leave the place you 
abide).  But viewed as the basis for an economic system, it's a matter quite 
different from that.

Everyone is going to eat, live in housing, wear clothes, use fuel for heating 
and cooking.  The thing to decide is whether these things are going to 
brought about dierectly, a direct use economy, or whether you will work for 
cash and 
purchase them.  These are two different economic models.  One is not better 
than the other, it, as in all things, is a matter of choose one and have the 
results of one, choose the other and have the results of the other.

The above sentiment, from Lisa I believe, that if one homesteads, one then 
does not have time for reading and writing ... leaves me as baffled and 
confused 
as the statment form a friend once who said she couldn't have a garden 
because she couldn't afford one.

There has been more than one comment, and one recently (don't remember from 
whom) that asked how some of us can blather to such an extent on this list if 
we are really homesteading.  Both Denise and I write quite a bit on a wide 
variety of topics, not just homesteading and self-sufficiency.  We read on 
the 
average of two books a week each.  Just finished 'The End of Nature' and 
'Deep 
Economy' by Bill McKibben and I'm now reading three of Edith Pargeter's 
"Brother 
Cadfael" mysteries that I missed when I read most of the rest years ago.

We have MORE time for reading and writing that we'd have if we provided with 
a job what now we privide directly, just the same that it costs us LESS 
because we have a garden.   

Here just past the solstace the corn and potatoes have been hoed for the last 
time, pumpkins and squash have been replanted where the crows dug up the 
seeds, and I'm finishing up the shaded seedbeds to growing the fall brassica. 
 
It's a month yet before time to plant the fall root crops and the things that 
need preserved are coming out of the garden at a measured trickle.  All the 
agrarian and husbanding farmstead tasks can be done in a couple of hours a 
day now. 
 Right now four hours a day in the shop just about does it for me both 
personally and economically.

So there is a hiatus where there's no need to rush off to the next task.  The 
year is full of such lulls and hiatus (the plural of hiatus is hiatus).  But 
what if I had a job?  It would be 'drag myself off to it no matter what', to 
some good end or no, leaving behind a rainy or frozen day, or pristine summer 
weather.

The homesteading economic basis gives the person MORE time personal and 
professional involvement, not less.  And this is true for two reasons:

1.  Once our base needs are met through our direct economy, we quit working 
at it.  This is almost tautological.  If you are frying up the breakfast eggs 
for the family and you have two eggs for each person fried, you don't keep 
frying eggs.  When you pour yourself that cup of morning tea and the cup is 
filled, you don't keep pouring tea.  And yet as obvious as this is, it is 
exactly 
how we agree to live our lives in the 'job' world.  If on any given month, or 
week, or even day you suddenly find that you've earned enough money to meet 
your 
needs, you can't just walk away and do other things.  You still have to go 
back to the job the next day.  

Not so with the direct use economy.  When we have cut the wood we need for 
the winter, we stop cutting wood.  When we plant all the corn we will want 
for 
the year, we stop planting corn.  When we have dried and canned all the pears 
we care for, we quit processing pears.   When the fences are all secure, we 
quit fencing.  When three's enough cheese for the season, we stop making 
cheese.  
(Do you begin to see how that in this system of viewing things, it is so 
important to separate in one's mind and one's view the things done for direct 
use 
and the things done for cash, even if on the surface they they may be one and 
the same.)

So the first way the direct use economy gleans more time than a job economy 
is that there are times when we are actually done with our work and the rest 
of 
the time is our own.  Sure those in a job economy might say ‘but I work 40 
hours (or a lot more if you own the business) and it seems as if you 
homesteaders are working 100 hours a week at your subsistence living’.  
Indeed we do, 
sometimes.  But other times we work ten hours a week at it and sometimes none.

2)  In a direct use economy effort is applied very efficiently to the task 
with no time wasted.  The most obvious manifestation of this is commuting.  
For 
that part of the living earned by direct use, the homesteader doesn't 
commute, 
doesn't buy special clothes, doesn't eat meals away from his own kitchen, and 
is on hand to deal with things that would rob great swaths of time were he 
remote from hearth and home.  In a direct use economy emergencies and 
adversities are averaged out in a way that cannot be done in the 'job' 
economy. 

So having expended some thought and consideration to the homesteading direct 
use economy, I have to say that I like to read and write .... I don't have 
time to not homestead.
   </HTML>