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  • From: Gene GeRue <genegerue AT ruralize.com>
  • To: homestead AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [Homestead] Who knows? Only time.
  • Date: Sat, 8 Mar 2008 12:47:32 -0700


On Mar 8, 2008, at 11:48 AM, Clansgian AT wmconnect.com wrote:

What I'm comparing that to are the plans to raise sheep, or asparagus, or
garlic and pay the mortgage, health insurance, vehicle and expenses, television,
computer, wind generator, etc. Not only do I not see any examples of that
happening, I don't see any historical examples either ... moder lifestyle on a
cottager's basis.

I know only one historical example. My dead "hillbilly dirt farmer" friend, Farrell Berry, left the Ozarks only once: as a young man to go work on big farms up north. He ate beans, saved most of what he made, came back home and bought a section of land for fifty cents per acre. He needed all of it. Thereafter he did all the things that we talk about here. He raised every kind of farm animal you can think of, he fed himself and his wife and ten children from their garden and the animals and hunting, fishing and trapping, and raised cattle for taxes, pickup trucks, clothes and very few supplies and Wild Turkey whiskey. He was a successful anomaly even in the hills and hollers of southern Missouri where most of his generation live on their parents' land or adjoining acreage, just barely "getting by" and never leaving but for the final hospital visit. Farrell often said that Ozark County land was so poor it wouldn't pay taxes.

Homesteading, so I have found, is a marvelous basis for a personal (family,
small group) economics. But it is a most lousy small business. I work to
dispell the myth that being fully a homesteader means being nothing else.
Homesteading for us is to enable us to do other things, to exclude them.

You have your programming and instrument-making skills. I never found the equivalent for myself.

And I've some reason to hope. I notice at least a 200% increase in the plots
of land plowed up for gardens, and it's still early here by the conventional
wisdom,


I have always been impressed by how many Ozarkers, possessing ample land, fail to put in the simplest garden. Those who do often only grow tomatoes and sweet corn.

I was happy to see this morning in the Arizona Republic on-line news a story about home gardens. A sign of growing knowledge and conditions:

http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/0308garden08a1.html





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