Homestead mailing list

[Gene GeRue <genegerue AT ruralize.com>]

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