Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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An Experiment in Country Living
by Peter Goodchild   01 August 2010
http://www.culturechange.org/cms/content/view/668/1/

One thing my wife and I learned from seven years in rural Ontario is that 
country living doesn't always mean freedom from money issues, and of all our 
expenses the greatest and most persistent was the car. People who live in the 
country nowadays are actually more hooked on automobiles than those who live 
in the city, since there are long miles of highway between one's home and 
other destinations such as shops or a job. In fact, one of the biggest 
problems of the truly poor in the countryside is that they may have no means 
of getting to a job even if it is offered to them. For everyone, the obvious 
alternative to the automobile would be horses, but how can horses survive at 
the present time, with the roads dominated by high-speed cars and trucks?

Besides the car, our big costs were property taxes and house renovations. It 
was a good thing we had paid cash for the house and land, because if we had 
been paying off a mortgage we would really have had trouble making ends meet. 
I should add that at first we were not as frugal as we might have been: we 
had a fair amount of money because we had sold our house in Toronto, but 
because we had so much money we spent it too freely.

We did not expect money making to be the principal issue in country living, 
but such was the case. Although we ran a one-acre market garden as 
efficiently as possible, a profit always seemed to elude us. As time went by, 
we began to realize that there were not many people in the area who had 
financial security. Most of the people we met were living either on pensions 
or on welfare, or something similar. The pensioners were sometimes elderly 
poor people living on nothing but payments from the government. There were 
only a few people living on company pensions, which provided a higher 
standard of living. One group of people who had a reasonable income were the 
few trades people that the area could support - carpenters, plumbers, 
mechanics, and so on. The other large segment of the population was the 
cottagers, the Torontonians, who were likely to show up only in the summer, 
but these people didn't have to deal with the problem of earning a local 
income.

Most people under retirement age, however, were barely surviving, partly 
because the entire area pretty well closed down during the winter. The main 
industry was "tourism," which is sometimes little more than a euphemism for 
"poverty."

My suggestions that people rediscover their rural origins didn't get very 
far. The young disliked country living and were rather ashamed of it. The 
middle-aged took the attitude, not that "anything worth doing is worth doing 
well," but that it is worth doing only with heavy machinery. I remember 
seeing two large brand-new trucks going down the road one day with a grand 
total of four people, merely to eat at a local restaurant -- not a big crime, 
just a vignette. The most knowledgeable people were in their eighties, but 
the following generations wanted to be part of what they considered the 
modern world: they were willing slaves to the urban economy that was slowly 
killing them.

After we bought the property, we seemed to find more and more work that 
needed to be done to make the place livable, and most of it had to be done 
before the approach of the first winter. We knew very little ourselves about 
renovations, and at the same time we had very few names to work with, so we 
ended up hiring people without getting multiple estimates for the work to be 
done. As a result, we were sometimes charged too much money, but we were 
unable to realize that fact until much later.

I would even say that some of those "renovations" should have been left 
undone. For example, we spent a good deal of money for eaves troughs to be 
installed around the metal roof of our mobile home, not realizing that a 
slippery metal roof would result in avalanches of melting snow in the spring, 
and that those avalanches would simply tear the eaves troughs away.

On the positive side, we finally learned many things about house repair and 
renovation. In particular we learned how to do a number of carpentry tasks. I 
even did a bit of plumbing, at least to the extent of replacing old faucets. 
Electricity, however, remained for me a rather esoteric subject, probably 
because I found it both dangerous and expensive. Electricity was also 
unreliable, and violent summer storms would often mean looking for candles 
and matches.

We learned a great deal about heating with wood. We not only managed to 
operate a wood stove properly, but we gradually went through the entire 
process of cutting down trees, sawing them into lengths, splitting the 
pieces, stacking and storing them, and so on. I became quite adept at using a 
chain saw, although I found that using such a machine on a long-term basis 
requires a good knowledge of maintenance, including sharpening the chain, 
cleaning the entire machine, and recognizing common problems.

As a long-term "survival skill," operating a chain saw is rather dubious, of 
course. How will people operate such things as the world's petroleum runs 
out? Oil production in 2030 will be less than half that of the year 2000. In 
any case, according to at least one expert on the subject, if you calculate 
the money required to operate a chain saw, and the time involved in 
maintaining the equipment, you may find that you're better off using a simple 
bow saw.

I think using a bow saw to put together a winter's supply of firewood might 
require many long weeks of labor, but there may be some sense to the theory. 
Certainly modern bow saws are quite good. The blades are of hardened steel, 
which means they cannot be re-sharpened and must be discarded eventually, but 
they last a long time, and buying a lifetime's supply of such blades would be 
easy enough.

I even bought some antique timber saws, those gigantic devices, often several 
feet long, that our ancestors used for dealing with logs. I learned how to 
set the teeth (bend them to certain angles), using tools that I had made 
myself, and how to sharpen them properly. I soon concluded that I didn't have 
the ancestral muscles for such saws. Part of the problem, however, may have 
been that even after I had done my best to polish the steel surfaces they 
were not really smooth, since rust had caused pitting. Much later I heard 
that such timber saws can be bought brand new, and that a new timber saw will 
cut firewood much more quickly than a bow saw.

We learned that there are many other ways of dealing with firewood and 
heating problems. A smaller house needs less firewood, and so does one with 
fewer and smaller windows. Good insulation is an enormous help. Another trick 
from the old days is to use less firewood by sealing off unnecessary rooms in 
winter. For similar reasons, the stove must be located in the room that will 
be used the most in the daytime.

We learned many things about vegetable gardening that we didn't know before, 
although the locals were not of much help, since they lived mainly on 
supermarket food. We discovered the importance of starting with good soil 
(which we didn't have), and the importance of keeping an eye on dates and on 
weather. We learned to identify and defeat many species of harmful insects. 
We also tried a great many crops and developed a good idea of what crops work 
in that area and which ones don't.

We gained a good knowledge of grains. Corn is by far the best grain to grow, 
since the yield per unit of land is quite high, and it requires very little 
in terms of equipment for growing, for harvesting, or for processing. By 
"corn," however, I mean the older varieties once grown by the native people, 
not modern corn, which is susceptible to insects and diseases. The other 
grain that did well was rye, mainly because of the sandy soil.

Our brief experience with raising chickens was quite educational in two 
senses. The first is that I learned something about the construction of 
buildings with frames made of 2x4s, and as part of that learning experience I 
did everything with non-electric tools except for the somewhat tedious task 
of cutting chipboard.

I built the first chicken coop with a poured concrete-slab foundation and a 
"shed" roof (i.e. one slope rather than two), and the outside was made of 
board-and-batten (vertical boards, with the intervening gaps covered by thin 
strips). The roof was covered with roll roofing.

For the second coop, I deliberately used entirely different methods, partly 
so that I could gain further experience. The foundation was of concrete piers 
rather than a solid slab, the roof had two slopes (and hence two gables), and 
the outside of the walls was covered with chipboard, which in turn was 
covered with vinyl siding, all of it admittedly not very "traditional" but 
perhaps "transitional." The roof was covered with the same material as the 
first coop, but in the form of shingles rather than rolls.

For the most part, I preferred what I did on the second coop, although I now 
think concrete piers are very difficult to build and position neatly without 
preformed molds and pre-mixed concrete.

The second and rather odd thing that we learned, or seem to have learned, 
about chickens is that our long hours of acquiring an education in modern 
poultry-raising may have taken us somewhat in the wrong direction. Just as we 
were closing down our entire chicken operation, I began reading a few 
articles which seemed to indicate that from a survivalist perspective it 
would be better to get away from modern methods. These methods are designed 
to maximize production of either eggs or meat.

But our chickens -- eventually totaling fifty -- were living mainly on 
purchased feed, which was expensive to buy and transport, and out of that 
feed they ate only the types of grain they liked, and simply left the rest to 
rot. They were also living in highly fortified buildings with well-fenced 
yards, all of which protected them from foxes, raccoons, and weasels, but 
their isolated existence meant they were not roaming the fields in search of 
vegetation and insects which could have provided free food.

It may well be the case that a better approach to poultry may be a 
less-modern one. The chickens raised in more-primitive cultures, in other 
words, may be relatively unproductive but might have greater resistance to 
diseases and predators, and the actual varieties of chickens worth 
considering may be smaller and hardier birds that are closer to the ancestral 
types.

Perhaps above all, we learned that it is possible to live with some 
independence from modern civilization. On the four acres that were ours by 
law, but in reality belonged more to Nature, the seasons followed one 
another, even if we were sometimes too busy to notice. In spring the river 
roared and bellowed and foamed along its banks, and in winter that same river 
was a tranquil study in black and white. None of that will ever change. But 
there are other things will certainly change one day: the cars will be gone, 
and so will the money economy.

Peter Goodchild is the author of Survival Skills of the North American 
Indians, published by Chicago Review Press. His email address is odonatus 
[at] live.com.

Peter Goodchild's previous articles on Culture Change are
The Century of Famine
Post-Peak Economics
Food and Population
Depletion of Key Resources: Facts at Your Fingertips
When the Lights Go Out
Crime in the Post-Peak World
How Much Land Do We Need?
Putting Meat on the Table
Laborers Before Sunrise
The End of Electricity
Growing Your Own Grains
After the Age of Exuberance.