Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["John D'hondt" <dhondt@eircom.net>]

From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>
> Sure, add more. We're not in the city anymore, not isolated but too far 
> from stores to bicycle and if predictions hold horses will be very 
> expensive. Rural or city, my best guess is too many things will start 
> getting too expensive in a matter of months - and hope I never see it. Gas 
> #1, food a close second. I don't quite like the word crash because it 
> sounds too all or nothing. It appears this slow motion economic 
> contraction is irreversible for multiple reasons. And what we're seeing 
> already is desperate cuts in several state and city budgets, loss of many 
> social services and safety nets - and some pension defaults dead ahead. 
> So it looks like gradual worsening of family finances and a lot of big 
> bumps in the road, more downhill than uphill. With local networking pretty 
> iffy for many of us the Internet is a poor substitute. Still it's nice to 
> be able to communicate over vast distances with so many.

At the very moment there must be thousands of horses, definitely in Ireland, 
looking for a home for next to nothing.
But whether it is a good idea to get one is another question. Horses do not 
need to get shoed. They can be made used to working without expensive 
blacksmith work. But to be useful they will need some harness; collar with 
haimses, straddle and bridgins, head collar and bit and at least a cart 
which people will find much more expensive than buying even a trained horse. 
I could buy at least 20 good horses here now for the price of one new neck 
collar. But I won't do that for I got a few already each with their own 
harness for the leather has to fit the horse.
Working with a horse also requires a learning curve from the owner. It is 
not quite as easy as driving a tractor and if you try to drive horse and 
cart like a tractor you are likely to loose the cart the first time you 
drive in or out of a field that has a gate or pillars.
Good to know also is that a big horse,16 hands and up, will likely eat as 
much as two cows. In my location a horse that size needs about 2 acres of 
grazing to survive for the year. But luckily there are small pony races that 
pound for pound out-pull the big ones.

As to networking in a basically hostile neighborhood....it is hard enough to 
keep going with what we have been doing for over twenty years. I reared four 
fantastic children and thaught them all the jobs going to survive and then 
the three oldest found a mate that wanted something else from life leaving 
us a bit understaffed at most times. I then tried to find maybe a wwoofer or 
two who could fit in what we are doing here. Must have had a hundred over 
the last few years and found half a dozen who would fit in. Unfortunately 
these all have a goal in life, know what they want and have plenty of drive 
to get it. They came here for a limited time to learn something specific and 
left. The other 96 would sink any sailing boat they were crewing on. A few 
of these wanted to stay but they would have destroyed us if we had let them.
I then advertised to get a young family here offering to share everything we 
have, plenty of food, a dry roof over the head a chance to live with and in 
nature. No takers. Nada. Well I suppose this might be even more tricky than 
finding a good single person.
Most people still can't see what is coming and that is that.
> Without kids at home we don't really do Xmas or shopping with the madding 
> crowd, so 25th is just another day here, and long as the ground doesn't 
> freeze I can get some more wheelbarrow work done. The next two months 
> won't let me do much with the garden.

It is the same here Paul even if we do have some adult children and even 
some small grand children not too far off. A long time ago when we were 
still in suburban Belgium we were part of a neighborhood group of young 
parents. There are about a dozen couples and a few singles who apart from 
mutual help all the time came together once a month to talk openly and in 
complete honesty about a particular subject. One month that was about Xmas 
and all the hype surrounding it. We found to our surprise that just about 
everybody there hated Xmas and everything to do with it but we all went 
along with the mass hysteria because that was the only thing imaginable. 
Most of us would have preferred to live with a primitive tribe along the 
Amazon that had never heard of Xmas.
That two hour long meeting definitely changed the life of this family. We 
became eccentric while thinking that all the hype was not necessary unless 
life through the year was too empty and without purpose. One can teach 
children anything, even that once a year we have to chop down a small tree 
and then see it die inside the house for a while. You can also teach 
children that a 60 foot tall living tree outside is something else again and 
that there needs to be a very good and better reason than "everybody does 
it" to kill a tree.

End of rant, all the best for the new year,
john