The Utah Garden Challenge

aka How to Find Out Which Small Farms are Threatening Your Agribiz by U.S. Dprtmnt of Agrcltr. Read it here.

Oh and a link to a naturopathic-type home remedy database.

Back to Eden Film

"Each one of us, whether we like it or not, is utterly and completely dependent on an unseen community, an invisible world... In our Western Greco-Roman compartmentalized fragmented systemized linear reductionist individualized disconnected parts-oriented thinking, we tend to disassociate the seen from the unseen. We do so at our own peril. We are all, every one of us, simply a manifestation of this invisible world."
--Joel Salatin, "Folks, This Ain't Normal," page 108

Some people made this film about mulch and compost. Some of it is kind of duh sort of stuff to us (the homesteader crowd, that is), and I think they're Evangelical Christians (which because I'm not, sort of annoys me), but if you can get past the dogma, there's some good stuff.

Watch it here (it's free), then read the how to section (I'm only recommending the right column on that page, the left column you can take it or leave it). I'm also very fond of their song "To Eden" by Tony and Jenn Hooper for some reason.

Food, Inc

Most of us already know the things in this documentary. After all, wanting to be in control of our food supply is part of what attracted us to this way of life. But if you're as obsessed as I am, you'll watch it anyway.

I like that they don't have a narrator being all authoritative. They just show interviews and in some places use the interviews as a voice-over for the visuals.

Watch the trailer.

Rent it on YouTube. 

Watch it on Movie 2K.

Watch or download it on StageVu. (If you watch it, you'll have to have DivX player. If you download it, it should play on Windows Media Player.)

Buy it on Amazon.

If you haven't seen it, I recommend it.

Three Reasons to Homestead

I don't want to scare anybody stiff, and these videos are disturbing. The first one is less than eight minutes long, but the other two are around an hour each, though well worth the watch. While I don't agree with them that stocking up on gold and silver is THE answer to surviving political unrest and the dollar's dive, I do think they have a point. Hedge your bets a little, learn to grow your own food. I watched all the videos in one sitting, but I definitely don't recommend it.

Reason #1: What if the dollar completely tanks? 



Reason #2: The economy is not healing like they tell us it is.



Reason #3: America is no longer the land of the free. When people get tired of dealing with a 1985 government (and by 1985, I mean the book, not the year), how is that unrest going to affect you?



Thoughts?

Every Now and Then I Go Window Shopping for Farms...

I am so not in a place to be able to actually buy one, so I don't know why I do it. I haven't posted in probably a year because, well, there hasn't been much to post about. Right now I'm going to school (can't buy a farm without money, can't get money without something to trade for it...) and living in this massive student housing apartment complex. Which is mostly just depressing, but hey, you do what ya gotta do to get where ya need to go.

Now that I have a computer again, I'm catching up on all the blogs I follow (which is taking forever since I've been distracted with life for a LONG time...) which just makes me wish I could be on some land already. So to soothe my frustration (or maybe I'm feeding it, who knows?) I get on Lands of America, pick a state and some search parameters (acreage, county, price, etc) and then I go and drool over all the beautiful farms up for sale that I'm too broke to buy.

Like this one

83 acres in southwestern Colorado with a house, orchard and fields already established....mmm