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

The Food Safety Modernization Act

Lawyers and such swear up and down that S.501 ("The Food Safety Modernization Act") won't affect anyone's small farm or backyard garden. Psh, how's this?

It all starts with a farmer named Roscoe Filburn, a modest farmer who grew wheat in his own back yard in order to feed his chickens.

One day, a U.S. government official showed up at his farm. Noting that Filburn was growing a lot of wheat, this government official determined that Filburn was growing too much wheat and ordered Filburn to destroy his wheat crops and pay a large fine to the federal government.

The year was 1940, you see. And through a highly protectionist policy, the federal government had decided to artificially drive up the prices of wheat by limiting the amount of wheat that could be grown on any given acre. This is all part of Big Government's "infinite wisdom" of trying to somehow improve prosperity by destroying food and impairing economic productivity. (Be wary any time the government says it's going to "solve problems" for you.)

The federal government, of course, claims authority over all commerce (even when such claims are blatantly in violation of the limitations placed upon government by the Constitution). But Roscoe Filburn wasn't selling his wheat to anyone. Thus, he was not engaged in interstate commerce. He wasn't growing wheat as something to use for commerce at all, in fact. He was simply growing wheat in his back yard and feeding it to his chickens. That's not commerce. That's just growing your own food.

Read more...

If you can control the food supply, you can control the people. It's like NAIS, only with plants.

Urban Homesteading: Garden Girl TV

A lot of times homesteading in town is overlooked or not addressed. We know it exists, but we don't talk about it enough. However, there is a site I found that is all about "urban sustainable living."

This is the teaser-like commercial thing:



The website is Garden Girl TV.

Ironwood Farm Project

I have new blog to add to my blogroll! I just finished catching up! Whoo-hoo!

This blogger's name is Jenny, and her blog is called "Ironwood Farm Project." She has two children, a boy and a girl, which she homeschools in an unschooling way. She and her husband live in New Mexico on a 10 acre family farm in an off-the-grid strawbale home (I know all of you are green with envy lol) which is featured in this article. She does Flamenco as a hobby and is working on living sustainably. They have cattle, a pair of pigs, sheep, bees, a garden, and various poultry. Her husband had an awful accident involving his thigh and there are complications at this point. They are also planning on making a living with their farm at this time.

So off with you now! Check them out!

Cauldron Ridge Farm

From there I went in search of a new blog to devour. And I found Gina's "Cauldron Ridge Farm." I read it all. From her move to Cauldron Ridge Farm, through two different jobs, graduating with a degree in entomology (that is what you call a degree in bugs, yes?) to her move to yet another farm and the ups and downs of everyday life. She works full time, plus does the farm thing with her two little boys and husband. It's amazing.

Dancing in A Field of Tansy

When I caught up with "A Homesteading Neophyte," I went in search of new blogs that had quality content. I had to get my fix, you see. lol

That's when I found "Dancing in a Field of Tansy." I caught up on that one faster because there are not so many posts. She is artistic and crafty from what I've seen, and she has goats. I like goats. I grew up on goats' milk from our very own French Alpine/Saanen crosses. Some of them were nasty, some of them were gentle but didn't know how to nurse babies, so we fed her kids with a couple of calf bottles and kept them in a box in our living room. Some of them died. We ate some. As a child, I would sit on my parents' bed under the cooler where I couldn't hear anything. Then, after it was done, I came out and watched them bleed the goat. They hung it on a ginormous mesquite tree we parked our van under.

One goat got her horns stuck in the chainlink fence, crying for her mama. We didn't get to her fast enough (and nobody called a vet after the fact), so she went through the rest of her life with her nick twisted sideways.

But I'm off topic again...Tansy has goats, yes, and I like goats.

A New Tradition; A Homesteading Neophyte

I have decided to do a "Blog of the Week" type of thing. Except I'm not reliable enough to make sure I post about a blog I like each week. So instead I am going to post about blogs that interest me whenever it occurs to me to do so. It's kind of the way I live my life. Do it when it occurs to me and hope it occurs to me.

Today I am posting about the very first homesteading blog I ever discovered. I found it last summer. After I read thirty years worth of back issues from Mother Earth News and wanted to know how people homesteaded now (rather than in the seventies and eighties). Well, I googled all sorts of phrases, trying to find the one that would hit the jackpot. "Rural Living" was out "Country Living" brought up another blank. Phrase after phrase, I searched; using every phrase I could think of that would describe what I was looking for. Finally, I found the right one: "homesteading." Bingo! And best of all, I discovered there were blogs that were worth the space they took up in cyberspace. Homesteading blogs. Until then I had only found dumb ones written by dumb kids who wanted to tell the world about their alcohol addictions and how they cut themselves...as though anyone cared.

Well, I found Phelan's "A Homesteading Neophyte" and, starting from her first post ever, I read all the years of experience buried deep in the archives. It was like reading a good book that never ended. And better yet, it's happening now instead of 1979 or 1983 or 1995. That's something that's important, that it's possible now.

Beginning Steps to My First Garden

Last night I had a lovely dream about sheep. I dreamed I had eight sheep and five of them were pregnant. And they had cute little lambs. It was a homesteading dream, or else I wouldn't have mentioned it in this blog.

You probably know from my blog description that I am a teenager who wants to be a homesteader. If you know what homesteading is, you probably know that most teenagers (at least the ones I know) want to be fashion designers and doctors and actors and authors and veterinarians and brain surgeons and singers, and artists, and archeologists. All those subjects fascinate me, yes, but I want to be a homesteader. I want cows and sheep goats and chickens and a garden and cats and dogs and children on a nice size piece of land in the Rocky Mountains where I can live a life that makes sense to me. Right now I'm learning as much as I can about cooking and sewing and crocheting and other domestic chores as well as more homesteady things like gardening and animal husbandry. Most of my experience in the homesteady things up until now has been book learning and blog reading.

I am still working on that, but now I have decided to plant a garden. I figure now is a good time to start when I have a ton of time on my hands (and I'm graduating this spring even though I just turned seventeen last month, so I'll have even more time on my hands, soon). I don't want to do animals just yet because I'm going to do college and and the job thing before I do the homesteading thing and it's a little difficult to take care of a dog when you're busy with college and all that fun stuff. At least you could leave it home and ask your mom to take care of it (I don't have a dog, just so you know).

My mom really doesn't know the first thing about chickens. She likes cats and tiny dogs. The one time I had her take care of my chickens (because I was at youth conference for four days), she didn't give them any water and they started eating their eggs to compensate. So any animals I have from now on will be at a time I can take care of them. Now back to the subject I'm writing this post on: gardening.

Now is about right to start doing the garden thing. There's never a frost after Mother's Day (ironically, it has sometimes snowed for the last time on Mother's Day and then all melted away and been sunny and just like spring the next day, but it has never broken the rule), so anything I want to start indoors needs to be planted in March or April. Therefore planning is in February (or January if you're really organized and motivated, which I am not under normal circumstances).

I am doing a 20'x30' garden this year. I figure it's a good size. I'll be able to have some variety but not be overwhelmed. Plus it's already fenced off with four feet of chicken wire above the ground and 6-8" buried. And these are the plants I want to grow:

• Tomatoes
  
• Cucumber
  
• Zucchini
  
• Onions
  
• Garlic
  
• Herbs (haven't decided which yet, but definitely the kind for pizza/spaghetti sauce)
  
• Carrots
  
• Lettuce
  
• Some berries
  
• Maybe some flowers
  
• etc
  

This is far from an exhaustive list. It's just kind of a general idea, I may add some plants, I may take away some plants, I'll probably add more details and whatnot. You'll see. I'll post my plans as they develop and become more specific and specialized.