The New Year Starts With New Seeds

Happy New Year!! My new year started off with some seed purchases. This year, as with other years in the past, we’re bringing in some new open-pollinated varieties to try.  We’ll certainly have a disappointment or two, but hopefully we will also find a real keeper to excite us.

This year we will be growing a new root crop — we are trying Rutabagas as another root crop to store for Winter eating.  I have also located some Stinging Nettle seeds and will scatter those here and there, hoping to start a patch that will naturalize in the woods. And this year, we will be growing a small patch of Quinoa to see if this grain is worth our time and garden space.

One of my 2013 goals is to produce even more food than before. This means I will have less time to devote to the flowers that are contained in the perennial beds that surround us. Many of the perennial flowers I grow need to be divided every couple of years — a daunting task with so many plants. I had hoped to dig many of the perennial flowers out of the large front bed during Autumn and then fill the holes and simply haul in a broader mulch cover. But with all of the rains we had, that project didn’t happen. Hopefully I can arrange this during the 2013 Spring season but as we gardeners know too well — Spring is crammed full of garden activities.

The exciting goal for 2013 at Wood Ridge Homestead is to begin seeding the understory of a small food forest area. This area is located along one area of our woods edge, just inside our deer fencing. To grow more food without expanding the veggie gardens has appeal, especially in an area where mature Oak trees are. Whether we can actually establish a new growing zone as part of this wooded area remains to be seen. We have already been working this food forest some — during 2012, we planted some PawPaw trees, grafted Persimmon trees, and Hardy Kiwi vines in this area. So here’s hoping that we can succeed with an understory of greens that will enable us to grow more foods!

The 2013 Seed List is now posted (although I may add a few more newly purchased seeds). This listing is our seed inventory for vegetables and is a partial inventory listing for herbs and flowers. Do you keep a seed inventory? I find it’s so helpful because I don’t have to rummage through the seed packets!

We Are Living In Difficult Times

In the past decade, Americans have witnessed extreme situations that have threatened many of us.  We have seen bad weather conditions and weather-related catastrophic events like Superstorm Sandy. We have all seen the increase in violence, too, from the inner city to the rural regions. Man-made disasters and natural disasters threaten us and both are increasing in occurrence and in severity.

We are living in difficult times and the problems they cause can be overwhelming. We cannot escape many of the difficulties but we can brace, and plan, for them. Dangers lurk around every corner and we’re continually bombarded with them now.  It’s a doom-and-gloom point of view but it is our reality.  I have said before, we are at The End Of The World As We Know It. Truly — it’s arrived.

Threats from weather, civil unrest, terrorism, financial problems, pandemics, drought, government and corporate corruption — these threats affect all of us. And when a possible threat becomes a reality, the effects are seen throughout our society.

As our society becomes more complex, the systems which interact with one another will often fail now — all because of the interdependency that has created the complexity. Think of these inter-connected systems as spokes on a wheel. When one spoke breaks, the wheel continues to roll along. But when several spokes break, the wheel is weakened.  So the threats that we sometimes face and the dangerous situations which are sometimes forced upon us can create problems. And those problems  leave us without resources or with broken down systems that cause a new set of problems: one problem creates another problem.

In the case of Superstorm Sandy, the disaster has been devastating for some disaster victims and tolerable for others, depending on a number of factors like their location or their preparedness. In general though, the end results of Superstorm Sandy have weakened food delivery services, disrupted power grids, caused problems with transportation, contaminated drinking water, destroyed homes, and created medical problems. Whatever the danger or disaster, when something bad occurs, the majority of those affected are forced into situations they often cannot cope with.

Faster and faster the dangers come. We see problems and threats more often. It’s alarming to see the increased frequency of these threats, too. We need to admit that we are living in difficult times. We must learn to help ourselves better. We must protect ourselves better. Having worked for years with disasters through my past employment with FEMA, I can say that the majority of those affected by dangerous situations like disasters were never prepared for them. They were not prepared emotionally, physically, or financially.

Why is this? Why are most Americans ill-prepared for dangerous situations and disaster-related problems? Many people don’t want to worry about the bad-stuff.  And many people believe nothing bad will happen to them. But this is not rational thinking, it’s avoidance behavior. Most people feel helpless, even overwhelmed, when they worry so they tend to ignore what frightens them.  And many people lack the confidence to help themselves. They would rather have someone else, like the Government, help them.  They are offloading personal responsibility and that mindset is a poor choice — I have witnessed first hand how the Government operates and “helps” people. And anyone who is paying attention to the assistance that FEMA has been providing in NJ and NY will agree.

Here’s the deal: we cannot become an even larger Nation of dependents who want the Government to take care of us. It’s foolish. And it’s unsustainable. We must learn to be better prepared and better educated so that we can fend for ourselves and protect our loved ones from dangers and unforeseen disasters.

With our complex society and interdependency, a disaster that does not affect us personally still affect us indirectly. Disasters cost money and lives. If a disaster is a Federally-declared disaster, taxpayers foot the bill. Disasters create additional costs, too. In the Superstorm Sandy, Wall Street was inaccessible. Because the buildings and streets were physically damaged, the global Market had to be shut down — there was no back-up plan. Think about that…  because of poor planning with those-in-charge of New York’s Wall Street location, the entire global investment world was affected. And they want us to trust them with our investments….

The continuing onslaught of disasters and dangerous situations affect us and we react to them.   A natural or man-made disaster always forces a reaction by anyone who has been affected, but the end results vary depending upon the person affected.  It is up to the victim to decide whether to be better prepared the next time.  Disaster victims don’t always learn hard lessons — some will become proactive towards preparedness and self-reliance and some will not. It’s about individualism and the mindset.

Aside from disasters, there are also many serious situations that can threaten us, too.  We are living in difficult times and none of us care for it but we cannot escape it. Our current economic situation is a threat that we all experience, directly or indirectly. The Federal Reserve is creating money out of thin air, the devalued housing market has eroded family wealth, and the underfunded retirement liabilities pose a threat to retirement plans. Because we are all affected by these problems, directly or indirectly, there is a mood across portions of America that has evolved, especially since our financial mess became publicly known in 2008. Many Americans distrust our government more than before. Many of us have no faith in our banking system. And we have learned to be skeptical of most broadcast news.  About half of our country realizes that we are living in difficult times now. Our attitudes have changed and this has influenced our outlook. Then there is the other half of our country who want a bigger, more protective Government. And they want free stuff. And they don’t want to work.

What we witnessed on Election Night was the evidence of societal change.

We are a Nation that is divided. We are a split group. We are a society of workers and takers. And it won’t balance out correctly. Even if Obama and his followers keep pushing their divisiveness while they also tout “social justice” and all of those other “justice” causes. This societal change is not just dangerous, it’s disastrous.

Many publications have been written on societal change, specifically about the evolution of societies, the rise and fall of societies, and how civilizations actually fail. One book that has gained attention over the past decade is The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy – What the Cycles of History Tell Us About America’s Next Rendezvous with Destiny, by William Strauss and Neil Howe. Authors Strauss and Howe predict our future based upon our past and the historical cycles in other countries. Well worth reading, The Fourth Turning offers much about our destiny and how we might better prepare for what is inevitable.

“The next Fourth Turning is due to begin shortly after the new millennium, midway through the Oh-Oh decade. Around the year 2005, a sudden spark will catalyze a Crisis mood. Remnants of the old social order will disintegrate. Political and economic trust will implode. Real hardship will beset the land, with severe distress that could involve questions of class, race, nation and empire. The very survival of the nation will feel at stake. Sometime before the year 2025, America will pass through a great gate in history, commensurate with the American Revolution, Civil War, and twin emergencies of the Great Depression and World War II.” – Strauss & Howe, The Fourth Turning

If you haven’t read The Fourth Turning, please do. Prepare yourself.

Although we are living in difficult times, it will get worse — much worse. But even though it will be difficult — even bleak — we can become more self-reliant so that we can help ourselves as best as we can. Many of us know that we can improve our lives and our lifestyles, and sometimes, we simply need reminders for encouragement. Let’s all become better prepared to protect ourselves and our families so that these difficult times are not an overwhelming challenge. Will you join in?

I’ve listed some basic steps that can help us prepare to become less dependent and more self-reliant. A blog post, a hand-written journal, or an ongoing action-item list can help each of us become actively engaged in more self-reliance as we prepare for any disaster that heads our way.

• Define your goals towards self-reliance and prioritize them. This is the backbone of your “plan”.
• Become action-oriented. Lay out your “plan” to achieve those goals.
• Establish a time-table, if possible, and strive to achieve each of those goals. Expect results and try not to procrastinate.
• Have a positive attitude.
• Learn to adapt to a variety of situations.
• Assess your personal skill-set, then identify some new skills that could be beneficial. Check your “plan” to see if there are any new skills that might help you further your goals.
• Learn a new skill.
• Determine the necessities required for your “plan” to succeed.  Do you need a pantry for stored foods?
• Create a ‘wish list’ for items that will help you achieve your “plan”. Do you need a shed for storage?
• Be active, both physically and mentally.
• Engage your “plan” daily. Perhaps a checklist will help you to achieve a goal.
• Remember what is truly important.
• Garden!
• Plant a garden, increase the size of your garden, add in (or start) edibles that are perennial  (come back every year)
• Plant a fruit tree, or plant several. Remember to plant fruit bushes and nut trees if time, money, and space allows
• Learn to preserve foods: water bath canning, pressure canning, dehydrating, freezing.
• Buy extra food for the pantry: purchase food in bulk, or simply extra cans of foods to put away in the pantry
• Store extra water
• Keep basic medical supplies for emergency situations
• Inventory tools, add necessary tools.

We are indeed living in difficult times. We can learn to adapt to many scenarios. We can also learn how to cope with many of the dangerous situations as long as we become better prepared to do so. Some of the preparedness involves training yourself and your mindset. And some of the preparedness requires us to plan for our personal needs and safety.

Remember to strive for “safe, sanitary, and secure” and use this as a personal checkpoint during an emergency, if needed. Are you and your home safe? Is your location sanitary? Is your home secure? You and your household’s personal safety are of utmost importance.

Knowing you are safe, your secondary items of importance are water and food. We must have these to survive! We must always remember to keep extra items on hand — just in case. We must have extra foods put away so we may eat. We must have an adequate quantity of stored water (roughly, 1 gallon of water per person per day). We also must stock some basic medical supplies and medication.

We are living in difficult times. Let’s all become more independent and self-reliant. Our lives really do depends upon it!

Cooking With A Rocket Stove

A rocket stove provides an efficient heat source that can be used for cooking and for radiant heating. A rocket stove is a very simple design that uses a wood fire in a combustion chamber and a vertical chimney that serves to direct the fire’s heat upward.

A small rocket stove is generally used for cooking, using small scraps of wood at no cost.  The larger rocket stoves are mass heaters that operate in a similar fashion as a wood stove does. There are some commercial rocket stoves on the market and most of them are small cooking stoves. Many rocket stoves and rocket mass heater stoves are hand made and there are design plans and videos online to be researched if rocket stoves appeal to you.

Our small StoveTec rocket stove gives us the ability to cook outdoors using fallen branches from our woods. When we want to cook with our rocket stove, we fire the rocket stove up and within a minute, we have a fire to cook on. We cook on our rocket stove with cast iron and we are preparing a meal from dead tree limbs we collect from the woods. On days when we’re outside and can’t be bothered with watching a pot of food on the stove top, we fire up the rocket stove and cook a meal outside while we’re nearby. It’s a convenient method to cook with and it uses a natural resource to provide the energy to cook with.  A few walks into the woods with some ties and we have bundled enough dead wood to cook with. Free energy. And a good meal.

Caution: Change Ahead

Yep, we arrived.

We got there.

(You did too.)

We’ve all reached that destination many refer to as TEOTWAWKI (The End of the World as We Know It).

We’re okay. How about you? We’re adapting as best as we are able to. We’ve met difficulties head-on and it seems that as soon as we make a few changes, here it comes again!

So adapting to “new ground rules” has become our new normal.  Now we try to look at the ever-changing economy as an enormous challenge we’ll try to prepare for. For us, investment strategies have changed, retirement plans have changed — in short, our finances have changed. And these things are changing our outlook on the future. Politics, legislation, corporate greed have been instrumental in each of these changes and it has all been forced upon us. And we see more forceful changes ahead, too. The signs are all there, here are just a few, none of them are good.

The National debt has now exceeded $16 trillion dollars.

The SNAP food stamp program broke yet-another record recently: 46.7 million people in America are now receiving benefits.

Unemployment continues to hover above 8%. Of course that’s the lower U3 rate provided by the BLS which does not include the underemployed or those who have given up and no longer looking for a job. A more appropriate unemployment number is the BLS U6 rate.

So how about those jobs? President Obama keeps saying that he has created millions of jobs. Millions! Thankfully, the Federal Reserve Economic Data realizes it can’t fudge their bean-counting. The fact is there has only been a net gain of 300,000 over the course of the Obama administration to date.

And it should come as no surprise to learn that the US has slipped down for the 4th year in a row in the Global Competitiveness Report 2012-2013 just published. The US is now ranked at #7, dropping from the #5 position this year.

Our competitive edge is a measurement of our productivity and we know we’re losing. We’re not only unable to compete in the global market, our civilian labor force is now 63.5%, the lowest level in decades.

Forbes wrote that 165 million Americans are dependents of the State:

New research from Ranking Member of the Senate Budget Committee Jeff Sessions (R-AL) reveals that this reality may already be here, with more than 107 million Americans on some form of means-tested government welfare.

Add to that 46 million seniors collecting Medicare (subtracting out about 10 million on Supplemental Security Income, Medicaid, and other senior-eligible programs already included in Sessions’ means-tested chart) and 22 million government employees at the federal, state, and local level — and suddenly, over 165 million people, a clear majority of the 308 million Americans counted by the U.S. Census Bureau in 2010, are at least partially dependents of the state.

Personal wealth has decreased more than 30% in recent years, and home values have plummeted more than 35%, too.

So it comes as no surprise that the number of persons living at or below the poverty level has increased. And as the poverty rate increased, incomes decreased. The real median household income has fallen another 4.8 percent since we were told that we’re really in “an economic recovery.”

Recovery? What recovery? Americans are being lied to and manipulated like never before.

This is not the America I know.

And honestly, this is not how America has ever been. But this is our new America — the old America is lost.

Last August I wrote Are We There Yet? noting some of the Nation’s changes and how they have negatively impacted our household.  Since then, we have tried to stay a step ahead of the inevitable.  We see the signs. We’ve tightened our seat belts as best as we can, but what we see isn’t just a crash that’s ahead of us. We see something worse, much worse. We see a collapse of our economy and we think it’s going to get chaotic, then frantic, then desperate and dangerous.

Long ago, we stopped listening to “corporate mainstream news” on television. Worse than the blatant political bias on the news stations is the lack of truth being reported about global economic collapse.  The news stations are not altruistic, they are for-profit corporations that service themselves and the corporate world they are attached to.  They are part of a corrupt system that shapes opinions and ideology. They manipulate us. And they make big-money to do this. To intentionally hide important events or negative reports is unethical, yet this is what the networks do. They decide what we need to know in the hopes that they can manipulate or lull us into further complacency. Fortunately, through the Internet, we learn the reality about the poor economy and how it is dangerously tied into the downturn of the global economy.

Greece, Spain, Italy — members of the European Union –  are showing the world what the reality of our economic system is, but the news stations have blacked it out. In Spain, people are taking their money and leaving. They know the panic and desperation that will lead to looting and riots in the streets. A few weeks ago, activists looted supermarkets and distributed food to the unemployed and hungry people who were unable to buy or grow their own food.

Some Americans don’t understand what lies ahead but make no mistake — people see the signs, people sense danger is ahead of us.

For now, all that we can do is try to prepare for the change ahead of us. We have set some revised plans into motion, but even these plans can change. There are forces much mightier than we are, so we remain cautious while we plan for some of these inevitable changes.

We grow as much food as we are able to. We eat in-season. We preserve foods to last us through the year. We cook with wood on occasion. We turn out the lights at night and use solar lanterns instead. We chop wood to heat our home. We do our own construction and repairs. We’re debt-free and we live simply. We unplug from the many gadgets and gismos that are unnecessary. And we discover new “old ways” of doing things, learning from those who lived before us in times gone by.

We look back to the Great Depression and try to understand history and how people survived that economic disaster. We wonder how society will be re-molded as those who say they are The Ones In Power have planned. The only path we know is the path of self-reliance on our homestead.  And so we continue on, making some adjustments along the way. We plan and prepare for the ever-changing government and economic system we live in. I hope you are, too.

Harry Browne once wrote, “When you know that you’re capable of dealing with whatever comes, you have the only security the world has to offer.”

Original Homesteading

Many people use the term homesteading to define their own lifestyles in today’s terms.  Some people believe that homesteading is a simpler lifestyle with a small garden in a backyard.  Some folks think that homesteading is farming. Others believe that homesteading is practiced only in an off-grid home in the wilds of Alaska.  Homesteading has a varied meaning in contemporary times, so how did the term ‘homesteading’ become so misused or misunderstood?

The act of homesteading and the definition itself have evolved in the past 150 years.

While homesteading has seen a resurgence through the back-to-the-land movements that began in the 1970s, the homesteading lifestyle  is much more than simply going back-to-the-land or living frugally.  Homesteading is, and has been, the ability to create and sustain a household through a self-reliant lifestyle where most sustenance, labor, and services are self-contained.

Historically, homesteading wasn’t just a lifestyle, it was a legal and contractual obligation between an individual and the Federal government. Starting in the 1860s, the Federal Government enticed its citizens to settle the Great American Desert by offering land grants to emigrants who were willing to homestead, to work and support an undeveloped portion of America.

This video is a good summary of the homesteading era in American history. The video is filled with commentary and diary readings by many descendants of the original homesteaders.