Rural Revolution

Planting hard red spring wheat

noreply@blogger.com (Patrice Lewis) — Thu, 31 May 2012 05:53:00 +0000

Last year we had our first experience (or perhaps I should say, experiment) in planting wheat.

Northern Idaho is wheat country. The grand and beautiful Palouse hills are perfect for growing this most elemental of grains. So my logic was, if they can do it, so can we.

So a couple of years ago, we started prepping a portion of our land for a wheat patch, specifically for hard red winter wheat (which is planted in the fall). (If you scroll down the list of key words on the left-hand side of the blog until you come to "wheat," you can follow our progress throughout the subsequent year.) That first year's experiment culminated in failure, as explained here.

But as with most failures, we learned a great deal. One of the biggest problems we had with winter wheat is we had no way to control the cheat grass that overtook the field. So this year we skipped out on the winter wheat and decided to grow hard red spring wheat. By planting in the spring, this would allow us to disk and cultivate the pasture (which would hopefully get rid of the cheat grass before it got too good a start) before we planted the wheat.

So last fall we bought 200 lbs of DNR (Dark Northern Red) spring wheat. In this photo it looks pinkish-red which is NOT because it's red wheat, but because it's been treated with a fungicide (most seed wheat is). The fungicide is colored red so people don't mistakenly eat it or feed it to livestock. We socked this wheat away in the barn for the winter.

We started prepping the wheat field on May 12. The grassy stuff you see is the early growth of cheat grass. Our hope is that by plowing it at this stage in its growth cycle, we could kill it off without using chemicals.

Don rototilled the pasture on May 28. We were delighted that the cheat grass hadn't grown back!

Next, we wanted to "scratch up" the pasture a bit before planting. Since we're not using a seed drill, one of the things Don discovered last year is that by smoothing the ground TOO much, the seed has a harder time "gripping" the ground and growing. Making little furrows, we hope, will allow the seed to grow better. So Don removed every other tine on the cultivator.

But when he went to cultivate the pasture, it was too muddy thanks to some recent rain. So we had to wait a day or two for it to dry out. We were racing the time because we needed to return the tractor to our sainted and patient friends Mike and Judy, who have been incredibly generous in loaning us their equipment.

The last couple days have been dry and windy, which dried out the pasture. Tonight Don checked the weather and saw a chance of rain and thunderstorms predicted for tomorrow -- which is also when we need to return the tractor. So he came in and said, "If the pasture is dry enough to cultivate, do you want to plant the wheat tonight?"

You bet! So as the sun was setting, he walked along the pasture and determined it was indeed dry enough to cultivate.

While he cultivated, I fetched the 200 lbs. of wheat and some buckets.

The dye in the fungicide left all our hands pink. We were careful not to touch our mouths or eyes after handling the wheat.

Four buckets, ready to go. We're hand-broadcasting, of course.

Meanwhile, the sun went down.

Sorry this shot is blurry, I put my bucket down hurriedly and snatched a picture, but I was trying not to fall behind the rest of the family while broadcasting.

We criss-crossed the field, then criss-crossed again, then criss-crossed again at right angles, trying to distribute the wheat as evenly as possible. We always worked as a single team, moving at the same pace. If one of us emptied his or her bucket first, the rest of us waited while s/he filled it up again.

At last we covered the field as best could. We had just a bit of wheat left over, so we just walked along and sowed the remainder in any bare spots we noticed.

Oops, sometimes too much wheat was broadcast (well, dumped) in one spot. That's a problem with hand-broadcasting. (We're only human.)

But the vast majority of the wheat was more evenly distributed.

Tomorrow Don and I plan to drag some tires over the field to close up the furrows and bury the wheat a bit. We'll see what happens with our wheat experiment this year! However it turns out, one thing's for sure: we're off to a better start than last year.

Parmesan butter pan biscuits

noreply@blogger.com (Patrice Lewis) — Wed, 30 May 2012 05:10:00 +0000

Here's a recipe that Older Daughter loves to make. It's fairly quick and absolutely delicious.

The dough has yummy things like basil and Parmesan in it.

She was using some fresh milk some friends had given us, which first meant she had to skim (suck) off the cream.

Then we could use the milk itself in the recipe.

Mixing...

Kneading...

The dough is divided in half, then rolled into a rectangle...

...and sliced into bars.

Melt some butter (or margarine)...

...then divvy it up between two baking pans.

The bars of dough are dipped and rolled in the melted butter...

...then placed in the pan.

Ready to bake.

Ta da! Delicious and easy.

Here's the recipe. (We normally double it because everyone loves these so much.)

Parmesan Butter Pan Biscuits
1/3 cup butter or margarine
2 1/4 cups flour
2 T Parmesan cheese (we double this amount)
1 T sugar
3 1/2 t baking powder
1 t basil leaves (we add about a tablespoon)
1 T parsley
1 cup milk

Heat oven to 400F. Melt the butter and pour into a 9" baking pan.

In a bowl, add all the ingredients except milk. Stir in milk until just moistened. Turn dough onto a lightly floured surface and knead about ten times or until smooth.

Roll dough into 12x4" rectangle, then cut into twelve 1" strips. Roll the strips in the melted butter and place in the same pan. Bake for 20-25 minutes until lightly browned.

Technical difficulties -- %$#@&% Blogger....

noreply@blogger.com (Patrice Lewis) — Tue, 29 May 2012 16:55:00 +0000

So it looks like Blogger.com has transitioned to an All New (cough) IMPROVED format, grrrr. Needless to say, it isn't worth squat.

This is all the behind-the-scenes stuff, and one of the things it ISN'T allowing me to do is post comments. So if your comment doesn't get posted for awhile, please forgive me and feel free to heap all the curses and blame on Blogger, as I've been doing all morning...

Freedom isn't free

noreply@blogger.com (Patrice Lewis) — Mon, 28 May 2012 15:04:00 +0000

It is the veteran, not the preacher, who has given us freedom of religion.

It is the veteran, not the reporter, who has given us freedom of the press.

It is the veteran, not the poet, who has given us freedom of speech.

It is the veteran, not the community organizer, who has given us freedom to assemble.

It is the veteran, not the lawyer, who has given us the right to a fair trial.

It is the veteran, not the politician, who has given us the right to vote.

Remember - only two defining forces have ever offered to die for you, Jesus Christ and the American GI. One died for your soul, the other for your freedom.

SurvivalBlog down

noreply@blogger.com (Patrice Lewis) — Sun, 27 May 2012 15:08:00 +0000

WARNING: GRAPHIC LANGUAGE

Several readers have emailed and asked why they've been unable to get on SurvivalBlog.com lately. We haven't been able to either. This is the official announcement:

This weekend, our server in Sweden was put under a "ping flood" Denial of Service (DOS) attack that resulted in 65% packet loss for a few hours.

This attack was most likely orchestrated by the man in Texas who last week anonymously sent me a racist rant and threats against both my blog site and my books. (His e-mail began: "You ni**er lover you have five days to take all links and any [sic] metion for [sic] links below off your site. If you [sic] dont [sic] do it I will post [sic] everyone [sic] of [sic] you [sic] cr***y books on [sic] prirate [sic] sites and kiss your ni**er loving income from them good [sic] by [sic] .")

The attack was timed for a three-day holiday weekend, because the miscreants expected that the staff at our ISP would be unavailable to help up reconfigure.

OBTW, the attack did not initially include our dotted quad backup address: 95.143.193.148 (Which is explained here.)

At least this provided a good test for our Continuity of Web Services (COWS) defenses. Obviously, we are now going to need multiple mirror sites as well as an adaptive cloud server that can handle any future DOS onslaught.

The other lesson this teaches is the importance of having a backup. We provide an offline archive of the past six years of SurvivalBlog posts, available for a modest price.

~Jim Rawles~
Editor, www.SurvivalBlog.com

There is also an update posted on the excellent blog The Orange Jeep Dad, so go take a look at that. Please excuse the language, though Orange Jeep Dad did some admirable deleting.

I never fail to shake my head at the astounding depths of hatred which lurk in some people. Please pray that the SurvivalBlog folks can get things straightened out.

Random pix

noreply@blogger.com (Patrice Lewis) — Sun, 27 May 2012 14:57:00 +0000

Some random shots from the last couple of weeks:

I took the camera and hit our pasture one day, trying to take a photo suitable for the front cover of the quarterly magazine I edit for the Purebred Dexter Cattle Association. This is the photo I used (our cow Ruby).

My folks are up visiting (staying in Coeur d'Alene for a couple of months) and they came over for dinner one evening. Older Daughter snapped a pic of my dad chuckling over a comic book.

Chickens on tires.

The girls discussing something in the barn.

Bumper sticker we saw in Spokane.

Another chuckle:

Some serious "awwww."

Building a better mousetrap. Older Daughter had a mouse in her room. So one night she decided to build a mousetrap using some books stacked stair-step fashion, with bits of cheese leading up the stairs. At the top were two folded pieces of paper laid lightly over a can, with a piece of cheese in the center. The idea is the mouse would step onto the paper and fall into the can.

It worked!!

What I want to know is, how can a four-day trip result in two weeks' worth of laundry?

A chickaree (a type of squirrel) in our barn (blurry shot, sorry).

We have a robin nesting in the rafters of our barn. Usually it's swallows who like to nest in rafters, but this is definitely a robin.

This is Snap, our rooster.

We've been having fewer eggs in the chicken coop lately. This could explain why.

Tossing tires with Jack's wonderful wife, Natalie.

Jack and Natalie's youngest. Oh so cute!

I don't know my snakes. Anyone? Gopher? Rat snake?

Alert!

Older Daughter is gradually papering the back of her bedroom door with our weekly church bulletins. Not your typical teenage wallpaper.

Explaining the intricacies of geometry (in a very messy room).

Moonset at dawn (behind a cloud of steam).

Sunset.

A candy store for Preppers

noreply@blogger.com (Patrice Lewis) — Sun, 27 May 2012 00:21:00 +0000

Here is this weekend's WND column entitled A Candy Store for Preppers.

Not a huge response on this article. Oh well, can't bat .1000 every time...

Tires tires everywhere...

noreply@blogger.com (Patrice Lewis) — Sat, 26 May 2012 14:44:00 +0000

Ask and ye shall receive...

When it comes to tires, that's all ya gotta do. Ask. Everyone wants to give you their old tires! Now that word has gotten out, we've been buried in the dirty (beautiful) old things. I'm getting them faster than I can process them.

I'm trying to lay out the garden as ordered and regular as I can. To this end I'm using measuring tapes and strings to line everything up.

These widely-spaced tires along this narrow strip of garden will be for viney plants such as pumpkins, watermelons, cantaloups, etc. I've put newspapers and wire mesh beneath each tire and they're now ready for planting.

I lined up a series of huge tires along a string to be used as herb beds.

In this respect, measuring tapes are very handy.

Then two evenings ago, we got a call from our friend Jack, who works at a tire store. He was on his way with the company truck to deliver a load of seventy tires (!).

Needless to say, his company is thrilled that we can use the tires, since otherwise they have to pay to have the tires recycled and/or processed. Jack said they'll give me as many tires as I could possibly want. And then some.

See? A veritable mountain of tires.

Then yesterday, Don and I borrowed a neighbor's trailer and drove to a nearby town that has a tire dealership specializing in tractor tires. They had dozens of huge old tractor tires they would be delighted to get rid of. "Dozens" would be a bit much -- these babies are huge and are correspondingly harder to manage than smaller tires -- but we'll take some.

It's hard to appreciate the size of tractor tires until you're up close to them. Don estimates they weighed about 300 lbs. each. The fellow used a forklift to load them onto the trailer.

The trailer held five tires...

...which we strapped down firmly before creeping home with our groaning load of 1500 lbs or so.

We chained up and used the car to drag each tire off the trailer. Don and I were then able to hoist each tire on its side and roll it out of the way.

Okay, time to get these things under control.

I started by trundling 27 of the biggest truck tires into the garden.

These I left uncut and merely stacked by the potato tires, to be held in reserve until it's time to start building the stacks.

That reduced the pile by about one-third. Then I sorted the remaining tires into small, medium, and large sizes.

There were a few small odd-sized tires mixed in, so I'll cut these and use them for flowers.

I stacked the cut-off sidewalls out of the way. We have some ideas for using these discarded parts.

Meanwhile Don tried his hand at cutting one of the tractor tires.

It was hard going, but he finally succeeded. The cut was wavey-ier and more jaggety than he wanted, so he said next time he'll use a chalk string to mark it so he can get a cleaner cut.

Next steps: cutting out sidewalls, moving the tires into the garden, lining with newspaper and mesh, and filling. (Oh, it that all?) I'm encouraged that for all the work I have to do this year, I'll have a whole lot less work to do next year.

Shakin' in the Nation

noreply@blogger.com (Patrice Lewis) — Fri, 25 May 2012 14:37:00 +0000

A friend used an earlier blog post of mine on her socio-political blog, Shakin in the Nation.

If you think I'm opinionated, you should read this lady's work. Good stuff!

How hard can it be?

noreply@blogger.com (Patrice Lewis) — Thu, 24 May 2012 15:20:00 +0000

As you may have gathered from my blog post on tire gardening, I’m incredibly excited by the potential for finally growing some decent vegetables this summer. At long last, it seems we may be able to overcome the poor gardening conditions in our little neck of the woods and grow something good.

But this project got me thinking. A garden – make that a successful garden – is clearly a critical component on the road to self-sufficiency. Since I didn’t grow up gardening (or canning or milking cows or making cheese or anything else like that), over the years I’ve faced a steep learning curve on nearly every aspect of homesteading. We’ve learned through trial-and-error what works in our area and under our circumstances and within our budget, and what doesn’t.

This underscores the importance of starting NOW if you want to strive for a self-sufficient lifestyle. If your goal is to move to a homestead and begin the journey toward food independence, don’t waste any more time – just do it.

The reason I say this is because too many people think homesteading is a snap. Eh, how hard can it be? You plant seeds, they grow. In a few months you harvest a bountiful crop and can/freeze/dehydrate it. You get a cow, you milk it. Criminey, what’s the big deal? How hard can it be?

This is dangerous thinking. Dangerous and foolish. The pioneers in this country, heading into unknown territory to face unknown setbacks in their quest for independence and self-sufficiency, faced a terrifying amount of uncertainty and unfamiliar obstacles; but at least they were armed with the knowledge how to plant, grow, harvest, milk, preserve, and otherwise survive under primitive conditions. Most people back then did. They had to.

Do you?

If the bleep were to hit the fan, we can’t all mosey down to Home Depot and buy pre-grown hybrid tomato plants. We’d darn well better have a supply of heirloom seeds (preserved from the season before), a place to plant them, the knowledge of how to cultivate them, the understanding of how to harvest and preserve them, and above all the ability to save seeds for the next year.

And unless you’re blessed with perfect soil and a temperate and forgiving climate, a garden can’t grow forever in a vacuum. Soil must be amended. Where will you get those amendments? Our endless supply of composted manure is something we take for granted since our livestock creates so much of it; but it’s valuable stuff to those who don’t have critters.

The fact is, farming is a complicated and interconnected process. Personally I find it an endlessly fascinating one, but hey, that’s just me. For those who are less enchanted with manure in all its forms, it’s going to be harder to handle homesteading.

It’s either comical or depressing (not sure which) whenever I see perky advertisements for urban people to “grow your own food!!” and then try to sell these little hydroponic garden kits ("Guaranteed to grow!") that take four months to produce a meal’s worth of herbs. I have nothing against such kits – they’re fun projects for kids – but I have concerns that those unfamiliar with the intricacies of gardening (and the quantities necessary to keep a family in food for an entire year) will come to the erroneous conclusion that planting a windowsill herb box will solve all your food security woes for a year. Or worse, because your windowsill herb box is blooming luxuriantly, you come to the conclusion that you’re a natural and superb gardener. After all, how hard can it be?

Folks, it’s just not that easy. In the real world of homesteading, stuff happens. Deer hop fences, wind storms knock down fruit trees, growing seasons can be short, and even grasshoppers can cause untold damage. In short, nothing is "guaranteed to grow." Nothing.

We’ve been dabbling with increasing devotion to food self-sufficiency for nearly twenty years now, and we’ve been learning the whole time. Had the circumstances been truly dire, we probably could have compressed those twenty years into three or four (by devoting our every waking hour to the subject), but the fact remains that homesteading ain’t a cakewalk.

Even now we’re constantly adjusting our expectations. For example, I don’t know that we’ll ever succeed at having fruit trees. This was a hard reality to accept, especially since our old place in Oregon had dozens of old and established trees (apple, pear, and plum). We took those beautiful trees for granted until we moved here, where the harsh prairie winds, the long winters with deep snow, and above all the hardpan layer about 18 inches below the surface in our area all subtract from the likelihood that any fruit trees will survive. Don’s allowed me one more chance to plant some trees (we’ll punch through that damned hardpan before planting, amend the planting medium, etc.) before giving up. No sense throwing good money after bad. If fruit trees won’t grow, then we’ll concentrate our efforts on small fruits instead.

What concerns me are those who people think they’ll wait until AFTER the bleep hits the fan to move rural and learn self-sufficiency... because, after all, how hard can it be?

It IS hard. And frustrating. And wearisome. And fascinating. And invigorating. And satisfying. And yes, even thrilling...IF you’re of a disposition to find such things interesting.

Tire gardening is as adaptable to urban backyards as it is to north Idaho homesteads. Get some tires, fill them with dirt, and plant something. Lots of things. Line the perimeter of your yard with tires (or raised beds or whatever). Just do it. When those tomatoes or those corn plants or those beans or peppers or peas or spinach or carrots or onions or garlic or broccoli is ready to harvest, learn to preserve them.

The conclusion of this rant is this: If you want to live rural, move heaven and earth to make that goal come true, as quickly as you can. Start now. Learn everything you can.

But if you’re not all that interested in moving rural (but just sorta kinda think you should for possible “bleep” reasons), then stay put... but don’t waste that backyard space. Start growing some food. Learn what it takes.

And never assume homesteading is easy unless you can prove otherwise.

Okay, rant over.

Planting peas

noreply@blogger.com (Patrice Lewis) — Wed, 23 May 2012 23:43:00 +0000

Now that I'm finished gallivanting off to Colorado, it's time to get serious about the garden. We've been having a spate of cold nasty windy weather (it was 39F this morning and we lit the woodstove because the house was so chilly), so I figure the best thing to plant first in the garden is peas, which don't mind cold nasty windy weather.

But before I could plant, I needed to get the tires ready. Except for the potatoes, these will be the first "rows" in my nascent tire garden.

I started by putting newspaper and wire mesh below each tire, then shoveling some dirt (just regular dirt from the plowed garden) into the tires.

Then I filled about 2/3 of the remaining space with composted manure. Got lots of that.

Then I shoveled another layer of just plain dirt over the top. I'm aware that I'm also shoveling some weeds and their root systems, but that's okay. Oddly enough, I don't mind weeding -- and at least with tires, the weeds are confined. Once they're gone, they're gone.

I paused and took some photos of a robin, possibly my all-time favorite bird. He was comfortable enough that he spent some time grooming as I took pix.

Filling the tires is actually pretty quick work, except for trundling the manure over from the pile.

While I worked, the chickens took dust baths in the pile of topsoil. Dust baths help keep mites down on chickens. It's a good healthy thing for them to do.

It was a day of grumbly thunder...

...though most of the rain skirted around us.

Older Daughter, who loves thunderstorms, perched on our driveway gate to watch the show.

Anyway, I diligently filled all the tires for which I had newspapers and mesh already installed.

Then I came in and counted out peas, and realized I didn't have nearly enough tires. Back to the drawing board.

So the next day I added another sixteen tires. This time laying down newspapers and mesh was complicated by the high gusty wind. Really complicated. Newspapers and wind don't match.

Then I started trundling manure and filling tires. This took so long that I didn't get finished until just before dark.

So the next day I finally got around to planting peas.

According to the planting directions on the package, I could fit about 20 peas per tire without crowding.

My robin friend was back, looking for grub.

(Literally.)

But I only got about one-third of the way through planting the peas when I got driven in by rain. Heavy rain. And as I write this, it's only 42 degrees and pouring -- decidedly chilly for late May!

Oh well, I'll finish planting peas tomorrow.

Random Lydia shots

noreply@blogger.com (Patrice Lewis) — Wed, 23 May 2012 16:38:00 +0000

For anyone needing a Lydia fix, I have a bunch of photos that have accumulated from the last few weeks, mostly involving either (a) sleeping, or (b) getting spoiled. Enjoy!

Welcome to our newest advertiser!

noreply@blogger.com (Patrice Lewis) — Wed, 23 May 2012 05:33:00 +0000

Let me tell you a little story. A couple of years ago, we decided we needed to purchase some paracord as part of our preparedness supplies. Paracord is remarkable stuff. Strong as anything, it won't stretch even under extreme and sustained weight. Don did a fair bit of research and found the best price from a company that offered 1000-foot rolls.

When my outdoor clothesline broke a few years ago in October, we figured we wouldn't bother putting up a new one until the following spring. However that meant all our clothes had to be draped on multiple clothes racks (since we don't use a dryer).

But Don had a better idea: to build me a suspended overhead clothes rack that would hold about four full loads of laundry. (The constructed is documented here.) And what did he use to hold the hanging rack in place? Paracord!! Paracord was the perfect choice since it wouldn't stretch even under the groaning weight of multiple wet loads of laundry. In fact, we've never gotten around to replacing the outdoor clothes line because the indoor rack works so well.

So paracord, as you may have gathered, is used for dozens of things on our farm, from fashioning halter ropes for the livestock to patching fences.

Okay, that's the history of our love-affair with paracord. Now fast forward to the Self-Reliance Expo of last weekend. I was sitting in the Backwoods Home Magazine booth when a nice fellow named Tom came up and introduced himself as an advertiser (since he thought I was on the magazine's staff). I told him I wasn't a staff member with the magazine, just a freelance writer, then joked that he was welcome to advertise on my blog. One thing led to another, I gave him my business card, he checked out the blog, and now here he is!

I'd like to offer the warmest possible welcome to Camping Survival -- the very company we ordered our paracord from two years ago! Honestly, these people have the best possible prices for paracord on the block (as well as the highest possible standards of service).

It's not just paracord this company offers. It's everything having to do with preparedness, camping, survival, and outdoor issues. They offer MREs, unusual canned foods (such as bacon and butter), knives, flashlights, rope, emergency kits... sheesh, the list is virtually endless. And all this wrapped up in a company that has a long track record of over fifty years in business.

Besides, I just love it when we have advertisers whose products we bought long before they were advertisers.

Click on their ad (on the top right-hand side of the blog) to investigate their amazing selection of products and even more amazing prices. Can't beat that paracord!

Welcome Camping Survival!

Updated website to visit

noreply@blogger.com (Patrice Lewis) — Wed, 23 May 2012 04:08:00 +0000

My e-buddy, Suzanne Venker (author of the fabulous Flipside of Feminism) has a revamped website, well worth visiting.

Suzanne is one of those wondrous women who doesn't back down from controversy. She's a champion of stay-at-home moms and (not incidentally) a brilliant writer. Take a look at her website here.

Visiting Sharon's Country Store

noreply@blogger.com (Patrice Lewis) — Tue, 22 May 2012 14:54:00 +0000

A few weeks ago, I had the unusual chance to visit one of our advertisers in person. Well, not the person (she was unfortunately not there the day we visited) but her store.

I refer to Sharon's Country Store in Bonner's Ferry, Idaho. Sharon came to us as an advertiser in mid-April, and I thought that was just great because we were planning a trip to Sandpoint (not far from Bonner's Ferry) in early May. So I deliberately swung up to see her store.

As an interesting note: I had to stop at a grocery store and ask directions at one point. When the man found out I was looking for Sharon's, he said "Oh, everyone knows where Sharon's is!" Apparently it has quite an excellent and widespread local reputation.

Once we found the store (right on the highway, by the way) it was easy to see why.

This store is small but packed with diverse products. Here are some of the things they carry:

Old-fashioned candies and sweets.

Bulk foods.

A nice array of old-fashioned toys.

A beautiful selection of hand-made, hand-braided rugs.

Sewing notions and fabrics.

Furniture and wooden clothes-drying racks. (I am a HUGE fan of clothes-drying racks. I can't even begin to tell you how much money you'll save by not using a clothes dryer.)

My jaw hit the deck when I saw these stoves. I had a serious case of covetousness. Breathtaking.

The quilts and rocking chairs were beautiful and (I believe) all Amish-made.

The girls tried out the rockers and proclaimed them supremely comfortable.

Except for being in a modern building, this is one fantastic old-fashioned general store. I admit I'm a sucker for places like this. (Sure wish it was closer!)

Unfortunately Sharon wasn't at the store when I visited (I didn't give any advanced notice) but the staff was charming and courteous.

If anyone has a chance to visit Sharon's in person, they'll find it as wonderful a place as we did. In the meantime, visit their website, it's the next best thing.

Going Country: Moving Rural for Self-Reliance

noreply@blogger.com (Patrice Lewis) — Mon, 21 May 2012 15:39:00 +0000

When I was asked to be involved in the panel discussion The Women of Prepping at the Self-Reliance Expo, I was offered an additional opportunity to give another talk, subject of my choice. I decided to give a talk entitled "Going Country: Moving Rural for Self-Reliance."

This talk was a shortened distilled version of my ebooklet Moving to the Country offered on Selfsufficiencyseries.com for $2, but tweaked a little to be specifically geared toward Preppers.

I promised a number of listeners I would post the text of the talk, so here it is.
___________________________________

Going Country: Moving Rural for Self-Reliance

Good afternoon. My name is Patrice Lewis, and I homestead twenty acres in north Idaho with my family, trying to live a self-sufficient lifestyle.

I’ll be talking about moving to the country in order to become as self-reliant as possible. The focus of my talk is not about the feasibility of you leaving your urban environment – whether you can afford it, whether it’s better to stick it out in the suburbs, or all the reasons why you can’t leave your job or your friends. Instead, this talk is directed at those who have already made the decision to move rural in order to become better prepared for an uncertain future.

May I see a show of hands for those who already live a homesteading lifestyle?

Now may I see a show of hands for those who live urban or suburban, but who want to live a homesteading lifestyle?

It’s for folks like YOU that this talk is directed. I’m working on the assumption you’re interested in moving to the country in order to become as self-sufficient as possible through homesteading, rather than moving to the country just for the pretty views.

There have been endless discussions about how to bug out to a rural retreat. I’ve read stuff on the best routes out of the city when the bleep hits the fan, the types of transportation, what you should put in your bug-out bags, and how you should stock your rural retreat.

I've read much, much less on what the heck you do once you GET to your rural retreat. Not much is written about the long-term sustainability of your bug-out. In short, for long-term societal interruptions, you don’t just need a rural bug-out; you need a homestead.

A homestead is not just a place in the country, it’s a place where you can potentially grow a huge garden, raise fruit trees, acquire livestock, defend against two- and four-legged marauders, and otherwise survive indefinitely.

A Brief History
As a brief history, my husband and I left urban Sacramento back in 1992, shortly after we were married. We didn’t know exactly what we wanted to do, but we did know that the city wasn’t where we wanted to be. We didn’t want to spend the rest of our lives listening to traffic and sirens and fighting neighbors, getting tied up on highways and buying all our food from grocery stores.

Above all, we didn’t want to be the type of couple who would be married for fifty years, only to look at each other on our golden anniversary and say, “If only.” If only we’d moved to the country. If only we’d raised our futures kids on a farm.

At the time, we were both working professionals and between us we made about $70,000/year – a very respectable sum for a young childless couple in the early 90’s. We were able to pay off our student loans and car payments without much effort, as well as save up a nest egg of about $5000. In short, we were sitting pretty financially.

What I had no way of knowing was it was the prettiest we were to sit, financially, ever again.

At that time, we had the rare insight to realize we were at a critical juncture in our lives. With no kids and no debts, when would we ever have a more opportune time to jump ship and move rural?

We considered staying in California, but land prices were too high. And even back then, we could see the regulatory nightmare on the horizon for the Golden State. So on the excuse of sending me to graduate school, we found an inexpensive fixer-upper on four acres in rural southwest Oregon. I’m not exaggerating when I say we bought the land and they threw the house in for free. The house could only be charitably described as a shack. Built in 1874, it encompassed every interior decorating disaster spanning five decades. When I told friends how to find our place, I would tell them to look for the house from The Beverly Hillbillies, before Beverly Hills. But the property was enchanting and we fell in love with it.

We knew we were giving up lot when we left California and moved to Oregon. We were giving up our jobs. Our friends. Proximity to our families. Our careers. Our regular paycheck.

Even more interesting, we surrendered to a surprising extent the respect of our families. Our parents wondered what on earth were we doing, giving up dependable careers and a nice income? Those of you whose parents started life poor and climbed their way into the middle class know what I’m talking about. To watch their children deliberately reverse course and voluntarily opt for a life without financial security seemed to them stark raving insane.

But that was okay. We were young, in love, naïve, and entirely dedicated to the idea that we knew what we were doing.

In retrospect, it’s a good thing we didn't know what we were doing, because had we known what was in front of us, we might never have left the city.

Bottom line, we went from a great income to nothing. Zilch, zero, zero, nada, nothing. For five months we had no job, no money, no prospects. The employment opportunities my husband optimistically thought would drop into his lap never materialized. I was in graduate school full time and accruing student loan debt. Our savings account quickly disappeared. We often lived on our credit cards. Any hopeful plans we had for fixing up our little slice of rural paradise were shelved. Rather than replacing the roof which leaked like a sieve during wet Oregon winters, we put bowls on the floor to catch the drips.

Desperate for income, my husband took his hobby – woodworking – and turned it into a highly specialized niche business making hardwood drinking mugs. We hit the road and peddled them at Renaissance Faires and Oktoberbests. We worked seventy and eighty hour weeks, trying to keep our heads above water. Livestock was out of the question – we couldn’t afford to fix up the infrastructure we needed, such as barns and fences, plus we were away from home too much selling our wares to be able to care for livestock, which we couldn’t afford anyway.

It was a brutally hard time of our lives. It would have been so easy to give it up and move back to the city… so easy. But we didn’t. We had the teeth-clenching determination to succeed because more than anything in the world, we wanted to live in the country.

For ten years we lived in poverty. No health insurance, even through the hospital births of both our daughters and the partial amputation of my husband’s thumb on the bandsaw. Ten years of never buying new clothes or eating in a restaurant.

When our girls were born, we were already accomplished students of thrift, but raising babies added a whole new element to living cheap. We had hospital bills to pay off as well as the emergency room for patching up my husband’s hand, so spending money on things like disposable diapers and lots of toys was out of the question. Daycare was impossible (and we didn’t want it anyway), so when I graduated with my master’s degree, I worked nights as a field biologist and my husband worked days in the shop. It’s amazing, really, how little money it takes to raise children when you simply don’t have money to waste.

But gradually things got better. We transitioned our business from retail to wholesale and got off the road. A few years after our daughters were born, I came home for good and split the hours in the shop with my husband, and our business truly became a family affair.

After ten years in Oregon, we moved to Idaho in 2003, where we found a twenty-acre homestead with a house and outbuilding for $115,000. We’ve been there ever since, and can’t imagine being anywhere else.

But rural living doesn’t have to be as hairy and difficult as we made it. You simply need to strip away your rose-colored glasses and approach the subject with far more maturity and realism than we did.

In other words, do what I say, not what we did.

* * *

There are a number of things to do before, during, and after purchasing rural property. Let’s look at these in order.

Before Buying Rural Property
Okay, you’ve decided you’re going to take the leap and get out of the city. But such drastic measures require mature planning and intelligent forethought, rather than impulse and rosy dreams. What should you do first?

• Get out of debt. I can hear the groans of dismay right now, but let me tell you, you don’t want to be dragging the leg shackles of credit card bills, student loans, and car payments along with you to the country. Your income is likely to take a tremendous drop, but bills don’t go away. Contrary to popular belief, country living is not necessarily cheap, especially in the beginning. So buckle down, live on beans and rice, cut up your credit cards, and work like mad to get rid of the debt. Believe me, you’ll probably build up more debt when you move anyway – don’t handicap your efforts even further by bringing along several maxed-out credit cards.

A corollary to that is to leave as cheaply as possible, starting NOW. Frugal living is fun and creative, but you won’t be able to embrace it if you look at it as a constant string of deprivation.

• Find ways to make money from home. One of the first things we realized about country living was the importance of working from home. It might sound oh-so romantic and fun to set your own hours and theoretically stay in your pajamas all day, but it goes much further than that.

Working from home means you bring your work with you. It means you’re not tied by an umbilical cord of employment to a city job. It means you don’t have to commute long distances and/or through adverse weather conditions with high gas prices. It means you can look far enough away from urban hubs that you can buy twenty acres and a house for $115,000.

Most people in rural areas don’t do just one thing to earn money. They have many irons in the fire. Some hold down two or three part-time local jobs. Some have many creative ways to earn money at home. It’s the rare but lucky individual who can take his city wages with him in the country and telecommute. But developing income from different sources has a major advantage: if one income stream dries up, you’re not absolutely destitute.

The topic of working from home is huge and beyond the scope of this talk, so I’ll just touch on it briefly here.

Finding a niche and filling it might sound like a cliché, but it’s true. Look at your skills and interests and see what can be transitioned into multiple streams of income. Be realistic in what you think people might be willing to pay you for. YOU might have a fascination with hand-painting pastel ceramic dragons, but do you realistically think enough OTHER people will like them so much that you can support yourself? Unlikely. But maybe you can teach ceramics, or teach music, or do desktop publishing, or computer data recovery, or other skills you already possess which could possibly bring in money. Start thinking about that now.

• Broaden your skills. Before you make your move, start learning to pressure-can green beans, handle a chainsaw, shoot a rifle, learn carpentry, and grow a garden. Read up on plumbing and wiring, on livestock care and fencing. Start developing a library. Start learning skills that will be marketable in a rural environment.

• Make a bucket list of what you want in your rural property, and know what’s negotiable and what is not. After talking with sixty or seventy realtors during the course of buying our Idaho property, I learned they don’t necessarily try to find property that suits your needs. Rather, they take the properties they have available and try to convince you it suits your needs. I can’t fault realtors – they can only sell properties that are available, not create ideal properties out of thin air – but it means you have to know what hill you’re willing to die on vs. where you can compromise.

• Decide what kind of climate and terrain suits you. Some people love heat, others prefer cold. Some like arid deserts, others like oceans or mountains or forest. There’s nothing wrong with anyone’s preference and there’s plenty of land to suit all our tastes. But keep in mind one critical thing: this is not a vacation home you’re buying. This is, conceivably, the land that may keep you alive if the bleep hits the fan. To that effect, avoid extremes in terrain or climate that make true homesteading impossible. Deep forests or arid deserts are breathtakingly beautiful, but not practical for growing wheat or raising cattle or planting orchards or other self-sustaining ambitions, at least not without immense effort, time, and of course money.

While Buying Rural Property
Okay, you’re ready to jump ship and move rural. You’ve found the part of the country that interests you. You have several pieces of property bookmarked to visit with a realtor. What now?

• Research the local, state, and federal laws that might affect you personally. This could include homeschooling laws, wetlands requirements, livestock or building restrictions, CC&R’s, gun laws, eminent domain issues, timber, water, and mineral rights, liens, rights-of-way, and other issues. Remember, just because you’re buying a piece of rural property doesn’t mean you’re exempt from state and local laws.

• Consider whether your targeted property is suitable for your long-term goals. If you want to farm, don’t buy desert land or property that’s completely forested or on a steep mountainside. Don’t get swept up with the beauty of a parcel without realistically assessing whether it will be useful. And for God’s sake, NEVER buy land sight-unseen.

I recently heard a radio commercial for forty-acre “ranches” in mid-state Washington. The descriptions sounded glorious. But what they didn’t tell you was this land is nothing but dry scrub unable to support agriculture except with extensive irrigation, and water rights don’t come with the property. The land parcels were cheap because they were useless for much of anything except for someone to brag they own forty acres. Take it from me, you’ll wear yourself out trying to turn unproductive land into a homestead without a huge amount of money and labor. The same applies to a parcel that’s heavily forested. Forests don’t support farms. Remember, you’ve got to think realistically about your targeted property.

• Consider buying property with an existing habitable structure, rather than bare land. Bare land is wildly expensive. Oh, not for the initial purchase – that can often be seductively low – but it’s expensive to bring in power or rig up alternative energy, build something to live in, and create the infrastructure you might need for homestead, such as barns and fences.

Also, buying land with an existing and habitable structure means you’re less likely to face bureaucratic nightmares from government officials who can restrict your activities due to wetlands, endangered species, or other red tape if you try to build on bare ground. Don’t be ashamed to start small or humbly – you have to start somewhere. If your new home is a butt-ugly shack – well, you can always build something nicer later on. But in the meantime, it’s good to have a roof over your head.

• Adjust your expectations. Too many books, magazines, websites, and blogs emphasize the beauty and simplicity of rural life without considering that country living is not all sunshine and moonbeams and mystic crystal revelations. To paraphrase Murphy, if something CAN go wrong, it will. When newbies are faced with complications, they often become disillusioned and disheartened, and eventually return to their “simpler” life in the city.

• Water water water. I can’t emphasize this strongly enough – your land MUST have water. How deep is it? How clean is it? Is there a well? A spring? Is the supply consistent? Are there usage restrictions? Will you face wetlands violations if you plow that field? Who owns the water rights? What about irrigation? If you haven’t got enough water and can’t afford to get more, your chances of having a successful farm or homestead is virtually nil.

• Learn the politics. Be careful about moving to where the political climate is the polar opposite of your own. Just saying.

• Family members, especially your spouse, must be on board. A bitter and complaining spouse will ruin your experience and, possibly, your marriage. And don’t think that moving rural will necessarily “save” your teenage children who are heading down the wrong path. Yanking three mall-oriented teens out of the mall and into a rural environment can result in rebellion and resentment, not wholesome goodness. Try to move while the kids are young and more adaptable. Or, if you do have older reluctant teens, give them goals: “You can do X once you accomplish Y.” We have neighbors who told their three teenage boys they couldn’t get their driver’s licenses until they’d completed their Eagle Scout.

• Consider renting for awhile in your targeted area. I know everyone is impatient and you want to start your homestead as soon as possible; but by renting for anywhere from a few months to a year, you can discover a number of critical things. Perhaps the weather or climate isn’t suitable after all. Perhaps the politics in your region are not to your liking. Perhaps other problems are more widespread than you anticipated. If such is the case, you can leave without having irrevocably committed all your efforts into a piece of property. But renting can also provide additional benefits. You can explore the area at your leisure and target specific locations or properties that interest you. You can begin to get involved in local functions or organizations, and spread the word about the type of land you’d like to buy. You can start making friends.

• Do NOT overburden yourself with too high a mortgage, because it’s almost guaranteed that your income will drop when you move to the country. What might be perfectly affordable on your old paycheck may not be affordable on a country income. Better to buy a cheap fixer upper and spend years slowly improving it, than buying something shiny and pretty and too expensive.

• Consider the potential for defense for your new property. Ideally you want someplace well off the main roads but with open views – and this does NOT mean perched on a hillside in full view of everyone. If you’re totally surrounded by trees, you don’t have clear lines of fire if you’re being attacked. But bear in mind, total isolation can be almost as deadly as city living. No man is an island, and if you’re too far away from others, no one can hear you scream if you’re under siege. Ideally you can band together with neighbors to help defend your area.

How close is your new homestead to a major city, and how easy is it to get from here to there? Living close to a city has advantages like access to supplies and entertainment, but if the bleep hits the fan, that city can be your worst nightmare. There are many experts on security, far more expert than I am, and some of the best are right here at this Expo (be sure to seek their counsel). But my point is not to forget security when purchasing rural property.

After You Buy Your Rural Property
Congratulations, you’re now the proud owner of a piece of rural paradise! Now what?

• Do not bite off more than you can chew. Too many newbies think they can “do it all” their first year on the farm. They try to build a house and barn, get chickens, cows, goats, and pigs, plant a garden, drill a well, fence forty acres of pasture, cut and split eight cords of firewood, in addition to homeschooling four young children and trying to make some money from a home craft business. Then they wonder why they’re stressed, exhausted, and broke. Unless you can devote yourself full-time to developing a homestead, I would suggest no more than one, perhaps two major projects per year. That way you can take the time and energy to do it right without killing yourself.

• Concentrate on infrastructure before you get livestock. Animals need protection from weather and predators, and they also need to be kept where you want them to be. Before you buy a cow or baby chicks, have a barn, corral, fences, coop, or whatever ready to go. In other words, at least in this case, don’t put the cart before the horse.

Remember, you might be able to store garden seeds for the long-term, but you can’t store livestock. Chickens or cows are a little reluctant to get vacuum-packed and put in storage. Better to move to your rural place now, get your livestock, plant your garden, and learn the art of self-sufficiency – so you have it when you need it.

• Two rules of country living: Leave a gate the way you found it, and never let your dogs roam.

• Learn how homesteading is an interconnected circle. Livestock can provide you with milk, eggs, and meat; composted manure enriches your garden, scraps of which can be fed to livestock. The whole thing is a beautiful circle, but it takes awhile to achieve. And in the beginning, that circle can be quite delicate and easily broken.

• Preparedness is a three-legged stool: supplies, knowledge, and community. Presumably you’re all doing pretty well in the supplies section; but knowledge of how to sustain yourself indefinitely from the fruits of your labors takes awhile to acquire; so do friendly and supportive relationships with neighbors in your new area. Your emphasis on rural property should be on how to grow or raise your own food, and you need the knowledge and equipment to do that. But no one can go it alone. You don’t want to be so remote that you’re isolated. We all get by with a little help from our friends, so cultivate a friendly relationship with everyone you can in your new community. Become involved, join local organizations, attend a local church, offer yourself to your community. You won’t regret it, but remember: all this takes time.

In short, there’s no time to lose! There comes a time when, after you’ve done all your research, you have to close your eyes, grit your teeth, and take the plunge. Don’t just endlessly talk about it – talk is useless. At some point you have to take the leap. This might mean taking losses in the city and jumping into the unknown.

Self-sufficiency takes time, effort, preparation, money, and experience. Better a year too early, as the saying goes, than a minute too late. Just know what you’re jumping into.

The biggest take-home lesson from this talk is this: your rural property should be productive, capable of potentially supporting you, reasonably defendable, and not so far from neighbors that you’re isolated in case you need help.

Remember, the people who know the most about country living and self-sufficiency are the ones who have never done it. The best way to learn about how little you know, is to jump in with both feet and start experiencing it.

Home again home again, jiggity jig

noreply@blogger.com (Patrice Lewis) — Mon, 21 May 2012 14:13:00 +0000

Sorry I didn't post anything yesterday, but my goodness I was wiped after my phenomenal weekend at the Self Reliance Expo.

A few photos from the trip home:

Pike's Peak (taken from a moving vehicle). I still can't believe I could see it from my hotel room window all weekend long. Gorgeous.

This fawn accompanied us all the way to Spokane.

Seen from the air, it never fails to astound me how flat this part of the country is. Everything is laid out in grid-like perfection.

As we flew west, things got drier and drier. One of the overwhelming concerns I heard at the Expo from those wanting to move rural in Colorado was the lack of water. They're right -- it's a concern.

I am forever struck by the vast emptiness of this portion of the country. And it's empty for one simple reason: water. Or the lack thereof.

Soon we were flying over the reason for all that lack of water: the Rockies. So many states are in the rain shadow of these mighty mountains.

We passed over ridge after ridge, and it was easy to see how layers of moisture could be peeled off clouds until there's nothing left by the time it gets to the east side of the chain.

Just coming over Spokane.

Once we got home, the cattle immediately started to misbehave by plunging over the pasture fence onto the neighbor's property in the mistaken belief the grass was greener. Rather unusually, they behaved themselves while I was gone (our herd has a long and enthusiastic tradition of escaping fences the moment I leave home, leaving poor Don to contend with them as best he can solo). This time at least they had the courtesy of waiting until all four of us could grab push-poles and retrieve them.

We'd been meaning to push the animals back onto the wooded side of our property anyway (to let the pasture side grow up in grass a bit more), so we figured now was as good a time as any. The critters were all in high spirits, so the moment we opened the gate they galloped through.

Thankfully two out of our three out-of-bounds beasties immediately decided to follow (sometimes there's an advantage to the herd mentality), but Thor (Matilda's yearling) couldn't figure out which way to go. "Mama!"

At last he found he way through the gate (Don closed it behind him) and came thundering up the path.

"Mama!" (That's Matilda, grazing on the left.)

And suddenly everything was peaceful again as the animals cropped down the grass in the driveway.

Being back on this side of the property means the livestock will be using a different water tank, which had grown yucky because we hadn't been changing the water. So Older Daughter helped me tip the tank and dump out all the old water.

Time to scrub!

Here's the scrub brush. Ewww yuck.

Hosing off as I go. Soon the tank was fresh and clean.

Ahh, it's good to be home.

Day Two at the Self-Reliance Expo

noreply@blogger.com (Patrice Lewis) — Sun, 20 May 2012 12:03:00 +0000

Day Two at the Self-Reliance Expo was packed with activities, absolutely packed, and so I didn't get as many photos as I hoped.

I started out doing a BlogTalkRadio interview with Wilson from Pantry Paratus. It was challenging to accomplish this -- the acoustics in the Expo hall were too bad, so we went outside to a quiet courtyard, but then it started raining; so we moved to a covered area in the courtyard and continued the interview, but the wind picked up (which interfered with the microphone); so we tried using a small room off the Expo hall, but the RedShed folks were conducting another radio interview; so we finally removed ourselves to Wilson's car in the parking lot, which worked like a champ. Whatever it takes!

The biggest commitment of the day was the Panel Discussion involving the "Women of Prepping." This consisted of (left to right) Jackie Clay, Nurse Amy, myself, Lisa Bedford and Kellene Bishop.

As you can see, the setup on the stage was wonderful -- comfortable chairs for the speakers, a table for our notes, etc. The Panel discussion lasted two hours, and it passed in a flash.

In fact, we ran out of time. We had five questions (submitted in advance by readers on the Self-Reliance Expo Facebook page) and theoretically had five minutes to answer each one. Yeah right. As Dave Duffy (from Backwoods Home Magazine) later joked, you get five women together and five minutes per answer was much too short a time.

All jokes aside, he was right. The questions that had been chosen for us were picked out of a pool of 600 questions submitted by Expo readers, so it was an enormous task for the Red Shed Media Group to sort through them all and select representative questions for each of us. It hardly did the questions justice to limit ourselves to five minutes, LOL. And in fact we ran out of time, so in the end each of us only had a chance to answer three out of the five questions, with a few minutes to take questions from audience members.

The topics we discussed were very diverse and based on each of our particular specialties, which included firearms and self-protection, finances, homeschooling, home businesses, medical issues, and canning/homesteading. From the expressions and reactions of audience members, it seemed the information was very well received. And after the discussion was concluded (we had to vacate the stage on time because Nurse Amy had her hour-long discussion on medical subjects immediately afterwards), we came down and all of us became involved in additional conversations with various people who had more questions and were looking for more information.

This is Lisa Bedford (The Survival Mom) who turned out to be the coolest person imaginable (here she's giving a presentation for beginning homeschoolers). Lisa and I hit it off like a house on fire. She's every bit as knowledgeable as her website suggests, and an incredibly likeable person (as is her family) into the bargain. (We all went out to dinner Saturday night and we didn't get back to the hotel until past 10 pm. I was astonished it was so late because we were having such wonderful conversation I didn't even notice the time.)

I had to stop and photograph this booth because of an interesting coincidence. It just so happened I ordered some heirloom sugarbeet seeds from these folks just last week. (Before I left for Colorado I got a notice the seeds had shipped, which means they were shipped within a day of my ordering.) Imagine my surprise to see these folks at the Expo!

They sell, among other things, heirloom seeds vacuum-packed for long-term storage, so I stopped and told them I was impressed with their customer service.

This is the empty booth for the National Geographic Doomsday Preppers show, which was there to cast participants for the next season. I stopped and chatted with this representative for a few minutes, which turned out to be quite interesting.

She said casting for the show was obviously the most challenging part. I said that from a Prepper's perspective, it's because (a) no one wants to blow their OpSec, and (b) no one wants to be portrayed as if they're wearing little tinfoil hats. We have recordings of some of the episodes from the last season a friend made us. Don and the girls have watched them but I haven't seen them yet. I told the woman that my understanding is that the people portrayed in last season's series were a little off the deep end (please understand this is second-hand reporting) but to their credit, National Geographic was NOT attempting to paint all Preppers with a tinfoil brush. In other words, they were making every attempt (to paraphrase Fox News) to be fair and balanced.

The Nat Geo representative was grateful and said the trouble with casting is it tends to attract people at the extreme ends of the bell curve. This, of course, means the largest number of Preppers -- the everyday teachers, dentists, doctors, crafters, housewives, electricians, waitresses -- in short, just ordinary folks -- who have concerns about the economic future of our country, get lumped in with the extremists; and then people conclude all Preppers are wearing tinfoil hats.

As I said, it was a short but very interesting conversation, and I'm glad I stopped and spoke to her. I wished her luck with the casting and genuinely hope they are able to find people who are more "mainstream" (for lack of better term) in their representation of Preppers.

(Just as a side note, the National Geographic booth faced the main stage, and so for two days this representative was a captive audience to every speaker. I have hopes she came away understanding that Preppers aren't talking about weird tinfoil hat conspiracy theories, but instead have legitimate concerns about economic issues (such as the debt crisis now unfolding in Europe) or vulnerability issues (such as the latest news on the potential for an EMP attack on the power grid). And none of us wore tinfoil hats.)

Again throughout the day, I had the privilege of meeting a number of readers who stopped by, and in fact I remained in conversation with several for a couple of hours following the Panel Discussion. I also gave my second talk on Moving Rural for Self-Reliance, which brought others forward to discuss options for leaving their urban environment and relocating to more rural areas. Lots and lots of good "vibes" and interest from so many people!

The one overall comment I heard several times from independent sources (attendees, vendors, speakers) is the positive atmosphere of the Expo. The people who came, came because they wanted to. The booths were very busy with people gathering information and making purchases and learning things. Sometimes Preppers are portrayed as doom-and-gloomers, but I assure you that wasn't what I saw.

Here's an amusing anecdote related to me by Nurse Amy on Saturday morning as we had breakfast in the hotel. It seems Friday night she and her husband had gone to dinner, and her husband had forgotten to remove his tag from the Expo. In the restaurant they were accosted (or is that too strong a word?) by a couple who peppered them with preparedness-related concerns and they stayed in discussion with them for about half an hour. The couple didn't realize a Self-Reliance Expo was in town and so promised to come the next day. The couple thanked Nurse Amy and her husband for their time and departed... whereupon another couple in the booth behind (who had been listening with perked ears through the entire conversation) turned around and said, "We're Preppers too!" They also hadn't realized the Expo was in town and made plans to come the next day. Amy is an amusing speaker, so I laughed as she related this experience and I said Preppers are coming out of the woodwork.

Anyway, by the end of the day and all the booth break-down, I was pooped but exhilarated. I joined Lisa Bedford and her delightful family for dinner and saw this beautiful sky as we entered the restaurant (first time I'd been outside all day!).

I can't thank the producers of this Expo enough for the privilege of participating. What an extraordinary experience it was!

Busy day at the Self-Reliance Expo!

noreply@blogger.com (Patrice Lewis) — Sat, 19 May 2012 04:43:00 +0000

Man oh man, what a concentrated and busy day it's been at the Self-Reliance Expo in Colorado Springs!

This Expo is put on by a group called the Red Shed Media Group, which sponsored the mixer I attended yesterday evening.

What a treat it was to meet so many people! The Backwoods Home Magazine staff was there in full force. Here's Dave Duffy (left) sitting next to Steve Bedford (The Survival Mom's husband).

The Expo was held (appropriately enough) at the Expo Center.

We arrived early enough to finish helping set up the Backwoods Home booth (where Jackie Clay and I were parking ourselves).

I had a few books and tankards to sell, though (as I explained to curious visitors) the tankards could hardly be called "preparedness-related" except insofar as they demonstrated how it's possible to make a living from home.

By opening there were crowds outside the door.

This young couple, Wilson and Chaya of Pantry Paratus, had one of the niftiest booths at the Expo. It was like a general store for Preppers.

Their booth was just around the corner from the Backwoods Home booth, and I was delighted to see it was always packed.

One of the more amazing sights was this Subterranean Long Term Food-Storage Vault (for only $15,000) which looked bizarre...

...but secretly I thought it was a spiffy concept.

This is the remarkable Jackie Clay, homesteader extraordinaire and one of the most down-to-earth people I've ever met. Since we both hung out at the Backwoods Home Magazine booth, I had a chance to get to know her (after admiring her for years). Evidently I wasn't alone in my admiration -- she was a huge draw for the booth and barely had a chance to sit down all day.

Speaking on this stage was challenging. The acoustics in the building were bad, there was no podium or lectern for notes (I borrowed a high table from the snack bar to use as a lectern) and the microphone was handheld -- but let me tell you, every speaker had a packed audience.

This woman's name is Jeri McFarlane and she's the inventor of a spiffy gizmo called a Jar Box, which is a stackable canning jar unit. Here's she's holding an iPad...

...showing how her product is now being carried by Lehman's (which is charging a whole lot more than she was charging here at the Expo). She was thrilled that her product is getting more widespread attention, and I thought it was nifty that this spunky woman invented and followed through in the manufacturing of the product entirely herself.

This is Brad Stieg of the Tattler Reusable Canning Lid company. Talk about a thrill to meet him. Y'all know how much I love my Tattler lids! (By the way, Brad is being flown down to Texas this upcoming Tuesday to appear on the Glenn Beck show. No kidding.)

Here's Jackie Clay chatting with a fascinating fellow named Bill who especially wanted to meet the Backwoods Home crew and came specifically for that purpose. Darned nice guy.

This is Dave Duffy (left) with Don Childers, the artist who's painted nearly every cover of Backwoods Home Magazine since its inception. Don and his wife Nancy were charming.

I had the chance to meet a lot of wonderful readers. There must have been fifteen or more who introduced themselves over the course of the day. And people were coming from so far away to attend the Expo! One woman came from Arkansas, another from San Diego -- and this was by no means unusual. I believe the Red Shed Media Group is on the right course, providing opportunities for a meeting of minds between vendors and experts, and attendees who are concerned about the future.

Interestingly, one of the booths was being held by the National Geographic Doomsday Preppers documentary folks. While I can't say for certain, it didn't look like they had a lot of interest. In other words, no one attending the event evidently wanted to be categorized as a kook for showing interest in intelligent preparedness, so they avoided the Doomsday Preppers booth like the plague.

In fact, the overall atmosphere for this Expo was overwhelmingly positive. Visitors were keenly interested in the booths and products, the speaker talks were packed, and people were asking very intelligent questions. For those of us to whom prepping is merely an extension of the self-reliant lifestyle we're trying to achieve, we felt like kids let loose in a candy store. Every booth was fascinating, every vendor was enthusiastic and knowledgeable, and altogether it was a remarkably positive experience.

I look forward to tomorrow!

Greetings from Colorado Springs!

noreply@blogger.com (Patrice Lewis) — Fri, 18 May 2012 02:44:00 +0000

I'm writing this from a hotel in Colorado Springs. Been up (yawn) since 4 am finishing up the talks and panel questions for the Self-Reliance Expo, so I'm a little on the wiped side.

Just some photos of the day's travels:

Lake Coeur d'Alene, just flying over the southern end.

Coming down near Denver, I was struck by the perfect symmetry of this cloverleaf. Quite pretty from the air.

Taxiing to a stop. In the exact center of the photo (hard to see, sorry) is the white peaked rooftop of the airport, designed to resembled the snow-covered peaks of the Rockies. (It was a hazy day, so the real peaks weren't very visible.)

They're putting me up at this swanky and incredibly friendly hotel. Nice!

Hotel stays are a rare, rare thing in my life (last year's trip to Florida was my first hotel stay in eight years), so stuff like this tickles me pink.

From my hotel window is this beautiful view of the Rockies. The tall peak is Pike's Peak.

Shortly after posting this, I'm attending a "mixer" downstairs to meet the other speakers as well as the staff of the Expo. My, doesn't that sound sophisticated?

But I'm limiting myself to one glass of wine. Alcohol and lack of sleep don't mix.

Cheerio!

Planting potatoes and wrapping raspberries

noreply@blogger.com (Patrice Lewis) — Thu, 17 May 2012 13:58:00 +0000

The only thing I've had a chance to plant so far in our incipient tire garden is potatoes (mostly because I've been too busy getting ready for the Self-Reliance Expo in Colorado to get any other tires ready).

Planting potatoes in tire stacks is an old and established technique, so I anticipate a decent crop of potatoes this year.

First thing to do with seed potatoes is cut them into pieces, with at least one eye per piece. I had a fair amount of seed potatoes so I just cut them in half, though I could have cut them into smaller pieces. The potatoes should sit for about a day to "harden" the skin of the fresh cut, or they're more likely to rot when planted.

Meanwhile I laid out eleven of the bigger tires. We didn't cut off the sidewalls on these, because sidewalls make it possible to stack them.

Underneath every tire, I put a thick layer of newspapers (to cut weeds) anchored by hardware cloth mesh (to discourage voles).

After this, it was time to fill the tires. I used a combination of topsoil and composted manure. Trundle trundle trundle.

But slowly I got each tire filled...

...though I didn't get done until just before sunset.

The next day, with the potatoes hardened off, it was time to plant. A much easier process!

I laid out four pieces per tire...

...then buried them deep with a trowel.

A good watering...

...and that's it for the time being for potatoes. It will take awhile for them to grow enough to stack another tire on top and fill with straw.

Meanwhile I noticed some nips on my raspberry plants. Sheesh, deer damage already. These guys don't waste any time. Needing to get the plants protected, Don made some shafts...

...which he screwed firmly into the frame of the raised bed.

Then he strung baling twine along the top to help support the bird netting.

Meanwhile I took some hastily re-rolled netting from last year's (failed) garden...

...and trimmed off the jagged ends.

I literally wrapped up the raspberries in a six-foot-high envelope of netting, leaving one side with a generous overlapping for a "door."

I've become a huge fan of bird netting as a safeguard against deer. Not gonna lose my plants this year!

Escape!!

noreply@blogger.com (Patrice Lewis) — Wed, 16 May 2012 23:59:00 +0000

I was awoken this morning at 4:30 am by the sound every livestock owner dreads: the sound of hooves where they shouldn't be. This far north, it's quite light at that pre-dawn hour, so I lifted my head and looked out the window. "Oh, they're not gonna like that," I murmured as I watched five horses gallop across our neighbor's -- the wrong neighbor's -- field.

I got dressed and headed downstairs to call the Neighbor A, whose horses had escaped. Just as I reached the bottom step, I received a call from Neighbor B, whose field the horses had just galloped across. He was spittin' mad because the escaped horses had trashed his fences in an effort to reach Neighbor B's horses. (Horses can be hell on fences.)

The reason Neighbor B called me was because he didn't have Neighbor A's phone number, and Neighbor B knew I was an early riser.

So I called Neighbor A (who, to his credit, actually answered his phone at that hour) and explained the situation. Meanwhile I headed down our driveway to keep on eye on the escapees.

The light was still a little dim, so the photos aren't the clearest; but here are four out of the five the culprits.

The thinnest slice of moon shone in the eastern sky.

A blurry shot of one of the horses greeting Brit, our mare.

"Hey, I like this freedom stuff!"

"Crud. The party's over." Neighbor A drives up on his ATV, grain and halters in hand.

"If one comes, the others will follow," he told me. Here he's haltering up one of the horses...

...before slowly driving away, pulling the horse along.

Sure enough, the others followed.

The drama ended just as the sun rose, 5:20 am -- though Neighbor A still has to mend some fences (both literally and figuratively) with Neighbor B.

I'm so used to it being us whose livestock escapes. In a weird sort of way, I'm glad it was someone else this time.

The beginning of a tire garden

noreply@blogger.com (Patrice Lewis) — Tue, 15 May 2012 15:53:00 +0000

We've lived in north Idaho for nearly nine years now, and it's worth noting that we've never had a successful garden. One year we had a pretty good one, but I wouldn't classify it as great. And that was just one year.

Gardening in our area is tough. If it's not the heavy clay soil, it's the boggy spring conditions, the weeds, the short growing season, the deer, the voles, or even the grasshoppers. In short, the odds are against us.

It's not that we haven't tried. We've plowed endless amounts of composted manure into the soil in an effort to improve it. It hardly made a difference since we were still competing with the other issues (boggy spring rains, deer, etc.).

BUT (I say with gritted teeth), I am determined to succeed at gardening. A self-sufficient lifestyle is literally unreachable without one.

Last year we finally gave in and made four raised beds for our small fruits (raspberries, blueberries, strawberries), which makes perfect sense. Raised beds mean the soil drains better, warms up sooner in the season, and the beds can be netted against deer as well as meshed on the bottom against voles. In short, raised beds seemed like the perfect solution. With materials we had on hand, we made those four beds for the small fruits, and what a difference it's made!

But we were stymied with repeating this process for vegetables, because we'd need lots more raised beds. As in, lots and lots and lots, in order to grow enough veggies to keep us reasonably self-sufficient in produce. The problem wasn't space -- we're blessed with plenty of that. The problem was materials to build the beds (and a lack of money to spend on said materials).

We are fortunate to have a decent stockpile of boards and beams from an old barn we disassembled many years ago -- but even that supply of wood was limited and we didn't want to use it ALL on raised beds for the garden because it would leave us without wood for other projects.

So one day about a month ago -- God alone knows why it took us so long to reach such an obvious conclusion -- we decided to try tire gardening. It was one of those head-clunk "duh!" why-didn't-we-think-of-that-sooner moments.

The more we thought about it, the better an idea it seemed. Tires are tough to the point of indestructible, they're free, they're black (the better for absorbing sunlight and warming the soil earlier in the season), and they're abundant.

First thing we did was research potential problems with leaching. Nope, no problem. Any potentially hazardous chemicals are bonded into the tire structure, and unless and until the tire itself degrades (which should take, oh, decades and decades), then those tires are essentially inert.

And my goodness, they're everywhere! We started asking around gas stations and auto repair places and other potential sources, then nearly staggered back as the owners practically shoveled all their old tires in our direction. We also have a friend named Jack who works at Les Schwab (a regional chain of tire centers), and about once a week he loads about thirty old tires onto the back of his truck and delivers it to our place, and we compensate him for his time and gas. We've paced off our garden spaces, and potentially we have room for about 550 tires! (Obviously it will take awhile to work up to that.) There's a lot of garden space inside that many tires.

We learned a thing or two, especially from Jack. Don't get steel-belted radials, he told us, because the steel extends into the sidewalls and we wouldn't be able to cut through it. We also learned that, aside from the occasional giganto tractor tire (what a treasure!), tires can be roughly divvied up into three sizes: small, medium, and large.

The first thing to do, of course, is cut off the sidewalls. We thought about cutting off both sides, but in the end decided to do only one side.

"Like cutting butter," Don said.

We'll have to figure out some function for the cut-out sidewall pieces.

Meanwhile we started putting out word with friends that we're on the lookout for old tires. Our neighbor told us he had an old tractor tire down in his woods that his grandkids used to use as a fort. We were welcome to take it.

Tires like this are a bonus. Here in farming country it won't be hard to find them -- we just have to put out the word.

But tractor tires, being so big, are harder to fill. While we'll welcome a few such tires, the smaller ones are easier to handle. In fact, we used the tractor to fill the tractor tire, layering soil and lots of composted manure.

Since we want to do built the tire garden correctly from the start, we need to put in safeguards against both weeds and voles. The tough prairie grasses around here can push up through nearly anything; and voles will burrow up from below and munch down the root system of vegetables.

So before we lay down a tire, we're putting down a thick layer of newspapers, then anchoring them with mesh hardware cloth. Here Don's cutting the hardware cloth.

The hardware cloth (which we bought last year) comes in three-foot-wide rolls. We need strips two feet wide to go under the regular (not tractor) tires. The long strip of one-foot-wide wire we cut up and lay two pieces together. Can't waste this stuff, it's too expensive.

Newspapers. Lots and lots of newspapers. I estimate I'll be going through stacks twelve or fifteen feet high. I'm soliciting newspapers from all our friends.

I'm trying to lay everything out as tidy and neat as possible, since the location of the tires (once filled) will be more or less permanent. (And, not incidentally, since I'm hoping to write some future magazine articles on this project, it doesn't hurt to have the end result as photogenic as possible.) Don also plans to run drip irrigation hoses among the rows of tires, so keeping everything in nice rows will help with that aspect.

The only thing I've planted so far is potatoes (which I'll write as a separate blog post) since we're still in the process of acquiring tires, cutting up tires, laying out tires, etc. Our warm weather is holding (unusual) so we may take chances and plant some of the cool-loving plants soon, such as broccoli and peas.

It would be far too expensive to keep ordering topsoil (we bought a load last year for the berry beds), so we're going to use our own stuff heavily amended with composted manure, and see what happens.

This is an unfolding project and I'll be documenting it as I go. But I'm so excited about its potential! I'm babbling about it to anyone who will listen. Maybe I'm just setting myself up for failure once more -- God knows it's happened before -- but at least we're tipping the odds of a successful garden in our favor this time.

And, as a side bonus, we'll eventually be keeping about 550 tires and a fifteen-foot stack of newspapers out of the landfill. Whoo-hoo!

Honestly, I never thought a bunch of old ratty tires would be anything but ugly. But now I think they’re beautiful.

The beauty of pollination

noreply@blogger.com (Patrice Lewis) — Mon, 14 May 2012 20:33:00 +0000

Here's a remarkable YouTube clip our pastor sent called The Beauty of Pollination. And speaking of attachment parenting, take a gander at this bat whose baby is along for the ride while mama feeds during the night!

Attachment parenting

noreply@blogger.com (Patrice Lewis) — Mon, 14 May 2012 17:30:00 +0000

Doubtless most of you have seen or at least heard about the controversial Time Magazine cover featuring a mother breastfeeding her almost four-year-old son. Many people reacted with disgust to the photo for two primary reasons: (a) the defiant attitude of the mom and the peculiarly “unbonding” attitude of the boy; and (b) the concept of breastfeeding children who are older.

Critics of the cover say that the in-your-faceness of the photo will set back the advances of breastfeeding by years. I don’t know any woman who wants to stand in the shoes of the mother in that cover.

The focus of the articles in this particular issue of Time has to do with pediatrician Dr. William Sears and his Attachment Parenting method of raising babies. In a nutshell, Dr. Sears and his wife Martha (a nurse) promote baby wearing (using a sling), breastfeeding, co-sleeping, and other elements of bonding. They are the parents of eight children (adopted and natural), including one with Down syndrome. Believe me, if anyone understands the broad range of childhood situations, it’s these people.

Dr. and Mrs. Sears give what they call the “Seven B’s” of Attachment Parenting as follows:

• Birth-bonding
• Breastfeeding
• Bedding down close to baby
• Babywearing
• Belief in the value of your baby’s cries
• Beware of baby trainers
• Balance in parenting

When my girls were babies, Dr. Sears’ book (appropriately called The Baby Book) was my baby bible. We adopted many of his recommendations. I am a huge fan of Dr. Sears’ methods.

When our girls were babies, we lived in a tiny house and we had no room for playpens changing tables, wind-up swings, etc. Heck, we barely had room for a crib (it was in the living room for Older Daughter’s first year). Therefore it was a natural thing to sleep with the girls when they were babies. A secondary advantage is I never had to get up in the middle of the night to feed. All I had to do when a baby cried, as I so vulgarly explained to concerned friends, was roll over, stick it in her mouth, and go back to sleep. Don made a safety side-panel for the side of our bed and the baby slept on my side (rather than between us). That way I could be alert to any noise, hunger, or wet diaper issues with them. And let me tell you, there is nothing more heart-melting than to lie in bed and gaze at your sleeping baby. It’s a bonding experience like few other things. We transitioned each girl into her own bed by the age of two.

I breastfed both girls until they were about two as well. It seemed like a good and natural balance for me and the girls – long enough for nutrition and bonding and closeness, short enough that toward the end it was nothing more than momentary comfort as they became independent toddlers.

Younger Daughter nursing, about one year

Dr. Sears strong advocates the use of a sling for babies, so the child can be on the mother’s body much of the day. Oh my goodness, I agree!! There are few baby products in the world more simplifying for a mother than a sling. I used slings with the girls constantly. There is no finer way to go through one’s day. The baby is content because he’s right where he ought to be (with mama), plus he gets to see and be involved in everything his mother is doing – washing dishes, talking on the phone, feeding the chickens, grocery shopping, etc. And the mother can go about her day unconcerned that baby is bored or getting into something he shouldn’t. When a baby falls asleep in the sling, the mother can either continue to carry him, or she can lay him gently in his crib and let him continue his nap.

Older Daughter, about ten months

My theory about many of the problems today – which is why I remain a huge fan of Attachment Parenting – is that our culture does everything it can to physically separate a mother and her baby. Strollers, cribs, playpens, even daycare… everything, it seems, is designed to keep a baby physically separated from his mother. Somehow baby-closeness is considered unnatural or even – yikes – unneeded.

Yet worldwide, that’s abnormal. In more (cough) “primitive” cultures, a baby was expected to be skin-to-skin (or at least cloth-to-cloth) with his mother for many months after birth. This isn’t to say babies were never allowed to be placed on the ground so they could learn to crawl, but rather that when not learning to move independently, a baby was happiest on his mother.

Now an interesting thing has come out of Dr. Sears’ theory: it seems babies raised with the Attachment Parenting method turn out to be better adjusted and more secure than babies raised with a hands-off philosophy. One of the things Dr. Sears said that always stayed with me was this: Needs that are not met as babies come back to haunt people as adults. (That’s not a direct quote, but that’s the gist.) It makes sense to me. If babies are forced to be “independent” from the person they need the most (their mother), how does this affect their mental health and emotional security as adults?

If babies have constant access to their mother during the stage in life when they critically need it – say, the first two years – then this natural need has been filled and they can move on to the next stages of increasing independence throughout childhood and into adolescence. While I can’t vouch for everyone, I know that’s the case with our girls. They received the bonding and physical closeness they needed as babies, and now as teens they’re respectful, mature, and increasingly independent. They have no emotional insecurity or neediness (beyond normal adolescent concerns).

So anyway, that’s Dr. Sears’ theories. But what if you take those theories too far? And that, more than anything else, seems to be the center of controversy surrounding this Time Magazine article. How long should you sleep with babies? How long should you carry them in a sling? And above all, how long should you breastfeed?

How breastfeeding – literally the most natural thing in the world – could be considered “controversial” escapes me. The nutritional and emotional benefits of breastfeeding are absolutely beyond question. I realize there are circumstances under which women can’t breastfeed (physical limitations, breast complications, and of course adoptions, etc.), but the data are indisputable for breastfeeding benefits.

But for how long? Can you breastfeed a child for too long?

Interestingly, I was able to witness a situation with a family in which breastfeeding was only one component of an extremely unbalanced situation. I related this to a large extent in an earlier blog post (here) about two boys being raised in an emotionally unhealthy home with a dominant mother and an emasculated father. The mother believed in unlimited breastfeeding, and I witnessed an incident where her four-year-old son was physically abusive to his mother until he got to nurse. The fact that she gave in to his abuse and let him breastfeed was just the symptom of how messed up this family’s dynamics were.

Unconsciously, I think that’s what people are responding to when they see that Time Magazine cover: a visceral aversion that it’s the child who is ruling the roost. It’s not that Attachment Parenting is bad; far from it. Rather, it’s that some parents don’t know how to transition from the needs of babies to the training and discipline necessary for toddlers and preschoolers.

What are your thoughts?