A Way to Live: Your mileage may vary. Ours often did.

Tuesday, March 24, 2020

Your mileage may vary. Ours often did.

We were both raised to garden on a fairly large scale.

My dad grew up in a half-starved sharecropper family; he had, and imparted, a wide range of homesteading skills and what could be called “hunter-gatherer” skills as well. He always reviewed anything he saw on television or in the newspapers as to how it was or was not of any use according to his subsistence yardstick, and was acerbic in his references to what others called “civilization.” We thought his approach had a lot to recommend it, and from 1977 to the present have tried to live his ideals.

Capital-intensive industrial society consists of brittle gestures toward “efficiency” but true efficiency is in the realm of robots. We here have instead focused on “resiliency:” flexible, low tech, high redundancy subsistence, on the theory that if abandoned by the “system” we could flourish, at least enough not to be a burden to our neighbors.

We held Permaculture principles and no-dig as appropriate models but sometimes had to diverge a bit to meet our food goals, because there was never quite enough organic matter in the labor or money budgets to do it to others' standards.

The quality and quantity of our efforts faded after 2016, as we entered our mid-sixties. Health concerns mounted. Therein lies a tale.

If you want to try this life, whether on the lawn or patio or balcony, there are plenty of resources in print and online, or in the reminiscences of relatives, etc.

For those interested, here are the online folders of eleven years of photos of microfarming at Stony Run “Farm.” They are offered in case they contain any ideas worthy of emulation.

But remember: your mileage may vary. Ours often did.

2007-8