“All the good ideas I ever had came to me while I was milking a cow." - Grant Wood, American artist
I grew (or raised) every thing in tonight's dinner with exception of the mushrooms in the spinach. That was my first garden sweet potato.
I love "going out for milk & eggs". Its my own form of protest. I paid no "sales taxes" on the food or the gasoline to get to the store. As one of our commentators once said about my post Its a Cold, Cruel World "It a Help's me keep in touch with my inner John Galt" (I used the first person).
(Today's milk and egg haul)
Once you have the chickens and the cow, nature provides most of the rest. I have 21 laying hens that are over 1 year old, and they are still giving me an average of 16 eggs per day. I have another hundred or so birds at various stages of growth, all of them free rangin' and doin' it. Yea, the layers are headed for the soup pot soon... but they had it really good while they had it... and there is no such thing as hospice for livestock. Better to go quick.
Especially for a good cause... and to a "Better Place"... my freezer.
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OK, so I feel pretty good about this self-reliance thing... well, sort of. The fact is that while am not at all reliant on food distribution, I am totally and utterly dependent on our coffin freezer t0 preserve our meats. Fresh milk and eggs show up daily, no refrigeration required... potatoes and corn meal and flour keep for months... tomatoes lend themselves to easy canning... but 600 lbs of pork and beef is whole other story.
Anybody have any ideas for a backup plan or other methods of preserving? I am all ears. I guess I could salt the pork and smoke hams... but I can feel my blood pressure rising just thinking about it...
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The U.S. equity market appears to be completely unafraid of December's crude Oil deliver price of nearly $83. Maybe they are right. I wouldn't bet on it with my hard earned money. If you are a trader, that's different... the "trend is your friend", but you gotta know how close 'em out.
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I pray that both those who opposed the government's recent foray into the U.S. healthcare system AND those who supported it will read this article AND the link to the flow chart - though I doubt people that supported it will read it or bother to understand it. They just wanted "something". They got "something". What they got is going to make the "War on Drugs" look productive, fair, and rational.