Preparedness for when

nuatha

thriftwizard wrote: »

One of my fellow-traders was born into a "self-sufficient" household that lurched from one disaster to another. The result is that she cannot bear to eat eggs, or anything with eggs in, as quite often they were the only food they had, day in, day out - eggs for breakfast, lunch & tea! Her parents didn't "believe" in bartering (luckily, mine did) her mother was not an adventurous cook, and her father never really got the hang of vegetable growing although they were vegetarian... Even the smell of eggs makes her nauseous!

One of my grandfathers hired out as a farm manager, as his sons were old enough they became his labourers. Each year he managed to squirrel some money away until he bought a decent size small holding. He took all sorts of jobs away from the farm, because it and the family always need more cash than it could generate. For many years he ran it with his oldest son - who had a full time engineering job as well as work on the farm.
The dream of self sufficiency doesn't compare well to the reality of long days working your land and another job to pay the bills.
(And a farm may be a valuable asset, but it doesn't generate money itself and a bank manager won't take payment in kind on a loan secured on it.)

[Deleted User]

Oh my, if we are to believe it the news feed has just popped up an item saying that President Obama is going to disclose the full truth about UFO's before he leaves office and they say that David Cameron will likely do the same here too!!! Mmmmmmmmm I wonder if the truth will really be 'Out There' in the media if he does???

GreyQueen

Hey, they're politicians, if you can see their lips moving you can tell they're lying.

milasavesmoney

What a wonderful post Thriftwizard! I think if &HTF (see what I did there did there for the nervous forum directors:D) you would have the learned life skill of bartering down pat. It would be something most people would have to learn and in a tough situation it's not really the time to be learning such an important skill.

Probably, if we each looked at our upbringing, we could all name important learned life skills. My depression era parents taught me so many important lessons from sewing, gardening, food preservation, and thriftiness... to watching the butchering of deer hanging in our trees after a hunting trip, gutting fish, preparing dove and quail daddy had shot and brought in.... I'm thankful.

milasavesmoney

MrsLurcherwalker wrote: »

Oh my, if we are to believe it the news feed has just popped up an item saying that President Obama is going to disclose the full truth about UFO's before he leaves office and they say that David Cameron will likely do the same here too!!! Mmmmmmmmm I wonder if the truth will really be 'Out There' in the media if he does???

I had not heard this but I do live very close to Roswell NMex., the home of a quite famous UFO sighting. It would be interesting to see what Obama says about that. I hope he includes it in his tell all.

maryb

Grey Queen You will be proud of me (I hope) Stir fried some chard in olive oil with garlic, lemon zest and juice, caraway seeds and chilli flakes.

Served as a bruschetta topping on toasted sourdough rubbed with garlic.

oh MY!!! nom nom nom nom.....

Perplexed_Pineapple

MrsLurcherwalker wrote: »

Not necessarily concern but the thought of where it might lead in the future and I'm aware that it might also lead to new and better lives for many folks so I'm not quite the Luddite that it might appear from my initial post. I wish I had the faith in humanity that would lead me to think that applications of science in animal-human transplant would ALWAYS be to the benefit of humans but I don't and the idea of animals being bred purely to harvest their useable bits and pieces, which is where it MIGHT lead is as unacceptable to me as breeding animals purely for their fur. Just MY opinion and by no means the only one.

PP what's your take on GM crops?

I'm not sure about GM crops. I can see many potential advantages and I'm not worried about the technology in itself. For example, plants that needed less insecticide might lead to a reduction in the indiscriminate use of neonicotinoids which in turn might allow bee populations to regenerate which I see as a good thing. Crops that are better at nitrogen fixation might reduce our reliance on fertilisers produced from oil via the Haber process. On the other hand I am very worried about attempts to monopolise the GM market and to restrict the use of "heirloom" seeds. Politically it is worrying that the European Central Bank is lending money to the massive pharmaceutical company Bayer to buy Monsanto, the leading GM seed supplier:
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-05-25/monetary-lunacy-ecb-could-end-funding-bayers-purchase-monsanto
So I really I'm more concerned about the implementation of GM crops than their existence if that makes sense.

GreyQueen

maryb wrote: »

Grey Queen You will be proud of me (I hope) Stir fried some chard in olive oil with garlic, lemon zest and juice, caraway seeds and chilli flakes.

Served as a bruschetta topping on toasted sourdough rubbed with garlic.

oh MY!!! nom nom nom nom.....

Sounds righteous, maryb, glad you enjoyed it.

I think chard, like several other veggies, suffers from not being so easy for food retailers to being to market in good condition. All the leafier veggies tend to wilt quickly, and runner beans are sad unless straight off the garden.

I have an incredible amount of feral chard on the lottie and am giving away posies of the leaves to friends and associates atm. Hoping to get some people switched on to it as a salading (the younger tender leaves) and as a cooked veg for stirfries or steamed lightly.

Chard's very useful because it looks after itself (haven't planted any for 6 years and still have it coming up) and it's happy to overwinter, even frosts just wilt it a bit for few hours. Dunno if it'd withstand protracted spells of icy and snowy weather as we haven't had any to challenge it that way in my neck of the woods.

M0nsanto, the company whose roll of honour includes the infamous Agent Orange, I believe. I wouldn't trust them, nor their current chemical arsenal such as Roundup.

Genetically-engineered plants as we have them now are lightyears away from the slow plant hybridisations which we have been doing for centuries, even millenia. I think a precautionary approach is prudent and I wouldn't knowingly ingest a GM product if I had the choice. We don't know what such things do to animals and that includes us human animals.

Monocropping of large areas incentivises pest infestations, and insufficient rotation with leguminous plants (peas & beans mostly) depletes the nitrogen in the soil. We've left good husbandry far behind due to chemical crop-growing, by treating soil not as a complicated biome in its own right, but as some kind of brownish strata for supporting growing things whilst we spray and squirt natural-gas derived fertilisers and pesticides and herbicides over them.

I grow things on my allotment without artificial fertilisers and some of my proudest harvests are bumble bee nests, of which I have facilitated several.

Cappella

GreyQueen originally said
Dunno if it'd (chard) withstand protracted spells of icy and snowy weather as we haven't had any to challenge it that way in my neck of the woods.

I think it would withstand them GreyQueen. It has certainly withstood both ice and snow here in the past, and I think I may live further north than you.It's like kale and perpetual spinach I think, both hardier than we'd think. Even if the plant seems to have been badly hit new leaves soon appear. Is your chard green or one of the coloured varieties ? I have coloured chards in my tiny, sooty back garden and they seem to be thriving. It was a bit of an experiment, but this year I've put a few broad beans, and some black kale in, even though it's so small, dotted amongst the perennials. Think it's too dark for the beans but the kale's doing well.

I'm very, very wary of GM crops. And even more wary of both Monsanto and Bayer. I've wondered for a while now if the GM wheat and soya flour now used in most breads is partially responsible in the huge rise in the number of people who are suffering from both IBS and gluten allergies. My sister has recently been diagnosed as having coeliac disease, numbers of patients with this have also spiked sharply over the past fifteen years, which seems to fit the time frame. Sourcing unmodified flours isn't easy though, and they can be very expensive. The power that the huge conglomerates have in controlling the market is frankly terrifying.

GreyQueen

You might be interested in reading a book called Wheat Belly, cappella. It's written by an American doctor and is a real eye-opener.

One of the pieces of research into coelic disease used blood samples taken from US servicemen 50 years ago and stored and contrasted it with blood samples taken now from men of the same age group. It also followed up on the health outcomes of the original group.

What they found was shocking - coelic disease had increased four-fold. And a stunning amount of modern coelic sufferers are not presenting with the classic severe weightloss and diarrhoea pattern. A lot of people have a silent form of coelic where they may even be seriously overweight but their guts are being badly damaged by gluten. I've read in many places that anything from 1 in 5 to 1 in 10 people with coelic disease may be undiagnosed at any time, and that the typical time from onset of symptoms to diagnosis is 11 years!

And the glutens themselves are not the same glutens that they used to be, as we are 99% on hybridised dwarf wheat which came into production in 1960.

Re chard, I started with a single pkt of Rainbow Lights mixed chard. It self-set and defaulted to regular chard and ruby chard, which is what I have today. The regular chard produces very large leave, as in about rhubarb size, and the ruby chard (have some monstrously-big multi-stemmed plants) produces lots of little leaves, as in about 3-5 inches long, which are very suitable for salads.