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Category Archives: Relocalization

Family heirloom bean seeds

Saturday, October 29, 2011

My older sister and I have often lamented that the heirloom seeds that were used for so many years on my mother’s family farm have been lost. But my sister recently discovered that a cousin has been growing green beans from family seed for many years. That cousin sent me some of those seeds. They’ll […]

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Asheville and thereabouts

Saturday, October 15, 2011

I made a three-day trip to Asheville this week. This photo is from the Blue Ridge Parkway near Mount Mitchell Warren Wilson college is an unusual college that requires work credits for its students. The college has a rustic campus that includes a 300-acre working farm. Greenhouse on the Warren Wilson farm The Warren Wilson […]

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Know your farmer? Not if she can help it…

Tuesday, June 28, 2011

There is no creature in the U.S. Congress more vile, more black-hearted, more ignorant, and more determined to horse-whip us all back to the Dark Ages than Virginia Foxx. I am ashamed to say that she represents my district, the 5th District of North Carolina. She’s always up to no good, in service of corporate […]

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Population growth? Run for your life…

Thursday, March 3, 2011

Sometimes I have survivor’s guilt. I got in my Jeep, I drove and drove and drove, and I escaped the corporate life. Not only that, but many people struggling to get closer to the troughs in the corporate feedlots tried to eat my lunch back then, but I beat them back. It was self-defense, but […]

Also filed in Economic issues, Retirement issues, Rural issues | | Comments (1)

The preparedness dilemma

Sunday, January 2, 2011

I can guess what this retired Stokes County farm tool was doing in 1935. What is the right amount of preparedness? The official position of the American government is that every family should have at least a three-day supply of food, water, and necessities. The assumption is that, in a regional disaster, help can be […]

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Water independence and water security

Thursday, September 30, 2010

The gauge shows the 3.5 inches that fell last night. To me, few things are as disturbing as a drought. And few things make me feel more secure than the sound of water rushing in my little stream. I can hear the water now through the upstairs open window that faces the woods. The remnants […]

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What can we learn from small newspapers?

Tuesday, April 20, 2010

My local newspaper, the Stokes News While big newspapers are foundering and shrinking, small local newspapers are holding their own, or even thriving. Is there a useful economic lesson in this for relocalization? Oceans of ink have been spilled in attempts to analyze why larger newspapers are dying. It boils down to two things: both […]

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The methods of 100 years ago

Tuesday, March 16, 2010

Here is a link to a scanned copy of Henley’s Twentieth Century Formulas, Recipes and Processes. The book, which is in PDF format, is more than 800 pages long and covers just about everything a self-sufficient American in 1914 might need to know — farming, shelter, tools, homemade cosmetics and medicines, preserving food, and so […]

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The awful 14th century

Tuesday, March 9, 2010

Pieter Bruegel, the Triumph of Death I have written previously about the dark and miserable era that followed the fall of Rome, starting in the 5th Century. Here’s another: Europe in the 14th Century. In 1978, the historian Barbara Tuchman, who won a Pulitzer for her history of World War I, published a book that […]

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Family dairies, R.I.P.

Monday, March 8, 2010

Small, family-run dairy operations used to be very common all across North Carolina’s Piedmont and the nearby Blue Ridge Mountains. They are gone. I doubt that very many of them survived much later than the 1950s. Like all small family farms, the dairy farms had to deal with competition from the larger, more industrialized operations. […]

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