Kevin and Sarah at Living Traditions Homestead offer some thoughts on “shortening the supply chain of getting food to your table,” beyond stores and growing your food. Wonderful ideas here:
They made me think of one of my favorite novels, My Antonia, by Willa Cather. Kevin and Sarah, like many of the modern homesteaders, are so different from the back to nature movement of the 70s, where the ones that came to my rural area were hippies, into communal living, and they gave me a jaded view of modern “homesteading.” Many of these new pioneers embrace debt-free living, they do a lot of research on gardening and farming and they try to build diversified income streams. Here’s a bit from a piece I wrote in 2012, but despite this old post, I hadn’t even thought of these ideas Kevin and Sarah offer:
Throughout the story, Jack’s grandmother exemplifies the indomitable American spirit and she’s a testament to planning not just to survive, but to live as comfortably as possible in an unforgiving environment. The Shimerdas, city-dwellers in their home country, fail to take responsibility for their own survival, necessitating good neighbors to prevent their demise. In one scene the grandmother packs a hamper to take to the Shimerdas, she offers this line:
‘Now, Jake,’ grandmother was saying, ‘if you can find that old rooster that got his comb froze, just give his neck a twist, and we’ll take him along. There’s no good reason why Mrs. Shimerda couldn’t have got hens from her neighbours last fall and had a hen-house going by now. I reckon she was confused and didn’t know where to begin. I’ve come strange to a new country myself, but I never forgot hens are a good thing to have, no matter what you don’t have.”
libertybelle diaries 