FACING THE FUTURE via SELF SUFFICIENCY on your own, GREEN ACRE

The future? INFLATION, excessively costly fruits and vegies, meat andn fish priced above the sky. What does that suggest? Self sufficiency! We will have our acre, grow our own veggies and grain, use solar and wind power, make our own soap which is easy and fun with just a stove and any kind of oil, olive, animal fat, and a little home made lye. (out of ashes from woodfires.) We will keep darling goats and turn their milk into butter and cheese. We will pick wild foods like ginseng and fiddle head fern heads to sell to the wealthy city people, or grow strawberries or raspberries for them, and we'll bring them our jams, our cheese. A bucolic picture NO?

Don't look fondly back at ancient gravures showing farms with smoke curling out of chimneys, livestock grazing, while you hack up smog nodules and your lungs get eaten out by city air. Don't dream of children playing in the cornfield while your kids play in gang-infested streets. Start now with self sufficiency on the OUTSKIRTS of a big city where land is cheap and be like your own ancestors: till the soil, grow everything you need. The only thing you'll buy will be salt and coffee.

Gandhi had India digging their own salt and weaving their own cloth to shake off the colonial domination. You have long suspected that you are colonized, that Big Brother's foot is on your neck, his hand in your wallet. Yes. We are colonized, by the government that extracts almost HALF of our earnings for roads already built, armies we don't need, schools that are pitiful in their inefficiency. Does the government protect us? Capitalism (its corporations,) has exported its factories and jobs to ASIA where they can hire people for a dollar a day. Where do they think they are going to sell the finished product? Not here. The stock market is doomed. When it falls, and the banks, SSI, Welfare and entire economy fall with it, food will be the coin of the country.

Now is the time to get an orchard and field. Here, trembling in our city homes, today, we are tied to wage slavery of the dullest sort, if we are lucky. Many of us have no jobs, and run little service oriented cottage industries out of our homes. But what will happen when greenbacks are scarce. When a thousand of them are required for a monthly rent? When three of them are required for a loaf of bread? Will we grow grain and bake that bread? First, Only if you have a VITA MIXGRAIN MILL, and SECOND only if we get that acre in the country. Close to a big city is fine. Just one gas tank away so the STARVING hoards can't come find us. The future could go sour at any moment. We need to achieve freedom from that danger. Gainful UNemployment! We ex big city wage slaves will tell tales of horror to our kids as we watch the gulls, or watch the desert birds and pray that they never wander to the city to adventure in the smog and  rent thousand dollar boxes as we did. The future will have communities of exiles. You and your friends on a forty acre parcel. Your orchard, common grain field, common barn, common tractor. We may go to the city for car parts but some may op to let the heap rot. Where's there to go? Of course the Starbucks generation will be OD'ing just about then, their livers gone, what a panic when the job goes too so we'll have to stay in touch with them and let them know that if they want to earn their keep on a caffeine free farm. Luckily there are stimulants that need NOT be imported from Asia or Peru (like tea and coffee). Gingko, fennel, (licorice) Hawthorn and kelp with the ginger that you grow in your garden or greenhouse, together synergistically deliver a bigger wallop than Sumatra Coffee which Starbucks sells at 8$ a pound. And we can grow all of them in our yard. 

We can be energetic and fit. We will help one another. I hear that it takes two to throw a turbine up a tower so the wind can give us electricity.. What do I know? I'm a city denizen DREAMING of exodus. The future seems to entail  a DIASPORA. The air is already so filthy in the city that to take a deep lung full is a guaranteed cough. Before the food riots start, before Iraq and Iran and the Bush dynasty of oil men create a plantary Armageddon, the smart money should leave the big cities.

Some of us plan to leave. Maybe grow chile peppers for the ritzy stores, or goldenseal or purple coneflower for the healthfood stores (if the UN Codex continues to permit its sale, and if not, for the blackmarket) or grow ginseng on the shadowy north side of a hill, and on the southern face, a vinyard, berries or cherries or kiwi or something scarce and delicious, purple passionfruit from Maui. Chayotes. Those last two are kind of rare. In KANSAS, at least.

Every home needs a SOUP GARDEN. There you grow basic rations for the day you cannot get any kind of food out of the store, either as money ran out, or food trucks were hijacked outside of town. SOUP is hot, filling and requires vegies, pulse, grains. THE SOUP MASTER RECIPE must be memorized, then you go looking to plant those items in the yard. Find the beans in the dry bean bin at super market which offers the bean seed much cheaper than actually buying tiny 3$ SEED PACKAGES from HOME DEPOT. You plant 15c worth of beans every spring.(The Navajo trick of putting a bean, a squash seed and a CORN seed in a "SISTERHOOD" hill works great for soup!)

The home farmer wants to pick up all the berries in the DUMPSTER outside the store. Mush them, plant in flats, you get tons of berry plants. VERY hard to find Turkish mulberries  but regular mulberries are prolific bearers, can be turned into jam if you add lemon juice and rind. Into trees if you plant the fruit. Mulberries don't have an acid note. By adding the lemon peel, juice, you give the jam a sugary tang. It comes out purply red as it's 99% berries and only l% lemon rind and juice. Tangy and citric. AMAZING RECIPE! Try it! KIWIS also are improved by copious amounts of lemon peel and juice in the jam.. In Southern California, guavas, oranges, tangarines, kumkuats and lemons fall off trees, roll through the streets. So we can make marmalade almost year round.

Or we can roam country backroads, find farmers with bushels of fruit to sell at low prices, (Be careful of fallen fruit, can't be juiced raw. Soil injects Salmonella or E Coli into it) And while in the sticks, find country antiques, carry them to the city once a month to sell to city dealers who will become addicted to our tangy marmalade so we sell that too! 

What we will have in exchange for finding an antique butter churn or spindle and filling a few dozen jam jars is time to PAINT again and finish those novels...and run a cottage industry with a wi-fi satellite connected PC. That's the future, that's  the golden cobblestones we're following like a road to Oz. And in case the future has a world recession, then we have food in the freezer.

Hope the smoggy city doesn't kill us first. Or the lack of honey bees who seem to have left town. (Not in my San Fernando Valley yard. But then I'm far from commercial agribusiness, the big, nasty sprayers). But in case your bees go, if we learned all the above, we can surely get a brush and learn to hand pollinize our blossoms or picket against the poison corporations.

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Our 'POSTER-BLOGGER' is ANITA SANDS HERNANDEZ, Los Angeles Writer, Researcher, mother of 4 and career Astrologer. Catch up with her websites TRUTHS GOV WILL HIDE & NEVER TELL YOU, also The  FUTURE, WHAT'S COMIN' AT YA! FRUGAL LIFE STYLE TIPS,  HOW TO SURVIVE the COMING GREAT DEPRESSION, and Secrets of Nature, HOLISTIC, AFFORDABLE HEALING. Also ARTISANRY FOR EXPORT, EARN EUROS....* Anita is at astrology@earthlink.net ). Get a free natal horoscope "my money/future life" reading now + copy horoscope as a Gif file graphic! No smarter, more accurate DESTINY reading out there!

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