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I’m not exactly sure what this means. Does follow mean the groups I’ve joined? Because I don’t follow anyone, I don’t think. But I like the Activity Feed because I get to see things in groups I may not have joined and I see folks’ posts and I’m probably not going to sift through all the individual members to see who I want to follow just to see what they may randomly say now and then. I like it the way it is.

This is what FB did – sort of. Their algorithms decide what and who I see and it used to just be a news feed in chronological order. Every day, I’d scroll through the day and then get off. I like doing that here. Just scroll through and see if there’s anything that piques my interest, then I can always go to the group or topic if I want.

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What a lot of lovely helpful people. I have to ask for help lifting a feed bag out of the cart and into my car. Back problems. When I do it myself, I end up hurting myself. It’s hard for me to ask and not do it myself. But I’m grateful there’s always a nice person or staff people around to help. Maybe it’s a lesson in gratitude and humility rather than self-reliance. 🙂

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I’ve been darning socks, sweaters, bedsheets, tablecloths and more since my grandmother showed me how in the 1960s. You don’t need anything fancy, but I do like either an orange or a wooden darning egg rather than a lightbulb because I’m just more likely to break the lightbulb and have glass everywhere. I do use a thread that matches the sock, so cotton thread (flower thread or a heavier quilting thread or maybe even a button thread) for cotton socks and wool darning yarn or I might pull apart a crewel yarn the way you separate embroidery threads to get one or two threads for darning wool socks and sweaters. I find if you darn it nice and tight you’re less likely to wear out that spot again.

There are several ways to darn a knitted item. I’ve been planning to upload a photo series showing how to darn on my old blog but hadn’t had time. We just started spring break (I sub at the local schools) so I’m hoping I can get that up there and then you’re free to check it out. I’ll post here if I get it up this week. Meantime, there’s Heidi’s video and a lot of good internet instruction out there. Or best of all, find a grandma who can teach you. 🙂

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We do everything we can to simply not need much money for our life. Because I am old and remarried and he isn’t content to live on a couple of acres in an old schoolbus, we have expenses. We live on about $1000 a month – when I’m not spending extra on supplies to put aside for future or things like storage jars.

The only things that have really made us cringe are:

car and home insurance (they just keep going up by hundreds a year)

natural gas (we now heat our home with wood from downed trees in the neighborhood)

water bill (we’re on the lowest usage tier but the city added $20 for sewer and now we pay more than we ever have)

The main thing is that we don’t buy anything, really. And we enroll in all programs to help seniors: property tax refund cuts my bill in half, internet is half, VoIP phone is reliant on electricity and internet but it’s less than $20 a month. We have no TV, no cell phones.

And still, the bills are 3/4 of what we spend.

Plus we decided in 2020 to start living more like pioneers or hunter-gatherers or mountain people. We forage, make our own medicines, eat almost no packaged foods (I never did really anyway), eat very little grain, have laying hens, barter for venison. My husband does all the fixing and building and I do all the sewing and food preservation (including poultry butchering) and fixing things that don’t require heavy lifting.

I can’t say I do a lot of things to beat inflation other than switching to wood heat because I’ve always lived so simply: hang my laundry, do one load a week, eat simply, no magazines, use the library, darn socks, mend clothes, tarps, etc.

We do barter and use a couple of local buy and sell groups and that’s been great.

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I dehydrate and ferment fruit and veg and mushrooms. I just started dehydrating meat and I’d like to start drying fish. I also pack meat in salt or fat. That meat gets stored in a cold room over winter. I preserve eggs in lime water. I store our tree nuts and seeds (pecans, acorns, black walnuts) in big burlap sacks and shell them as needed, but the maple seeds have to be shelled, dried and then stored in jars.

Chicken scratch, while it’s not technically preserving, gets a dusting of DE in layers to kill the moths and weevils in it.

I’ll clabber raw milk when I get it and can make soft cheese from it and store that in jars of oil for awhile. I make a lot of yogurt.

I buy butter and make a huge batch of ghee that lasts months and is shelf stable. I’d like to render tallow or lard but haven’t found a local source of the fat.

When we have any good tubers or roots (potatoes, turnips, burdock, dandelion, wild carrot), I usually dry them but some I leave in the ground and harvest as needed over winter (mostly sunchokes).

Sometimes I can jam, applesauce, or fruit, but we don’t eat that much of it so I do a lot less of that now and focus on drying food.

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Your video is amazing. Good to see you were true to yourself at your job. The upheavals certainly led you to better days and a better kind of life.

<font face=”inherit”>I’ve always been a societal drop-out. I just never believed that money = life. And I chose what we’re doing for a lot of reasons but mostly because it’s efficient and can be sustained if infrastructure fails. </font>

While I’ve been wildcrafting for medicine and food and living simply for decades, homesteading, per se, is new for me. During “The Madness”, homesteading YouTubes caught my eye, which was especially interesting to me since I’d finally settled down in one place and at 63 am unlikely to move again.

We tried to fit into the traditional farming homestead model; it didn’t work for us. Our land is too shady, and we can’t physically get enough water regularly to the only sunny spots on the 3/4 acres we have. Gardening has been a major loss and has not produced food for the last four years. Because the land already provides fruit, nuts and seeds, greens, and a small amount of roots, we are focusing now on growing starchy roots and tubers, foraging, and spending more time raising meat and egg animals. This is turning out to be a more efficient use of our time and effort. And it is actually feeding us with little cost or heavy work.

I also chose to avoid “alternative” infrastructure, for electricity or gasoline-run, for example. Rather than wonder just how long we could rely on a back-up generator and then have to defend it from marauder’s or not be able to get parts for a solar system, I chose to prepare for needing none of it. We can bring the small livestock into a large mudroom in the house if we need to. I chose this level of simplicity because my back is not good so there’s a lot I can’t physically do, and this kind of life is not as physically hard or time consuming as an agricultural life. Plus it’s not desirable to outsiders or as much of a government target. It’s kind of like being a medieval peasant, really, or an early colonist out in the wilds rather than in a settlement. It’s not super “American lifestyle” but I don’t think a survival lifestyle, should it come to that, will be able to be what we’re used to. I think we’ll have to go back in time and learn from earlier times.

So we chose it for simplicity, invisibility, and historical proof of success. We can sustain it and it works for two older people who are getting less able to manage farming techniques than young folks with families.

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Well, that’s going to be hard at tax time. You need to submit the 1099 with the taxes like a W2, don’t you? Maybe not, I can’t remember. It’s been a long time since I needed one. But Etsy does send them out if they are going to.

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My husband knows more about it, but he said something about SD Bullion and they sell coins if that’s what you want.

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The only concern I have with animal antibiotics is that they don’t have to adhere to the same standards as human antibiotics. (Okay, I admit I’m not even sure Big Pharma adheres to ANY standards of safety anymore.) So the antibiotic portion isn’t the problem, but the fillers and binders that may not be so good for humans. That said, my daughter is a vet tech and she said if there was nothing else, she’d take them and I know I would, too, if I really needed them.

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Yes, Ancel Keys (Mr. liar liar pants on fire). LOL Yeah, they weren’t happy about it, but older folks who had those guidelines forced on them (and fought them) quietly smiled and made sure I didn’t get canned for it. I called it “History of…” or some such thing and kept it entirely fact based. But everyone in the room was floored because they didn’t know the whole thing was based on the lie about cholesterol and plant based foods.

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Really? I never got one from Etsy, but they did say they because it changed and they weren’t required to change the terms that they wouldn’t be doing it until next tax year. Meantime, they made it impossible to keep my store because they wanted me to sign terms that I agree they can sell my banking info and now I heard they are having trouble paying sellers because they had ties to Silicon Valley Bank. I miss the income, we needed it, but I am so glad to be out of Etsy.

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I will do that. 🙂

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A lot of things I grew up with and a lot I learned more recently because of how I need to change the way I store and use food. It’s not hard. There are so many people here to learn from. You let me know if there’s anything specific you want me to share with you. Whatever it is, I’m sure there are lots of ways to do it.

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I’ve had a learn to embroider series on my old blog for ages, but have been planning to do a similar hand sewing and mending series. I just need the time to get it done. Then it will just be a free series you can follow along and learn from. I’ll let folks know when it’s done.🙂

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Oh, I like that! Making more time for family and be with the people you want to spend time with. Or even have a moment or two for yourself.