Even if they’re those special loans that can’t readily be discharged through bankruptcy and which can cause the IRS can yoink away your tax refunds for years?
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You’re the fool who dared to value education, which as we all know gets in the way of Making America ‘Great’ Again.
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Funny, my takeaway is that if you don’t have money to shitcan on a penny stock, don’t enter the market. A lack of higher education without signing up for servitude is a different problem, also related to scams run by the grasping and idiotic rich.
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I have seen that!
Most of those people are nuts! Which is why I was always quiet about my “prepping” stuff cuz I’m not a kook, I just want to be able to eat if there is a disaster of any sort…
Also I hate the structure of the show where they give a rating to the people… thats just odd.
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On our tiny .11 acre city parcel, we grow a shocking amount of food. I have 3 flats of peppers and four flats of tomatoes started for this year, and plan on doing cabbage, beans, beets, herbs and cucumbers (for pickles). One side of our house is all strawberries, and we have two cherry trees. We can all kinds of stuff, and Mr. Kidd got a small anearobic fermenter in the fall. We don’t have a dehydrator, but it seems like we look at buying one every fall.
We don’t really do any of this for doomsday reasons. We like fresh food, but both grew up in food insecure households. Amazing how fresh properly canned foods can taste two years later.
In a decade or less, we’ll be moving out of the city, and will start farming more seriously in the sticks. Because 60-ish quarts of whole tomatoes isn’t enough for a whole year. We’re no hippies, though, but we don’t fit in with the guns-n-jeebus crowd either.
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THIS.
I grow cucumbers, beans, tomatoes, tomatillos, peas, chard and lettuces, chives, basil, oregano, fucking mint. Two tiny 6’x9’ plots, both south facing tho. And we have raspberries, blueberries, grapes, currants and strawberries in the front yard.
The tomatoes and tomatillos get sauced. Cukes pickled. Beans and peas eaten green and then later dried and stored. Everything eaten as it comes in.
Do you save seeds? I only save beans/peas cuz thats easy. Everything else almost self propagates now. Even the tomatillos. I always just throw the slug eaten rotten bits into the plots so I get lots and lots of self starting seeds. I don’t grow enough to dehydrate, we just eat it all. 
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We save pepper seeds and sometimes beans. If my tomatoes are good this year, I’ll save some seeds. Tomatillos are a little too good at volunteering. We grew them one year, and took another 3 years to fully eradicate them. Like morning glories, be careful how/where you plant them.
New for this year: onions and potatoes. And the blueberry bushes have had a year to set roots, time to force them to flower.
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THANK YOU.
This is basically how my parents did things while I was growing up. If I hadn’t chosen to live in an apartment, I’d be doing the same.
I’ve had a lot of people say, “oh, so your parents are hippies” when I tell them I always had home-made jam as a kid. It makes me really angry, not just because it’s inaccurate, but because neither hippies nor preppers invented any of this stuff. Where my parents grew up, this was just what you did. And given how fun gardening is, and how yummy the rewards, why not keep it up?
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Don’t even need a natural disaster for it to be an advantage. Fresh fruit and vegetables are set to get expensive, thanks to a certain unnatural disaster.
Turns out that the commercial harvest doesn’t go so well when there’s too much ICE.
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That unnatural disaster is going to mean my backyard is set to become vulnerable to thieves and vandals of the two-legged sort.
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to be fair, i think it was the hippies that brought the idea mainstream. before that, it was only farmers who did that, and before them, everyone did out of necessity. modernization was killing the widespread knowledge of HOW to do it. i value the hippies for helping carry the knowledge into the last 20th century.
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Totally disagree. If anything, it was the war efforts 1914-1918 and 1939-1945 (plus the 30s because of the global economic depression, plus the 50s due to rebuilding after the war) that really made it both a tradition and a habit. Both my parents are from countries that were invaded and occupied during both wars. Lots of people kept vegetable gardens to save money and ensure a steady supply. Lots of people kept some chickens too – if my dad had had his way, we would have had chickens and rabbits too (my mum said no because when she was a kid she had to clean up after the chickens).
1950s post-war immigration to the US and the British Commonwealth countries, and the habit spreads (though thanks to victory gardens it was already a thing). Then the hippies latched onto it.
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that’s in line with what i’m saying, though. all that knowledge and habits formed through the 50s would’ve been lost to industrialization, which picked up steam post-war. if hippies in the 60s and 70s hadn’t had strong “back to the land” aesthetic, and had just sat back and embraced commercialization and industrialization, that would’ve been lost.
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I have to disagree.
Most of the hippies that tried the whole “back to the earth” thing failed miserably.
While all the non-urban people (of which there are a lot) were always growing their own food and canning and preserving.
The hippie thing was city folk only.
Like hipsters now. “Discovering” fermenting.
It was never lost, it was always there, it just wasn’t “hip”.
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No. You’re discounting the post-war immigrant wave.
I know the standard cultural narrative is that immigrants assimilated into the WASP status quo in return for acceptance, but that’s not really what happened. The immigrants brought new foods to the mainstream, like lasagne. Often they didn’t have the money to join the mainstream middle class, so they sewed their own clothes… and grew their own food.
Put it this way: in my little corner of English-not-a-first-language in the 1970s and 80s, home gardening and home sewing of a non-hippy type was still going strong, and kids like me were being inculcated against industrial food, because it was worse quality at greater expense.
Outside the home we fit in, so long as you didn’t look too close. Like how my peanut butter sandwiches had homemade jam and not grape jelly. Or like how none of our clothes had tags, because my paternal grandmother wore so much handmade stuff the commercially made clothes felt weird with the tags in, and she passed that on to the rest of us.
And while the hippies and Yippies were reading Steal This Book, the immigrants were quietly practising a cashless side economy based on family, favours, and bartering – something that the captains of industry did not like at all, though of course they do it amongst themselves all the time.
So the hippies didn’t preserve anything. They just appropriated it. But the previous incarnations never stopped.
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This.
I’m the only woman in my family that doesn’t sew her own clothes.
Everyone else is great seamstress, sewing clothes for everyone. Not because they’re hippies, but because for the cost they can get better quality. Same goes for food. We grew as much as we could because it was cheaper and better. And we were poor. We weren’t hippies. My Mom always laughed and said she was married with two kids when the sexual revolution happened. She couldn’t afford to be “liberated”.
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This.
A lot of these skills were preserved among people who were 1st, maybe second generation immigrants and weren’t part of the money class. If you could afford a little bit of ground or some balcony space for pots, you grew and preserved food. I grew up with some amazing bread due to Polish and German neighbours. None of my (3rd and 4th gen) family baked or canned and fresh grown veggies were seasonal.
I learned to knit from that German neighbour but never stuck with it because I couldn’t get the knack for holding a steady tension and do not have the patience for practice unless it is something I really enjoy. Sewing, I have the same problem. But those women were not part of some back-to-earth movement. They would have (or will, that German neighbour is still holding on, still knitting, still baking) knocked you into the middle of next week if you called them hippies. Hippies were around (it’s a strange area, a real mix of conservative farmers, hardcore union labourers and hippies whose main cash crop is still not yet legal) but they weren’t canning and sewing so much as drying and rolling.
shrug My sister sews. I can cook and could figure out fermentation and canning. I know how to till soil and how to dig in fertilizer. I even know a few places to source good fertilizer starter. I can ride a horse and pluck a chicken. I could clean and dress one if I had to. None of this we learned from hippies, despite my dad’s beard in the seventies. Know what an entire deer or cow’s worth of raw meat smells like? I do. I have helped tie a whole pig (butchered) up in chickenwire for spit roasting. Find me someone who can weld and I can tell you how to build a kickass mobile spit-roaster. I am even aware of techniques for making charcoal.
It’s amazing what you learn when conveniences are a good distance away, not reliable or unaffordable.
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i get what you’re saying, and it definitely plays a part, but it’s still the outlier experience. the mainstream experience was the commercialized, pre-packaged food version that was taking over. saying the hippies “appropriated” it is incorrect, because there was no permission needed. they simply saw what older (often immigrant) people were doing, understood the value in it, and helped spread it to the mainstream.
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I still disagree.
Hippies were the original hipsters.
They thought they were being revolutionary but they were just “discovering” things their grandparents already knew how to do, none of it was new, and they didn’t make it mainstream because as you say, they were outliers and not part of mainstream culture.
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