Autumn is well upon us, and people who have been struggling to stay afloat in this lousy economy all year are now faced with the prospect of the coming holiday gifting season. Which can be daunting in the best of times, but can be positively depressing for those not used to not having cash or credit for the consumerist frenzy. This post is about helping to trim the gift list if you haven’t done so already, plus how and where to find gifts for loved ones that they may cherish forever, help maintain and spread the joy of the season, and not cost an arm or leg.

Previous Posts:
Christmas in a Depressed Economy
‘Tis the Season: Gift Ideas

1. Analyze your gift-giving habits, trim the tree.

In our free-wheeling consumerist culture the Christmas shopping season represents half or more of retailers’ annual intake and an average middle class family’s greatest expenditures on unnecessary items for the year. If your family is struggling, the credit cards with their usurious interest rates have already been cut into small pieces and thrown away, consumer loans have been paid down or frozen in place, and promises to self not to spend more than you’ve got have been made. Don’t change a thing just because the holidays are coming!

If you have a lot of friends and extended family for whom you’ve bought gifts in years past, networking with them early is a good idea. See if doing something other than gifting this year could be a thankful relief to them as well as you. Pot-luck holiday get-togethers are fun, and no one person has to provide all the food and drinks. “Re-Gifting” parties can be great fun too, where you give some trinket you got from someone else in the past (it’s been just taking up room in the closet or on the shelf ever since) to someone else. Chances are someone will remember who gave Fred that hideous tie he’s never worn and laughs will ensue. The holidays are for fun, so have some!

If you’ve got children, find out what they want most instead of just gathering their wish lists of every toy they’ve seen advertised on TV. For children old enough to know Santa isn’t Bill Gates, one big gift can be better than ten little ones. Items like bicycles, roller blades and other sports equipment can be purchased second hand and refurbished, maybe personalized with glitter paint and trim. Go for things they’ll really use and enjoy, stay away from basic junk.

2. Seek out mainstream and even obscure second hand, consignment and/or junk outlets in your area.

There’s nothing like serious holiday shopping among the hugely varied items at a resale outlet, where the perfect something for someone on your list could be found. Often area churches, animal rescue outfits and civic organizations host thrift shops. In many places there are great private resale shops that offer amazing items from art to furniture, crockery to costume jewelry. Don’t overlook those even if you also plan to shop at Goodwill or Salvation Army.

I’ve found beautiful handcrafted chess sets and boards, totally unique hand-whittled puzzle boxes, antique glassware and china, beautiful jewelry boxes, hand-crafted doll houses, etc. in some unlikely haunts. Sometimes something just needs cleanup and a couple of touches, sometimes you can put a lot of yourself into it with a new paint job or fixes, and again you can always personalize. Commercialized junk doesn’t tend to become someone’s most treasured keepsake. Remember it’s all about the thought and effort, not about the price tag.

3. Know your local resources.

If your area has a Freecycle club, think about joining. You can get rid of some of your closet-clutter and maybe get items for gifting. Great for baby furniture and accessories, bicycles and such, often tools, household items, yarns and needles, fabric and sewing machines, books, clothing, home repair and building supplies, etc. All free.

Keep up with your area’s want ads and garage/yard sales as well. Spending Saturdays thrifting and bargain-hunting can be both fun and rewarding as you add to your collection of things “perfect for…” whoever will most love that gift. Your time and effort adds to the value of any gift you give!

4. Think Creatively!

Many people don’t know that you can make a wonderfully colorful and snuggly warm blanket out of a stack of old sweaters. They make great stuffed animals too, if you’re handy with a sewing machine. Purses out of old jeans, sparkled up with some craft store jewels and studs are always welcome presents to the teen set. For younger girls a box full of sparkly costume jewelry is great, as is a laundry basket chock full of fancy dress-up items (including high heels and hats!). For already-creative young’uns, a bunch of items from which they can salvage feathers, beads, trims, etc. may be just the thing. Art supplies can often be found second hand in areas where artists are, I always buy up as much paint, brushes, pastels, pencils, charcoals, canvases, sketchbooks and whatever else as I possibly can.

5. Have Kitchen, Will Travel.

Consider pouring your heart into food for family and friends this year. Make batches of yummy fudge, lots of Christmas cookies, try your hand at hard candies, etc. Such things are always most welcome during the holidays even if they don’t tend to last long in a crowd! If you have to go to the company party and are expected to bring a gift, fudge always works even better than some cheap soap or cologne or tie, and you don’t have to worry about whether you’ve drawn a man or a woman’s name from the hat.

6. Gift of your time and talents.

Have a friend or relative working two part-time jobs, barely getting by and who could really use a night out? Know a caregiver who is stressed to the max? Stumped for something for the teenagers? You can make some beautiful cards (post on that upcoming) and include ‘tickets’ for babysitting, house or pet sitting, a home-cooked meal (at their convenience), even a movie night in your den using your big-screen TV and DVD player. To be redeemed later.

Whatever your talents are or time you can spare, it can be gifted. If you sew, you can gift that. If you cook, gift that. If you have a vehicle, you can gift chauffeur duty. If you paint or craft, you can gift those too. There’s no reason to spend money you don’t have on things to give away to others who may not need or appreciate them just because it’s the holiday season. If you plan wisely and aren’t shy of new adventures, this could turn out to be the most holiday fun you’ve had in years! Even better, once the real spirit of the season infects you, it’s hard to get rid of even when the economic situation isn’t so tough any more.

So start planning, see how much fun you can turn this into by involving your kids, your spouse, your friends!

Later this week we’ll mark the Summer Solstice, when the sun turns from its annual march toward the north and the days start getting shorter. The first day of summer, when our Victory Gardens start producing real food, the swimming hole looks very inviting, and families start heading for the hills to enjoy cool nights and summer fun.

If you live somewhere outside the inner city – or are just planning a vacation somewhere near the fields and forests, there are some wild foods you may wish to try that are now at the peak of their flavor and nutritional value. In addition to other installments here on wild and/or otherwise free foods [], knowing something about how to obtain necessary nutrition when available never hurt anybody.

First off, those of us who live south of the Mason-Dixon line are only too familiar with an introduced Japanese legume so invasive that it’s taken over 12,000 square miles of territory. We call it Kudzu, and it’s everywhere. It was introduced by the railroads to control erosion on steep banks, and quickly overtook everything in its path. It grows a foot a day, covering hillsides, fields, forests and telephone poles, abandoned houses and cars, and even (as is a joke around here) late-sleeping campers and slow-moving cows.

Kudzu is a soil-enriching, fine compost producing legume that could be very high quality animal feed if it weren’t a vine that binds almost every machine that could possibly harvest it. Goats love it and will keep it under tight control, but fire just makes it meaner. Its deep taproots provide a medicinal and nutritional starch and its pretty wisteria-like flowers make a nice jelly. But it’s the high-protein leaves that are most useful as food. If you harvest, take the smaller, new leaves at the ends of vines. They’re very tender, so steaming is much better than boiling. They make a tasty mess of greens to go with corbread. They aren’t particularly tasty steamed, but flavor is much improved by simmering about 5 minutes in broth. We like kudzu much better than poke, which has to be cooked twice and is as mushy as spinach, not nearly as tasty as collards, kale or turnip greens. But it’ll definitely keep you going, has more protein and vital nutrients than most any other wild green you could cook, and nobody will ever miss the leaves you gather.

If you harvest roots, roast them like potatoes, slice or cube them for stews. They’ll pick up the flavors of the other ingredients. The dandelions are pretty tough and bitter by now, but are still an excellent source of nutrients and can be mixed into stews or pot-greens with that are not bitter and things will even out. Other wild greens are best eaten raw, as in salads or added atop a sandwich. And many of these are more packed with nutrients than anything that grows in a domesticated garden. The delicate foliage of sourgrass doesn’t stand up to cooking at all, I usually just pick a bunch as I’m walking or gardening and consume it leaves, flowers and stems immediately. the bright yellow-flowering garlic mustard leaves and flowers make a spicy addition to salads as well, and they’re everywhere.

Purslane, chickweed and lamb’s quarters are all great in salads, as are the buds and flowers of day lily. I slice the buds for salads, but they’re also good dipped in beer batter and light-fried like squash blossoms. Another edible flower is Lady’s thumb (redshank, pictured above), and these grow in dense stands to make it easy to pick quite a lot in one place. Another flower that can add color and substance to salads is nasturtium, and the younger leaves are delicious raw as well. don’t be afraid of those now-tall and seeding wild onions/garlics either, just be aware that they’re strong so you don’t need that many. Dandelion flowers are always good, and if you happen upon a thicket of blooming wild roses (white or pink), pop off some and add the petals to your salad.

Summer fruits are beginning to ripen now as well, and these are always a treat. Elderberries, blackberries, blueberries and such can be encountered almost anywhere out in the country. Elderberries need to be made into pie or jam, but black and blue berries seldom make it back to the kitchen before getting eaten. If they do, cobbler is easy to make and a summer favorite around here.

Check out wide eyed lib’s series on foraging if you want more info, and as always, be absolutely sure you’ve got the right plant before you eat it. Now that the abundant season is upon us, take advantage of some of nature’s offerings!

The news these days is chock full of dramatized street theater as the “haves” fight about ridiculous things like super-bonuses for AIG grifters, amazing world-class ponzi money-laundering schemes, and how we on the low end of the totem pole get to pay through the nose (as usual) to bail these crooks out. At this point it’s not even a partisan fight, it’s just rich versus poor. As usual. We who have been actually harmed by these interminable games of economic Risk are just trying to survive with the basics – food, clothing and shelter.

While I hope that anyone who regularly reads this blog has already bought their seeds and planted their ‘taters, there are things we usually have to purchase – or trade for – because we don’t produce our own at home. Sure, it doesn’t take more than a quarter acre of yard to keep a fresh milk goat or half a dozen chickens who give us eggs for free, but often people will be unable to even do that much. Keeping that goat fresh requires breeding once a year, and then you’ve got to either deal with a smelly billy goat or transport to where the smelly billy goat is standing stud. And what about the kid? That’s something my family could never quite conscience (these youngsters, if not also female, are usually slaughtered for meat). And don’t let anybody fool you. Those chickens CAN fly (sorta). At least to get over the fence into your neighbor’s yard.

If you are lucky enough to still have a roof over your family’s heads, there are ways to save a great deal on foods you can’t produce in your garden but need to keep everyone healthy and satisfied. Nothing makes us feel wealthier than a truly fine and healthy diet. Plus, that alone can save us multi-thousands in chronic diseases we really don’t have to get in the first place. The first of these is to join a local CSA. With this membership, which is critical to purchase right now if you can, you get a portion of the crops and products of local farmers near your home. Even if you garden, this can help fill out the take so you’ve got more to work with. Buying local directly supports your local farmers, and helps them to purchase the seeds and equipment they need to keep on producing.

Even better, many CSAs also keep bees for honey, cows and/or goats for dairy, chickens for free range eggs plus poultry, and some even raise pigs and steers for later slaughter so you can purchase a “share” of those as well. When I was young – it was a large family – my mother always purchased a half a steer every year to freeze in the chest freezer, along with as many chickens as she could get locally. Not only are these animals raised humanely and fed on pasture and hay that they’re naturally designed to consume for maximum health, they were always locally slaughtered so that even the ground beef came from just those steers raised on that farm. Nowadays when ground meat from the supermarket may contain the remains of as many as 100 animals, some of whom were no doubt very sick when they went in, this is vastly preferable.

But what I want to talk about in this post is dairy. Not just milk, but also cheese, yogurt, butter, sour cream and other dairy products we use on an almost daily basis to add protein to our diets and keep the kids happy. The reason to avoid store-bought dairy is more than just the fact that big dairy farms often pollute their milk with genetically engineered hormones and such, it also avoids the mass mixing of milk from farms far and wide that must be mass-pasteurized and have much of its useful ingredients neutralized. So that you end up paying $4 or more for a pound of butter, $2 or more for a few ounces of yogurt or sour cream, etc. We can save a great deal of money – and learn a lot about how food works – if we do this sort of thing for ourselves.

If you’ve a CSA with a dairy division, or a local dairy farm, you can often purchase raw milk on the sly (the government is trying hard to close this loophole). This gives you the raw material to work with to produce your own high-protein and full-fat food ingredients. My family once had a friend up the road who got a fresh goat in payment of a debt, a guy who didn’t drink much milk. That goat gave 2 gallons a day, so I did the calligraphy for his craft catalog in exchange for a gallon a day of fresh goats milk. Which he delivered! Now, you need a mechanical separator to get cream out of naturally homogenized goat milk, and I didn’t have one, so we just drank it. Cow’s milk is much easier to work with…

Raw cow’s milk naturally separates just by being left to separate. Cream rises to the top, the regular milk settles below. You should always pasteurize what you have, meaning that before you drink or use it, go ahead and boil for 5 full minutes. This can destroy some of the natural caesins in the milk or cream, but is definitely worth it to avoid any sicknesses that might result from raw. Just separate the cream first, and what’s left after pasteurization makes fine butter, sour cream and rich cheese. If you’re working with goat’s milk and don’t have a separator, make the butter first since this will serve to separate. Just keep it refrigerated or frozen for longer term storage.

To make butter, just fill a sterilized quart jar half full of whole milk or cream and shake it. This will take some time, but is definitely worth it. The cream component will tend to coagulate and this is what you want. It also floats atop whole milk so is easily scooped out. Accumulate a pound or so of this thick butter, fold in a little salt, and it can be used immediately or frozen in wax and plastic for later. It won’t be yellow, but that’s just another coal-tar dye. Who needs it?

To make yogurt, a spoonful of ‘live’ yogurt is added to a jar of milk and well-shaken, allow it to set overnight (shaking occasionally). By morning it should be thick, stir again and refrigerate. Add sugar, honey, spices, flavorings, whatever, and spoon in liberally on your burritos or use it as dip for pita (which is also easy to make). Yogurt is a bit like sourdough, in that your refrigerated starter can last for years. A single purchase, you can turn it into whatever you like! It freezes fairly well, so you can make a lot when you get your local milk and it’ll last a long time.

Cheese is a bit more labor intensive, but worth it if your family gets most of its animal protein from milk products. There are both natural and genetically engineered rennets on the market, go for the natural if you can. These can also be salvaged from commercial, natural cheeses and added. Cream makes the best strong cheeses, but this takes some time. The internet has sources for the necessary ingredients, or perhaps your CSA can help you with that as well. Be choosy – local food is a growing movement as things in the dollar-based global economy fall apart, be on the forefront of making sure you can do as much for yourself as possible!

This sort of knowledge – how to grow, preserve, obtain and stretch food for your family – is not knowledge that ever really “goes out of style.” Who knows what will happen to those jet-setters and politicians who whine endlessly about pieces of paper or mere bits and bytes of information that grant their wealth – so much greater than We the People who are just trying to survive? Do we really care? If we can do for ourselves, they don’t seem so important anymore, and our personal worlds expand locally to include all the things we really need.

Perhaps in the end that would be the greatest lesson any of us could ever teach our children as well as our erstwhile ‘masters’. We’ll be okay, thanks. When you’re hungry, we’ll talk about it…

So get busy, folks! Find out where your CSAs are, start making some friends in the farming community, see if you can turn that shed into a goat barn, and figure out how many chickens you can host in your back yard without compromising the garden. We can live through this, maybe come out the other side more confident than ever that we’ll never be helpless again!

Links:

Local Harvest: CSA
Dairy CSA
Cook for Good: Yogurt
Homemade Cheese
Cheese Making & Supplies
What’s Cooking: Homemade Cheese

As we move into 2008’s extended holiday period, more than a few families are wondering if there will be a Christmas this year. Sure, some retailers are going all out to stay open long enough to see if anybody’s buying this year, but with consumer credit at a virtual standstill, international trade languishing on the docks and jobs being lost by the thousands every week, it’s a no-brainer that this Christmas isn’t going to be ‘the usual’ consumer spending orgy of Christmases past.

Presuming that your family still has a home, can heat it, and enough income to put food on the table, there are ways to have a festive, meaningful Christmas without going further into debt and without ending up with cheap Chinese junk that nobody really wants or needs.

The best thing you can do for your family is Make Your Own, and involve the kids! We save old Christmas cards in a box in the closet, pull them out around Thanksgiving and use them, plus various saved papers, made papers, trims, sequins, glitter, buttons, studs, etc. to make brand new Christmas cards for the people in our lives. Scissors and glue, a paper cutter, maybe some cutsey hole punches and lots of odds and ends, these cards inevitably get saved by every Mom, Grandma or other friend/relative who gets them! And kids are especially creative in this area. Sure you’ll have to clean up the mess, but a great time was had by all.

There are schedulers, list-keepers, budding writers and artists in just about every family. So another great gift are notebooks, journals, sketchbooks and schedulers you can make or buy. My friends over at Casual Keystrokes have compiled a worthy list of the best of the best journals, notebooks, sketchbooks and schedulers available online, some of them offer great deals and discounts.

If you really want to put some ’self’ into it, the ideas and designs of some of those items Keystrokes suggests can be used as models for do it yourself gift projects. My grandson learned how to make leather bound notebooks in school, has really turned it into an art form. He collects old used leather jackets from Goodwill and other thrift shops, and recycles that leather for bindings. The neatest looking ones are patchwork of different kinds of leather, bound together with leather glue (can be purchased at a craft supply store).

Paper can be bought or made, but making can be fun. Did you know that you can make fine paper from collected dryer lint? Frugal Living offers the recipe and details on how to do this. Fine handmade paper bound in a fine handmade leather bound book can be the most delightful gift under the tree for anyone who loves to write, doodle, or keep meticulous notes.

You might be surprised at how useful that dryer lint can be to the dedicated crafter. PlanetPal offers recipes and instructions for how to make lint paper mache and lint clay as well as lint paper. And if there are very young ones on your Christmas list, there are some great patterns and instructions for how to make stuffed animals and dolls, and that dryer lint makes great stuffing too!

There is also the tradition of “Hobbit Presents” that some families find so fun. This is the practice of re-giving a previous year’s gift to someone else. When it’s unwrapped, the family can remember where it came from, who has enjoyed it, and who gave it to whom. These sort of gifts need to be more substantial than cheap plastic stuff from China, but quality items handmade with skill and care make great Hobbit Presents. Pride in craftsmanship is something children miss out on too much these days. Teaching them, encouraging them and helping them learn to value such things from themselves and others won’t hurt them a bit.

So it’s November. Get busy!!!

Links:

‘Tis the Season: Gift Ideas
Casual Keystrokes
Making Paper from Dryer Lint
Lint Craft Recipes
Stuffed Toy Patterns

The election is now over, the Neocons and their operatives at Treasury and the Fed are doing their best to loot the nation completely before power changes hands, and the citizens are collectively holding their breath, wondering just how bad it will get, thousands of jobs disappearing every week. The Grinch may well have succeeded in stealing Christmas this year – looks like we won’t have Circuit City to kick around anymore.

As the economy falls (for everyone but the oil companies, who are enjoying record profits as usual), the prices of just about everything keep going up. The most primal of our needs is food, and how we will survive the depression without sacrificing our health, our weight or our taste buds is a question many families are beginning to struggle with.

By next spring we can expect the number of home ‘Victory Gardens’ to explode as patches of lawn are tilled under and favorite veggies are planted. Depending on where you live – thus how long your growing season is and whether you get two a year – a family can produce a significant chunk of its annual consumption of fresh greens, tomatoes, peas, peppers, and various specialty items like melons, squash, eggplant, artichokes and tasty herbs. In a well-managed yard garden of no more than 12×20 feet and a clever porch container garden.

In the meantime, here are some basics for making the most out of short food dollars while getting the most nutrition and least amount of excess fat from your day to day diet.

1. Eat More Soups and Stews

Basic one-pot meals can be hearty, tasty, nutritious and extremely satisfying. If you don’t have a crock pot, consider one as your Gift Wish this year. You can start a soup or stew you prepped the night before when you make your morning coffee, it will be ready to eat when you get home from work.

For these you can use cheaper dry legumes and grains, bullion stocks and storage veggies like potatoes, onions and carrots. If you’re meat eaters, a ham hock in the pot adds a lot of flavor. Cheaper cuts of beef make for fine stews, and chicken is a perennial favorite. Can be purchased in tuna-size cans (same aisle), will make tasty chicken-rice or chicken noodle or chicken n’ dumplings. A good pot of hearty soup or stew can last a couple of nights, or provide easily microwaveable lunches the next day. Every time you don’t buy prepared food you’re saving real money for better tasting and more nutritious home-cooked meals.

And don’t forget about pot pies – a great way to stretch a good hearty stew when there’s lots left over, they freeze well and can be made in single-serve portions when you’ve got time!

One Dish Crockpot Meals
All Crockpot Recipes

2. Learn All About Quick-Breads

To go with those hearty soups and stews you’ll want to whip up some good side-breads. A 5-pound bag of cornmeal (self rising) can make a lot of cornbread either for dunking or crumbling or just munching. There are good recipes for various quick wheat breads using leavening agents that don’t require as much work as yeast. Crackers are another side that doesn’t take long to whip up and can be as hearty as you like with sesame, caraway or flax seeds, some herb flavorings and maybe some additional flours (rye, oat, etc.) to the usual wheat.

Homegrown Evolution: Quick Breads
6,718 Quick Bread Recipes

3. Window Box, Porch & House Plant Gardening

Salad greens – your basic variety of leaf lettuces, spinach, etc. – love cool weather. Even if you live in an all-winter-freeze environment, if you’ve a sunny window you can attach plastic weather sheeting in such a way to enclose a window box, which will then pick up enough heat from the house through the window to allow growing salad greens. If you can water and harvest from inside the house, even better!

These boxes need not be deeper than 3-4″ of good potting soil and compost, lettuce and spinach have very shallow roots. If you sow the mixed leaf seed, don’t worry about separating the plants. Just cut the leaves when they get to be about 3″ tall with a pair of scissors, they’ll keep growing back. Spinach should have a bit of room, harvest outside leaves and let the center keep producing more.

Dark green leafies like kale and collards can easily be grown in well-insulated pots on the porch, so long as your porch gets sun. They’ll grow right through snow cover, but you have to keep the pot from “ground-freeze.” Harvest these the same way as spinach (though the leaves are much bigger) – outside first, let the central plant keep producing rather than just cut the whole thing down. I have collard and kale plants in my garden that are two years old, their multi-harvested stems several feet long, still producing fine greens.

And peppers (chili or bell) can grow indoors all year long in a good size pot if it gets sun. They even have seeds for ‘ornamental’ pepper plants just for houseplant use, though the peppers are indeed edible. And like avacado and citrus trees, they’ll live forever if you take care of them.

Container Gardening: Vegetables
Vegetable Gardening in Containers

World markets continue to take dramatic hits and the Dow has fallen below 10,000 for the first time in four years. Seems a lot of banks and other players are unhappy with the trillion dollar bailout package passed last Friday because it limits their personal golden parachutes and stock option scams. Awwww. Should we call the waaaaambulance for these whiners? Nope. If they didn’t need our money they shouldn’t have begged for a handout in the first place. In the meantime, regular people are having a much harder time putting food on the table as prices rise dramatically and more and more find themselves out of work. This post is a beginner’s primer on how to get food if you can’t afford it.

Before I get to the list of good links readers may find helpful depending on their particular situations, readers should know that many states, such as the one where I live (NC) have budgetary caps on how much relief in the form of food stamps they are able to provide. This can mean that even as increasing numbers of people find themselves going hungry, fewer people will have access to the standard governmental relief. Thus more people must turn to other providers. A good overview of those providers supported by the USDA commodity program is provided at Amber Waves. If your family is in danger of ‘food insecurity’ be sure to familiarize yourself with emergency providers in your area. Cities generally have soup kitchens, places where you can go for a hot meal. Most smaller cities and many towns or counties also have food banks, check into what you will need to provide to qualify.

For those with few to no reasonable alternatives, or who may find themselves in a chronic situation (or are just stubbornly self-sufficient), here are some fine hints about foraging. Foraging the nearly lost art of getting your food from places other than the neighborhood supermarket or soup kitchen. Food prices are projected to continue rising and stay high for at least the next three years. Part of this is our newfound dependence on imported foods with huge ‘carbon footprints’ due to transportation and energy-intensive mechanistic agriculture. If you’re trying to keep your family alive and healthy, you honestly don’t need mangos in January or expensive processed foodstuffs at any time.

Of course, as with all matters of saving real money on food, you’ll have to learn (or remember) how to cook for yourself. Eating out and buying pre-prepared meals is the most expensive way to eat, not to mention the most unhealthy. Since health care is a growing desperate concern for everyone, staying healthy should be paramount in all our planning.

From the great DailyKos “Frugal Fridays” series, Foraging: Living Off the Fat of the Land we get several good ideas. Of course living close to water allows foragers with a little skill the luxury of catching crabs, crayfish, regular fish, baby clams, etc., and seaweed can be a fine addition to the pot to lend nutrients and salt (plus ample amounts of iodine). Living inland can offer lots of fine opportunities to forage for edible fungi, berries, tubers and pot herbs as well. it’s puff ball season in my neck of the woods, which are spendid stuffed with chopped acorns, cabbage, herbs and onions, baked in clarified butter in a covered dish. Hickory nuts are falling, and the wild sunflowers are blazing – these are otherwise known as Jerusalem artichokes, and eat like small potatoes.

Of course there’s Cossack Asparagus in marshlands almost everywhere. These are your basic cattails, and all parts of the plants are edible all times of year. The new green shoots are better than bamboo shoots (which also may be found here and there), but I best like the set-cob’s fuzz which can be ground into a very light, fine flour for baking and thickening broths. As things nutritional become rarer, families will likely have to learn how to like basic stew meals that can be made in large pots and eaten over a period of two or three days (refrigerated in between, of course).

If you don’t mind killing and cleaning, there’s a reason they call possom the “other other white meat.” People have traditionally made fine meals of squirrel, turkey, various ground birds, snakes and the standard larger game. Just be sure you’ve got whatever permit is required, both for hunting and fishing, in your area for the game you’re seeking. I’ve known families who could eat meat twice a week (all anybody needs) for an entire winter from a single deer. Best advice is to stay away from carnivores and scavengers (like ravens and buzzards, bears and racoons).

People in the country or with ample back yards could consider a fresh goat for milk and some few chickens (easily kept but noisy if you’ve a rooster) for eggs and occasional Sunday dinner. Check your local paper’s “livestock” want ads, chickens are very cheap and goats aren’t anywhere near as expensive to buy or feed as a cow. Or make friends with a farmer who has livestock. Around here I can get cheap (or for straight barter) milk, honey, free range eggs, grass-fed meat if I ate it, and all the composted fertilizer my garden can handle.

Of course learning how to garden will help a lot. Tomatoes and peppers and salad stuff can easily be grown in pots and flats on the patio or deck, herbs in the kitchen window, and many other things if you’ve the room, a shovel to turn ground and a metal rake to break it up. Know what grows in what seasons in your area – some crops like cabbage, collards, kale, lettuce, spinach, radishes, broccoli, brussles sprouts and cauliflower need cold weather to develop. Kale will keep on growing right through the snow! Others need lots of heat and sun. If you plant extras you can preserve for the future, or barter for trades with those who have foods you didn’t grow. Specializing can be better than trying to grow it all. Barter will become increasingly important as the food shortages and high prices continue.

Many wild flowers and weeds are edible, and some of those are more nutritious than anything you can buy in the store. Violets, dandelions (greens and flowers), day lilies, wood sorrel, purslane, etc. Don’t forget kudzu – its greens are very high in protein and its flowers make lovely jelly or colorful additions to salads.

Out in the woods there are acorns, elderberries, fox grapes, sloe plums, wild cherries, blueberries, hickory nuts, walnuts, ground nuts and other goodies in addition to the edible ferns and fungi. Be sure you know what you’re doing with those fungi – many local extension agencies offer print material and courses to let you know what’s edible and what’s not.

And don’t be shy – if you live in a farming/gardening region, keep track of who’s been harvesting, go ahead and ask permission to glean from those fields. Modern mechanical machinery leaves quite a lot of edible food behind, and farmers usually just plow it under. Many or most farmers in your area may be entirely willing to have you gather what you can of their already harvested crops.

Foraging is a lot like work, but more fun. Since millions will be out of work (and many of those one out of a two-income household), there should be time if you’ve got the energy and desire. Do check out some of the links in this article and below, get yourself psyched about the possibilities right now. In really hard times all we really have to do is survive, and learning to do for ourselves instead of waiting for a handout that may never come is very empowering. Kids love this stuff, so be sure to include them on your weekend foraging trips!

Links:

Emergency Providers Help Put Food On the Table
Foraging: Living Off the Fat of the Land
BHM: You can become a hardcore forager
Wild Food Foragers of America
Edible Wild Things: “Cossack Asparagus”
Wild Herbs/Foods Archive
Staples Archive
Harvesting Wild: The Mast Crop
Modern Forager

Posts to This Series:

Part 1: Roadblocks and Interference
Part 2: Food: Eating What You Can Get

As Congress meets today and tomorrow to grill the principals before Friday’s vote on the $700 billion “emergency” Wall Street bailout plan (which has been in the works for months but strategically dumped on us all as an “emergency”), oil companies have instituted “rolling shortages” all over the Southeast. Some areas have been out of gas for more than a week and a half, and the situation is not expected to ease until Monday at the latest. Some gas – a single tanker at a time – is being delivered to stations along the Interstates and is being strictly rationed unless it’s diesel, one station per county.

State police are managing the gas lines to prevent violence, which did break out last week in the Nashville, Tennessee area when people started cutting in line. Food prices are rising so fast the stock boys at the grocery stores can’t mark up the goods fast enough, and the specter of looming fuel shortages for winter heat – or price increases that will force people to do without – is beginning to look very scary.

Bailout or no bailout – and despite the launch of FBI investigations of Fannie Mae, Freddy Mac, Lehman Brothers and AIG – the United States may well be fully in the clutches of major economic depression before winter even hits. Whether or not that translates to global recession isn’t much of an issue to regular people, as we here in our own homes wonder how we will survive. This post and several following posts in a new series will take a look at the steps citizens should take as soon as possible to ensure their families will make it through the next 6 months. If depression goes on longer than that, additional strategies will be necessary, some already compiled as series in this blog and available under the “Our Most Popular” header on the left side of the page.

Here in Part 1 there are two broad categories of concern citizens will have to work around in order to do for themselves, particular to not freezing, not starving, and not getting indefinitely detained or killed. Considerations must start NOW.

Things to Plan Around:

1. Availability of home heating fuel/gasoline.

It is quite likely that there will be rolling gas shortages throughout the next year. We can also fairly assume there will be drastic fuel oil shortages in the northern tier of the country, and that many will unfortunately freeze to death in their homes or die of carbon monoxide poisoning from kerosene heaters, or fires from badly planned fireplace/wood stove installations.

If you live in an area with ample woods with standing or down dead or a brisk firewood market for purchase, or availability of wood stove pellets, get yourself a wood stove. These come in all sizes and thicknesses, some need more protection to floors and walls than others. You will also need stove piping and must plan a way to get the smoke outside your house (can be through a removed windowpane if necessary). Stoves are often available reasonably cheap and in good condition through Craig’s List or other re-sale sources. Do your homework, install it correctly. If the electricity goes out or fuel oil is unavailable, your family will still be warm. AND you can cook on it!

Resource: NASD: Proper Installation, Operation and Maintenance

2. Deployed Troops, Curfews, Travel Restrictions, Rationing.

Beginning on October 1st – next week – the US Army’s Third Infantry Division’s 1st Brigade Combat Team – all 6500 to 8000 troops – will be re-deployed within the borders of the United States for various police functions. Regular police forces are being deployed for crowd control and peacekeeping functions as well, in managing protests, gas lines and runs on banks, grocery stores, etc. Expect to be challenged every time you go out, be thankful when it doesn’t happen.

Important: In case of travel restrictions, try to gather your immediate family in one place, preferably the place among your extended network best situated according to all considerations. Schools may be shut down due to lack of fuel for transportation and/or heating, if you have college-bound offspring, consider taking a couple of semesters off unless things at the college look stable. Don’t be afraid to call the admin and ask pointed questions, either. You won’t want anyone near and dear to you to be stuck someplace where they have no resources.

What this means is you need to do what stocking up you can immediately, and plan for obtaining the rest of your needs in possibly creative ways. If you have money socked away, withdraw enough to get you through if the bank goes under, all of it if they’ll let you have it. Store ready cash in freezer bags in the freezer. Purchase as much staple supplies as you can possibly afford, NOW before there are serious shortages and before the prices double or triple.

What food supplies you will need to obtain, along with other tools and supplies, will be supplied in Part 2 of this series. Please stay tuned!

Links:
Southeast Gas Update
FBI investigating companies at heart of meltdown
Long Term Capitol
Craig’s List: Great Resource or Scary Place?
20 Ways to Live on Almost Nothing
It’s Better Than Cheap… It’s Free!

Posts to This Series:

Part 1: Roadblocks and Interference
Part 2: Food: Eating What You Can Get

Watching Treasury’s Paulson on Meet the Press Sunday made me sick. That pitiful, pleading look, the bizarre non-logic, the reversion to fear, fear, fear… the guy’s a cheap crook in an expensive suit and no, the whole world isn’t going to self-detonate if we let the greedheads take their lumps for being so damned greedy. Let ‘em fail.

Meanwhile, I’ve a fine plan to salvage the housing market as well as the business and jobs outlook. Instead of giving up to $3 trillion dollars (the price goes up hourly) to the crooks who got us into this mess, why not give every citizen $3,000 dollars? They’ll catch up on their mortgages, then FHA (the receiver for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac) can refinance at lower rates and more realistic selling prices. Voila! the mortgage market is no longer “bad debt.” And if we’ve got an extra couple of trillion laying around to spend on these greedheads, why don’t we spend it on something useful – like universal health care?

That price tag is less than a third of the price tag the Fed, Treasury or Wall Street has come up with to bail themselves out of the hole they dug, and it would completely solve the asset valuation problem for regular Americans who don’t earn $5 million a year. And it lets the Wall Street failures fail. They earned it, they deserve it. Screw ‘em. The rest of us will be fine with our dividend.

But if you really want to try and understand what they’re all so boogedy-scared of right now, here are some links to excellent overviews that will tell you more than anybody wants to know about how we got to where we are today, and why.

Daily Kos front pager ‘Devilstower’ published a spectacular overview of how we got here in his Three Times is Enemy Action. It’s clear and concise, easy to understand, and will make you furious. His piece is so good that it was picked up by The Nation, which also offers an article by William Greider that’s worth reading, Paulson Bailout Plan a Historic Swindle.

Trading insider bonddad offers his usual excellent analysis of the bailout plan being pushed by BushCo (with further links) with Paulson to the US – Grab Your Ankles, beginning with the relevant observation…

“There’s a plan afoot to screw the US taxpayer.”

Yeah, well. Seems to me that instead of ‘trust’ in the very people who have screwed things up so thoroughly, we should see if trusting We the People might not work better.

If indeed we must in the wake of the failure of the only valuation we’ve had in recent years (real property) find some other means of valuation, giving the “bailout” money to those of us who DO consider our homes and businesses to be valuable would do more to dig us out of this mess than giving it to crooks.

Links:

Paulson to the US – Grab Your Ankles
Three Times is Enemy Action
Paulson Bailout Plan a Historic Swindle

More than 40 million Americans – including children – have no health insurance. As the economy continues to weaken and good jobs are outsourced to countries where universal care exempts businesses from having to carry the health care burden, millions more are being thrown into the ranks of the uninsured. Then there are those who have changed jobs, and encountered insurers who simply will not cover them due to pre-existing conditions. These days if you’ve ever had treatment for things like acne, high cholesterol or carpel tunnel you can find yourself on the growing list of the “Uninsurable.”

Now, if you don’t mind jumping serious hoops and get an early start in the fiscal year, states do have sliding scale plans and Medicaid allotments. If you are covered by one of these, you do NOT count among the officially uninsured. In my officially “economically depressed” region, approximately two thirds of the citizens qualify for food stamps and medical care, but there’s only enough money to cover less than half of them. The rest simply do without, at least until they simply can’t do without anymore. The cost of indigent care at our few public hospitals is yet another perpetually unpaid bill.

This blog offered many good tips and links to useful resources for the uninsured in a previous 3-part series Inexpensive Health Care Tips, Part 1, including in Part 2 some strategies for getting necessary prescription medicines, and in Part 3 how to negotiate access to primary and emergency care.

Now that approximately half of the citizens of the US are either uninsured or underinsured (have high deductible “junk insurance” or coverage that is routinely denied), we cannot expect that things will get any better any time soon, at least not so long as the inside-the-beltway crowd has unlimited free health care. The progressive political website Daily Kos is hosting a Thursday series by diarist ‘nightowl724′, part 1 of which is 10 Survival Topics for the Uninsured.

There are some good resources, advice and strategies presented (topics 1 – 6 of the promised 10). The project arose from the Daily Kos Health Care Google Group. The posting schedule for this month is worth noting:

August 14: Survival Tips for the Uninsured, Part 1
August 15: Uninsured and Lucky to be Alive Part 1
August 21: Survival Tips for the Uninsured, Part 2
August 22: Uninsured and Lucky to be Alive Part 2
August 28: Living with a Chronic Illness

Interested readers can subscribe to the series here.

Links:

Inexpensive Health Care Tips, Part 1
nightowl724’s page
Inexpensive Health Care Tips: Intro
Inexpensive Health Care Tips – 2: Necessary Medicines
Inexpensive Health Care Tips – 3: Primary and Emergency Care
Basic Health Maintenance: Part 1
Basic Health Care Maintenance: Part II
Medical Rationing and Medical Tourism

My eldest grandson graduated from high school in the top 10% of his class a couple of months ago, for which we are inordinately proud – he was taking courses like advanced biology, pre-calc, physics and advanced literature/writing, which most kids around here avoid like the plague. Now we’re facing the costs of getting him through college, since we raised him and of course we will.

We have had to seriously crimp some of our expectations about how this could happen, as things have changed both personally and societally since our children were in college. First, they don’t give out full scholarships to incoming freshmen around here, no matter how well they do in high school. You have to start with your basic Pell Grant and complete at least two semesters before you’re eligible for scholarship or extra grant money. The Pell Grant won’t come in until the second semester because the process doesn’t even start until the student’s already enrolled, so tuition must be paid up front out of pocket, along with all fees and the cost of textbooks.

So for our grandson, we have made concessions. He will work for his father in another state through the fall, save up money to be put toward tuition, books and transportation (or one of those, since they’re all necessities). That means not starting college until January. That will give us time to save for the tuition.

We’ve also decided to begin his academic career at the area community college rather than the university his mother graduated from, because the first year or two is just basic requirements, the CC offers them in a straight transfer program, and the cost is less than a third what the university costs for a full-time student. That way if he does well, he can get into the scholarship system quickly, including those from university when it’s time to make the change.

Tuition at our Community College is less than $700 per semester, which leaves $300 from the basic level Pell Grant to pay for everything else. $300 won’t even buy him lunch, so saving on the cost of books – which can often add up to tuition for the course – is required. Luckily, the CC here knows it’s in an official “economically depressed region” and offers cool alternatives. Most courses have online sources for lesson material, so students needn’t purchase textbooks at all. There’s also a lively book exchange, a used book option, and even a lending library on campus. So we’re hoping to get by at least the first year without having to buy any books at all.

At higher levels, however, he’s going to WANT to purchase books – he’ll want to keep them forever, as source material he can readily access in his future life. So I have found a couple of sources of very good information on how to save a bundle on college textbooks. If you’ve got someone in or getting ready for college, the tips will serve you very well! Check them out:

10 Tips: Save on college textbooks
MSNBC: 10 ways to save on college textbooks