No more grocery stores
This weekend may have changed my life...
I met a woman who grows 80 percent of her own food in the backyard of her Portland home. Saturday she invited me and B to walk through her garden. There, we met Jay, her resident bluebird who swoops down from her pear tree to retrieve peanuts from an opened hand. We got to see the benefits of compost toilets, which produce "humanure" and feed her garden so well that she scoffs at the idea of Miracle-Gro.
She's got four types of pears, three plum trees, figs, peppers, tomatoes, squash, celery, cabbage, snow peas...basically a better veggie and fruit selection than Fred Meyer, and it's all organic, of course. She's even got a menopausal herb section. Plus, she doesn't ever have to wait in line at the checkout, she simply steps out her back door. I did a little tally with the help of my online banking and found that I spend between $250 and $300 a month on groceries, and if that bill vanished, in 5 years I'd have an extra $12,000 to do whatever with. And no, she doesn't put any money into the garden, either.
For mulch, she simply opens her door and listenes for chainsaws. Then she walks to wherever the noise is coming from, and asks for the sawdust or wood chippings. She gets cut grass the same way. Puts it all into her compost, and after a few months, gets the best free dirt ever.
She says she'd rather spend her time doing this than going to work for the money to buy food. Duh, me too. She's even taken it a step further... she grows fibers too, and spins her own yarn. She harvests silk from silkworms, and dyes her clothes she makes with plants she grows. She cancelled her trash service--without the packaging from prepared food, she doesn't have that much to throw away. She uses powdered toothpaste, etc.
She isn't your normal Portland hippie-dippy type. Sure, she's got bumper stickers plastering the back of her Subaru wagon like everyone else within city limits, but she's not even a vegertarian, she eats her rabbits. She's down to earth and considers a lot of what she does to be political. If she's not buying potatoes shipped from Idaho or bananas from Colombia, then think of how much gas/oil/US involvement in foreign countries/pesticides, etc., we don't have a need for.
Anyhoo, my next mission is to get out of this apartment and into some dirt!
I met a woman who grows 80 percent of her own food in the backyard of her Portland home. Saturday she invited me and B to walk through her garden. There, we met Jay, her resident bluebird who swoops down from her pear tree to retrieve peanuts from an opened hand. We got to see the benefits of compost toilets, which produce "humanure" and feed her garden so well that she scoffs at the idea of Miracle-Gro.
She's got four types of pears, three plum trees, figs, peppers, tomatoes, squash, celery, cabbage, snow peas...basically a better veggie and fruit selection than Fred Meyer, and it's all organic, of course. She's even got a menopausal herb section. Plus, she doesn't ever have to wait in line at the checkout, she simply steps out her back door. I did a little tally with the help of my online banking and found that I spend between $250 and $300 a month on groceries, and if that bill vanished, in 5 years I'd have an extra $12,000 to do whatever with. And no, she doesn't put any money into the garden, either.
For mulch, she simply opens her door and listenes for chainsaws. Then she walks to wherever the noise is coming from, and asks for the sawdust or wood chippings. She gets cut grass the same way. Puts it all into her compost, and after a few months, gets the best free dirt ever.
She says she'd rather spend her time doing this than going to work for the money to buy food. Duh, me too. She's even taken it a step further... she grows fibers too, and spins her own yarn. She harvests silk from silkworms, and dyes her clothes she makes with plants she grows. She cancelled her trash service--without the packaging from prepared food, she doesn't have that much to throw away. She uses powdered toothpaste, etc.
She isn't your normal Portland hippie-dippy type. Sure, she's got bumper stickers plastering the back of her Subaru wagon like everyone else within city limits, but she's not even a vegertarian, she eats her rabbits. She's down to earth and considers a lot of what she does to be political. If she's not buying potatoes shipped from Idaho or bananas from Colombia, then think of how much gas/oil/US involvement in foreign countries/pesticides, etc., we don't have a need for.
Anyhoo, my next mission is to get out of this apartment and into some dirt!
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