(no subject)
Mar. 19th, 2021 11:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
brin_bellway[cw: food, (mild) apocalypse, (fairly mild) unsanitary]
>>and we have to imagine that most of that added textile production would be consumed by the family (because people like having nice clothes!).
>>The only thing you didn’t cover was how good the flavor is of your first vine ripened tomato or cantaloupe! Home grown really does taste better, both from flavor and the hard won sweat equity known as pride!
I hear stuff like this a lot (also that thing about people liking a wine more if they believe it to be expensive), and it always boggles me.
How...how does that *work*? I struggle to imagine what it would be like to be the kind of mind that perceives more expensive (whether in money or effort or time) things as being more enjoyable.
I enjoy expensive things *less*. They are tainted by the acute awareness of how much went into them: "I went through all that shit for *this*?". Peanut butter is tasty in isolation, but its flavour is further improved by the comfortable knowledge that this was a *fantastic* use of fifteen cents of materials and ten seconds of prep time. When I eat peanut butter, I have no regrets.
---
I feel like I *ought* to practise gardening enough that I can grow victory gardens when needed, but god, growing your own food is always such a letdown. You're out there in the dirt and the bugs and whatever cocktail of airborne toxins the plants feel like putting out this week, labouring hour after hour, week after week, and after you've harvested (getting jump-scared multiple times by tomatoes that turned out to have rotten patches on the side you couldn't see until after you picked them), you end up with...some garlic scapes (which might seem irreplaceable because you can't directly buy them, but it turns out if you put a bunch of garlic on some asparagus it's basically the same), a few zucchini, *maybe* a couple bell peppers if you're lucky, and approximately one dollar worth of potatoes.
(meanwhile your mom is waxing lyrical about the glory of home-grown tomatoes, because apparently she is one of Those people; you never liked tomatoes anyway, not even when growing them was somebody else's problem)
---
I guess if I *needed* to make my clothes look fancy for political reasons, I'd do what I had to do (while quietly resenting every minute of it), but if it's just for *myself*? No, dude, if I spent one zillion hours making the cloth for that dress, it is whatever fucking colour came out of the loom. *Fuck* decorating, I got *enough* shit to do.
---
I've been thinking of trying mushroom farming. Apparently you can do it indoors, avoiding most of the filth and bugs and poison normally involved in gardening. And if you manage to overextend and end up with too many mushrooms (I think this has only ever happened to us with tomatoes, but it's not *completely* unheard of), you can just dehydrate them.
I hear about permaculture and food forests, but it's always people approaching it from angles like Being One With Nature and Encouraging Native Species, and it's only if you read between the lines that it kind of sounds like there's only a *few* years of backbreaking labour and then things mostly settle down. I'm not sure if I'm actually reading into it correctly there or not.
(I have a mulberry tree and it's technically worth it, in that I put so little effort into it that the couple dozen berries I get each year are enough to be worthwhile. (The rest are snatched up by birds at zero-dark-thirty.)
(The birds will not be able to reach my mushrooms.))
>>and we have to imagine that most of that added textile production would be consumed by the family (because people like having nice clothes!).
>>The only thing you didn’t cover was how good the flavor is of your first vine ripened tomato or cantaloupe! Home grown really does taste better, both from flavor and the hard won sweat equity known as pride!
I hear stuff like this a lot (also that thing about people liking a wine more if they believe it to be expensive), and it always boggles me.
How...how does that *work*? I struggle to imagine what it would be like to be the kind of mind that perceives more expensive (whether in money or effort or time) things as being more enjoyable.
I enjoy expensive things *less*. They are tainted by the acute awareness of how much went into them: "I went through all that shit for *this*?". Peanut butter is tasty in isolation, but its flavour is further improved by the comfortable knowledge that this was a *fantastic* use of fifteen cents of materials and ten seconds of prep time. When I eat peanut butter, I have no regrets.
---
I feel like I *ought* to practise gardening enough that I can grow victory gardens when needed, but god, growing your own food is always such a letdown. You're out there in the dirt and the bugs and whatever cocktail of airborne toxins the plants feel like putting out this week, labouring hour after hour, week after week, and after you've harvested (getting jump-scared multiple times by tomatoes that turned out to have rotten patches on the side you couldn't see until after you picked them), you end up with...some garlic scapes (which might seem irreplaceable because you can't directly buy them, but it turns out if you put a bunch of garlic on some asparagus it's basically the same), a few zucchini, *maybe* a couple bell peppers if you're lucky, and approximately one dollar worth of potatoes.
(meanwhile your mom is waxing lyrical about the glory of home-grown tomatoes, because apparently she is one of Those people; you never liked tomatoes anyway, not even when growing them was somebody else's problem)
---
I guess if I *needed* to make my clothes look fancy for political reasons, I'd do what I had to do (while quietly resenting every minute of it), but if it's just for *myself*? No, dude, if I spent one zillion hours making the cloth for that dress, it is whatever fucking colour came out of the loom. *Fuck* decorating, I got *enough* shit to do.
---
I've been thinking of trying mushroom farming. Apparently you can do it indoors, avoiding most of the filth and bugs and poison normally involved in gardening. And if you manage to overextend and end up with too many mushrooms (I think this has only ever happened to us with tomatoes, but it's not *completely* unheard of), you can just dehydrate them.
I hear about permaculture and food forests, but it's always people approaching it from angles like Being One With Nature and Encouraging Native Species, and it's only if you read between the lines that it kind of sounds like there's only a *few* years of backbreaking labour and then things mostly settle down. I'm not sure if I'm actually reading into it correctly there or not.
(I have a mulberry tree and it's technically worth it, in that I put so little effort into it that the couple dozen berries I get each year are enough to be worthwhile. (The rest are snatched up by birds at zero-dark-thirty.)
(The birds will not be able to reach my mushrooms.))
no subject
Date: 2021-03-21 03:51 pm (UTC)Yeah, I think the *most* important thing I've learned from gardening is the importance of division of labour and economy of scale. Subsistence farming is *really* not a thing you ever want to have to do.
It's just scary that we *tried* to grow a victory garden this year and it almost completely flopped. It turned out to be more of a test run--the grocery stores have limped along well enough during the plague that one *could* live entirely off of them without *too* much trouble, especially since we had enough liquid funds and storage space to smooth out most of the boom-and-bust supply on our end--but it was a test we failed. As such, I've been thinking about how to make a more solid backup plan for the *next* time grocery stores go wonky (which could well be much wonkier than this, and possibly longer).
(Speaking of which, have I thanked you lately for introducing me to canned peaches? They're delicious and have an excellent shelf life and I am very pleased to have them in my dietary toolkit. I've been buying the big cans that are about three portions' worth and keeping leftovers in a Mason jar in the fridge.)
---
>>you might have the climate for nut trees and "plant a bunch of herbs until one of them starts self-seeding in the plot" and tactics like that
Indeed I do: one area of my yard contains a whole bunch of feral oregano and two hazelnut trees. Unfortunately it turns out the hazelnut trees are incompatible with one another and *not* the breeding pair we supposedly bought, so we have never once gotten any hazelnuts out of them. We haven't done anything about it so far, but at some point we should probably add a third.
---
>>I have no good solutions except, like, "net everything and hope your birds are stupid and lazy this year"
I'm thinking of putting a net on the mulberry tree and seeing if that helps.
I suspect hoping for *my* local birds to be stupid is more tenable than hoping for *parrots* to be stupid.
---
>>I may also just throw up my hands and learn to enjoy whatever weeds are locally popular
We've been talking about that over in the Tumblr comments. I'm looking forward to trying dandelion flowers.
In my research I'm also hearing a lot of praise for amaranth. Next time I'm shopping at a store that sells plain amaranth seed (not made into pasta or anything) I'll buy some so I can try amaranth porridge and maybe pop-amaranth, and if I like it I might encourage some to settle my backyard.
no subject
Date: 2021-03-23 12:38 pm (UTC)It's in the name - it lets you subsist. No more than that.
>> have I thanked you lately for introducing me to canned peaches
I don't think you have! I'm glad you like them! (I need to buy canned fruit for my own place, but I'm back to living at the top of a suburban hill and grocery logistics are thus bad to being a massive pain)
>> two hazelnut trees
oooh hazelnuts are good! They'll grow up in the [more-temperate hills outside the city] but they burn pretty easily. My grandmother had some back when she owned a larger property.
>>I suspect hoping for *my* local birds to be stupid is more tenable than hoping for *parrots* to be stupid.
Parrots are smart and have knives attached to the front and come in huge numbers. At least they're brightly coloured and thus quite pretty when they're covered your tree/bush/basil-plant with thier bodies. I suspect many things are less hostile to gardening than parrots.
>> I'm looking forward to trying dandelion flowers.
That's fair, though I find the kinds of weeds which put out spikes and burrs and such to be very unpleasant whenever I have to interact with them, which is what the lawn at a previous house got when not weeded; picking spiked seed-pods out of my clothes is just not fun.