Bruce’s Poor Man Survival Bulletin
A Digest of Urban Survival Resources
For Independent Minded People!
ISSN 2161-5543
In This Issue:
1.
7 Easy
crops for your garden
2.
Thrifty, Unique gifts for Mother’s Day
3.
Plan 3D-Design solar homes
4.
Are workers just a liability?
The most remarkable thing about my mother is that for
thirty years she served the family nothing but leftovers. The original meal has
never been found." ~ Calvin
Trillin
7 Easy Crops by Craig Idlebrook
Not everyone is blessed with a green
thumb. Many gardeners are looking for low-maintenance crops after watching past
efforts fizzle. And even the best gardeners suffer off years, scrambling for
quick-growing crops to replant after poor weather or critter mishaps.
Don’t throw in the trowel! Here are 10
suggestions for crops that are easy to grow, including some quick-performers.
While there’s no guarantee in the growing world, these crops are a good bet to
succeed under your care, or in spite of it.
Garlic
While garlic’s an easy crop to grow,
growing perfect garlic can become a lifetime obsession. Getting started is
simple: In the fall, plant peeled cloves, pointing upward. Cover. Wait. Harvest
heads in the spring or summer.
These hardy plants basically grow
themselves. If you plant them in rich soil and regularly water them, the cloves
will produce bigger bulbs. Erratic watering and poor soil leads to smaller
cloves, but smaller cloves usually have a stronger taste. You can’t lose.
Green beans
There’s a lot to love about a plant that
feeds itself.
Green beans are nitrogen fixers; they
process nitrogen from the air rather than pulling it from the soil. In other
words, growing green beans is a tasty way to fertilize your garden.
They’re also quick growers. You can wait
until all danger of frost has passed to plant and still have plenty of the
growing season left. Green beans are an excellent candidate for a replacement
crop in late spring or midsummer.
Gently harvest the beans, and the plants
will produce all summer. If you get tired of green, try purple or yellow
varieties.
Peas
Another nitrogen-fixer, peas are great for
gardeners who can’t wait until the frost is gone to start planting. As soon as
the soil can be worked, you can pop peas into the ground.
Peas prefer some shade, but they’ll do
fine with full sun, if planted early. Plant peas in loose soil about a
knuckle-deep. Give them something for climbing to avoid fungus problems. Water
regularly.
Peas are the perfect garden-grazing food.
Children love being able to pick peas for munching while their parents are
working in the garden. Also, pea shoots are a delicacy.
Cilantro
The biggest problem with cilantro is
keeping up with it. Cilantro plants grow quick and bolt in the blink of an eye.
If that happens, you’ll find cilantro volunteers in your garden for years, and
wouldn’t that be a shame?
Stagger plantings of cilantro for a
continual harvest. Plant in containers or in the ground an inch apart and a
half-inch deep. Keep in full sun and water regularly.
Everyone has a strong opinion about the
taste of cilantro.
It’s perfect for salsa and salads, but if
you like the taste, you’ll find it fits well with almost any meal except
pancakes.
Chives
Plant seeds in sun or partial shade after
danger of frost has passed. Water regularly until established. Watch ’em grow.
Wait until well-established to harvest, and then eat regularly. Cut stalks 2
inches from base for continuous growth, but don’t worry about measuring. Chives
are hardy!
Use chives in any dish you would otherwise
use onions. They are a beautiful addition to eggs, and their flowers are great
for salads.
Potatoes
Potatoes are the king crop in northern
Maine, a growing area plagued with rocky, acidic soil and a terribly short
growing season. That’s all you need to know about a potato’s hardiness.
Like garlic, you can tinker endlessly with
growing the perfect potato, but you can grow good potatoes easily. They even
grow well in plastic bags filled with dirt, according to one potato blogger.
Potatoes can be planted as soon as the soil is worked, but you might want to
cover them if it’s a soggy spring. Plant again in June for a second crop.
Tempting as it is to use a shriveled
potato in the back of the fridge for seed, buy seed potatoes from the garden
center. They’re cheap and, hopefully,
disease-free. Cut up bigger seeds so that each chunk has two or three eyes.
Plant a foot apart in rows, closer in hills.
Dandelions
If you can’t beat them, eat them.
Dandelions are nearly impossible to keep out of your garden, but they also are
a great crop to eat. Every part of the plant is edible and extremely
nutritious. And talk about a no-maintenance crop.
The leaves are tastiest young, but you can
eat them anytime if you boil them long enough. Add young leaves to a salad or
sauté to add to any dish. The yellow flowers are versatile and tasty. The roots
can be brewed for tea, roasted or added to soups.
One word of caution: Dandelions are great
at soaking up toxins. Don’t harvest them near roads or in public places where
pesticides or herbicides are used.
Dandelion seeds sometimes are tricky to
buy, but why bother? You don’t have to go looking for them; they’ll find
you.
Excerpted from GRIT, Celebrating Rural America Since 1882. To read more articles from GRIT,
please visit www.Grit.com or call (866) 624-9388 to subscribe. Copyright 2012
by Ogden Publications Inc.
Find Your
Timewasters. Keep track for one
week of all the ways you waste time. Do you spend 10 minutes finding your keys?
If so, make a key hook by your door, and use it. Do you forget "that one
item" when you go to the store? Keep a list on your refrigerator and, each
time you empty something, add it to the list.
PM’s
Compendium of Useful Resources
Genetically modified
crops have been shown to have some
very negative effects on the environment and on human health. But the USDA has approved 80
different genetically engineered crops and has never denied a single one. At
this point, approximately 70 percent of all processed foods in the United States contain
genes that have been genetically engineered.
Unique Mother's Day gifts
Show Mom you learned a
thing or two about the value of a dollar. Our super chic (and cheap) picks for
Mother's Day gift picks include something for every mother and every budget.
Building a new solar
home or on adding
energy-efficient features to your existing house? Here are some design ideas and free building guides
Mother Earth
News magazine has provided
solid information on many topics related to sustainable living and natural
building for several decades, and now many of these articles are available
on-line. I've compiled a list of links to some of their best articles on
passive solar design, landscaping and retrofitting, by experts like Dan Chiras
and Gary Reysa. Combined, the articles add up to a book-length primer on green,
energy saving design. They are yours to read and use for free.
Click here to get the Mother Earth News
Solar Design Guides >>>
http://www.todaysplans.net/use-motherearthnews-free-solar-green-home-guides.html
Plan3D is a
website that will let you
experiment with your solar design ideas before you build. It's a simple and
intuitive CAD program
Get Tara’s Best Kept Secret to Balance for Busy Moms
The Nanny
State Updates…
Top 5 Biggest Concerns About CISPA
The House on Thursday opted for an earlier-than-expected vote on the
controversial CISPA bill, which now moves to the Senate. But what's the big
deal with this bill? How might it affect the average Web user?
The Cyber Information Sharing & Protection Act (CISPA) is intended
to allow for information-sharing between private companies and the government
in the event of a cyber attack…as we all know, it’s a challenge to trust the
government anymore. Read more at:
The Parting Thought –
The average duration of unemployment in the United States today is about three
times as long as it was back in the year 2000.
And according to a
recent Wall Street Journal article, the number of announced job cuts is actually rising
again....
Also, announced jobs cuts rose 7.1% in April,
according to Challenger, Gray & Christmas, to 40,599 — and up 11.2% from
last April — another bit of evidence that the jobs market isn’t doing well.
Economic conditions in
the United States have been steadily getting worse for quite a while, but that is not the only reason
for our employment problems.
There are two
other trends that I want to briefly mention…
1) A lot of jobs that
used to be very labor intensive are now being replaced by technology. Thanks to
robotics, automation and computers, a lot of big companies simply do not need
as many workers these days. Those are jobs that are never going to come back.
2) As labor has become
a global commodity, millions upon millions of U.S. jobs have been sent overseas. Today, you are not just competing for a job with
your neighbors. You are also competing with workers on the other side of the
globe. Unfortunately, it is legal to pay slave labor wages in many of those
countries. By sending our jobs out of the country, big corporations can also
avoid a whole host of rules, regulations, taxes and benefit payments that they
would be facing if they hired American workers
Workers are
increasingly being viewed as "liabilities", and there is a good
chance that the moment you become "expendable" to your company you
will be kicked out on the street.
That is one reason why
I am encouraging people to consider starting their own businesses. If you work for
someone else, your security can be taken away from you at any moment. But if
you work for yourself, you aren't going to get fired.
“Until the next
revolution”, the Poor Man
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