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Surviving Hard Times - Ninurta - 03-26-2023
I'm creating this thread as a repository for information I happen to run across on the internet concerning how to squeak by when times are tough or money is tight... like during a depression or economic downturn.
The Appalachians are no stranger to hard times. When white folks first settled here, they mostly just brought a rifle and some shootin' fixin's, an ax or tomahawk (or both if they wanted to be ostentatious), a belt knife that doubled as an everything knife, and maybe a fistful of seed corm.
A lot of folks in those days claimed virgin territory based on "tomahawk improvements". What that meant was that you wandered around until you found a likely piece of turf you wanted to claim, marked the corners of it by blazing trees at the corners with your tomahawk,and then erecting a half-face lean-to or a brush arbor, threw a handful of corn seed into the ground to show you were "farming", and then left it there to grow while you went off to the land office to register your claim, which could take a couple months of travel.
Those settlers learned a lot from the Indians, and it was hard to tell one from the other just going by lifewways. They lived on game from the forest in combination with corn, beans, squash, greens and whatever wild fruit they could locate. They dressed themselves in the skins of the game they ate.
That's the way it was for the next 100 or 150 years here.
Over time, stock was added to their reportoire to decrease the need to go out hunting their dinner, and more folks started dressing in wool and linen as their farming inventory increased.. Cotton never caught on here because the climate precluded them from growing their own.
As time rolled onward, the coal companies moved in and provided "gainful employment", but the net result of that was that the locals depended more on a paycheck and manufactured stuff brought in by the coal companies to stock the company store, and less on self-reliance.
That's how it was during the Great Depression around here, although farther north where my Dear Old Dad was from, and where mineral wealth had not yet been found to be exploited by outsiders, the "coal boom" was not felt. Nor did their lives change up there much from their ancestor's way of life. During the Depression, there was apparently plenty of stuff to buy, but no money to buy it with, Folks had to get creative in their cooking to make whatever they could get stretch farther. Hunting came back into vogue, but there was little time for it for folks here working in the mines, and ammunition was hard to get. Even in my day, my dad still counted my shells when I went out hunting, and when I returned, and there had better be a game item for each expenditure of powder, or there was hell to pay.
Around here, in coal country, gardens were still raised, but they were tended mostly by the women and children, since all the men were sequestered away in a hole in the ground and steadily digging the walls away that supported to roof for most of the day. It also fell to the kids, mostly the older sons, to do the hunting.
You never know when times like that might come back again, economics being a fickle bitch when she's run by knotheads and idiots.
Some of the ways food was stretched during the Depression - and I've eaten most of this stuff, especially the corn bread and the potato cakes.
Good advice from Australia on 6 things to pack your garden with for high returns to keep you from starving. I can live without the cabbage, but to each his own. Corn comes in a staggering number of varieties, but at least one sort of flint corn or dent corn should be included - it grinds better to make corn meal and flour.
Not many folks grow gardens here any more, and most of those that do are older folks. Younger folks have again become too dependent on the outside world, and if that world ever lets them down (as it has done to every single one of their ancestors), they'll either starve or face a steep learning curve, having to learn farming that they should have payed attention to earlier..
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RE: Surviving Hard Times - Ninurta - 03-26-2023
As if in confirmation of my rant above regarding the coal mines and the lack of farming compared to former days, I ran across this video on YouTube. When it said "the poorest county in America", I was certain that it was regarding the county my Dear Old Dad grew up in, but I was mistaken.
This is McDowell County, WV. It's right across the state line from where I'm sitting, so the same culture and economic area. Same accents. Same attitudes. Same everything. Even the same landscape. This is what life is like right here where I am, right now. We don't really have to wait for any economic collapse - it's already on us, and has been for some time ever since the Robber Barons came in to steal our resources, and then the Socialists came in right behind them to shut everything back down and keep us in the poor house.
Blankenship is a common name around here, and unless I'm mistaken, this Sandy Blankenship that is interviewed went to school with one of my sisters. It was a long time ago, and I left here for 30 or 35 years and didn't keep up with everyone, so I can't be sure.
There is a place in the video where the narrator says "I went outside, and there was the wood stove burning". That's not, strictly speaking, a wood stove. It's a smoke house. Someone is smoking a deer they've killed to preserve it for the coming year, until deer season rolls around again.
Not really about surviving hard times, but then again it is. Calamity doesn't always hit everywhere all at once.
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RE: Surviving Hard Times - 727Sky - 03-26-2023
The last video about W.V. is truly sad.... I have thought about doing some garden stuff around here but I never have. We have some land down the street where rice and vegetables are grown... People farm the land and we get 50 to 30% of the crop (depends on the crop) during harvest... Last time I looked we had 8 100+pound bags of rice in our upstairs storage area and that is from last years harvest.
The house sits in front next to the road and the back yard is about 2.5 acres of jungle with everything you can imagine a jungle grows..
Prices have increased for western foods like canned soup or cereal but I seldom buy or eat western food..One thing about Asians is they know how to make food out of just about nothing or anything as long as there is rice..and as long as there is not some kind of rice blithe I do not see a problem with rice around here.. Rice is their bread IMO.. Pork, Chicken, Fish and sea food are the staples..Beef is expensive and usually not very good ...Cattle take to much room in Asia where every square inch of land is claimed by someone, but, early in the morning and still dark you need to be careful driving as they do not put tail lights on cattle as the walk them down the road to a spot where they have permission to let the cattle graze... You can tell they are on the road by all the cow shit so slow down.. !!
RE: Surviving Hard Times - Ninurta - 03-26-2023
(03-26-2023, 08:28 AM)727Sky Wrote: The last video about W.V. is truly sad.... I have thought about doing some garden stuff around here but I never have. We have some land down the street where rice and vegetables are grown... People farm the land and we get 50 to 30% of the crop (depends on the crop) during harvest... Last time I looked we had 8 100+pound bags of rice in our upstairs storage area and that is from last years harvest.
The house sits in front next to the road and the back yard is about 2.5 acres of jungle with everything you can imagine a jungle grows..
Prices have increased for western foods like canned soup or cereal but I seldom buy or eat western food..One thing about Asians is they know how to make food out of just about nothing or anything as long as there is rice..and as long as there is not some kind of rice blithe I do not see a problem with rice around here.. Rice is their bread IMO.. Pork, Chicken, Fish and sea food are the staples..Beef is expensive and usually not very good ...Cattle take to much room in Asia where every square inch of land is claimed by someone, but, early in the morning and still dark you need to be careful driving as they do not put tail lights on cattle as the walk them down the road to a spot where they have permission to let the cattle graze... You can tell they are on the road by all the cow shit so slow down.. !!
I don't know how bad the drugs are around here, since I don't get out much and circulate among the heathen any more. I do know that it damn near takes an act of congress for a pain patient to get any pain killers at all. Grace had her back broke and has had 3 back surgeries, and is in constant pain, and she can't get any. Instead, she gets occasional steroid injections and nerve cauterization about every 8 months or so to control it.
From my time working at my last job, I gather opiate abuse is fairly common, and folks have found ingenious methods of passing drug tests. Marijuana is endemic, and is used for pain control as well, but it's been legalized here... but the nearest legal dispensary is 70 miles away. I've heard they have done away with medical marijuana cards being required to make purchases there, but I don't know that for fact, since I've never tried to go inside one. If push came to shove, I'd rather grow my own anyhow, since then I know what is in it, and would know it hasn't been laced with fentanyl, since I'd know where it came from. When they made it incredibly difficult to get legal pain meds, the cartels moved in to supply the vacuum with fentanyl, and now that shit is in just about everything.
We are surrounded by cartel bases - Sinaloa Cartel to the west, Jalisco cartel to the east and south. I've only seen two Cartel folks here in sighting distance, but took a couple shots at them from the woods, and they've not been back. That was not long after the sheriff's department rolled up a safe house operation they had here, when they were trying to re-establish. They can take that shit elsewhere - I ain't having it in my holler.
I think what they are finding is that hilbillies can get every damn bit as grouchy as a cartel sicario in some of these deeper, darker hollows, so they are setting up in relatively safer areas on the perimeters of the area and employing locals to mule the drugs in to the places that are less safe for them. There's a reason "revenuers" often came into these hollers and never came back out, and now the cartels are having to learn that same lesson all over again. Doesn't really matter that it's some of the locals protecting their own drug operations from "furriners", but it doesn't help that both the law AND the local drug producers as well as locals that just don't want cartels in operation here are all stacked up against them here. The combination can make this pretty dangerous ground for them to tread.
And we have a LOT of abandoned mine shafts still in the ground to hide bodies in. An invasion of the size they'd need to take over would not go unnoticed by the law men, and then it would be on in earnest, with everyone shooting at them both on the way in and on the way out... and they don't want that kind of attention.
So they try to play nice here, and not draw too much attention of the negative sort. A couple years ago the Feds rolled up a Jalisco operation in a tiny place named Axton, VA, that spread tentacles all the way up the valley with distribution points as far north as Winchester, VA. Still, they are here (have set up again in the Roanoke area a couple hours east of here, I hear in the wind), and so "street drugs" are not safe for human consumption, since they may be laced with fentanyl. Fentanyl OD's are on the rise on account of that, and the fact that addicts don't much care so long as they get a fix before they shuffle off this mortal coil.
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Rice is one of the things we stock up on. Rice can stretch almost anything out into a meal, and we have to stock it up because Grace doesn't like beans. We've got about 30 pounds of pinto beans and another 20 pounds of rice laid back - but we all know that a pound of either will stretch out into several pounds of food when cooked, and when you stir in the fixin's, you've got a pretty decent meal.
I can't grow rice here, but I can grow corn and beans. This year all my corn is going to be sweet corn, which is great in season, but doesn't keep as well or grind into meal as well as flint or dent corn. I couldn't get flint or dent seed this year, but am still looking for it for next year, as well as a hand crank grinder to grind it into meal. I may try my luck with the Cherokee to see if I can get them to part with some of their corn and bean seed. The Eastern Band of Cherokee in NC have taken to growing pot, and are setting up a dispensary on the reservation, so they ought to have some spare seed for other stuff that won't be going into the ground the weed is going into.
People are not raising as many cattle here as they did when I was younger, and a lot of the pasture has gone back to woods. Last trip I made down through my old stomping grounds confirmed that, and I didn't see very many cattle - but I DID see a whole lot of goats now.
I have a photo taken from this yard in about 1965, and all the hills were cleared for pasture, cattle running on them. Now, it's all reverted back to forest. No more cattle here, but what I do have are bears, deer, squirrels, and rabbits. They wander right into my yard, despite the fencing I have around it. A couple months ago, I looked out my bedroom window and there was a 6 or 8 point buck grazing in the yard pretty as you please, unconcerned as hell, right beneath the window. The last snow we had of any account, I found bobcat tracks in the snow right on my deck, just outside the kitchen door.
Suits me just fine. I can't kill another man's cow, but nobody owns those deer, bear, rabbits, and squirrels.
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RE: Surviving Hard Times - EndtheMadnessNow - 03-26-2023
I've been through a few towns in Oregon and Nevada that look very similar to sad McDowell County. Aside from inner Portland, much of southern Oregon along the I-5 corridor is meth towns & campgrounds. It's like a cancer eating away everything and spreading outward. Today it's probably a combination of meth/opiates & fentanyl.
I grow a small garden every spring/summer, but admittedly not for survival. I just like the fresh crisp taste & that little bit of satisfaction I didn't have to rely on a grocery store plus save a few bucks as I'm a big beef eater.
From your local territory description I got a sudden chill of 'Deliverance' up my spine. Ha. Probably more real than I would know.
Distance from Welch, West Virginia to the wealthiest county in America is 367 miles...Montgomery County, Maryland.
RE: Surviving Hard Times - Ninurta - 03-27-2023
(03-26-2023, 07:31 PM)EndtheMadnessNow Wrote: I've been through a few towns in Oregon and Nevada that look very similar to sad McDowell County. Aside from inner Portland, much of southern Oregon along the I-5 corridor is meth towns & campgrounds. It's like a cancer eating away everything and spreading outward. Today it's probably a combination of meth/opiates & fentanyl.
I grow a small garden every spring/summer, but admittedly not for survival. I just like the fresh crisp taste & that little bit of satisfaction I didn't have to rely on a grocery store plus save a few bucks as I'm a big beef eater.
From your local territory description I got a sudden chill of 'Deliverance' up my spine. Ha. Probably more real than I would know.
Distance from Welch, West Virginia to the wealthiest county in America is 367 miles...Montgomery County, Maryland.
You ain't alone about the chill - when Grace and I were getting married, her daughter said to her "he's from WHERE? Haven't you ever seen the 'Wrong Turn' movies?" ROFLMFAO!
It's really not that bad around here. Hill folks are easy to get along with so long as one observes a few simple rules, the foremost of which is "don't be minding other folks' business". Live and let live. Mountaineers are the sort of people who will do anything in the world they can for you... until you piss them off. Then they'll do anything in the world they can TO you. So the easiest way to get along here is just not to piss folks off - pretty much like anywhere.
My son was raised in one of the wealthiest counties in America - Loudoun Co., VA. When he started raising his own kids, he decided that Loudoun County was no kinda place to raise children, and got the hell out of Dodge. He got out just in the nick of time - look what a mess that place is now, monied or not.
My "garden" is beyond "small" - it's positively TINY. I have another patch about 20 miles south of here that I can raise a garden on, but don't fancy the constant driving to tend to it.
There is also plenty of stuff to gather here. In a good mast year, I can gather literally tons of hickory nuts, black walnuts, acorns, and beech nuts. Matter of fact, it's about time for ramps (wild leeks, in case you've never heard of them) to start poking their leaves out of the ground in the woods, so it'll soon be time to go hunt some of them down.
Actually, the black walnuts pretty much gather themselves - they roll down hill and get back-stopped by the wall of my house. Year before last, they were piled almost as high as the windowsills all along the back of the house.
Really, there is so much stuff growing wild here, and free for the gathering, that if push came to shove I'd only have to use a store for a very few things, like coffee.
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RE: Surviving Hard Times - Chiefsmom - 03-27-2023
I have my grandfathers Foxfire books.
Worth more than gold to me.
And really, just a fascinating and educational read.
I was thinking about starting another gardening thread here shortly.
Good idea for a thread!
RE: Surviving Hard Times - Ninurta - 03-27-2023
(03-27-2023, 12:55 PM)Chiefsmom Wrote: I have my grandfathers Foxfire books.
Worth more than gold to me.
And really, just a fascinating and educational read.
I was thinking about starting another gardening thread here shortly.
Good idea for a thread!
The Foxfire Books are an invaluable resource for self-sufficiency Appalachian -style. I started using them back in the '70's BI (Before Internet) and still use them. As a matter of fact, I've managed to acquire the whole set in PDF format to keep up with the times.
Good stuff!
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