(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.
----------------
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.
.