Word from a harvest Book

On Drying Food "There is now a strong trend among gardeners to think dry, just as farmers have been doing for thousands of years, and as many gardeners still do in countries where each person is directly responsible for producing at least some of his own food. The reason is that more Americans are thinking about gardening as a way to produce food that will be used all year long. Pressed by rising food prices, international uncertainties, and worries about power shortages, they are looking more to a small plot of land as a means to supply food for the family table all year long."*

This sounds a whole lot like modern sentament but this book is actually the *"Organic Gardening Harvest Book", by the editors of organic gardening and farming, Rodale Press, Emmaus, PA 1975. Fourteenth Printing 1984.

There is a lot of talk about total economic collapse these days. These are tough conversations that frankly scare me a bit - and make it so that we are preparing to make do because I think that the climate and economic situation is dire enough that tough times are on their way.

But I also think it is always healthy to have a ballast to this thinking. For me that balance is that every decade (yes even the 1980's) has had this kind of thinking going on. Every generation and envisioned their generation as being the last - whether from religious apocalypse or a man-made one.

I have to take the attitude that I do what I do because it is the right thing to do. I think that the most responsible way to live is to not be utterly dependant on a system of grocery stores, and economic systems. It think stewardship of God's earth (not the human's earth) means we have to reduce our wasteful and trash-producing ways and to try and leave something for generations to come.

So even if TEOTWAWKI doesn't arrive, hopefully other generations will - and that there will be someting left for them.