Northern Farmer

A new year and it’s going good so far. We’re in a strange weather pattern up here, always cloudy, murky, and always the possibility of freezing rain or snow. The temp hovers around freezing day and night. This has been going on since before Christmas. I’m forgetting what the sun looks like. At least the days are short so we don’t have to look at the gloom all the time. Bright spot is with it this warm we’re not using so much firewood. Yesterday church started the New Year with a roar, I tell you, it would be pretty hard to survive in that church just to uphold social status like so many churches nowadays.

I’ve been busy with seed corn here daily, quite a system is developing. Also I will be getting some information on quite a number of Open Pollinated varieties one of these days in the mail. It’s been what I’ve been looking for, shorter day varieties for the northland. And they’re out there, but a person has to search a little. I’ll share any info that I get, maybe even start a separate page just for that. It’s a passion of mine. And studying all the different types of corns is unreal; I never knew all these things about such a wondrous plant.

We’re even planning on putting in a home patch for making corn meal for ourselves. And also planting “corn beans” as a companion crop with them. This is a step in family self sufficiency that I don’t come across all to often. At this point it’s only considered a hobby, although it should be more than enough for a years supply of food if need be. And the corn and beans would be open pollinated so we can restock all of our needs every year. That doesn’t mean we’d be eating corn bread and beans every meal, but the food supply is there, just in case. No worries about the power being out and spoiling, no cost at all in preserving these basic food.

In the future what will happen if there’s a huge disaster, natural or manmade, and there’s no power, or we can’t buy canning lids and such. No freezer to go to, no wheat to buy, stores empty. And I get a funny feeling this could happen. What good do hybrid seeds do us after the first year? A family corn and bean patch, and I’m not talking sweet corn here, would make all the difference in the world. And they’d last a long, long time in storage, cheap. It would be a family staple as it once was. Now this is not to say that this is all a person should raise, but many folks could easily and affordably raise these two staples and easily store them away. Cheap insurance, but a more important insurance than any that can be purchased today.

So I urge people to chew on this a bit. This is probably one of the most important steps anyone could take. It is a food system that becomes completely independent of everything the world throws at a person. It will fit almost any farm or homestead. And the start up seeds are very readily available at this point of time, yet. Remember, big ag wants these seeds destroyed. Don’t let them.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 2nd, 2006 at 7:17 pm and is filed under Northern Farmer. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.