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HarveyDarkey Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Mar-02-11 11:31 PM
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How the recession turned me into a scavenger
Edited on Wed Mar-02-11 11:31 PM by HarveyDarkey
By Felisa Rogers

I hear a bellow from above, unintelligible but happy.

"What?" I holler.

The bellow again. I detect words, but distance and thick underbrush are the enemies of meaning.

"He must have found some more up there," I say to Kamari, who is crawling on the ground 10 feet away, happily plucking hedgehog mushrooms from the blanket of dead leaves.

{snip}

When I moved from Seattle to the country, I imagined a well-stocked pantry. I could see myself happily squirreling away shiny Ball canning jars full of tomatoes and beets from the garden. I envisioned myself braiding garlic and maybe building a root cellar. What I did not imagine was relying on handouts from my friends to keep food on the table.

http://www.salon.com/life/pinched/2011/03/01/recession_turned_me_into_scavenger
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elias49 Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Mar-02-11 11:45 PM
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1. Thanks for this. Tagged for reading after Colbert
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emilyg Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Thu Mar-03-11 02:05 AM
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2. kick
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csziggy Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Thu Mar-03-11 02:14 AM
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3. Salon seems to be down
Bummer, looks like a good article.
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HarveyDarkey Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Thu Mar-03-11 08:28 AM
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5. Works fine for me
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csziggy Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Thu Mar-03-11 06:46 PM
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6. It worked for me today - just not last night n/t
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XemaSab Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Thu Mar-03-11 02:25 AM
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4. I had to jerry-rig the link:
http://www.salon.com/print.html?URL=/mwt/pinched/2011/03/01/recession_turned_me_into_scavenger

It's the print version, but if you hit "preview" you can read the article.
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SoCalDem Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Thu Mar-03-11 06:52 PM
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7. Living the "country life" is not as easy as many think it will be.
Unless you have grown up in that lifestyle, you will probably encounter more failures than successes, for a very long time.

Any gardener can tell tales of invasions of bugs that destroy everything.

My encounter with chinch bugs proved that..they left behind shredded green stuff..like confetti. There were so many, that I could HEAR them munching away..

Sometimes the weather gets you...like a massive hailstorm that gave me another confetti garden.

and then there were rattlesnakes (3 in 1 week) that made my veggies "too expensive" to pick:(

Another thing to consider is that until your first crop, you still have to eat something, and even after the crop, you will have to supplement.

Canning is an art, and many would-be canners end up quite ill, or fearing illness, afraid to eat what they have canned .
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