Prudence and Poverty
The fake thrift of prepping PART ONE
After a couple years in a poor Mexican town where 90% of the houses are built out of found pallet wood, I see how “prepping” is a wealthy pursuit. Like thinking you’re being thrifty going to Home Goods and buying a $400 rug from last season at $725. Saving $325 by spending $400 is a wealthy pursuit too. I was totally that person most of my life.
Prepping and having storage and keeping pantry goods isn’t a thing here. Buying in bulk, canning in Ball jars, having the kind of stove that accommodates a stock pot to hold a bunch of ball jars, having a stock pot, knowing how to can, finding the lids for the Ball jars, having enough propane gas to boil the water for a long time in the stock pot on the big stove … besides all the labor? No gracias.
I heard my landlord say to my neighbor, “Why are you growing tomatoes? Luis has boxes of them at the tienda.” To be fair, the landlord is pretty daft, but he’s not wrong. In 50 years of living here he’s never run out of tomatoes. I don’t grow tomatoes anymore, I had a long decade of The Tomato Affair at my homestead/organic farm in North Georgia. Some years were great, most invited aphids and squash bugs to eat the zukes in the other garden beds. Those horned caterpillars also made an appearance and ate an entire summer’s worth of produce overnight. Unless you’re really really good and in love with the labor of gardening, it is a fool’s errand. I tried Square Foot Gardening, Container Gardening, Till/No Till, Permaculture, raised bed, drip irrigation, you name it, I gave it a go. It’s all really expensive. It’s all really tricky. I’m here to tell you that it’s worth it to pay more for food. Trust me.
I canned tomatoes one season. So much work and such a mess. I had an 18 foot long butcher block island and a deep farm sink and 6 burners in a pro kitchen with every tool imaginable and it was a pain. I made pizza sauce with them over winter. Meh. You can buy San Marzano’s in the store all year. Never again.
A lot of my tomato time was spent reading organic gardening books and in organic old timey social media pages swapping recipes with sister wives for soapy water and eggshells and blood meal magnesium soil amendments to keep away bugs, slugs, deer, rabbits, my own chickens, other birds, fox and of course dogs. Nothing says roll and dig like some blood meal. I found I simply couldn’t watch all garden beds and all animals all the time. I spent most of my time running to the chicken house to find out what was scaring the hens into screeching or to move their tractors to a new patch of grass. Brady, my dog who is 14+ now and with me still, was the chicken guardian. She took one or two eggs a day from the nesting boxes as a fee but did a good job of critter chasing.
I learned a lot in that decade. Mostly that I wasn’t going to waste time growing things that I could buy for less than $10/lb. Another rule was not to grow things that other expert and talented gardeners grew better than me. And that was everything. After much trial and error I figured out my soil and in the end, I would sell that before I’d sell vegetables or chickens. I just wasn’t great at it. I wanted a farm property so bad I could taste that shitty clay soil. I wanted out of the city so I fled…this is 18 years ago. I sold my restaurants and bought chickens. I thought I was Alice Waters. All I wanted was an egg yolk colored like a Seville sunrise.
I could grow swiss chard 11 months out of the year and every color of the rainbow. I was good at that. Raw, steamed, fried—I loved it. Stuffed it with goat cheese and mushrooms and took a lot of photos. Turns out the oxalates in the greens contribute to kidney stones, so I pumped the brakes on the chard intake. Broccoli, cauliflower, asparagus, carrots, sweet potatoes all took 100 years to figure out. I ended up just making sprouts and baby greens and some lettuce. You’ll stuff yourself like a rabbit shaped body pillow when they get rolling in season. And be quick because they dry out and bolt after the first sunny day. Best to grow in the winter.
I knew the answer. A Greenhouse.
A greenhouse in the South is about 120 degrees in the winter and 475 degrees in the summer. Before 9am. I turned it into a sweat lodge sauna after the first season. When your thermometer can’t read the temp because it’s too high, don’t go in there.
Unless you’re running a farmers market in your front yard (which of course you’ll need permits for) you’ll likely not need the bumper crop of green beans, heirloom tomatoes, mountains of crookneck squash, heritage breed chickens and their eggs, goat milk, lavender fields, rosemary acreage, apple orchards, fig trees and plums. Oh and the 4 blueberry bushes. You’ll want to sell those at a local farmers market and pay a fee over there or do a CSA box to sell your harvest to the community. I’d do that for a while and just as I was homing in on a niche thing to sell (artisan bread from a wood fired oven with organic flour and my own fennel seed and rosemary) for $6, someone else would come in and do the same for $5. Maybe without the fennel. So then you spend your days looking for a market manager who won’t allow duplicate products. And guess what you’re not doing. Tending your garden or baking your artisan bread that yields a profit of $2
I had the answer, yet again. I’ll need to start my own market. And so I did. I had a job in FL in the 90s where I put Green Markets in crappy town squares and unused parks for a publicity firm hired by the Downtown Development Board. I would do this in food desert hoods in Atlanta. A pretty standard formula and great for real estate developers and let’s face it, most things are just to make developers rich. Get a bunch of shiny organic sorta hippy folks wearing Free People scarves to sell their wares in a terribly dangerous neighborhood and hope the mommy stroller brunch set and other gentrifiers follow for some handmade soaps and yellow tomatoes. Lofts and Trader Joes can’t be far behind.
I drove all my eggs and breads and Mr. Stripey tomatoes and other treats to Atlanta at 5am and rented tables to other farmers for $10 each. It made enough to pay for my gas and for a kid assistant. Mostly I liked making Mix Tapes for the event if I’m honest. The Atlanta traffic, two hours on the road each way, and summer humidity ended that gig after a couple seasons. I’ve always been ambitious but when I do the math and see that I made more money sitting on my duff looking out the window, I was Back to the Boonies! I had moved OUT of Atlanta and sold a couple successful restaurants there why was I driving there on the weekend to sell beans? The image of Pastoral Pursuit I guess. So stress free, look at me. I got out of the rat race. Lies.
To Be Continued…
