Tag: farming

SubscribeStar Saturday: End Farm Slave Labor

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Today’s post is a SubscribeStar Saturday exclusive.  To read the full post, subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for $1 a month or more.  For a full rundown of everything your subscription gets, click here.

Yours portly went down a weird rabbit hole earlier this week:  I was looking into how to grow mushrooms at home.  I have some large mushrooms growing in my yard after some recent rainstorms, and it got me thinking about how feasible (and easy) it would be to grow them myself.

Suffice it to say:  not easy enough.  Apparently, nothing grows easily except for weeds—and stories about how businesses can’t survive without imported slave labor.

That’s what I stumbled upon while searching for YouTube videos about growing mushrooms.  This video from Business Insider sounds innocuous enough—a small town in Pennsylvania grows millions of mushrooms every year—but the entire video is just a mainstream media sob story about how mushroom farmers have to destroy mushrooms because they don’t have fresh slaves:

At no point in the video does the reporter say, “maybe they could pay people more money to harvest these mushrooms, then they could harvest and sell their entire crop.”  The video does mention that demand for mushrooms has increased 15%, which—according to the law of demand—should mean that mushrooms can demand a higher price.  It seems as though mushroom farmers could use sell at a higher price and, therefore, pay their pickers more.

Regardless, the price of mushrooms will increase, but isn’t it worth it to pay a few cents more rather than employing indentured servants imported illegally from abroad?  Not only is mass migration corrosive to culture and law and order; it’s also immoral on two counts:  people break the law, and then end up exploited as slave labor.

Slave labor has another downside:  it massively depresses wages for legal workers.  The rest of us pay an invisible but real tax:  in exchange for cheaper mushrooms (or any produce), we get lower wages across the board.

It’s time for a second abolitionist movement on American farms.

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Stardew Valley

The Portly Politico12 Comments

One of yours portly’s goals for his long, indolent, decadent, self-indulgent, succulent summer break is to play more video games.  I am happy to report than my reversion into perpetual childhood is progressing nicely, as I’ve already logged nearly twenty hours (rough estimate) in Stardew Valley so far.  This week I am also running my annual Minecraft Camp, so I’m pretty much getting paid to play video games with kids all morning.

Stardew Valley is a farming sim game released in 2016.  It draws heavy inspiration from the Harvest Moon series (Story of Seasons in Japan; Wikipedia offers a good overview of the legal reasons for the different names).  In addition to farming—planting, watering, and reaping crops; raising livestock; clearing land for cultivation; upgrading and building farm buildings—the game encourages exploration and relationship-building.  Your character can spend all day fishing, for example, or exploring a network of caves (with monsters and loot!).  You can chop down trees, plant new ones, hang out at the saloon, romance the local singles, donate artifacts to the museum, and on and on.  You even have the opportunity to rebuild the dilapidated community center—or throw in with the big box chain store in town and bulldoze it.

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SubscribeStar Saturday: Pee Dee State Farmers Market Plant & Flower Festival

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Today’s post is a SubscribeStar Saturday exclusive.  To read the full post, subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for $1 a month or more.  For a full rundown of everything your subscription gets, click here.

Festival season continues apace; ergo, my reviews/travelogues/retrospectives/self-indulgent recaps of said festivals roll on as well.  If my use of the word “ergo” hasn’t turned your stomach, read on.

Last Saturday, 30 September 2023 I attended the Pee Dee State Farmers Market, which was hosting its annual Plant & Flower Festival.  I learned about the festival from, of all places, YouTube ads, featuring our long-serving Commissioner of Agriculture, Hugh Weathers.  Commissioner Weathers has held his office since 2004, and I’ve seen his name most of my adult life on gas station pumps (there’s a little inspector’s sticker that bears his name), but I’d never seen him until these commercials.

That uninteresting fact aside, I needed to pick up some pumpkins for carving, and I figured buying some Certified SC Grown pumpkins was the way to go.  There was also the added bonus of taking in another festival on a crisp, autumnal morning.

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TBT^2: Preserving Old Varieties

The Portly Politico6 Comments

Recently, I had the opportunity to catch up with an old friend of mine from college.  He has turned the backyard of his cookie-cutter suburban house into a veritable Garden of Eden—or, at least, an impressive little homestead.  He’s managed to grow everything from blueberries to squash to melons and more, to the point that he can substantially impact his grocery bill—and that’s with three energetic sons!  The boys have already stripped the blueberry bushes clean.

He takes great joy in being able to feed his sons and his wife from his garden.  Sure, they still have to buy groceries, but they enjoy delicious, fresh fruits and vegetables throughout the year.  My friend also takes particular care to save seeds for future plantings, and has an impressive compost pile in a dark corner of the yard.  He tells me that about once a year he’ll dig to the bottom of the pile and find pure, black, nutrient-rich soil.

He even raises his own worms!  He tells me it’s incredibly easy to do, a “low effort, high reward” project that helps to keep his garden’s soil rich and aerated.  His young sons also love helping out in the garden, and the worms are a fun, crawly project for them all.  They even have a dill plant with monarch butterfly caterpillars, which he has had to cover with netting so the birds don’t gobble up the beautiful larvae.

It’s truly inspiring seeing this kind of backyard agriculture first-hand, and my friend’s dedication to preserving heirloom varieties while also feeding his family is impressive.  He gave me some corn kernels for planting, which I’ll save for next spring.

I did not arrive empty-handed, though.  The broccoli plants that I so disgracefully let wither managed to survive!  I had one, impressive, beautiful plant return.  Rather than gobbling it up, I let it flower.  The little buds we see on supermarket broccoli will, if left to grow, blossom into gorgeous yellow flowers.  Over time, seed pods will develop after the petals fall; those pods and their stems turn brittle, and eventually fall to the earth.  Either the second broccoli I planted made a comeback, too, or I have had a new plant rise up from fallen seeds.

Regardless, broccoli produce tons of seeds, and I was able to take my friend a bag full of them.  As for my plant, I’m going to let nature take its course and see what happens next.

Here’s to letting a thousand broccoli flowers bloom!

With that, here is 11 August 2022’s “TBT: Preserving Old Varieties“:

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Supporting Friends Friday: Backwoods Home Magazine

The Portly Politico2 Comments

As I’ve noted in the past, I’m running low on friends to support.  There are still a few bloggers out there that deserve some praise, I’m sure, and I can think of a few that I really enjoy, but who are a bit too spicy to endorse outright (until blogging pays the bills—which is an extremely long way off—even I have to censor myself).

As such, I might be giving Supporting Friends Friday a hiatus starting in July.  I started it last June (with a post about real-life buddy Jeremy Miles‘s book of poetry, Hindsight: Poetry in 2020), so it’s had over a year—a good time in which to run its course.

I’m not saying it’s gone forever.  I’m just going to give my talented friends more time to churn out excellent work.  Supporting Friends Friday has really been beneficial to the blog, especially since honoring Audre Myers with a post on 27 August 2021; that brought over a whole new readership, and has led to more contributions in the comment sections and to the blog itself.

Of course, I could end up changing my mind by next week, so who knows?  That said, I thought I’d dedicate this “season finale” edition of Supporting Friends Friday to a publication I’ve come to enjoy and respect over the last year:  Backwoods Home Magazine.

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Shortages

The Portly Politico8 Comments

Everyone reading this post has noticed their grocery and gas bills shoot up over the past few months.  These are not the result of the war in The Ukraine, despite the mewling protestations of the Biden Administration to the contrary.  In part, they are the result of extended lockdowns during The Age of The Virus, and the subsequent disruption to the world’s “just-in-time” production model.  Shutting everything down immediately probably didn’t do much to stop the spread of The Virus, but it definitely stopped the spread of goods, and the production thereof.

But these shortages seemed largely academic until recently.  Sure, you’d hear about them here and there, and it was impossible to buy toilet paper for awhile, but other than a few panic-induced shortages, you could pretty much get what you needed, even if you had to pay double for it.

Now, for the first time since the very early days of The Age of The Virus, I’m getting seriously concerned about looming shortages—and not just a few missing luxury items from store shelves (not that toilet paper is a luxury item, but there are always substitutes for that), but the basic necessities of life.

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TBT: Egged Off

The Portly Politico11 Comments

Shortly over a year ago I wrote a piece about officious bureaucrats shutting down two little girls selling chicken eggs in Texas.  The girls were trying to help people out and make a few bucks after the crazy ice storm massively disrupted Texan supply lines.

Since then, I’ve obtained a source to bring farm fresh eggs to my home on an as-needed basis; it’s one of many small blessings for which I am thankful.  With food prices even higher than they were a year ago, free eggs is a huge boon.

I ended this post with the admonishment “The time to start growing and raising our own food is now.”  But even yours portly has largely ignored his own advice.

Let’s work on changing that in 2022.

With that, here is 30 April 2021’s “Egged Off“:

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Egged Off

The Portly Politico7 Comments

An unfortunately perennial story that always gets traction here on the Right goes something like this:  precocious youngsters, hoping to engage in some earnest enterprise, start selling lemonade or the like from a roadside stand.  The kids are doing well and making good money (for kids), until an overzealous local health board official sends in the cops to bust up the lemonade stand.  Like Treasury Department revenuers smashing up a yokel’s still, these local officials destroy children’s dreams—and sometimes slap them with a fine.

It’s a story that guarantees outrage, and highlights the clueless, stringent rule-following of bureaucracies.  Yes, yes—technically you’re not supposed to sell lemonade and hot dogs without some kind of license, and the health department is supposed make sure your establishment is clean.  But these are kids, selling stuff on the side of the road.  Why bother?  Let them have fun and make a little money.

The latest such story involves two young ladies selling eggs in their town in Texas.  The Lone Star State has been reeling since the major winter storm hit a month or so back, and food supplies have been disrupted.  Having some backyard eggs for sale surely helped out some locals.

Unbeknownst to the girls—but beknownst to some overweening Karen, no doubt—a local ordinance prohibits the selling of eggs, though it permits the raising of chickens on one’s property.  That’s asinine.  Why can’t people sell eggs in a small town in Texas?

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Gardening II: Late Winter Plantings

The Portly Politico3 Comments

After what seemed like two weeks of rain, we finally had a warm, sunny weekend here in South Carolina, with temperatures in the upper-seventies and clear skies.  South Carolina tends to go directly from the depths of winter to a hot spring (or cool-ish summer), and this sudden leap in temperature and climate corresponded with a sudden change in mood.  Instead of bundling up sleepily watching horror movies, the warm weather inspired some spirited outings.

Aside from a rather adventurous, muddy trip to Lee State Park (more on that in tomorrow’s post), my girlfriend and I dedicated Sunday afternoon to doing some late winter plantings (in keeping with my desire to homestead more on my property).  Growing season for most garden-variety plants begins much earlier here in South Carolina than other parts of the country, so we took advantage of the warm water to pot some edible plants, and put two directly into the ground.

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Phone it in Friday XVII: Modern Homesteading

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The weather is getting warmer—it hit a balmy 77 degrees at least one day this week here in South Carolina—and that means Spring is near.  Spring means gardening, and if I’m going to dive into the deep-end of converting my humble half-acre into a very small-scale farm, I’d probably better get crackin’ now.

As such, it was with great interest that I listened to an interview with Owen Benjamin, the stand-up comedian-turned-survivalist.  Benjamin is a controversial figure, and I don’t agree with some of his views, but, again, I can respect his knowledge in the area of homesteading without endorsing, say, his belief that the Earth is flat.

Regardless, Owen Benjamin’s message is a very Christian one:  don’t despair about the wicked craziness of the progressive Left and the materialism of the modern world.  Instead, “crush” it—be your own man (or woman), build something for yourself and your family, and give glory to Christ Jesus.  Creating culture is the way to save it.

With that preamble, I thought I’d share Benjamin’s recent interview with Blonde in the Belly of the Beast.  It’s a little over an hour long, but it’s worth your time.  One thing I learned is that growing some tomatoes and raising a few chickens is very easy, and that the barrier to entry for small-scale homesteading and farming is much lower than I initially thought.

Enjoy!

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