The Safecastle Freedom Award New Media Contest: I'm a finalist!

Safecastle ran a "new media" contest over most of 2011, seeking short written articles and short video pieces on some aspect of preparedness. Fifteen blogs hosted the contest entries, each of them choosing one essay and one video to submit as a finalist to Safecastle. I submitted mine through Rural Revolution. And I'm their finalist pick!

Here's a link to all the finalists so you can read them. Mine is titled Preparedness for Young People.

I'm really happy about this. Being a finalist is pretty cool, but maybe even more cool is that Don and Patrice of Rural Revolution have a small family business of making wooden drinking tankards by hand. They're amazing pieces of art AND they are functional. Take reasonable care of these tankards and they will last for decades. And I get one just for being one of their site's entries!

Garden update (lots of pictures)

"Black" hollyhocks (actually they are deep purple). A heritage variety we don't know the name of.

Horseradish which I just started from rootings. In a barrel so it doesn't escape.

These tomatoes are in the former chicken pen and are very, very happy
 to be rooting in a deep layer of old chicken poop. Lots of nitrogen.

Hops, taking over the garage as usual for this time of year.
People sometimes think we're growing cannabis. It's not surprising;
marijuana and hops are both closely related to hemp.

Wee little eggplants!

Potatoes in barrels.

More tomatoes, this time in the garden proper.
Lots of tomatoes setting, but look at all those yellow leaves.
Big difference from the chicken poop ones.
I have sent Barry out to buy fertilizer.

Sunflowers, growing tall. Barry planted them
rather randomly all over the yard.
He loves sunflowers. So do the birds.

Some nasty creature is eating all our cabbages.

Something new this year: Black beans!
Mostly just for fun; they are cheap to buy and you
have to grow a LOT of them to feed one person.

I was sprouting some black beans from the store
and decided to plant a few and they took right off.

Book recommendation: "This Life Is In Your Hands: One Dream, Sixty Acres, and a Family Undone," by Melissa Coleman

I picked this up at the library today and am reading it. It's excellent. And scary.

It's a cautionary tale that is worth reading by anyone who is anxious to try living off the land and the sweat of one's brow. A couple of idealistic young people bought 60 rocky acres of farmland in the 1970s and built a small self sufficiency farm there, and had two three little girls. They were making it, sort of, though rather precarious emotionally as well as other ways, when the middle child  wandered off and drowned in the pond on the property, and the whole family just spiraled down. The book is written by the eldest of the girls who was actually abandoned in the care of neighbors when the dust finally settled. Ugh.

I recommend it.

ADDED LATER, AFTER FINISHING THE BOOK: One thing I appreciate about the writing was the respect this woman shows for her parents, as flawed as they were and are. She honors them for doing the best they knew to take care of her and her sisters.