Nineteenth article in the LONL: Time goes by.

Wow. Look at that. It’s very nearly the middle of May already. Soon it will be June, then Graduation for the high school kids, then the forth of July will be here before we can blink! Then when we open our eye’s after that blink school and the fall holiday season will be starting up all over again.

Now, however, we have to get the last of the hot weather stuff planted in the gardens and harvest the end of the cool weather veggies. Then there are the things we can look forward to. Things like the graduations I mentioned above or the local Vol. Fire Departments annual BBQ dinner. That last will be this coming Saturday the fourteenth. They plan to start serving at five in the afternoon and keep going until there isn’t anything left to serve or folks stop showing up. (Just for y'all reading this in the blogosphere: The BBQ went great and tasted fan-totally-tastic! Ya shoulda been here, yum-mie! Don't know how much the VFD made on the event yet, just hope it was enough to keep the grass fire trucks on the road through the rest of grass fire season!)

I find myself working with the Community Seeds folks more than I’d planned. Brother Coop has some big plans for some things like a farmers market, organically grown produce and even vermi-composting. Things that I have been talking about here for a long time. I even have a chance to go to a conference on just those sort of things where I can learn more about them. Hopefully, I’ll learn enough to teach it to anyone I can tie down for the required amount of time. Should you be worried? Yep. I once was a Girl Scout. I know a little bit about tying knots. At least enough to know that untangling them can be tricky sometimes.

If you don’t know ‘vermi-’ refers to worms like red wrigglers and such. But of course if you’ve read enough of my articles in this paper you likely already know that.

Oh, about that conference I hope to go to with Brother Coop and another gal. If you want to find out about it just Google Growing Power. There’s some interesting information there.

I am just a bit disappointed with how many folks have adopted one or more of the nine 4x4 raised bed plots over at Community Seeds. I’ve been picking lettuce and spinach for my own use out of two of them. So Coop just told me to go ahead and pick one or two for my own. So I did. Wylie went with me this past Sunday and picked a mess of collard greens. He said they went down fine with beans and cornbread. I’ve enjoyed several tasty mixed green salads myself as well as cooked spinach.

Yeah. I did go over there and help plant the stuff. I’ve planted even more stuff since, especially some black diamond watermelons that I’m already drooling over and the plants haven’t even bloomed yet.

What I don’t understand is why some of the folks here in town who claim to be too poor to buy food haven’t lined up to get at least one of these 4x4 plots. Why they haven’t showed up to help with the tilling, the weeding, and the watering. All those things that must be done if you want to eat something that you’ve grown. I mean, come on folks! Dose the stuff out of a can really taste that much better that you absolutely have to get cash money so you can buy it at the store instead of growing your own.

Yeah, sure. It’s work. Sometimes hot, dusty and grimy. It also isn’t quick and you often have to wait for the season to be just right to plant or to harvest. To that complaint I say. SO. Get used to it. The way I see it with the budget crunch we are in there is no way the federal, state or even county government can feed us all much longer. I’m not even sure I’ll keep getting my Social Security Disability checks every month. That’s one of the reasons I’ve been wanting to turn my whole yard into a veggie garden and get chickens. Maybe this conference will give me some ideas on how to get that done.

Alt Op 17

Decided I better get this thing written and sent into the Lone Oak Newsletter before either of us were blown away. This is Tuesday and the weather folks say that today this end of Hunt county is in an area where there is a good possibility of severe thunderstorms and twisters. Only good thing about that is we might get more rain. We still need rain.
I’m about ready to let the folks who want these kittens come and get them! The little beggars are running around like nut cases trying to climb the walls . . . Literally! Climb the walls. Not kidding here. Ever seen a kitten trying to climb a wall? To bad I don’t have a camera maybe I could win money from that TV show or at least get a t-shirt.
As for my opinions this week. Where to start? The economy?
The economy is supposed to be going up. HAH! The only thing I see going up is the price of gas which means I can’t go hardly anywhere. I might have to find a weight watchers meeting closer to home if this keeps up. Not to mention cut back even further on my trips into the Greenville Wally World. Of course the one in Quinlan is a few miles closer according to the Google maps thingy. Why do I even bother going there? Simple there are things I just can not get here in Lone Oak. Don’t get me wrong now. If I could get those things here in Lone Oak I might still go into the big G just to get the heck out of Lone Oak occasionally. Providing I had the extra gas to do so.
By the way if you are one of those “make lemon aide out of life’s lemons” kind of folks you might be able to turn this problem with gas prices into a business. Probably not a big one but one that might feed you. Cause believe me, while gas prices might go down again they will never go as low as they were a couple of years ago, or even last year. If they do they will not stay there long.
What kind of lemon aide could someone with the right skills make out of this gas problem? Especially here in Lone Oak?
The main reason I’d be going into Wally World or to the Greenville Farmers Market would be for fresh fruit or Veggies, folks! Y’all do realize that there is almost no place in this town where you can go to get a sack of potatoes, a head of lettuce, some ‘matters and onions, apples, oranges, pears, or other such stuff. Yeah you can get a few of those, in small quantity at the LOG, thank goodness (and get well soon Dorothy!). But they don’t and can’t carry a lot of those things at any one time. So there’s a way to make some money right there. Or at least set up a trading situation.
A Farmers Market would be great here in Lone Oak, I think.
Yeah, I know, I know. It’s been tried. But that’s what I mean about someone with the right skills. The skill would be to get the local gardeners to back the thing! Maybe agree to trade the fruit or veggies they have for fruit and veggies they don’t have, or to grow mostly one thing while someone else grows mostly another. Heck, I bet that if someone had a green house that could grow some things like maters and peppers all year they could sure nuff sell them round here. They could at least sell salsa.
But the skill I mentioned above is the most important part of the idea. Getting folks together to back the thing. Trouble is that just isn’t my skill. I know what my skill is. I’m the wild idea person. I come up with them. Just wish I could find somebody who could pull the crazy things off.