“There are many more ways we can adapt. For example, instead of using up our energies harping about big farmers (whom of course we need right now to provide enough food for all of us), buy your own little patch of land to turn into an oasis of food and wildlife abundance. More and more people are doing this rather than standing around wringing their hands about global warming. Your little sanctuary will not be prone to disappear when the inevitable financial crises hit the big commercial farms.”
Source: Gene Everlasting: A Contrary Farmer's Thoughts on Living Forever
“My ducks give me eggs, and I took two of those eggs and nurtured them under a dome to produce two ducklings. In a way, I am their mother, and I think Hallmark should make a special card to honor me.”
Source: Powdered Saxophone Music
“From the moment that the first plow blade bit into the crust, the homesteaders began to destroy the foundations of their new life, and in a very few years the crust was gone--used up, scattered, blown away by the dry summer winds.”
Source: Bad Land: An American Romance
“Autumn brings the harvest. There's a race to gather the final fruits of the year's labor, and then to dry, preserve, and store them for winter. (Because most of us no longer homestead, this autumnal hoarding impulse often expresses itself as frenzied holiday shopping.)”
Source: The Spirit of Botany: Aromatic Recipes and Rituals
“Everyone across America had the same idea at the same time. Chickens became the toilet paper of the spring.”
Source: Back to the Prairie: A Home Remade, A Life Rediscovered
“The medieval mystics had a word for it—derelict. It's a good word, conjuring up as it does empty stables with their rotting planks leaning outwards like gaping teeth, their innards just rusting machinery and corroded pipework. Dereliction. The state of not being cared for.”
Source: The Well
“The homesteading generation's belief in education created the same Hobson's choice that so many farm families had to face. Children educated to become nurses, teachers, lawyers, pharmacists, insurance agents, doctors or police officers do not in general return to carry the family farm into the future. To use their education, they have to leave home and farming. And to complete this bittersweet irony, their children's success in other occupations were exactly what the homesteader generation had hoped for them. In a phenomenon familiar in both white and Black communities, the farming generation's deep commitment to educating their children produces children who were not, for the most part, interested in farming.”
Source: Great Plains Homesteaders
“When Gene was building his log workshop a few years ago, a helicopter flew over, circling back to the clearing next to our cabin. It was one of the Mirelli boys. Todd Mirelli plunked his chopper down in the clearing, jumped out, and came over to chat. He was building his own log cabin and wanted some tips from Gene. He truly did “drop in,” in the very sense of those words.”
Source: Finding Peace in the Wilderness: Journey to a Simpler Life
“If the way you've been treating me is a mark of fondness, maybe you'd better take a fresh look at your interpersonal communication skills.”
Source: Dream a Little Dream
“But with the morning came hope, and a brighter view of things.”
Source: North and South