RM> > It would be possible to have a small garden built up, a few people
  > > down the road do that, but I always found the amount of work to
  > > grow food is a lot more than it is maybe worth in dollars by the
  > > end of the season.

AR>I produce my own eggs and have a plentiful vegetable production.

AR>The value of growing your own food is not in how much money you do save. You
  >save money if you are efficient, but that is not the point, only the advantag
  >The real point is that what you grow is much better than what you can buy in
  >t markets, and that you don't depend on anybody else for food.

That is true.. I suppose one of my shortcomings is I don't buy a lot of
fresh produce. Salad makings in season and things like onions, potatoes
and carrots, but those last 3 are not often truly 'fresh', having been
bagged for weeks or months most of the time.

AR>Have you heard of that blackout we had in Spain? The whole country was busted
  >upermarkets closed, petrol stations didn't work, and since most cooking is do
  >with electricity here, people today had to eat cold meals. In this scenario,
  >re were only two kinds of person:

AR>Kind one is the one who usually buys food, and spent the day scrambling aroun
  >ike a beheaded chicken because water supplies weren't operational and there w
  >no food in the markets today.

AR>Kind two is the one who has a year worth of canned vegetables and a room wort
  >f water barrels and spent the morning doing accounting and the afternoon havi
  >a beer with his horses while reading ADMIN Network and Security.

AR>Guess which kind of person used to laugh at which other kind of person for be
  > a dumb paranoid redneck :-)

AR>So yeah, definitively there is reason to grow your own stuff. I think there i
  >reat value of becoming less dependant.

I think I'd fall into the 'Kind Two' catagory. I always have enough food
here to last me for at least 3 weeks before I start substituting what I'd
normally eat for things I have in quantity. If I find foods on sale that
keep well at a good price (40%+ off) I tend to buy anywhere from a 3 month
supply to a years worth or more, so I usually have lots of Something.

Power outages lasting for a while can mess you up if you keep a lot
of frozen foods if you don't have a generator to make power, and
my sister recently found out when they lost power for a week that
having a generator doesn't mean gas stations are open during a wide
spread outage to buy more fuel to keep them running.

Also, most can cook things on a Barbecue, at least until you run
out of fuel to run that too..

We started off talking about gardens though and the other thing about
that, especially here where we probably have shorter and harsher
seasons than you do there, is that you do 3 or 4 months of work before
most of it is ready to eat, and then most of it gets picked fairly
quickly and you get 2 or 3 weeks of fresh meals while you figure out
some way to make the rest of your garden produce keep until you can
use it, so we're back to canned foods for lack of a better term for
most of that produce..

But things change if you are talking about losing power for weeks
or months, something that likely wouldn't happen in most places
in North America short of a war happening, which I won't totally
rule out until I hear what Trump comes up with next..   B)

---
 * SLMR Rob  * Does a stealth plane crashing in a forest make a sound?
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