A NEW YEAR NEW PLANS

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These price rises affect everyone, but they hit the homesteader the hardest-they have hit us that way. The problem is that we have practically no flexibility to switch our spending around like someone in the conventional money economy. In effect, we are providing too many of our own needs to coast through this inflation without a care. For example, since we make our clothes and grow our food I can't delay buying a new suit or Louise can't switch from $1.00 a head fresh broccoli to a 20 cent can of green beans and use the savings to pay the electric company (whose bill charges have risen to about three times what they were just a couple of years ago). We have no choice but to come up with the cash; we can't reduce our consumption really because we've already cut it to the lowest level we care to accept. And that is the case with just about every bill we get; the item is essential to our way of life, we cannot do anything to reduce the amount we use and during the past two years the cash cost has doubled or tripled or worse. And the worst is yet to come.

Now, I'm not complaining. Louise can always turn out a double batch of hanging planters and fortunately there seem to be enough good folks willing to read what I have to say about gardening that I can cut down on bass fishing and spend more time in front of the typewriter. So all I'm saying is, before you go a homesteading, be sure you .can do more or less the same thing.

PLAN YOUR INCOME

Before you take off for the country, double check your projections of cash income needs and triple check your source or sources. Compared with a decade ago I'd recommend boosting the priority you assign to getting free of such fixed costs as heating oil or electricity. Our one biggest cost these days is energy of all kinds gas for cars and tillers, heating oil and electricity for the depth of winter when the wood fires leave you singed fore and frozen aft. If we had it to do over (or if and when we move the homestead again to escape "civilization") we would place availability of alternative energy sources high on our list of priorities in a homestead location. Probably even higher than fertility of the soil, which can always be built up organically. But only nature can power an electricity generating windmill or waterwheel, and harnessing either wind or water on our place will be a real challenge,

For folks with no hard preference for homestead location I'd strongly suggest checking out Appalachia where hill country land is cheap, water is plentiful, and there are many places where you can dig your own coal from surface seams that are too small for commercial mining. Or you might want to stay close in to a town to reduce travel cost. Might even locate near a genuine city to have public transportation, medical clinics, and jobs. Even if it does mean loss of some of the joys of wilderness living (such as the whippoorwills which make sleeping through either dawn or dusk on spring evenings an impossibility and the deer which make themselves nuisances in our corn every fall).

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