Free-Range Living

FREERANGE FOOD FOR THOUGHT---------

         Not long back from 'vacances' en Normandie to find the eco holding 'festooned with flowers' - by far the best show ever, presumably the cooler, showery weather of May/June has suited them well. There's lots of greenery here but the vivid colour splashes of the flowers really sets it all off. C'est gorgeous, n'est-ce pas? And not only in the garden,two or three fields near here have had as good a harvest of sparkling colour from poppies as can be remembered.

 comme ca----
 
This weather hasn't suited everything, though. The blight's come early to the spuds, thanks no doubt to the 'catchy' wet weather. There looks to be a reasonable crop - they were got going quite early all under plastic in anticipation of impending blight attacks. A patch of earlies (second earlies, actually, which seem to come virtually as early as first earlies and then give more crop), has yielded well, now stored in buckets in damp earth to facilitate leeks being planted out on that ground. Tomatoes have gone seriously awry this year, being normally available by now (early July) but look about three weeks behind. Perhaps the weather did for them - having said that some hereabouts are picking ripe tomatoes - don't the home-growns just hit the tastebuds-something to look forward to.
 
Celery plants seem to have struggled too this year - they'll probably have to go in the 'early production’ glasshouse now to get an autumn crop. Ah well, can't win 'em all - win some, lose some. At least the peas and broad beans are yielding well, going into the freezer for next winter, and the spring cabbage and red cabbage crops have never been so abundant, and they're on the ground that hasn't had compost or wood ash this year - the fertility of the ground just seems to gradually build up - all 'for free' from 'waste', (compost and woodfire ash) -can't be bad.

Foregone frugality----?

'Not spending money', though, seems to be something of an out-dated past-time these days, with 'conspicuous consumption' seemingly the order of the day. Could, though, spending on new items mean that some potential satisfactions have to be foregone? Just thinking of here recently when two older pairs of loppers were combined to make one sound item, which gave a good feeling of 'self-reliant satisfaction'. Probably, though, 'modernly infra dig' - not being a good consumer-? You could say it was entrepreneurial though - re-cycling redundant resources into productive resources, and using initiative and creative thinking in the process - useful 'freeranger' traits - ?

Another option to 'chasing the dollar' is to accept a certain level of cash income, and work 'economically' within it to 'make it stretch', the approach taken here on the eco 'micro'-holding. Such an approach then can become a creative challenge, solving life needs as economically  as possible. In the States, there even used to be a mag devoted to this approach called 'The Tightwad Gazette' - wonder if it's still going?  The latest challenge here - a 'biggy' - has been to acquire a new vehicle, which was found at a car auction and cost about a third less than from a dealer - it's looking good too and 'eco' driving it can give around an overall sixty mpg. It did take a few weeks seeking to find- sometimes you've got to suffer for your art. At least this 'non dollar-chasing' option can give the potential of escaping from the never-ending 'more, more' dollar-making cycle, which could be then limited in terms of its 'satisfaction' capability, with too little time left 'to stand and stare'. Maybe too, for freerangers, a strong 'one-dimensional' focus on money-making, might lead to too narrow a focus creating difficulty then in gaining 'the deeper, wider view', something probably of value to many freerangers.

Money and its current strength of focus, though, does at times seem to tend to 'fill' the picture. Take profits, for instance, the message in a current culture seems to be the need for lots of it and for people to be 'entrepreneurially' perpetually chasing it. Could such a trend have been fuelled though, by the economists seemingly ever-present message of 'profit maximisation', implying often quite strongly, that this is and should be, the prime force of peoples' behaviour -? Maybe, though, 'profit maximisation' was in itself originally an inserted variable in an economic model, to test for possible outcomes under certain conditions i.e it was never mean't to be taken as a 'norm'?

 Man just as a 'lone competitive' unit seems somehow to be incomplete - is she/he not also a social animal, as psychcologists suggest? Certainly in these rural parts, where 'community' is alive and well, this is the case, with people helping each other out, swapping spare plants, reciprocative chicken sitting, giving each other lifts, participating in communal activities (egs. older folks club, local history nights, local team participations), meeting up in the local social club for a laugh and a chinwag, and so on. Thank goodness too, it adds another important (to us) dimension in life. Perhaps the ultimate trick is to be able to get a reasonable balance between life's multi-dimensions - ?