PASA Conference Coming Up

Here's my annual publicity for PASA's Farming for the Future Conference.  I've been attending this conference for the last four years, and have always come away excited, energized, and having learned many useful things applicable to my homesteading endeavor.  The conference is held at the beginning of February each year in State College, Pennsylvania.  If you're interested in the sorts of topics I cover here on the blog and reasonably local to PA, I suggest you consider attending.

In the coming year I'll have the honor to be presenting with the man who first inspired me to start keeping a tiny flock of backyard chickens at the PASA conference four years ago.  Harvey Ussery will be leading an all-day pre-conference track on Integrated Homesteading.  I'll be playing backup.  Harvey is more than capable of presenting a knock-out presentation all by himself, as I have seen more than once.  He's concise, well-spoken, and his talks are carefully honed.  He does not waste the audience's time.  My hope as a novice speaker is to not look incompetent by comparison.  Frankly, I'd rather be learning than teaching, but it's hard to say no to an invitation from someone I admire so much.

From now until December 31st, you can receive an early bird registration discount, and additional family members receive discounted registration as well.  There are many ways to reduce the cost of conference registration if you want to attend but need to watch your pennies; everything from scholarships, to facilitated carpooling, to a WorkShare program.  So check it out even if you think it's not in the budget.  The next conference is going to be an even better deal than in previous years, because PASA has decided to pack an extra workshop slot into the two-day conference.  So I'll be able to attend six 80-minute talks instead of five.  I look forward to all the other wonderful extras of the conference as well: picking up free shipping coupons from Johnny's, checking out the free seed-swap table, the local cheese tasting, free live music in the evenings, a free seed packet or two from various seed vendors, the great quotation posters, a wonderful fund-raising auction with so many lovely and useful items, and all the unpredictable things I'll learn from formal presentations and conversations with other attendees.

I'd love to see some of you there, whether at the Integrated Homesteading track or the main conference.  If you plan to attend, please drop me a note.  If you can't attend, I'll most likely to a summary post after the conference, detailing some of the highlights and things I learned.

Road Trip with Dad

I'm taking off for a few days on a road trip to visit family in Maine.  These days I am very conscious of the resource-intensive nature of travel.  But having had a sudden and unexpected death in the family this summer, I am also keenly aware of how important family is, and that there is never any guarantee that I'll see the people I love again.  My family is far-flung, with relatives in California, and scattered over the northeastern part of the US from Ohio to DC to Maine.  "Love miles" are a reality for me, whether I choose to travel those miles or not.  As much as I am theoretically committed to a low-energy, local lifestyle, I have not been able to reconcile those values when it comes to maintaining ties with family.  Yes, I am a hypocrite.  The clincher with this trip is that my father is driving to Maine whether I go with him or not.  And truth be told, I'd worry about him doing the drive by himself.  So I'm going along, and I'm looking forward to it.  I very rarely have any one-on-one time with my dad, and I'm not about to turn down an opportunity like this one.  We have some fun things to do along the way.  It should be good.

I will try to be a little more regular in my postings when I get back.  Updates are in order for honey bees, the turkey, fig trees in containers, and potatoes in buckets - round two.  I plan to a post on the ancho chili powder too, since someone asked.  There are still so many projects to try and cram into what's left of the fair weather of this year!

Off to the Conference!

As you read this I'm in State College, attending a pre-conference, all-day workshop of PASA's Farming for the Future annual conference. Today it's Weed School: Managing Through Identification and Mechanical Methods, and tomorrow I'll have another all-day workshop on The 21st Century Victory Garden: Growing Your Food and Energizing Your Community. Meanwhile, my husband will be attending the Hands-On IPM (integrated pest management) and Bio-Controls workshop. Then on Friday and Saturday the PASA conference proper begins. (PASA: that's the Pennsylvania Association of Sustainable Agriculture.) One of the keynote addresses will be by Raj Patel, author of the book Stuffed and Starved, which discusses the paradox of a world with 850 million people starving alongside 1 billion overweight people. Should be infuriating, heartbreaking, and enlightening, all at the same time.

I'm looking forward to seeing people I've met at the conference in previous years. Oh! And the food at the conference is simply marvelous. I hardly need to think about packing food for the meals away from home. We get delicious breakfasts and lunches with each of our workshops, and the evening hors d'oeuvres tables, laden with products brought by member farmers, is always an incredible treat. Then there are the coupons and free samples from organic product companies that sponsor the event. I got a coupon for free shipping from Johnny's Seeds last year which I used when buying my broadfork; saved me a tidy sum. This conference has the best schwag! The benefit auction of all sorts of interesting gardening tools, and value-added products from member farms is always fun to browse through. Free live music on Thursday night. Networking opportunities with farmers and gardeners who live near me and follow sustainable crop management and humane animal husbandry. I enjoy seeing Pennsylvania's plain folk who mingle freely with us "English," but speak their Pennsylvania German among themselves. There will be a Pennsylvania cheese tasting by member farms on Friday night. Early morning yoga classes if I can get up in time for them. I'll probably meet a farmer who produces something sustainably that I'll want to start buying on a regular basis. I've arranged a meeting with an attending fellow member who will barter some of her compost worms for my bread. And these are all just the extras!

The hour-and-twenty-minute seminars of the conference itself are consistently informative and fascinating. I always play it somewhat by ear, but these are the seminars that I'm likely to attend:

Rural Pennsylvania's Energy Future
Using Organic Nutrient Sources & Interpreting Soil and Compost Analysis
How to Grow, Harvest, Manage, and Market Nut Crops
Specialized Techniques for Early Harvest of Field Grown Crops
Why and How to Create a Forest Buffer on Your Land to Protect Our Streams
Solar Electric Systems 201: Basics and Beyond
The Versatility of Small Grains: Food, Feed, Forage, Seed and Cover Crops
Pollinators, Predators & Plants: Building Landscapes to Attract Beneficial Insects
The Plight of the Honey Bees & How to Help Them Thrive
Year-Round Backyard Mini-Farming: Food with the Least Fossil Fuel and Footprint

I'll have to pick and choose among these, as some of them are scheduled concurrently. But don't these sound interesting? There are several dozen other choices that are less appealing to me that will no doubt be full of other attendees with different interests.

I always come home from the frozen wastes of State College in early February with a burning passion for the year's gardening and homesteading projects. It's like being able to swallow a motivation pill, once a year. It's all just SO exciting! Worth the money and the driving every year. This is definitely a garden-geek vacation.

I'll try to take some pictures that capture the wonderfulness of it all, to post when I return. Have a wonderful week everyone.

Confession Time: What We Save For

I've mentioned before that paying off the remaining principle on our home mortgage is my primary financial goal. If you've been reading my blog for any length of time, you've probably also gotten the sense that I'm a foodie. Good food is a huge part of what makes life enjoyable for me. And as many personal finance bloggers will tell you, you have to live life too, as well as do the right thing with your money. Sometimes that means spending some money on what you love.

Frugality is often seen as penny-pinching misery and an endless parade of joyless deprivation by those who don't practice it. I would argue that frugality is all about clearly identifying your priorities in life, and then arranging your finances to best serve those priorities. In our case, we want the mortgage gone so that we have more assurance we'll be able to go on eating good food in peace well into old age. I'm not kidding. My golden visions of the future revolve around meals cooked in a home we own outright with lots of home grown, top-quality produce, and a few luxury ingredients we can't produce ourselves.

This week we made our annual daytrip into Manhattan, taking a two-hour bus ride each way. We made our gourmet rounds to Zabar's, Neuhaus Chocolates, Murray's Cheese shop, Kalustyan's spice bazaar, and visited a little pub where my husband enjoys draft beers. We also dropped a wad for an epic meal at an astonishingly good and expensive sushi restaurant. We tried to get into the Morgan Library for a dose of book fetishism, but we got there too late, so it was an all foodie day. We didn't set a price cap to this excursion. I was afraid to look at the total damage on our credit card statement, but inevitably I had to. It came to more than $450 including transportation costs (no taxi rides though). Ouch.

For that money we got many foods that we know and love well, and which are not available to us in our immediate area. The cheeses we bought were all new discoveries made in a shop that allows us to taste everything before buying. We brought home seven different varieties, and rejected as many others. From Kalustyan's we brought home cooking and baking ingredients we'll use for many months. We did pick up a few things that we'll use as stocking stuffers for family members, but mostly we shopped for ourselves.

I wanted to include an honest accounting of our trip, in the interest of self-disclosure. Frugality is important to me, and I take a lot of measures to save small amounts of money here and there every single day. If I figured out how many loads of laundry I'd have to hang to dry to save the amount we blew in one day in Manhattan, it would probably depress me. But gourmet goodies truly make us happy. This is an authentic and self-motivated pleasure for us, not something we're goaded into by marketing. And we'll appreciate our purchases as we savor them over the next several weeks and months. In my book, this was a justifiable occasional expenditure. I wouldn't do it every month, but once a year seems reasonable.

So if there's something you truly love that costs a good deal of money, don't let anyone tell you that occasionally indulging in it is incompatible with a frugal lifestyle. The key is in evaluating whether spending your money on that ephemeral indulgence balances out with a net increase in your long term happiness. A lifestyle of week-in, week-out frugality is what allows us this very occasional splurge without jeopardizing our overall major goal, which is eliminating our debt. So we are very mindful that we earned this splurge, rather than simply telling ourselves that "we deserve it" without thinking through the implications. That money might have gone to our extra principle payment next month, but our day-to-day happiness on our way to our happy golden future is important to us too. We pay our credit card balance off in full each month, so this treat will not contribute to revolving debt or cost us anything extra in interest payments.

What do you scrimp and save for?

A Frugalite "Lets go"

Yesterday I took a daytrip with my DH to NYC, something for which we'd had bus tickets for some time. I packed homemade picnic-y foods for lunch. I figured we'd eat one restaurant meal and have a great time as a planned splurge in a year of really good frugal practices. We are serious foodies, so we planned to visit Zabar's, Murray's cheese shop and some other culinary meccas.

The only food we ended up buying as convenience items to eat right away were a bottle of coke, two poppyseed bagels, some smoked salmon shmear, and two on-draught micro-brews for my beer fanatic husband. I just couldn’t see a visit to NYC without some fresh bagels for me or good beer for him. We spent somewhere around $100 on the gourmet items we brought home.

We visited the MoMa for the free Friday evening admission and paid for admission to the Frick. We decided not to eat dinner in the city and instead just head home relatively early. We were gone from 6:30 am to 10 pm.

It felt a little odd spending so freely when I normally keep such strict discipline over my purchases. I told myself that I'd only buy stuff that I had no way of finding in the much more rural area we live in. The feeling of letting go and giving myself permission to spend after living very frugally was so different from the way I used to quieten the twinge of guilt about spending by just telling myself that I deserved these things, or that I would cut back in other areas, which of course I rarely did.

I feel great about the trip. It was a planned excursion with a moderate amount of indulgence. The weather was great. We had both a birthday and anniversary this week, and this was sort of a combination celebration for both. We'll enjoy the stuff we bought for weeks to come. Yes, I wish stuff had been cheaper, or that we'd been able to comparison shop for better prices. But it really feels like we earned this fun, and that it was "all right."