lonecity.com

As a general theme, my blog over the last few months has been me bitchin about how much things cost.  I’m slowly degenerating into a homeless bum because I can’t afford to live in a home anymore.  Well folks, today thats not going to change…  at least i’m predictable!

On my latest visits to the grocery store I decided a few ripe peaches and a couple of big juicy apples deserved to find thier way into my fridge.  At an on sale price of just about a dollar a pound, these few fruits set me back a small fortune.  At present my household has three people in it, and there’s also a small food expense from when my sister and her two children come over to visit.  They can’t afford to live any more than I can, so I can’t feel bad about them joining us once or twice a week for dinner. 

I believe the us department of agriculture reccomends five servings of fruits and vegetables per day.  Thats what the commercials say.  Lets see now, three people times five servings at a buck per serving minimum works out to fifteen bucks a day.  Thats not total food cost, thats just for the fruits and vegetables.  I think we all know that eating enough of the right foods helps keep us healthy.  You can probably guess that my family is overweight.  We don’t get the right amount of the right foods even though we would like to.  A steady diet of ramen noodles, macaroni and cheeze, and whatever meat we can catch has us right in line with the national average.  (2/3 of the us population is technically obese.)

It wouldn’t hurt so much if I didn’t know what I was missing.  I was fortunate to grow up in a home with an orchard in the back, a large producing garden, Fruit dryers and canning equiptment in the basement, ect.  As a child I never once missed the opportunity to get my fill of fruits and vegetables, and honestly I wasn’t one of those kids you had to trick into eating his vegetables.  As evidence of this, my mother has photographs of me from way back before I can remember.  Except for bits and pieces I can barely remember highschool.  In these photgraphs I’m skinny.  I don’t ever remember being skinny, but those pictures can’t be fake.  In my teen years I was thin as a twig.

What this train of thought got me onto today is that I’m going to plant my backyard full of fruit trees.  I figure with the trends the way they are, today peaches are $1 a pound on sale.  By the time five years passes by my trees will be starting to produce and peaches will have reached $2 a pound at least.  If I can garner a few hundred peaches, a few hundred apples, along with the apricots and pears,  I could easily produce a few thousand dollars worth of fruit in just my small back yard.  I’m not thinking of selling them on the street side, but I bet it will reduce my family’s food costs something handsome.  There’s also the added benefit of my family getting more healthy while the rest of the world around me gets fatter and uglier.

I may have to stockpile guns and ammo,  five years from now when gas prices meet gold prices and people are robbing each other to survive, I’ll need to protect my trees from bandits…