Long time since I've posted, been busy building a cidery in southern Utah.
We are looking for our first farm intern. Paid position, April 1-Oct 31, 2023.
Come experience farm-to-bottle value added agriculture in the heart of Utah's red rock country.
7000' with 500 fruit trees in Torrey Utah. Mostly cider apple varieties. Also perry pears, pie cherries, quince, etc. 80+ varieties of apples. And trialing some grapes. Started planting in 2012.
We get trees from mostly Cummins Nursery in Ithaca, vines from Northeastern Vine Supply in Vermont to get acclimated plants that ship at the right time.
Now to keep them alive. We have adapted Michael Phillips' general instructions in his books for our situation. 1) we do not strip the existing pasture, just mow. 2) we get the rental bobcat and auger 12" holes 4' deep. 3) backfill with only the native soil plus 1 lb Azomite and 1 lb rock phosphate. Treat the roots with myccorizal dip to establish tree microbiota. 4) 10 gallons of water at planting. They don't get water again until our irrigation cycle, every 11 days. 5) cage or wrap to protect from voles. We only plant trees in the spring, except a few trees we grafted ourselves that needed to get in the ground before winter. They did okay, but not my preference.
We do everything with the intention of driving the roots deep before winter. I know three new growers near our altitude in UT and CO trying to establish trees on drip irrigation and they are having terrible winter kill problems. One guy had 20% losses his first year. We don't get winter kill. Maybe 6 trees in 9 years. But they are all on drip and doing it the way the consultants say. I have offered our experience, they don't listen. We don't get winter kill {shrug}. If you use drip, do it on a cycle that saturates deeply at intermittent intervals. Best advice we got was from an old-timer here: water new trees on Thanksgiving, Christmas Day and March 1. We only do it the first year, about 10 gallons per tree, but do it religiously. Second best advice: "get ahead" on spring irrigation in the fall, at the end of the season when none of my alfalfa growing neighbors want water. I've augered holes the next April that were still damp 2' down despite a terrible snow season.
Prepare yourself mentally for slower growth than the books say, simply due to shorter growing seasons. The three year "Sleep, creep, leap" cycle is more like "Sleep, creep, creep, leap" at best, until they hit the summer irrigation water table here. Then they take off. Time to first fruiting doesn't really seem as correlated to rootstock as advertised; again I suspect it's just our short growing season. Maybe if we trellised we could have sped things up, someday if I find more land/water, I can run that experiment.
There's a link in my bio to my cidery and the site has a list of the trees we are growing along with some recommendations on which varieties we think are good for homestead use. But plant everything that you want. I was told we'd never get Virginia Crab to fruit here. Ha! I will happily be harvesting our first apples from that tree for cider in a couple weeks. Good luck!
Thank you for modeling kindness, wisdom and mentoring.
May you know peace like the soft cool grass between your toes, warm sunbeams on your cheeks and the soft chittering of sparrows.
Bill and Toby have saved a lawn chair for you, when you are ready they will want your help upgrading the permaculture design for paradise.
Myriad blessings unto you and your family today.
Angelika Maier wrote:do you organise all the meetings or is it a self runner that people take turns - in an organised or unorganised fashion?
I'm still spearheading the thing, but after 2 years, we have developed a system that sort of works. We don't do much in the summer, a lot of us are too busy. We watch the tomatoes slowly ripen and figure out the best day for a tomato taste-off party. This year we went too early, first week in September, not everything was ripe. But we have a potluck and at some point I circulate a list for ideas for what to do together that winter. It has three columns: I want to do this, I want to help organize this, I can lead it (or know someone who can). We pick what to do based on enthusiasm and resources.
We did a turkey butchering workshop the Sunday before Thanksgiving at my place. Last year we had the county bee inspector come out, a felting workshop. Next year, one of the members has five depredation tags for deer, and has volunteered to organize a large-animal processing workshop. Someone is signed up to do soap-making and I need to call her to get it set up for January. We do a seed swap and I hope to get Joseph Lofthouse to come this year to talk about landraces (our climates are not so far off). Maybe another movie night.
So it's a mix. I hope to get to the point where I could disappear and it would carry on by itself, but we're not quite there yet. But it's worth it for the community that is coming together and growing more resilient and supportive.
So we have to restart 3 hives. I ordered 3 packages of bees with queens that will arrive at the end of April.
DH will pick them up in SLC, about 200 miles away and whisk them home. Any tips on the transport? A few thousand bees loose in the car is the stuff bad horror movies are made of.
Tips on the installation? When we bought the hives originally, they were already established so this is new to us.
Things to note: if you aren't in the US and don't export to the US, you can ignore. If you sell less than $25K per year, almost none of it applies. If you sell less than $250K per year, you get a ramp up period.
If discussion level warrants, we can start separate threads on the key provisions like water quality, animals and manures, etc.
As the extension officer said, don't shoot the messenger. These rules were under an FDA review process for years. If you don't like 'em now, your recourse is your congressional representatives. This thread is to discuss how we are moving forward, not how we got here. That train left long ago.
dos zagone wrote:The search engine, is there a way to make it work better. Like a advance engine or something with more options. I use the one at the top of each forum section IE (plants) near where I can use (new topic) button. Is there a different one that covers all forums and is there a way to make particular word pairs show up in order desired or just subject line ect...?
At the very top of the page there is another menu, and non-traditionally, the search function is the top LEFT item on the menu. Once you click on it, you can search by keywords, phrases, in any, some or all forums, also by poster. You may have to actively scroll up to find it. Hope that helps!
I'm thinking I want to add some mason bees to our pollinator mix. We have a good number of summer natives, but we didn't get great pollination even with our honey bees last year and our hives did not do well over the winter.
Long time Safari user, using 9.03. Haven't had this issue at all, so now I'm curious. That kind of behavior would be totally annoying.
Patrick, in your preferences under the Privacy tab, what does it look like? Here's mine. Not saying my settings are correct, just that if they are different, we might know something.
Also, what extensions, if any, are you running? If you've got anything unusual in there, you might try disabling them, seeing if the behavior changes.
DH has been buying from Dripworks. Don't get the cheap compression fittings for the large tubing that feeds the small tubing, only the most expensive connections have worked. And don't cheap out on the pressure reducers. It's helpful to put a knife valve or two inline so you can adjust things. But you can get the main line tubing from the big box home improvement store locally and save some shipping. I like it because now that the main lines are down, I can change the drip fittings as I see fit without help. Me and a sharp pair of garden clippers. For vegetables I like the adjustable sprayers better than the gym rated dribblers, but it might be soil-type dependent on how well the water spreads.
ETA: we have about 30 4x8 raised beds and we run that on 4 separate main lines. Not sure how that translates to 50' rows, but I kind of doubt you'll get enough pressure in the system to run the whole thing at once. If you pressured it up enough to feed all the emitters, the larger connectors would likely blow out.
Our goose eggs have a much higher proportion of yolk to white than our chicken eggs, so meringue wouldn't be my first thought, but there's no reason it wouldn't work.
Weigh them if you have a scale and substitute by weight, a large chicken egg weighs about 60 grams.
Or we cook them any way we like eggs: fried, scrambled, omelets. Just lower the heat a little
Now that the geese are laying, we are giving our clafoutis recipe a workout. I like this one
And for a real south Texas way to cook eggs, make migas. I will confess that sometimes we use tortilla chips instead of leftover tortillas because there aren't ever any leftover tortillas in our house.
We built the simplest one imaginable that I found on the internet because I couldn't imagine simple.
We use barbell weights left over from when DH was seriously into working out. You can find them for cheap on Craigslist too. Ours only has 2 posts, not 4, upright parts from the plumbing section of the big box hardware store, 2 boards and an extra big drill bit to make the holes. Drill first, then screw down the posts
Are your tree trunks wrapped? We haven't seen this with our ducks, but the geese billed the bark on some young trees, nearly killed them. For safety sake, I would do that before introducing ducks to an orchard. And be prepared to protect any ground cover plants. They also destroyed a mint plant in 10 minute.s
Thinking back now way too late for the OP, I remember that Michael Phillips recommends a couple inches of pea gravel at least a 1' radius around every tree. Apparently the voles don't like to dig through it they way they do through soil. Perhaps setting the pots on a thick gravel bed could help in his and similar set-ups.
Even though the OP said cats won't work in his situation, for others, cats are a great help. The best was when we mowed the one acre orchard close right before winter except one strip. The voles concentrated there within a couple weeks, then bang, the cat got most of them in one weekend when we let him into the orchard fence.
But tree guards work. They aren't free, but neither is a tree. We have 8-10 with serious damage this spring because we ran out of guards and didn't get more.
Nicole Alderman wrote: Being told what not to do is often confusing for little kids, but telling them how they should say it or act guides them to saying it right.
This is so true for all humans, young or old. If I think about it, it's true for my puppy. He got a lot better at not pulling on the leash when I gave the command slack and copious praise rather than no pull when he was doing it wrong. If you don't clearly point toward the desired behavior, it can quickly devolve into a "bring me a rock" game which can be so discouraging people just give up.
One of my friends used to use the phrase, "use your grown-up words, please" to counter the whining.
Orange Pippin is a good resource for information on apple varieties, including disease resistance. Make sure you get them in the same bloom group or at least not too far apart. They are rated 1 (earliest) to 7 (latest). A 4 and a 5 are ok. You probably don't want early flowering anyway. And if any are listed as triploid, it won't pollinate another apple, so you need at least two that will pollinate each other in addition to any triploids. Nothing wrong with triploids, but something to be aware of. Crabapples tend to bloom longer and will cover most of your pollination needs in a pinch.
We had some Liberty fruit for us last year and quite liked them. Cortland did well at our annual taste test. So did Gibson Golden Delicious, it actually won. The other thing to consider is how much fruit you want, can store, or process. Early apples tend not to store, need to be processed quickly into dried fruit or applesauce and pie filling. The later apples keep better, some even improving, but only if you have a place to keep them between 35-40 degrees.
McIntosh is the parent to a lot of modern disease resistant apples. Orange Pippin has a good list of many of them, including the Cortland and Liberty. Empire is another good one. IMHO spur-bearing trees will be easier to care for. The tip bearing fruit it's too easy to prune off all the fruiting wood and lose a crop, but you have to prune to keep them fruiting. The spur bearers put out little, you guessed it, spurs along the branches. Once you see them, you'll know immediately what I'm talking about. You can't accidentally prune them off. Most apples are spur-bearers, just another thing to keep in mind.
Your extension service might also have a list of apples that do well in Wisconsin. It's part of the resurging cider country, you should do well there.
I'd like to see a photo of the slide-out bed. How'd you work the kitchen plumbing around that? Can you get a snack from the frig from bed? That would be awesome.
I'm out in the boonies. I've had a WF account for 23 years. There's not a branch within 50 miles, and their "updated" mobile app just wasted 30 minutes of my time and still wouldn't deposit my check. I guess the great outdoors on a sunny day isn't bright enough for their software.
Changing will be a PITA since everything is set up as autopay, but I'm fed up enough to start. I'm thinking about an internet only bank. We use one for long term savings and they are slow to make transfers, but everything else is easy. Anyone else done this, ditched the bricks & mortar? Pros & cons?
Once again, my friends and neighbors are organizing a straw bale construction workshop. This time the project will work on a free-standing "green room" for performers adjacent to a new community stage being built by the Entrada Institute here in Torrey. The instructors have all built and are living in their own straw bale homes here in Torrey, Utah.
The end of May is a glorious time on the upper edge of the Colorado plateau. The price is right: $375, including lunch. There are heaps of lodging and camping options and recreation in nearby Capitol Reef National Park. You could even come by and say hello to me
All the details are in the attachment. Hope to see you here in May.
I've never had a dog before. What's up with the gas? Is it just trial and error on the food to get it to stop? Is there something extra to feed that will help? Let the fart jokes begin. But please give me hope that this isn't a permanent feature of our beloved pet.
John Polk wrote:Another scenario where owning a gun on a homestead comes into play is when it is time to slaughter livestock (larger than a chicken or rabbit), or to humanely put down an animal that is injured/ill.
I mentally included that in
T-p arguments Guns are a tool in my toolbag to do x that I cannot do any other way
I suppose if one could get access to large animal veterinary sedatives then it wouldn't fit under that category. Most of us in the US don't have a DEA license to possess those things, much less the ability to buy them.
We once had a cat throw a blood clot that paralyzed its lower extremities. The pain as the clot breaks up is apparently like torture. If it had recovered, it would have continued to produce them more and more frequently. Those 30-45 minutes of trying to find a vet in the middle of the night to do the euthanasia changed my feelings on gun ownership, to say the least. Once you have an animal you can't lift into the back of your car, you take on an entirely higher level of responsibility to ensure a decent end if necessary, IMO.
I'm looking at my power bill. Like you, we have electric water, stove and oven. Run two frig/freezers. Unlike you, we also heat with electric. My bill for 12/7 - 1/25 when it was below freezing for 3 weeks straight and hit -5 at one point was 1126 KWH. There are two of us, I've had to use the dryer some, 1000 sq ft and I've burned about quarter cord of wood last month. And I cooked a bunch for the holidays. But I have room-by-room zone heat, keep the bedroom really cool and use an electric mattress pad heater (one of the greatest luxuries ever invented) and am compulsive about shutting off what I'm not using. DH, not so much.
What Rebecca said, make a list or spreadsheet. Your heater blower may be a big draw as it cycles on and off even if you don't use it much. Get a Killsawatt or whatever it's called and figure it out. Get the boys involved. If they aren't on board now, you'll have a heck of time getting them to shut off lights when you need them to.
Also, if you really are filling that much freezer space, you might do better with a restaurant walk-in type freezer if you have the floor space. Something super well insulated that was built for people worried about the bottom line more than whether it matches the other appliances. I'd be looking on Craigslist for something used out of a restaurant to see if it could work. And/or a passive cooled root cellar, that doesn't really need to be below grade, if you are storing a lot of food that just needs to stay cool but not frozen. Like homemade ham and bacon
And since this is a big project, can you project what your needs will be after your boys are grown and moved out? Or are they moving in their families? You'll do way less laundry, cooking, grocery storage and dishes once they are out of the teenage years. Or way more if your family grows to a third generation.
Canning is energy intensive, and I'm not sure if anyone's done the math to see how long you can pay to freeze something before you exceed the cost of prepping the food, the running the canner, cleaning up. I'd like to know if someone has. It's also work intensive, and the start up investment on jars isn't cheap either. Forget finding used jars cheap around here.
Good luck on the project. I hope you'll keep this thread going or start a new one when you start to record your progress.
(BTW, the plan for this structure was never to live in it full time. The pad for the forever, aging-in-place eco-warrior house is set aside. Whenever it comes to pass that we can build it right, we will dial this place back in the coldest months, using the space for much lower energy uses to run our businesses. If I could have figure it out how to do it debt-free, they'd be swinging hammers right now. I'm pleased that the cost of living here full time has been so low, and if our plans change, we will change out systems to even more efficient ones, like a solar hot water assist, but it doesn't make a lot of sense if it isn't going to be used much later. I'll just shut off the water heater altogether.)
I mentioned in another thread that I am inspired by Stefan Sobkowiak'sBiotope concept and we are planning to build two of them this spring. I'd love to include nest boxes for predatory birds elsewhere on the property, how far away do you think? And will any birds nest anywhere near my biotope if I can't keep the dang domestic turkeys from roosting on top of it?
I am wondering if we cannot summarize all the arguments in this very long thread and see if someone has something new to add, rather than rehashing what's already been said, in ways that increasingly drift toward insulting one another and risk pushing the thread into the cider press. It seems to me that there is a matrix to various answers to the original question:
Note: any argument in the Feelings category CANNOT be contradicted, not even with an argument in the Thoughts category because Feelings are not Facts. If I feel like eating ice cream today, you cannot say I am wrong for feeling that way. We enforce that with the BE NICE rule, but it is an immutable condition of humanity. One cannot rationalize away the validity of someone else's right to their feelings.
Now I am going to list all the arguments I can extract from the thread in 15 minutes (which is all the time I have to spend on this, feel free to append any I miss).
F-p arguments I am afraid of x and believe I can use a gun to avoid it (directly or on behalf of others)
Guns are cool pieces of machinery to admire and collect
Guns are fun to play with, I like the experience of shooting them
I believe I have a right to them and want to own them to express how important that right is
I have them because it is expected of me (local cultural standards)
F-c arguments Guns use too many resources to produce and operate
I do not perceive a danger to myself that I would resolve with a gun
I am morally opposed to killing under any circumstances I can imagine that would involve my use of a gun.
I don't like how I feel when I carry a gun (ex: need for heightened safety awareness)
The process for legally owning a gun in my jurisdiction is more pain than I wish to submit to
Guns have high risks that I do not care to expose myself to.
T-p arguments Guns are a tool in my toolbag to do x that I cannot do any other way
Guns are a requirement of my profession
T-c arguments I am not willing or able to spend the time and/or money develop the skillset or environment for responsible gun ownership
I am not allowed to own guns.
My personal decision-making matrix looked like this:
F-p Guns are fun to play with (I am an excellent shot)
I worry that I will have an animal in pain and the nearest vet is +1 hour away.
My personal security in an isolated rural environment depends one me.
F-c I don't like how I feel when I have to split my focus while carrying
I am not interested in hunting.
T-p I cannot personally kill a wounded goat with other methods available to me. Coyotes and mountain lions are frequent in my local area.
I spend a great deal of time alone here. (This fact has influenced many other decisions, like the fact that I never leave the house without a cell phone in case I injure myself).
T-c Getting proper training and equipment is expensive and not my preferred way to spend household income
I could (and often should) make a matrix like that for most any large decision (like whether to own an automobile). Any one of you, looking at my matrix might make a different decision than I have. And then say something shifts: a meth house opens up on my street and I feel more at risk, I suddenly take up an interest in wild duck cuisine, a small child moves into my house, I suffer a stroke and cannot safely shoot any more. The reasons can and do change. Who am I to tell you that your analysis of your matrix is wrong? Who are you to tell me my analysis of my matrix is wrong?
Do you have any arguments to add to the general matrix? Can you reverse engineer your own decision matrix? Has it changed over time?
The one time I did it, I followed the instructions from Mother Earth News which only cooked for 15 minutes, lots of cold water rinse, then rough up in the colander. It worked pretty well on Painted Mountain Corn. I should make some more.
The phrase is so catchy, so much easier to shout at rallies, than the .3% or .01% or whatever. Most people don't bother with (or can't do) the math. The doctor making $200K might be sitting on $150K of med school debt. That isn't living the dream.
In a different thread today, I posted a link to this article that states how much money most people (don't) have. The table is worth summarizing:
$0 in savings 28%
no account 21%
$ min balance 9%
<$1000 13%
(this adds up, according to the headline to 62% with <$1000 in savings, although there must a rounding error in the chart because these numbers add to 61%)
$1K-$4,999 10%
$5k_$9,999 5%
≥$10k 14%
I think about what the long-tail of that 14% must look like. It's a long long way from a GP or a local entrepreneur running a couple Subway franchises to get to people like the Koch Brothers, the dot.com billionaires, but they are all lumped together in that 1%. But if you don't have $1k to fix your car, someone with $10K in the bank looks rich. Kind of like our parents did when we were kids and saw bills in their wallets when the allowances were getting doled out.
What I really don't get is this: to win an election in the US, you need to get 50% + 1 vote. That's it. What is the appeal to those in the 62% bracket looking at the political landscape today to side with the ones who represent the top .01%? That side needs to peel off about 1 in 5 of those voters. Maybe the 62% don't vote proportionally, but they still have to get some of them. Or maybe both sides really represent the top .01% and we are being snookered.
Corrie Snell wrote:
How does having a mortgage balance of $75,476 (because one put an extra $20k down), beat having a mortgage balance of $95,476 with that $20k liquid, in the scenario where income disappears for some reason. The payment is still due on either of the two remaining balances at the end of the month. Having a generous emergency fund in either case will help pay it, but having that extra $20k liquid undeniably adds to the security of this person's situation. The POINT is, that the mortgage balance at this moment makes no difference whatsoever.
Have a mortgage balance of $75,476 AND the extra $20K of liquidity. Buy a smaller house.
Corrie Snell wrote:
Ann Torrence wrote:
#7 is bordering on fraud: "Still, you fret that your home’s equity is at risk. Can you protect it without having to sell?" and you do that by taking out equity by refinancing. And what if the value does fall? Walk away from the debt? Pay it back with the money you have invested elsewhere? In the Great Recession, recall that investment values dropped in parallel with the housing market collapse. And then the banks started calling mortgages.
First, I refer you back to Reason #1: "Your mortgage doesn't affect your home's value." The value rises and falls whether the property has a mortgage on it or not. If someone took out a "Big, Long Mortgage," putting just the recommended 20% down, right before prices tanked a few years ago, and someone else took out a mortgage, but put 40% down at the same time, and a third person paid cash for a property at the same time, they ALL lost out if they found themselves in a situation where they had to turn around and sell right after prices fell.
Let me make my point more clearly. Taking out a mortgage does not "protect" one's home equity. Imagine your home is worth $500K today, and you take out a $400K mortgage, bank that money in some foreign bank. Next week the market falls and the home is suddenly worth $300K. Yes you have $400K in the bank. You also have a $400K obligation. If you were entirely rational and unethical, the correct mathematical decision is to walk away from the mortgage, leave the bank (hey it's all a betting game anyway, right?) taking the loss. If you liked the house, you could buy it right back with the $400k and pocket the difference. That is taking it to the extreme to make my point. No equity is protected by taking out a mortgage and it is misleading of him to suggest otherwise. When I spot something that egregious, I view the author's agenda with suspicion.
Corrie Snell wrote:doesn't the idea of having a nice, cushy emergency fund (even if it is only earning .5%), to help, or fully cover the mortgage payment and other expenses in case of reduced or eliminated income in the future, as Mr. Edelman suggests with Reason #10, sound better than having a lower mortgage balance at that (hopefully never to occur) time?
Actually, having a generous emergency fund AND saving up the bigger down payment BEFORE taking out the smaller mortgage (ala Dave Ramsay) sounds even better.
Now I'm curious who Edelman's audience is, because it's not the typical American. More than half of Americans have less than $1000 in savings. From that same article, 28% of the people have no savings whatsoever, while only 14% have over $10K in savings. My guess is that less than 5% of the 14% are in a position to apply his advice, including having the personal discipline to save rather than spend when they have liquidity. But for the other 95%, it sounds like a message that is easily misconstrued into wishful thinking that would lead to 2008-style financial ruin. I'm not saying Edelman is responsible for misguided people hearing what they want to hear-we are all responsible for making our own good choices. But this conversation is advanced calculus for people who can't do long division.
ETA: Of course, I am not suggesting that anyone at permies is misguided or falls into the third-grade mathematically challenged category. But that article I linked to demonstrates the need for a lot of folks to do do some remedial homework-why I think Dave Ramsay is so popular.
We bought a half lamb from a neighbor, similar in age, best meat ever. I keep telling them how much I like it, but they are appalled that we are eating the chops rare. Apparently they like to put everything in the dutch oven for hours. One thing we noticed is that it doesn't have a muttony taste at all when we cook it, but it can develop if there are leftovers. Since I'm cooking only for 2, I usually strive for leftovers so I don't have to cook every night, but with the lamb, we just make enough for one meal.
I made tiny lamb meatballs the other day, sautéed then braised in chicken stock and red vermouth. A bit of cream would have been good in the sauce. Or mushrooms. Boiled potatoes I'm trying to use up, forked up with some basil puree frozen in olive oil, oven roasted carrots.
Lamb shanks braised with lentils and chopped tomatoes and a bit of onion and/or garlic, some mediterranean herbs, is good. Or do the lentils and tomatoes on the side if you are having chops. Unless you like your meat like my friends.
Larry Noel wrote:This is the first step in the Trivium, "Grammar," followed by Logic and then Rhetoric. There are three sides to a coin, and most inflicted by the Prussian education system hold only one side and do not even recognize the existence of the other two. Logic will give you the second side, and Rhetoric will give you the third, and then you will "own the coin." Until you possess all three sides, your knowledge is "valueless." I call training in the Trivium as the "Mental Martial Arts" because it will give the one who studies it the ability to "blunt the edge of words or fling them back." As I say, it takes three points to prove a line, three legs to stand a stool, and there are three sides to a coin, so follows there are three steps in critical analysis. If we are not taught those three steps, we are lost.
Since this is the homeschooling forum, have you got any suggested resources for homeschooling parents who want to incorporate the method into their curriculum?
Thomas Partridge wrote:Except that my family cannot buy my shares, since I live relatively far away from them (very far from all the ones that use facebook or even a computer). So I would basically be asking their endorsement on a product they themselves do not use.
Then you need a separate FB account for your farm. I think Joseph's story about the survey is telling but left something out. Your customers also want a relationship with the farmer. They want to trust you. That's hard for people to articulate.
Back to books: I just had a routine medical test. The woman who ran the machine bought a book from me 6 years ago, remembered me, what my book was about, also the print she bought from me. She was happy to see me, and we are going to do business together in the future. I probably spent 2 minutes with her six years ago. You build that kind of relationships with your customers, you can charge fair for the high quality you are producing.
I don't price eggs at grocery store prices, that's commodity food and ours are better. Mine are the most expensive at the farmers market, on purpose. I never take any home afterwards. Sometimes people come buy them at my house the morning before the market starts because they are afraid I'll run out before they get there. They are buying eggs, but they are also buying me, my brand, my commitment to quality. Don't sell yourself short. You are the brand.
Thomas Partridge wrote:
Well except for the facebook thing, we have a facebook page but I rather not sell a single share than ask my family and friends for help with sales.
You aren't begging, you are making a good product available to the people close to you who probably share your values. They will be your best evangelists to help you find more customers. Raise your prices (see below) and give a "friends and family" discount. I sold a ton of books that way when I was peddling my masterpiece.
Thomas Partridge wrote:
What about posting flyers, is that still a valid strategy or does that not work well anymore?
Might, can't hurt.
Farmer's markets for sign-ups. Even if you can't sell there. Make it a game: Make a new poster of a chicken breed each week and tell your customers: "tell us our chicken breed of the week when you call for your share to get a free extra chicken when you sign up."
Raise your prices and you can afford to give away one-free trial chickens. I'm studying the wine business right now, and it looks not uncommon to give away in the tasting room essentially one bottle out of every case to make the sale.
Best advice I got when selling books: don't expect to get the same price for every book, but never sell a book for a loss. I didn't, sold them all and didn't go broke. Bet it's the same for poultry. You are lucky in VA, it would cost me $20K to get set up to process chickens here, the <1000 bird exemptions aren't interpreted as much of an exemption.
Argument # 11 is particularly specious, "You’ll never get rid of your monthly payment, no matter how hard you try" because you'll have taxes and insurance. That doesn't mean I should keep paying the bank interest.
Argument #8, 9 and 10 are unrealistic, that people save the difference between a low down payment and a high one. Most people just buy a bigger house and leverage as low a down payment as they can. If you have the discipline to save the differential up front and then the ongoing spread on the two mortgage examples, then you don't need to be reading this kind of advice. Most people don't make life decisions at this level based on rational mathematics. If you do, more power to you. Don't use this as a rationalization to take on more debt than your total budget of Mortgage+Investable Excess Over Expenses.
#7 is bordering on fraud: "Still, you fret that your home’s equity is at risk. Can you protect it without having to sell?" and you do that by taking out equity by refinancing. And what if the value does fall? Walk away from the debt? Pay it back with the money you have invested elsewhere? In the Great Recession, recall that investment values dropped in parallel with the housing market collapse. And then the banks started calling mortgages.
I'm done. Both with the article and the mortgage. It is the most liberating feeling. Yes, I could take a heap of equity out and invest it somewhere (where? the stock market? seen how that's gone lately?). Or I could do what I'm doing, investing the money I'm not paying to a bank into trees, greenhouses, fences and infrastructure, things that hold or gain value just for existing and aren't taxable. Most people, myself included don't make 100% rational money decisions, because money in part represents security, which is more of a feeling than a fact. It feels damn great to be able to say "mine" every morning.
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