Thursday 4 November 2010

Coping With Rising Prices

So what can we produce here at HG Towers, I wonder, as prices rise and rise? 
wheat: yes, though it hasn't been grown for years and years the wheatfields are still there, if some of them are under trees, but those can be cut for fuel;
meat: yes, currently venison, boar, and hare but could be expanded to chicken, guinea fowl, duck, and rabbit;
corn: yes, did that quite recently as it attracted a subsidy;
tobacco: yes, but truly awful cigarillos come from it;
olive oil:yes;
wine: not at the moment but could be re-established although really not worth it when it can be bought at 1 euro an excellent Chianti litre;
veg. and salads: yes, in quite scary quantities;
fruit: some now, others the trees all had to be replanted so we'll have to survive on figs, apricots, cherries, and quince for a bit; 
from the wild there are mushrooms and berries (how Levi-Strauss).

It sounds quite good but I'd have to set up a food processing plant to cope with it all and it's bad enough already (the word 'tomato' makes me reach for my gun) - self-sufficiency is really about processing and storing your own just as much as growing it.

As for, coffee, tea, sugar, orange juice and hard alcohol (though I'm told there's a primitive still somewhere in the cantinas - probably buried under an avalanche of books) it'll have to be the supermarket.  And I'm not boiling the washing with ash and soap root either, never mind cleaning my teeth with sage leaves dipped in salt.  So I may as well get all the stuff above while I'm doing the Lidl run, after all, I wouldn't like to waste petrol.  And I could pop into Prada en route,   and get a few things before cotton prices get out of hand.

4 comments:

Caronte said...

No need to process food: just give away your surplus and it will be returned to you in some form or another in due course. Reciprocity is the name of the game.

Nomad said...

From the sound of that, should you not rename your pad to something more appropriate - HG Acres? Don't forget your obligation to feed the staff too!

hatfield girl said...

There's only me, Nomad. Not for the exciting stuff like driving tractors and waving chainsaws - the men won't let me near those kinds of things - but for the everyday stuff, it's me.

Unless the family is here writ large. Then the cooking has to be eaten to be believed.

There were once towers at each end of the house in the village but they were ripped off by the Medici; can't have the masses flaunting towers. Why didn't they tax them rather than razing them? They'd have made a fortune; anyone who was anyone put up a tower or two in this part of the world in those days.

hatfield girl said...

You're being subtle and economististo aren't you C