I would love to come live near you...unfortunately my husband and I live in New Zealand and I'm not sure how "we're really interested in living a different lifestyle with like-minded individuals" would go down at border control.
However, I enjoy reading your blog and contemplating some of your ideas.
Luckily I'm a teacher so despite being called a hippie by my work-mates for "gasp" growing my own veges and making my own bread at least I get a chance to "corrupt" the younger generation 
Well, hello Kate! Glad to know a hippie NZ teacher is enjoying the ride.
New Zealand is pretty well situated to survive the coming transition, with its lower population and great farmland. I get the feeling though, that you have your work cut out for you, corrupting the coming generation with knowledge that could very well save their health and well-being. Are you all keeping Monsanto on a short leash? They've sort of gotten out of control here.
And, um, is that "shepherd's bread" that you are making? >
Well I'd never heard of Monsanto so I had to look them up.
Seeing as I'd never heard of them it either means that they don't have a strong foothold here, or that they're done such a good job at infiltrating to a deep level that no one thinks to mention them.
Yeah you'd think things would look positive for New Zealand being that you can pretty much just throw a plant in the ground and it grows itself.
I wonder though if, being such a young country and our pioneering days being so recent, that the idea of "living off the land" is just too dis-tasteful for some to be able to consider.
I think we're too busy emulating the US has to want to consider something different.
But I could be doing my fellow countrymen a dis-service.
Actually on the subject of round-up. I had a chat with a guy at work about our garden.
He was gloating about how his Dad had come and round-upped his garden so it was weed free.
I said that we don't use weed-killers and that we pull weeds by hand.
He said "so you have a lot of weeds?"
I said "yes and a lot of vegetables"
Excellent! "Lots of weeds and lots of vegetables" would be a great rallying call. My mentor Christopher Shein say about weeds, "They have medicinal uses" or "they are healing and fortifying the soil."
OK, you have gotten me to thinking about the definition of a weed. It is basically an unwanted plant. So that means that one person's weed is another person's crop.
Take dandelions for example. They often grow in unwanted places as weeds. However, they do have a pretty flower and a fun seeding process. The greens are also considered edible. Sounds mostly non-weed-like to me.
On the other hand, most kids would agree that Lima Beans are disgusting and clearly fall into the weed category. However, that opinion changes with some people as they grow up (not with me though -- I will happily label the Lima Bean as a weed!).
How does that Round Up stuff know what I consider a weed anyway? Pretty smart if it works. Scary if not -- do I really want some chemical making my choices of plant preferences for me?
OK, enough random thoughts for now. Thanks for the chance to share them!
Round Up is a relatively short-lived herbicide that works by killing plants that don't have one of Monsanto's genetic modifications inserted into their genome.
Depending on what study you look at, this has a slight effect, no effect, or negative effect on the dollars earned per hectare under cultivation.
What I've observed in my garden is that mingling species gives me a greater yield without chemical inputs. I do use more effort to harvest if I only want chard. But harvesting mixed greens is super easy. And I have very few undesirable plant species and individuals. The dandelions are rather tasty.
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