We have a little over nine acres and I know that with some careful planning this property can supply us and our neighbors with a significant amount of food. For those of you who garden, are you applying some permaculture principles to your properties? I’ve recently come to believe that these will be and are some of the most important food supplying systems of our land. Plant hardy trees and bushes that offer fruit without ridiculous amounts of care. Plant edible and medicinal perennials that thrive with little or no irrigation. And of course, supplement all of that with a kitchen garden.

We live in a small farming community so we will be well off with locally grown food IF we as a community figure out seed saving. Not enough of this going around yet.

My dh and I both love to garden, he has a market garden now, I have a largish home garden.

We have a fairly large house so renting out rooms is a possibility.

I can a lot so offering how-to classes. Know most forms of handwork as well.

I am planning on increasing our stock of non-electric appliances like a wheat grinder and dehydrator. Need to convince hubby to put in a woodstove, we had one at the farm, not here in town.

We did purchase a few more bikes this year for our large family of 8. Being in town makes riding most everywhere do-able. I like the point raised that those who live closer to the job may hold the jobs longer than those who have transportation difficulties. I see this a bit now as I, who live 2 blocks from the library, get called in for fill-in more than the other part-timer who lives 7 miles out. I can justify biking to work for a 2-3 hours whereas she can’t justify the gas usage for such a short shift.

I’m currently an Economics major in a liberal arts college. Not to use how well that will be. But I’m good at managing things -finances, workload division, and am generally good at getting along with people.

My most-developed skill set though is writing procedures. Mostly for business but I think I can adapt it without too much trouble. People always need to know how to do things, at least.

I’ve also done marketing, and while the trend finding and graph making are useful, but I am not cut out to be a marketer, I learned that this summer.

I’m not a very strong person, but I also dig a mean ditch.

I’m just getting started into gardening and food preservation and medicinal uses for herbs, but I hope to develop those skill sets over the past couple of years.

As any resort, I’m a very decent cook, good with imrpovization and not letting things go to waste. People will always need to eat.

I also can look at stuff and a container and tell you whether or not the stuff will fit. I don’t know if that’s terribly useful though.

/Herbert.

I see a lot of “I can garden, knit, can food,” and while those are great skills that will be needed more in the coming years, they won’t be paying jobs. Maybe at first people will look to the knitters and gardeners for education, but soon we will be teaching all our children these skills* and they won’t be sellable.

I think that we need to look back 100 years to what sorts of jobs would be more available in a post-peak world. What jobs were there before the advent of oil? Butchers, bakers, chemists (pharmacists), doctors, lawers, merchants, and lots of farmers. People involved in transport included seamen, railroads were way more prevalent, people with wagons who moved things from the railroads to the purchasers’ homes. Travelling salesmen. Nurseries.

I also think we need to look forward, as well. Hopefully solar panels and wind turbines will keep popping up. Micro hydro looks promising. People will need to be trained to install and maintain these.

When I think of a peak-oil future, I think of a post-war Germany-type scenario. Schools still functioned. My father-in-law was planning on going to college, but had to take a year to train as a mechanic as a marketable skill. Commerce happened, even with an inflated currency.

Is it just me or are the “prepare and plod on”-ers all women, and the mutually assured destruction, TEOTWAWKI-ers men?

*I was going to say daughters, because traditionally that’s who had these skills, but with gender lines blurred these days…. I was told by a Norwegian friend that back in the 1940s all students, male and female, had to be able to knit a sweater as part of high school graduation – it was an essential life skill.

My mom nixed the idea.