How To Live On Nothing part 1

First off, like most titles, “Cooking With Children”, pops instantly to mind, especially after reading “Cooking With Herbs”, the title here is misleading. You cannot live on nothing. Period. You can’t do it. The American Indians couldn’t, no one in history could do it, and you can’t either. What you can do is live well on $30,000 to $50,000, and there is a book called “Living Well on Practically Nothing” that will tell you how to live well for $30,000. OK, but what if you are living on $10,000 or even less, say $6,000? Can you still eat well and live well? Yes you can, and I am here to tell you how.

Get some money

Realistically you will have to have some money, not a lot of money, but some money. If you really and truly do not have any money, get a job, work odd jobs, beg on street corners, pick up pop cans or bottles, go to the various govt. agencies like Social Security, the Welfare office, the Human Services office (there is a set of misnamed groups if there ever was one!), Salvation Army, check with the area churches, whatever you have to do but get some money.

Now a lot of people are going to get upset with what I am now going to say but here goes anyway: apply for every government benefit, subsidy, grant, program, handout, or free-bee you can find. Why? Well, for one you are probably “entitled” to get it. Do you really think Ross Perot over turned down a govt. handout because he was a billionaire? Every CONgressman is milking the system for all it’s worth too. If it is good enough for millionaires and billionaires it is good enough for you too.

But the main reason to get on the federal, state and local gravy train is to overload the system. The sooner it collapses under it’s own weight, the better off we will all be and you might as well get the money instead of some inner-city drug addict, drunk, Welfare cheat, tax evader, or welfare breeder with ten kids by ten different men.

Shelter

Next get a roof over your head. Hopefully you will be able to find a house where you won’t be bothered too much, as you will probably be doing, or need to do, some things that you may not be able to do in an apartment building. Nothing illegal of course, but best not get too many of the neighbors worried how you are able to live fairly well on nothing when they blow their entire paycheck on junk and can’t seem to get ahead.

Heat and air-conditioning

Now that you can have a roof over your head and money in your pocket, you will need food and heat. Sorry, can’t help much with the air-conditioning bills, sweat it out is about the best I can do for you there, although there are a few tips that should help with that like getting in a tub of cool water or laying a wet towel over yourself to help cool you at night. But for most of us, heat is not a life-threatening problem like cold is. Sure a bunch of elderly and infirm people die during heat waves when they seal themselves into their homes during power outages, but how many do you think would die if the power went out in the dead of winter? So we will deal with how to heat your home here.

OK, to stay warm you will need to do some things, and history will guide us here. Remember the wing-backed chairs, footstools and four-poster beds in the movie “A Christmas Carol”? Ever wonder why they had them? Because the houses back then were cold and draft, that’s why!

The wing-backed chairs kept the draft off your face, the foot stools kept your feet off the floor and the four-poster bed both kept the drafts off you while you were sleeping and helped to keep you warm. The curtains actually made a small room in a room, so you only had to heat a small area to stay warm which was a big help. This is the same reason castles had tapestries and wall hangings in every hall and room, it cut down on drafts and that cut down the heating bills. So use curtains, wall hangings and the like between rooms if you don’t have doors, over windows, and over walls to cut down on drafts around the house.

Next you can build a four-poster bed frame around your bed to cut down on the need for heat, nothing fancy mind you, just some two by four lumber you scrounged from a building that was being torn down, with some sheets and mattresses from hide-a-bed couches that were thrown away, across the top and hung from the sides.

Can’t find any lumber? Well, go down to the local appliance store and get some refrigerator boxes, cut one long side wall out and put the end of the bed in it and put one at each end of the (single) bed and one over the top, so you have a small cardboard “fort” or “hut”. For a larger bed, get more boxes, as many as you need to cover the bed. No, it won’t look fancy but it WILL keep you toasty warm! Why do you think the homeless sleep in cardboard boxes or under newspapers? Because cardboard and paper is an excellent insulator and a couple of boxes, one inside the other, can keep you alive through a blizzard with sub-zero temperatures.

Remember the construction site where they were tearing down the building? Well, that would also be a good place where to get wood for your wood burning stove or “trash burner”. All construction sites are good places where to get wood to burn, all you do is ask for the scraps and haul them away after the crew has left or is done for the day. Most places are happy to give it to you just to get rid off it so they don’t have to haul it away and pay dump fees.

Cheap wood burner

What is that? No wood burner? Well, they are “fairly” inexpensive for the cheap Chinese cast iron stoves, about a hundred bucks or so, and go on up to several thousand dollars for the really high quality airtight models. See if you can find a good quality used one, and if the person needs any help around the place, offer to do some work instead of offering cash. Mowing lawns, cleaning gutters, painting, whatever it takes.

If you really can’t afford to buy one, then get a 55 gallon metal drum (which you hopefully scrounged for free) and add one of the “stove kits” that has a door and smoke stack adapter. If possible get a second drum to go above so any heat going up the flue will get trapped before going out. Put dampers over each drum to adjust the burn and trap more heat. Keep the flues closed when not burning or they will vent any heat right outside. You will also need to line the barrel with firebrick (much preferred) or sand (if need be) to keep it from burning out.

After you have your “four-poster bed” and wood burner, you will go back to the appliance store and get another big box. This box will be your “wood box”, but actually you will be saving all your junk mail, catalogs, newspapers, labels off of tin cans, and any other paper or plastic items you happen to have that you otherwise throw away.

No trash

In fact, the only things you will now be throwing away are metal and glass, and those should be going to the recycling bins, so you will have no garbage at all except table scraps and they should be put in the garden for compost. If you have to pay for the garbage pick up by the can or bag, the wood burner will pay for itself in not time in garbage fees alone, not to mention the saving in the heating bills which will be slashed.

Burn everything

Everything that can burn will be burned. Things such as the cooked (on your wood burner of course) bones from your meat can be burned if you don’t want to dry them and grind them into bone meal to eat. Be careful what you burn
, however. Treated “green dyed” lumber will give off poisonous fumes that can kill you. ALWAYS vent the burners to the outside (chimney) and NEVER have a fire in an enclosed area with no outside air. Once the fire has used up all the oxygen, it will just put you to sleep, permanently! ALWAYS have an outside air source or the fire vented to it isn’t using up all the available oxygen.

Food and water

With the above poster bed, wood stove, food, and water you will be able to withstand a power outage that would have your neighbors frozen out while you are doing fine eating hot meals while sipping tea in your warm bed, so next we need to talk about food and water.

Eatable plants and foraging

Look around you. There is all sorts of free food growing just about everywhere. Get a wild food or edible plants ID book; available at most any public library, and start checking out your lawn, the parks and the roadsides.

Dandelions and plantain grow just about everywhere where there is grass, so they are easy to find and highly nutritious as well. Walk alleys to find fruit or nut trees that have the fruit just lying there. ALWAYS ask before taking any, however, and only pick up the fallen fruit. Don’t pick the ripe fruit off the trees unless you are specifically told you can because the owners probably will want them for their own use.

Most any overgrown field or roadside will have a dozen edible wild plants as well, such as horseradish, milkweed, nettle, mustard, clover and cattails. Like I said, get a good edible plant ID book from the local library and it can tell you what grows in your area and what they look like. Don’t overlook acorns, walnuts, or other nut bearing trees, shrubs and bushes that may grow locally in your area either.

Wild game

For meat, there is a tremendous amount of wild game in the cities. What sort of wild game? Well deer are so plentiful that they are considered hoofed rats in most areas. Raccoons and opossums in the garbage, squirrels in the attic, pigeons under the eves, rabbits and starlings everywhere.

In fact you can make a good living catching the raccoons and, opossums, squirrels and pigeons for people. Even if you don’t want the animals for food for yourself, and they are all good eating, you can probably sell the live ‘coons and ‘possums to dog trainers, or sell the skins or make craft items (‘coon skin hats) out of them, and live pigeons are always in demand from dog trainers or for live pigeon shoots.

I have had a heard of at least a couple of dozen deer that use my backyard as their home range, and when I had a night job I would often see deer on front porches eating the house plants in places where you would swear there wasn’t enough cover to hide a rabbit in. Find a golf course or large cemetery and you will probably find deer somewhere in the area, or at least deer droppings and prints. In fact there are more deer now than when the Pilgrims hit Plymouth Rock. They are always getting hit on the road so tracking down an injured deer, to put it out of its misery of course, is a quick way to get fresh meat.

All animals in the US, with the possible exception of some saltwater fish, are edible. It is only cultural bias that keeps people from eating perfectly good food. During and after WWI the Belgians starved with barns full of corn that they considered good only for animal feed. Mice, rats, groundhogs (woodchucks), prairie dogs, beavers, muskrats (“march rabbit” in the fancy restaurants), dogs, ants, frogs, worms, grasshoppers (the locusts of the Bible), bees, all freshwater fish, all snakes and all birds are edible, and it is only cultural bias that keeps us from eating them, as I have already previously said.

Harvesting wild game

As to how to harvest them, a good .22 is just about ideal. Most deer in the city limits are so tame you can easily get within 20 or 30 feet of them, and a .22LR or SSS round placed between the eyes or directly between the ears from the back will kill them instantly. Squirrels, raccoons, opossums, rabbits and the like can be live trapped, snared, trapped or killed with .22 shorts or CB caps and the noise level is such that many people 15 or 20 feet away probably won’t even know you were shooting. A .177 or .22 air rifle is even quieter and packs enough punch for small game if you must have absolute minimum of sound. For clearing squirrels out of attics or rats out of basements, the .22 shotshells are ideal or you could use one of the centerfire pistol shotshell loads.

Harvesting fish

Put out a trotline in most any body of water and see what you can catch. If there are trees hanging over the water, anchor a line to a sturdy but limber branch and let the line hang down. The bait will bounce up and down and when a fish is hooked, the branch will give enough to keep the line from breaking and wear the fish out. Most every stream, pond, lake or river will have something ft it, either fish big enough to eat, crayfish, turtles or frogs. Always keep a line out at all times and in various areas to see what you can catch as it’s all edible.

While some freshwater fish are not great, or even good, eating, they are all edible. Carp are considered to be poor eating because they have no real taste of their own, so mix a can of tuna or salmon with about half that amount of ground carp and you will have all “tuna” or “salmon” the next day. When I worked in an expensive restaurant that’s what they did, mixed ground salmon with ground carp and put it in the cooler overnight to get 50% more “salmon”. Save the heads, fins and guts or any “trash” fish you don’t want to eat for your garden. If you have pets, grind the fish waste up and cook it in a pressure cooker to kill all the parasites for use as pet food.

Water

As to water, I recommend the plastic two liter pop bottles. They can be frozen repeatedly, dropped off a two-story building, and are about the minimum amount of water that you will need everyday. Tie a rope under the lip under the cap and sling a pair of them over your shoulder. Either keep them in the dark or add enough chlorine bleach to kill off any plant life that may want to start growing in it. I have had no problem with simple tap water sealed in two liter bottles and keep in a dark place for five or six years at a time, but if exposed to light they start growing things in a hurry, especially if opened and drank out of. The water in a waterbed is NOT safe to drink, as the plastic it is contained in is not a food grade plastic and contains things you won’t want to drink. If you are forced to drink the water from a waterbed, be sure to filter it first.

If the water is going “flat”, all you have to do is pour it from one container into another to mix air back into it. If your city water tastes “funny”, you can let it stand in an opened container overnight, or mix it with soda pop at about one liter of water to two liters of soda, mix in a little sweetener and no one will know the difference. While this will work with any flavor of pop, it works best with strong tastes such as
colas, root beers and other dark colored sodas. Flavored dry soft drink mixes will also help hide the taste as well, and about seven to eight granulated sugar substitute packets will do nicely for a two liter bottle of soft drink mix.

After you take a bath, save the bath water to flush your toilets. The average flush uses from three to five gallons of perfectly pure water, which goes right down the toilet. You can store the water in five gallon food grade plastic buckets that you got from the local bakery, sandwich shop, donut shop or restaurant. Normally these are free as they just throw them away any way or they will charge a minimal amount for them. If you want them cleaned, expect to pay a small amount for the store to run them through the pan-washer for you. Be sure you get the lids as well.

Gardening

Now on to growing your own food. What’s that? No room for a garden? The hoofed rats ate everything you planted? Well it can be done; all you do is grow it inside! Either hydroponicsunder grow lights(Be careful! The government likes to raid anyone using grow lights or hydroponics, even to grow food, and often stakes out stores selling these types of items so they can trace you, so don’t sign anything, park around the corner, and keep the electric bill as low as possible. They also like to fly around looking for houses, barns, or other building that don’t have any snow on them because the house is too warm, so insulate the attic roof!) or in buckets of dirt on a window sill or south facing window for the light.

As to what to grow, pretty much whatever you like to eat that doesn’t take a lot of room. Herbs and things like tomatoes, radishes, and carrots will grow well inside and can be grown all year around if lights are used.

The limiting factor isn’t how hot or cold you keep it, as long as you are reasonably comfortable the plants will be fine, it’s how much light the plants get. The less light the plants get the less they produce, and will quit producing when it gets to the short fall and winter days with little light. If they are artificially lighted however, most plants will either keep growing or produce all year around. Take all your kitchen waste and table scraps and either dig a hole in the garden to put it in (don’t worry, you will never fill the hole no matter how much organic material you put in it!) or if you don’t have a garden, run the matter through a meat grinder or a blender with plenty of water and pour it on the plants.

Basic foods

Next, spend your food money on basic stuff, rice, beans, potatoes, salt, honey, and fresh fruits and vegetables in season, things that you would normally eat any way. Avoid processed food as much as possible, or do the processing yourself. Dry, can, or freeze what you don’t want to use right away. The same goes for the meats, you can dry, can or freeze the meats as well for later use or make jerky out of the tougher less fat cuts.

Sprouts

Learn to sprout seeds and they will bulk up to an amazing amount, adding fresh greens to your diet all year round. The public library will have books on how to do it and its idiot simple. Most any edible seed can be sprouted and used fresh for salads or the sprouts can be dried and ground up for flour. If you like tofu but don’t like the expense, learn to make it yourself out of soybeans. Making tofu is both easy and costs only pennies per pound to make. Hit your local library for books on tofu making. Tofu is a good food extender, as it will absorb the taste of what it is mixed with. Mix a pound of cheap hamburger with a half-pound of tofu and the next day you will have a pound and half of hamburger.

Bake your own bread

Buy or make your own sourdough starter and make sourdough breads, cakes, and other baked goods. It’s both very easy to do and tastes great. The smell of fresh bread every day is also a great smell to come home to! There are any numbers of books at your local library to tell you how to make a sourdough starter and make the breads and all the other baked goods as well.

Tools needed

To get the most from your food supplies, I recommend you get both a meat grinder and a grain grinder. If possible, get grinders that can be converted to both hand and motorized use. While grinding up a deer haunch or a five-gallon bucket of wheat, you will wish you had spent the money f or a heavy duty motorized grinder if you haven’t. I haven’t mentioned wheat as a basic foodstuff, but every survival food storage program I’ve ever heard of includes wheat.

OK, if you like to grind grain and bake bread a lot, that is you actually use wheat in your regular diet, get wheat for your storage program in addition to the other foods listed above. I live right in the middle of the Corn Belt, and oats and soybeans are grown so I can buy them straight from farmers for far less than I can buy locally, grains that have to be trucked in from other States, although the cost is not prohibitive if bought in bulk. Storage is in the plastic buckets you got from the bakery.

Helping on the farm during the harvest, driving a tractor or other simple jobs will often get you a year’s wort
h of corn, oats, soybeans or what ever crop is grown in your area for a few days work. The less cash outflow you have for food, the more money you will have for other things.

Raising domestic animals

If you have some room, and it doesn’t have to be very much, you can raise rabbits or chickens. So how much isn’t very much? How about a space two feet across, by eight feet long, by five feet high. My father fed a family of seven with rabbits out of a space that size, so it can be done and doesn’t have to cost a lot. Rabbits will be covered here, but chickens aren’t that much different and require basically the same care and feeding.

To make rabbit hutches, you will need to go back to the demolition site and see if they have any long or wide pieces of wood being discarded. Doors will work just fine here, so get as many as you can, as well as any wood flooring they are tearing up. If they are getting rid of any bricks, get them too; they will make a floor under the bottom of the hutches to keep it off the ground. What you want is a set of small rooms three across and three high for your rabbits with a south facing screen door so they can get light and air. The hutch will have a wooden floor which you will need to clean everyday or you can put in a small funnel that leads out the back for droppings with a small pipe or tube down the back so the wind doesn’t blow straight in. Rabbits are very clean animals and will learn to use the same spot every time. The rabbits should not have a wire floor, or if they do, make sure they have a large wooden floor to stand on because the wire is hard on their feet. A wooden floor will keep the animals warmer in the winter and will keep predators from seeing them as well while keeping the lower cages cleaner.

They will also need fresh water everyday as well as fresh food. Since this will be done with as little expense as possible. You probably won’t have the automatic food and water bottles that are sold in pet stores for hamsters and the like available unless you can either buy them from used/thrift shops or were given to you by someone who is getting rid of them. Feeding and watering the rabbits everyday will also get the rabbits used to you and make them easier to handle. Put a wooden box large enough for the rabbit to lie in in each cage with straw so the animals can make nests and stay warm. The female rabbits, called does, will use the boxes to make nests for the young and will line it with fur pulled from their bodies. Rabbits are rodents, that is animals who’s front teeth grow their entire lives, so they need to chew constantly to wear their teeth down and will chew on the wood boxes, so DO NOT use green treated lumber and try to use as few nails as possible. A good way to get boxes is to find some dresser drawers that are being discarded and saw the drawers in half and glue on a back.

As to what kind of rabbits to get. Basically, any type will be fine, and get one buck (male rabbit) and five does. These are not show animals and the young will be butchered at two to three months for meat, so any type of rabbit that is readily-available in your area will be fine. You should also keep records of the animals so you will know when they were breed, how many young each doe had, the weight gains, and so on. You will want to thin out any does which have few young, whose young show poor weight gain and so on. Don’t keep poor producers.

As to what to feed them, most any type of fruit or grain is fine, as well as alfalfa and vegetables; weeds from the garden, the tops off the vegetables and other greens are all feed to the rabbits. Hit the dumpsters behind grocery stores or talk to the manager about getting produce that has gone bad. Blown down pears and apples in season, lettuce and carrots discarded from the stores and alfalfa will keep your rabbits healthy and happy. If you have trouble finding fresh foods to give to the rabbits, buy alfalfa pellets from the feed store in bulk to feed to them, but fresh foods are always preferred when possible.

For more on what and how, for both rabbits and chickens, your local public library will have books on the subject, or you can contact your local county agricultural office. Magazines like “Countryside & Small Stock Journal“, “Mother Earth News“, “Backwoods Home“, also available at the public library, will have articles and tips for both the beginner and experienced breeder. Be sure to check on your local regulations about keeping animals in your area, but I’ve always felt that the less the authorities know about what you are up to, the better off you are.

For more money saving tips, I’ve included the following: When the cork seal on your canteen goes bad, just replace it with a seal made out of the foam liner that comes on the bottom of the meat packages. These will make excellent canteen cap seals and are free.

If you need scratch paper, hit the local copy store for paper that has been thrown in the waste can. If the copy store has plastic “credit” cards that you have to charge/pay up and put in the machine to copy, check the stores out at night when people will leave the cards laying around after they leave. The copy stores will just take them, so you might as well benefit from them.

Always check the local library for books and ask about the inner-library loan system as well. An inner-library loan is where one library loans a book to another library so a patron there can read a book that that library doesn’t have. This is normally a free service or the library might make you pay the postage to get the book, but in any case it’s a bargain and you should use it.

If you find a book you want to buy, don’t buy it new, check the used bookstores or hit the library book sales if they have one. At the used bookstore, ask if they have a book search service if they don’t have the book you are looking for. Some will, some won’t. Also ask if the used bookstore will take less or give you a price break or will allow you to trade your books for their books. Again, some will,
some won’t, but it won’t hurt to ask. Amazingly enough, antique stores are often an excellent place to find good used books.

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