This is Rumbull Strip America Heilman. There was a hard frost in late May this year that burned

my blueberry bushes and then I thought it would be a really good idea to put in my tomatoes and my peppers right before a massive heat wave in early June and they still

look terrible and when I look at them I'm filled with a kind of impotent rage and then there was a huge flood here in Vermont and it really hasn't stopped raining ever since.

I have a very complicated relationship with vegetable gardening and Vermont is full of people who are not only excellent vegetable

gardeners but they raise their own animals for milk and eggs and meat and they

put up enough food from the garden to get through the winter.

And I have a lot of friends like this.

And for years I have felt inadequate in their midst for my inadequacies.

So I was very happy when Justin Lander offered up a kind of primal scream about the challenges and frustrations of homesteading in Vermont.

This is a show that I made for Vermont public at the beginning of the summer, so thank you Vermont public for letting me play it here.

Now, here's Justin Lander.

Homesteading.

Okay, so we're not trying to sell anything.

We're trying to do subsistence farming.

We'll do trade and barter and we're going to raise all our own food.

We're like, okay, we got the cow and we got the garden going and we were raising pigs and chickens and rabbits and we tried all manner of waterfowl and eggs and just like we're going to raise all our own food.

And so that means that like every time you go to the co-op and or wherever and buy

a bag of lettuce lettuce it's failure it's defeat it's like cheating

breaking the rules I'm losing the game. We're trying not to buy any food, but also it's dinner. We're down to almost nothing and I'm like, oh God, there's only like this many bags of frozen

string beans we have to be eating so many potatoes right now or they're gonna

we're gonna lose them because it's getting warm in the root cellar. I've seen some sprouty eyes.

We have to really double our efforts at eating potatoes.

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