Micro Farming & Macro Gardening

Will we have enough hay?

2011-11-27T10:59:00.003-05:00

The other week I had a local farmer, Mike, deliver a number of bales of hay for our animals' winter feed. Shortly afterwards he called and asked if I could handle a few extra animals for a little while. "Sure!" I said, figuring that our pastures had the capacity for a few extras for a week or two. I left the farm for a short while to run some errands and was totally unprepared for what greeted me on my return. Mike had delivered a circus. Elephants, zebras, giraffes, camels, the whole shooting match! Yikes! There's no way my pastures could support all these animals! So I called Mike and left a message. Since it was getting late, I finally gave up and went to bed hoping that the morning would bring Mike back and the "few extra animals" would go someplace else. In the meantime I'd get up in the morning and roll several bales of hay out.

Well, morning came and the animals were gone. So were mine. Apparently the elephants just walked through the fences and all of them made good their escape. Now what? Oh well, they won't go far while I eat breakfast. So, just after breakfast I got a call from the car dealer about a mile away. "So, you got any elephants?" "Not now, they all got away. They're not mine by the way, they were just temporarily here." The car dealer wasn't impressed. "So, you need to come over here and get your elephants!" "Any zebras?" "No just elephants. When are you going to get here, they're making a mess and I don't want them to damage any of my cars." "Don't you want to keep them, you know, kind of as an attraction?" "No, just come get your elephants!"

I didn't know how to herd elephants! What was I going to do? How was I going to convince them to walk over a mile back to my farm?

Then I woke up.

It was all a dream, except the hay which Mike had delivered. Do you think I might be concerned about having enough for the winter?

Living Life On The Edge

2011-11-20T10:35:00.002-05:00

Forest edge, that is.

This morning I let the chickens out (as usual they boiled out of the door to get to the food!) and checked their nests for eggs. Excellent, two beautiful large ones. As I stepped out of their house, I heard the lead cock yell "Aaaarrrkk!" and the others took up the call. Everyone bolted for the house. Peculiar? No, actually there was a red tailed hawk flying over our pasture. After he left, the all clear was sounded and they all got back to business as usual.

Half of the flock spent spent this summer under the plum trees in front of our house, which they loved. Toward autumn I expanded their run over some open ground and a small patch of jerusalem artichokes. While the chickens enjoyed scratching in the open ground, they relaxed under the plum trees or jerusalem artichokes. They seemed to really like the cover.

This got me to thinking that chickens are really forest edge animals. They like some cover, but also like to scratch around in open territory. But tall trees are dangerous places because owls and hawks and other predators hang out there.

Cleaning Up The Garden

2011-11-13T11:45:00.002-05:00

The lazy, low energy way!

From garden cleaning

After their work here was done, I rotated them through the rest of the garden, then the orchard(s), then part of another garden, today they're going back into the pasture.

Some of their favorites in the last several weeks were Pac Choi, Kale, Arugula, Mustard, Beets, Chard, Cabbage, Broom Corn, Tomatoes, Peppers, Potatoes, Clover, Borage, Nasturtiums, Winter Squash, Crabapples, and Apples. They wouldn't eat Yellow Crookneck squash. They will bark young and tender trees, particularly apple trees, but they left the older trees pretty much alone other than pruning low hanging branches.

So, are you chicken?

2011-10-16T11:15:00.002-04:00

I like chickens, even though I don't particular care to eat them. I will if that's what we've got. For the past 10 years or so we've raised and kept laying hens and raised the occasional flock of broilers. We've always paid for processing the broilers, though, because we've been unwilling to do it ourselves. That's likely to change though.

The issues that I've had with the broilers:

1. They're just nasty disgusting animals.
2. Their health is fragile and frequently poor.
3. Their mortality rate is unacceptably high.
4. They crap all over each other.
5. Do I really need another reason?

Laying hens have typically not been an issue except buying new ones in periodically is expensive. Feeding them is also expensive, so the eggs cost us more than the ones at the store. But the eggs are also much better than the ones at the store.

At times in the past I've had the chickens do work for me, but with everything else going on I've let that go somewhat. Plus we haven't been able to justify keeping a sufficient quantity of the girls to really get the jobs done. That's about to change.

My inspiration to get back into serious chickening is "The Small-Scale Poultry Flock" by Harvey Ussery. Brilliant! From building a henhouse to breeding to butchering to feeding to putting the girls to work, Harvey covers just about everything that a homestead "flockster" (Harvey's term for chicken farmers) is likely to need. If you can't afford to buy the book, convince your local library to buy it. Or if you can afford it, buy two and donate one to the local library. It's well worth reading.

Why so much compost?

2011-10-02T11:09:00.003-04:00

Last post I showed some photos of one of three ongoing compost piles at our place. Why so much compost? We're working really hard to build fertility in our garden so we can grow more of our calories. Think about how much food you and your family actually consume in a year. Then consider how you're going to produce that volume of food. Your initial reaction might be that you just don't have enough space, or enough time, or enough labor to actually grow that food. And that might be the case, especially if the soil fertility is very low. But you can do something about that part. Sit down and read "How to Grow More Vegetables..." by John Jeavons. Then go through the master charts and plan your annual food production. Take the time to do it right. My first inclination was to calculate how much food the entire family would consume annually, then using the minimum fertility numbers determine how much land I'd need to garden. Ouch. Somewhere around 25,000 square feet. Spreading 1/2 inch of compost over that area would require more than 34 cubic yards of compost. And let's see, how am I going to double dig all of that area?

Rather than spread myself and my resources so thin that I'll accomplish nothing worthwhile, I'm going to focus on a much smaller area to make some genuine progress. Over time the productivity of the smaller garden will increase and I'll have the time and energy and resources (compost) to slowly enlarge that area. Oddly enough, that's the strategy promoted by Mr. Jeavons.

Also we need to think about where we're going to store all of that food. Where would you store 1000 pounds of potatoes? Or a similar amount of corn? Or squash? What's the optimum temperature and humidity level for storing each crop? Truth is we've lost so much food production and storage knowledge over the last couple of generations that I don't think many modern humans would survive if the food didn't mysteriously appear in the grocery store regularly. We're working hard to relearn these skills and teach them to our children. Let's hope that others are doing the same.

Why? We can talk about Peak Oil, Peak Soil, Peak Water, Peak Debt, Peak Minerals, etc. and all of these are big deals, but something people don't consider very often is Peak Labor. As the number of people in the workforce declines, so does GDP. And the number of people in the workforce is set to decline substantially as the post-war baby boom retires. With the decline in production in all of these areas it will simply be more difficult to procure food. Being in the position to fill most of your own calorie needs before the decline affects your ability to procure food is a good idea.

Compost

2011-09-25T11:19:00.002-04:00

We're planning to grow quite a bit more staples in 2012 and one of the challenges any gardener faces is achieving a high level of soil fertility. Compost helps. So, this year we're being much more aggressive in producing lots and lots of compost. We have one large pile that's finished and just aging. A second pile is about halfway along and a third is just beginning. We compost just about everything compostable. Old animal bedding, spoiled hay, weeds, grass, kitchen scraps, garden residue, and even paper and cardboard that Kate collects at work. The following series of pictures are of the second pile. The first photo shows the pile in progress next to a new stack of garden residue mixed (squash plants and corn stalks) with scrap paper and cardboard.

From compost

This next photo shows the pile after I've buried the "new" stuff with the older pile.

From compost

And a few days later you can see just how much the pile has sagged. When I turned the pile early in the past week, the paper and squash plants were gone!

From compost

The next two photos were taken by Kate yesterday as I turned the pile again.

From compost

I'm turning the pile fairly frequently to speed the process before cooler and even cold temperatures arrive. Plus I'd like the compost to be done and aging for some time before I use it in the springtime. And yes, I believe that having a tractor is a higher priority for my situation than having an automobile or even a truck. How many large compost piles can you turn with a car or truck after all?

Update on our front garden

2011-09-11T10:31:00.002-04:00

Another month or so has gone by and the change in our front garden is pretty amazing. Of course we gave it a boost with annual plants, but next spring we expect to be able to afford more perennials. Plus we're likely to change out the morning glory plants for runner beans just for more productivity. Although the morning glory plants are pretty.

Here are some photos:

From front garden

Can you find the bamboo in here?

From front garden

And a pretty nice pumpkin hiding here:

From front garden

Tools – Give or Take

2011-08-14T10:50:00.002-04:00

When we purchase tools each of us makes a choice, consciously or not, for tools that give or tools that take. And by “tools that take”, I mean tools that continue to drain our resources long after we bought them. For instance, way back when I received a gasoline powered string trimmer, or “weed whacker”, for fathers day. I was delighted because I was then able to walk anywhere on our property and trim our developing lawn without dragging an extension cord for my electric trimmer. But, there was an ongoing cost. The plastic string was rapidly consumed and we had to buy more. Since it had a two-cycle engine we had to add special oil to the gasoline. And it vibrated, and was loud, and hot, and smelly, and splattered pulverized stuff all over the place and me. When I was done trimming, there was no practical way to pick up the debris and compost it. Ultimately the string head gave out and I took the trimmer to the local lawn and garden repair shop. I was informed that the trimmer I had wasn’t designed to be used more than ten minutes at a time and I was lucky that it lasted as long as it did. What I really needed, he said, was a new trimmer with all these features for only $250. Thanks, but no thanks.

So, rather than a motorized string trimmer, consider a scythe instead. Here’s a tool that keeps giving. It’s muscle powered, so no gasoline. No consumable string and the blade will last a really long time with care. It’s nearly silent and you won’t be getting those bad vibrations. The trimmings will be deposited neatly in a windrow at the end of your stroke to be gathered up and composted, or possibly dried for hay. But the scythe is even better than that. It can easily cut through stems that a string trimmer can’t even touch. I like it a lot. And yes, you can trim at least as close to fences and other obstacles as you can with a string trimmer. With care, a scythe will even be safer to use around tender (or not so tender, like young trees) plants than a string trimmer will ever be. But you do need to take care, the blade is very sharp and will easily cut through hidden objects like irrigation lines.

You would think that all hand tools would fall into the category of “tools that keep giving”, but they don’t. Poor quality tools, like the mass market garden tools sold at big box retailers and, sadly your local hardware store, are frankly junk. Don’t be tempted by the $8 shovel like I was several years back. “It’s cheaper than a new handle!” said the lady at the hardware store. Yep, and it broke digging its first hole. Price doesn’t matter either, the $80 shovel I bought (it’s got a forged blade!) also broke digging its first hole. The replacement broke a few months later. We’ll see how long the third one lasts. My experience with spading forks has been worse. Not only are they clearly not designed for the task, but the manufacturing quality is the absolute pits. These are tools that keep taking. You should take your business elsewhere, I know I will.

By the way, I bought my scythe from Scythe Supply (www.scythesupply.com). They offer a complete outfit that’s pretty good. It’s worth ordering a fine whetstone to go with the outfit though. The standard whetstone is medium grit, which is good and necessary, but the fine one will put a finer edge on the scythe. I found The Scythe Book, which comes with the outfit, very helpful but I recommend reading the appendix first or only.

Many things happening down on the farm

2011-08-07T10:39:00.002-04:00

So, we've been busily working on growing food for our CSA members this year. Anyone who has put a seed in the ground can relate to the challenges and disappointments of gardening. But, that's not what this post is about.

We work really hard to grow much of our own food, but there are some things that are more challenging than others. If you read about biointensive gardening, you'll find that they recommend that 60% of your crops be carbon and energy intensive crops (like grains), 30% energy intensive root crops (like potatoes), and 10% vitamin and mineral vegetables (like typical garden veggies). We're not there. Potatoes, ok but not enough of them, vitamin and mineral veggies, ok. Grains, nope. We're not there. But we do have the space to raise some meat, eggs, and milk. I've gone vegan before but found that I have to continually eat more and more while still losing weight to the point of poor health. Maybe I was doing something wrong, but animal protein is still part of our diet. One source is these little piggies:

From piggies

Who've gotten bigger since:

From piggies

Sometimes we needed to move the pigs from place to place, but they weren't trained to walk along with us. So we bent a feedlot panel into a U shape and tied a "gate" in the open end of the U. And the pigs walked right along, like this:

We've also been upgrading the landscaping in the front of our house which has a southern exposure. In the past we had typical "foundation plantings" of not very useful plants. You know, prickly shrubs and mulch. Over time grass and weeds moved in and it became uglier and even less useful. So this winter and spring I hooked up the tractor and yanked them out.

From front garden

Then Kate laid some sheet mulch down, we planted some grapevines, bamboo, morning glories, nasturtiums, and a whole bunch of seeds. We're also building wire trellis on the front of the house to support the vines. Over time, we'll add more perennials as we can to improve the garden. Here's how it looked right after we planted:

From front garden

And here's how it looked yesterday morning:

From front garden

I've talked about our greenhouse before. Our usage of the greenhouse has been limited in the summer because it's just too hot and I can't buy shade cloth. (No dough to spare.) So, our plan is to make use of an old greenhouse frame

From front garden

to build a trellis over the existing greenhouse:

From front garden

Now Kate and Mac are sheet mulching around the greenhouse in preparation for the new trellis, vines, and other plants.

From front garden

Next spring we plan to build keyhole beds around the greenhouse for culinary and medicinal herbs. In addition to food.

Some time ago we dug a rain garden to collect driveway runoff. It worked pretty well, but we noticed that with the rain coming in events rather than more evenly distributed the rain garden had insufficient storage capacity. So, we put the boys to work digging the garden out to significantly increase the capacity.

From rainwater collection

And as if on cue, we got a third of an inch of rain in about 30 minutes the day after the "pond" was dug:

From rainwater collection

Still probably not enough capacity for a deluge, but the "pond" feeds a swale, which then can overflow into a much larger swale. The water is still held high on the hill. And now we can store more moisture on the highest part of the hill, improving our ability to grow food on this very hot western exposure.

Just a few snapshots of what we've been doing lately. Hope you enjoyed it.

Quiet

2011-07-03T10:20:00.002-04:00

I know that I've been very quiet on the blog lately, no time really. I'm rarely online for one, for another life as a subsistence farmer is very focused on providing food and fuel for our continued survival. This year has been quite the challenge on the food front. Our weather, on average, has been pretty good. However, seeds and plants don't grow based on weather on average, they try to endure the weather at the moment. Our weather has alternated from cold and very wet to scorching hot, averaging to pretty good but not good for most annuals. The result: seeds have rotted in the soil, then what plants came up were parched. We had two plantings of snap peas which never sprouted, third time was the charm. Our snow peas shot right up and are doing great. Squash is behind, but the potatoes are growing like crazy. Our Anasazi sweet corn is doing great, the Ashworth sweet corn sprouted an average of three plants per row. Growing spinach has been a complete joke. The perennials are doing well, annuals are anyone's guess. We've had years of no problems with rabbits and this year they're pests.

So, diversity in plantings and lots of organic matter in the soil, as I've stressed in the past, are crucial to survival.

How Programmed Are We?

2011-04-13T19:17:00.003-04:00

Our seventeen year old daughter spent spring break at her father's house (we're a blended family). When she came back she said, "Dad, you're going to really laugh about this one!" and proceeded to relate this story. It seems that her father told her that he's very concerned about her health and that she needs to eat healthier. She then did a tour of his refrigerator and kitchen, and laughed. I guess he thinks that she should stop eating the whole, natural food that we provide and convert over to the highly processed, chemical laced shit that he eats.

And yes, I did laugh.

Interrupt the waste stream

2011-04-09T10:04:00.004-04:00

We feel a moral obligation to keep our waste stream just as low as we can in today's world. One way to do this is to stop buying so much stuff. Stuff comes in packages, wears out, breaks, etc. adding to the waste stream. Of course having a pitifully small income helps, we can't afford to buy much stuff!

But we do have pets, although the cats are more working animals since they help manage the rodent population around the farm. But the rodents (and unfortunately birds) are not enough to feed our active animals and we buy pet food to supplement their diets. It used to be that their food came in paper sacks, which we could compost. Then the manufacturer switched to plastic coated paper sacks, which were not compostable and not reusable. Lately they've changed to a woven plastic material similar to a tarpaulin.

From Waste Stream

These are really high quality bags! Similar bags are also used for many pet food and packaged animal feeds nowadays. We're saving these for reuse later, maybe as sand bags. How many uses can you think of for some really good quality, slightly used bags? Earthbag construction maybe?

Other items in the waste stream include used boxes, newspapers, junk mail, just about all paper based packaging. We've been collecting this material from our local network all winter and will be using it for sheet mulch, plain old mulch, and compost this year. We run a small CSA and are asking our members to collect packaging and autumn leaves for us as well. Some have been nice enough to shred their junk mail for us.

So, interrupt that waste stream and collect as many quality bags and other items as you can!

The Post I Couldn't Write

2011-04-06T18:43:00.002-04:00

A couple of posts ago I promised that my next post would deal with mind control and how to escape it to work on a simpler and less costly way of life. As I composed it in my mind, the post became more and more difficult to write. Particularly as the doublespeak from Washington D.C. became more and more blatant. I’m still struggling with the humanitarian aid package that comes complete with slightly used cruise missiles. “Get your catcher’s mitt, here comes help from the evil empire.” And, yes, most of the world considers the U.S. (that’s us) evil.

Every now and then I sit down and read old books that I haven’t read for years. As I’ve aged and matured my perspective toward these books has evolved. One of the more recent re-reads is “The Once And Future King” by T.H. White. Before you pooh-pooh this as a kid’s book, maybe you ought to take another look. There’s quite a bit of social commentary in there. The first copyright date listed is 1939. Well, well, just what was going on in the world then?

In chapter 13, Wart has convinced Merlin to turn him into an ant so he can visit one of the ant farms in his bedroom. We then get to observe Wart’s experiences as a worker ant. One of his most striking experiences was the continuous broadcast from the central nest mind, the queen ant, through Wart’s antennae. For quite a while there’s nothing but instructions and platitudes about how life is great in the Nest. Then a worker discovers a bridge to the Othernest and things change. Now the broadcasts take the following form (and this is quoted directly from the book):

“The first one (lecture) was arranged as follows:
A. We are so numerous that we are starving.
B. Therefore we must encourage still larger families so as to become yet more numerous and starving.
C. When we are so numerous and starving as all that, obviously we shall have a right to take other people’s stores of seed. Besides, we shall then have a numerous and starving army.

It was only after this logical train of thought had been put into practice, and the output of the nurseries trebled – both nests meanwhile getting ample mash for all their needs from Merlin – for it has to be admitted that starving nations never seem to be quite so starving that they cannot afford to have far more expensive armaments than anybody else – it was only then that the second type of lecture was begun.
This is how the second kind went:
A. We are more numerous than they are, therefore we have a right to their mash.
B. They are more numerous than we are, therefore they are wickedly trying to steal our mash.
C. We are a mighty race and have a natural right to subjugate their puny one.
D. They are a mighty race and are unnaturally trying to subjugate our inoffensive one.
E. We must attack them in self defense.
F. They are attacking us by defending themselves.
G. If we do not attack them today, they will attack us tomorrow.
H. In any case we are not attacking them at all. We are offering them incalculable benefits.”

Do you see any parallels to pronouncements and policies from Washington over the past couple of decades?

Let me propose a few:

A. We are past our own oil production peak and produce less each year.
B. Therefore we must encourage still larger and more cars and trucks so as to use more and more oil.
C. When we use so much oil as all that, obviously we shall have a right to take other people’s stores of oil. Besides, we shall then have a numerous and oil hungry army.

It was only after this logical train of thought had been put into practice, and the output of the automotive industry doubled – both nests meanwhile getting ample oil for all their needs – for it has to be admitted that starving nations never seem to be quite so starving that they cannot afford to have far more expensive armaments than anybody else (Why is U.S. military spending ten times the next most profligate nation?) – it was only then that the second type of lecture was begun.
This is how the second kind went:
A. We are more powerful and oil hungry than they are, therefore we have a right to their oil.
B. They are more numerous than we are, therefore they are wickedly trying to steal our (non-negotiable) American way of life.
C. America is an exceptional nation and has a natural right to subjugate their puny ones.
D. Islam is the fastest growing religion on the planet and is unnaturally trying to infiltrate and overturn our way of life. Look at what they’ve done in Europe!
E. We must attack them in self defense. (Didn’t even have to change this one!)
F. They are attacking us by defending themselves. (This one either.)
G. If we do not attack them today, they will attack us tomorrow. (Didn’t have to change this one either, remember WMD?)
H. In any case we are not attacking them at all. We are offering them the incalculable benefits of freedom and democracy. It’s humanitarian aid. Really!

Chilling eh?

The other day I, along with millions of other Americans, received Mr. Obama’s email announcing his bid for re-election in 2012. Alright, he’s just past halfway through and he’s bidding for another go. And he’s doing it early because there’s a lot of groundwork to be done and a lot of person to person contact to be made in his grassroots campaign. Which by the way should be a record setting spend on a presidential campaign. Lots of damage control to do actually. I voted for the guy and can’t see why I should repeat that mistake. Based on the results, I’m not seeing a lot of value in voting at all. Candidate Obama promised to reverse the “failed policies of the Bush administration.” For quite some time, too long even, president Obama talked about how hard it was to fix the economy, unemployment, whatever just fill in the blank, because of the “failed policies of the previous administration”. I presume it became “previous” because it was hard to tell just whose policies they were. How many of these “failed policies of the previous administration” has president Obama reversed? Anyone? Zero. In fact, many have been amplified. Let’s see, newly elected hopey changey democratic president and a democrat led house and senate failed to even suggest repealing the “patriot act”. (Or was it “jackboot act”, I forget.) I’m not going to list all of the failures to change, but there was clearly no change with the change of administration from Bush to Obama. Either we have a consistent failure of leadership from the oval office, or the president no longer leads the united states. And yes, I’m using lowercase intentionally.

While we’re on mind control, the Rolling Stone recently published an article claiming that the military conducted psy-ops on dignitaries visiting Afghanistan including senator Carl Levin from Michigan.
Levin responded, denying the allegations and stating that he has always supported a strong military.
Let’s see, a lifelong liberal democrat in favor of a strong military. Sound fishy to you?

Of course its illegal to conduct psy-ops on U.S. citizens at home or abroad. And of course our government never, ever does anything illegal. Right?

BTW, how many times did you see this?

How did it make you feel? A little bit under attack maybe? Didn't the endless repetition make you feel like it happened hundreds of times? It’s kind of like the two minute hate. Isn’t it amazing how quickly congress forked over the so-called “patriot act”? How the invasion of Afghanistan was so easily accepted? And aside from the few “no blood for oil” protests, how easily the U.S. invaded yet another sovereign nation and murdered its president along with untold numbers of its citizens. And now that we’ve attacked Libya, barely a peep.

It’s even in the music, and has been for a long time. During the 60’s we heard a lot of protest songs, and a few like this one.

Have you heard any protest songs lately? How about “patriotic america” music? By the way, the few new “patriotic america” songs I’ve heard are far clumsier than the old ones. It’s like they don’t even have to try anymore.

After all of that, here’s the point:

LOTS OF PEOPLE ARE TRYING TO CONTROL WHAT YOU THINK!

Be aware of this. Be aware of attempts to control your behavior, past, present, and future. Think for yourself and work for yourself. This is essential for you to succeed in living a simple and wholesome life.

Before you say, “I do think for myself and nobody controls my behavior but me” read my previous post on the power of advertising. I struggle not only with Wednesday being spaghetti day, but Frosted Lucky Charms are magically delicious. But I don’t buy them anymore because I’m aware of the programming. Think about behaviors that are inconsistent with your beliefs. Think about inconsistent beliefs that you might hold. Let’s say that you believe that all human life is sacred, but you know that nasty Ghadaffi guy (or Sadaam Hussein or Al-Queda) needs to go so we’re gonna bomb him (or them) back into the stone age! Or another incredible inconsistency: “abortion is wrong, but capital punishment is ok”. Or how about this one “capital punishment is a crime against humanity, but abortion is ok”.

And here’s one to untangle, “the rail subsidy is just huge and needs to be eliminated, but we need to fund both the rebuilding of America’s interstate highway system and the revamping of the air traffic control system”.

In fact, rail transportation is the most energy efficient (and pleasant) means to transport people and goods long distances. The puny rail subsidy is dwarfed by the enormous budget of the Federal Highway Administration. Combine that with highway patrol budgets, state highway budgets, airport construction and maintenance, air traffic control, budgets for unconstitutional warrant-less searches in the airports and you can only reach one conclusion. The subsidies for air and car / truck transportation are ginormous. And these are only the government paid subsidies.

How about car insurance? If you don’t have a car, you don’t need it. But you have to have a car and the insurance because the federal government destroyed the U.S. passenger rail transportation network and the insurance lobbies got laws passed in most states requiring insurance. Who builds, maintains, and owns the highways? The government. Who builds, maintains, and owns the rail lines? The freight railway companies (not the government). Even Detroit, by the way, used to have a very effective public transportation system. But it was bought by guess which major automobile manufacturer, dismantled, and sold to Mexico. I rode on it in Mexico city in 1970, decades after it was declared obsolete, and you know what, it was pretty darn good!

Our government is crazy and we’re crazy for allowing it to continue on this path. Either that or we’re powerless to change it, because electing different politicians changes nothing.

So, be independent. Think for yourself. If the system’s not working for you, and there’s nothing you can do to change it, maybe you might consider dropping out of it. And pitch the TV into the recycle bin, it’s the primary propaganda machine.

Postscript: I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not an elegant writer. Read more on this topic in “Citizenship Papers” by Wendell Berry who is an elegant writer.

Is this 1984?

2011-03-29T14:14:00.004-04:00

"We have averted a humanitarian catastrophe" Obama 2011 about U.S. military intervention and bombardment of Libyan forces loyal to K'Daffy. Surely no innocent lives were ended by U.S. weapons. We help people by blowing them up?

WAR IS PEACE

"You are free to choose any health care program you want." Just about any Democrat 2010. Except of course the choice of not paying into the insurance scams.

FREEDOM IS SLAVERY

"We have to pass this bill (health care reform act) so you can see what's in it" Nancy Pelosi 2010.

IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

The telescreen is always on, you can turn it down but not off. How many television sets are on the moment people enter their homes and stay that way until they go to bed or leave?

The things we hear and see impact our ability to control our minds and lives. If you are working toward a simpler life you will need to learn when to listen, how to listen, and how to control your responses to that information. You need to recognize when some external agency is trying to control you and respond appropriately.

Support our troops?

2011-03-23T19:14:00.003-04:00

We support our troops? Well, here you go. Do you support this?

Or maybe this?

Or how about this?

Or maybe this?

Off target for a gardening blog? Well, it's connected with my next post which deals with saying no to mind control. Essential for staying the course as a farmer/gardener.

In the meantime, listen to some music here.

Food Comes First?

2011-03-16T19:53:00.002-04:00

Listening to the news out of Japan these last several days has given me some perspective on the following post. I was all ready to post it on Sunday, but felt that I needed to think about it a little longer in light of that string of disasters. Every day I hear more about people who have been without food, water, electricity, or heat since the earthquake and tsunami on Friday. Which made me think about redundant systems. It’s pretty obvious that most of the people in the affected areas didn’t have redundancies built into their home systems, we didn’t until a couple of years ago. Little things like a few days of water stored in a barrel in the basement, some extra food stashed in the pantry, candles, a way to heat the food without electricity or natural gas, and a means of heating the house that doesn’t require electricity or natural gas could make such a difference for anyone in the wake of a disaster. So, I added a little bit about building redundant crops and storage methods. Because despite the platitudes coming out of Washington, disasters happen even on a very localized basis and you can’t count on Big Brother rescuing you. Oh, and there are a number of nuclear power plants with reactors of the very same design in the United States.

Presuming we have air to breath, reasonably clean water to drink, and some sort of shelter then food becomes a top priority. Unless you’re prepared to go “hunter-gatherer”, and I’ll bet that most of us are not, then growing food becomes a really important. The foods that you will be most concerned with are not the ones that most casual gardeners grow, such as tomatoes and cucumbers. Here I’m talking about staple foods. These are high calorie, storable foods that will get you through the winter and most of the next growing season.

At this point in the discussion, we’re going to leave meat aside because growing meat takes even more special skills and uses more land resources than most people have. Some exceptional meat animals that can be grown in small spaces include chickens, ducks, rabbits, guinea pigs, and fish. If you’re an angler and have a clean fishery nearby, then you might have a fairly cheap source of protein and calories on your hands. Much the same story for hunting, but as I said, I’m not covering meat in this discussion.

So, staple foods. The easiest to grow are beans and peas, not the green beans or wax beans that you eat in the pod, although they’re good. I’m talking about dried beans and peas. Think navy beans and field peas. These legumes will be listed under ‘dry beans’ in the seed catalogs. Next easiest in my experience is storage squash. You’ll want the longer storing squash like Hubbard, Butternut, and similar squashes. Acorn type squashes do not store very long but should last through December. Plant a seed, provide water, and wait. Fertility needs aren’t huge, but they do need somewhat fertile soil. Most people don’t include onions and garlic in the “staple crop” category but I do. Plan to grow a lot of both, they really aren’t difficult to grow, harvest, and store. Then come potatoes and similar tubers. There’s more work for tubers because they prefer more deeply worked soil, and they need to be dug out of the ground. This job can be pretty hard on the old body without the right tools (and I don’t have the right tools). Corn rounds out the list ahead of small grains primarily because corn is easier to harvest and process with simple hand tools and techniques. The challenges with corn include high fertility needs, reliable pollination, and GMO contamination. Then come the small grains, rye, wheat, barley, etc. We grew some wheat last year, and while we did get a decent crop out of the small area we planted, we realized what a challenge threshing and cleaning the wheat by hand can be. There are more.

So you plant a row or two of these crops and you’re all set, right? Wrong. You eat a LOT of these staple crops. Take some time before planting season and keep track of how much you eat each week. You might not be eating many of these right now, but if you’re going to grow most of your own food, then you will be.

Take wheat for example. My family consumes eight loaves of bread every week. That’s right about 32 cups of wheat flour. If we’re making sourdough, we also use 1 cup of sourdough starter for each loaf, so that’s basically 1 cup of rye flour. Wheat flour weighs about 4 oz per cup, rye will be about the same so we’re not going to quibble over that. So a quick little spreadsheet calculation:

I used the “low fertility” values here because that’s what most of us are likely to attain to start with. Even this fertility level is better than most ground that has been “factory farmed” for many years. But you can make substantial improvements on even abused land. One section of our garden was so poor that even weeds wouldn’t grow. Now we get a pretty decent yield, but it took some work and lots of organic matter to get there. Someday we might get up to the high fertility values but it’s best to use a conservative estimate until we have some experience under our belts.

Now these values were computed assuming that bread would be our only use for wheat. But we consume pasta (Remember Prince Spaghetti Night!), pancakes, muffins, cakes, and other delicious items. So we should plan to at least double our estimated consumption. Right off the bat, we’re looking at 1/2 acre of wheat and around 1/8 acre of rye. Woof! I don’t know if you’ve ever tried harvesting, threshing, and cleaning small grains by hand but you should do it on a small scale before you tackle a project of this magnitude.

Most of us don’t have that kind of land area cleared and available. Right now we’re buying wheat and rye from a farmer nearby and focusing on other crops that we can manage more easily.

If you currently eat meat at one meal per day, you’ll need to assume that you will not continue to do so on a regular basis unless you’re able to raise your own. Don’t forget that the animals need to eat as well. Instead you’ll substitute legumes, fish, and game for protein and will probably eat more carbohydrates and greens along with them. Figure out how many lbs of dried beans you’ll need, calculate out how much you’ll need to grow and how much land area you will need. This is one of the many areas where John Jeavon’s “How to Grow More Vegetables…” comes in very handy. With experience you’ll be able to estimate based on your own results, but if you have no other basis for your calculations you could do a lot worse than this reference.

You can follow the same process for each of the staple crops, plan on growing several different varieties. The same stuff day after day, 365 days a year gets old really fast. And don’t forget other crops, fruit, carrots, turnips, beets, brassicas, leafy greens, tomatoes, herbs, spices, etc. These provide needed nutrients and give you the opportunity to put some variety in your diet.

When you start making your calculations, you’ll be astounded by the volume of food that you actually have to grow to survive. Make sure that you also factor in some spoilage, because it will happen no matter how careful you are. If your household consumes 5 pounds of potatoes every week, figure on growing around 250 to 300 pounds of potatoes. That translates to a minimum of 25 pounds of seed potatoes, I’d recommend more. Stored crops can and do go bad even under the best conditions, and yields can sometimes be disappointing.

Focus on the crops that are relatively easy to grow, harvest, and store. For most people that list includes beans, storage squash, onions, potatoes, and corn but not small grains. We use a lot of garlic, so that’s included in my list of staples.

You should also build redundancies into your cropping strategy. Plant more than one variety of each crop and plant multiple crops that almost fit into the same dietary niche. Potatoes and squash are an example of crops that we’ve grown and used as substitutes. Maybe we didn’t get as many potatoes in one year as we wished, but we were smothered in squash. The opposite can be true. No, they’re not the same nutritionally but they both fill the hole in your belly and provide lots of calories. That’s a big deal when you’re trying to survive.

Multiple storage methods and locations are other redundancies to consider. Remember that disasters happen. They might not have the global reach of an earthquake and tsunami as in Japan, but for a family just trying to scrape by even small failures can be disasters. If everything’s frozen and the freezer doesn’t work for a week or so, you’re going to have a problem. If one crop fails, you’d really like an alternative crop ready. If rodents get into one store of root vegetables, you’d better have staple foods stored someplace else too. Canning and fermenting food are two alternative storage methods to freezing or cold storage. While you’re considering, also look at the energy required to preserve the food. Low acid foods require pressure canning for proper preservation according the USDA, but pressure canning requires a tremendous amount of energy on a traditional stove. (A rocket stove is likely to be more efficient for canning, but we haven’t tried one yet. It’s in the plans for this summer.) Fermentation is a much lower energy means to preserve food that you might want to try.

So far I’ve only talked about annual crops. That’s because annuals are what most people eat. But what about perennials? Jerusalem artichokes are fine after resting in the frozen ground all winter. Hazelnuts are high calorie food that come back year after year without much effort at all. Chestnuts are another high food value staple. We’ve planted all of these, it just takes a few years or more to get a decent crop going. Let’s also remember wild crops out there which are typically free for the gatherer (remember hunter gatherer!) such as acorns and burdock roots. While they’re not staples, we hunt blackberries, mulberries, and wild black cherries around our place. In fact I just transplanted a bunch of volunteer mulberries last fall. I can’t wait!

I hope you get the idea. Making your staple crop plan isn’t hard, it’s just tedious. Anyone can do it and everyone should. If you find out that you need more land than you have, don’t let that discourage you. You can always find more space or grow a high value crop for trade on the limited space you have. Your options are almost endless, two that come right to mind are crop sharing with the landowner and leasing land. Trading some of your crops for those someone else grew is another possibility. A little creative thinking will uncover many other options as well.

Since we’re talking about staple foods and bread is a staple for many folks, here’s my recipe for Honey Whole Wheat Sourdough bread:

For the sponge:
5 cups whole wheat flour
2 cups water
2 cups sourdough starter (see “Wild Fermentation” by Sandor Katz for a good starter recipe)
1 tablespoon honey

Mix all ingredients in a large bowl, cover with a clean damp towel, and put in a warm place overnight. When the starter is good and bubbly proceed with the rest.

For the loaves:
1 bowl of sponge from above
3 cups whole wheat flour
2 tablespoons salt
3 tablespoons honey

Mix all ingredients thoroughly. The dough should be very sticky but not runny. Butter the insides of two loaf pans and dust the inside bottoms of the pans with flour. This will help the loaves release from the pans easily. Turn half of the dough into each loaf pan. Cover the pans with clean towels and place in a warm spot to rise. (The loaves rise in about an hour at our house.) When the dough has risen even with the tops of the loaf pans, bake in a 400 degree F oven for 35 minutes. At the end of the 35 minutes, remove the loaves from the pans and set upright directly on the oven rack and bake for 5 more minutes. When the 5 minutes are up, place the loaves on a rack to cool for at least 15 minutes, 30 minutes would be even better.

No, I didn’t forget about kneading, it’s not helpful for this recipe.

Get Help

2011-03-09T14:24:00.002-05:00

So, you’re out of work or soon will be. Now what? The traditional approach is to polish up your resume, network, get out there and search. Your full time job is looking for a job! Let’s say that you’ve already done those things and realize by now that it’s not working. These actions were all quite valid in former times when the economy was growing, but the economy has shed so many jobs that there are more than 15 million of you out there looking for work when there are fewer than a million jobs being created each year. And nearly 2 million people are entering the job market each year. And, the jobs being created are jobs that you’re not qualified for or are over-qualified for. You will not get different results by continuing to do the same thing.

As I discussed in my last post, you need to recognize the lies for what they are and start to plan a much different life. The old one is over. Of course it’s one thing to make a financial plan, and it’s absolutely necessary, but executing that plan is another story altogether.

It’s time to do something completely different. As humans we are united in our basic needs: food, clean water, shelter, and companionship. Many people don’t list companionship as a basic need, but I consider it so. I’m going to use the word sufficiency to indicate the satisfaction of these basic needs. As you work toward sufficiency you will need lots of help. We sure have. So, don’t be afraid to ask.

Sufficiency, rather than self-sufficiency, recognizes that we need and get help. Companionship we have in each other, our family, and our friends. To give you an idea of the scale of help that you’ll need, here’s a partial list of people who have helped us: Suzanne, Leslie, Bob, John, Mary, Tim, Richard, Claudette, Isaac, Nancy, Tom, Paula, Charlie, Mike, Margaret, Wayne, Bill, Mark, Terry, Renee, Jan, Trent, Janice, Cathy, Don, Diane, Stan, Marge, Bruce, Jim, Ann, Carrie, Dave, Janet, John, Mark, Stan, Tom, Brian, Kim, Debbie, Barb, Dennis, Eldon, Jim, Andy, Jun, Todd, Mike, Eldon, Steve, Andy, Nathan, Shannon, Mary Kate, Mac, Sean… Thanks to all of you and those I haven’t mentioned, thank you too.

You get the idea. Not one of us can stand alone, but together we can accomplish a lot. So get help.

Restructuring your life is hard to do, but you can get help there too. Again, you’ll be doing something completely different because the old ways won’t work anymore. The definition of insanity may not be, “doing the same thing and expecting different results”, but “doing the same thing and expecting different results” is insane. While you still have some financial resources, like unemployment benefits, you should take classes that will help you restructure your life. The very first you should take is a permaculture class. You’ve got the time, and I can’t think of a better way to spend the money. You’ll make new friends and come up with a new way of living that will save you more money in a few months than you spent on the course. It likely will be that transformative.

How about I word this recommendation a little more strongly. Every unemployed person should take a permaculture class this year.

Here are some resources:

Wayne Weiseman and the Permaculture Project
Bill Wilson at Midwest Permaculture
Wayne, Bill, and Mark Shepard were my teachers in the Permaculture class that I took in 2008.

The Permaculture Activist
A great publication and lots of resources.
Keith Johnson's blog
And PRI Australia

Listening to lies, making plans.

2011-03-02T19:31:00.010-05:00

As I’ve mentioned before we no longer have a television. We also don’t have internet access at home (a cost save), so our only source of reasonably up to date news is the radio. The station in our area that has the most regular news programming (all news) is National Public Radio. Or as we call it, NPO, because it generally P’s me O. This morning, for example, we listened to a report about food prices. The “correspondent”, or what I consider “propaganda drone”, said that families really should be barely affected by the commodity price ramp because:

1. Food is only about 10% of a family’s monthly budget.

2. Agricultural commodities only account for about 17% of the cost of the food that people actually buy.

3. The commodity increases are “only” about 50%.

The actual facts point by point now:

1. For the bottom 40% of the families out there, food is a much larger portion of their monthly budget. And many just can’t afford it, why else would there be over 40 million families on food stamps?

2. When you’re trying to save money, you don’t buy processed foods any more than absolutely necessary. On top of that, many producers were locked into contracts at pre-ramp prices. When those contracts expire, look out. Last week I called a farmer looking for feeder hogs. I’ve previously been able to purchase them for between $30 and $50. His price this year is $125. When I asked why he gave me two reasons: 1 - feed prices have doubled and 2 – most small producers have gotten out of the hog business, he wishes he had. To raise a hog to market weight, I would need to buy 1250 lbs of feed at a cost of about $250 unless I can grow my own or get some for free. Including bargain rate butchering that puts the actual pork cost at about $3.50 per lb. That includes no labor cost, no housing cost, no fencing cost, just the pig and its feed. The point is: you aren’t seeing the price ramp yet, but you will.

3. I live in a rural community and talk with farmers. Just the other week one farmer told me that he was glad that he has some on farm storage so he can sell his corn at today’s price. Last summer he pre-sold quite a bit of his crop under contract at about $3 per bushel. He’s now getting over $6 per bushel. Folks, that’s a 100% price increase.

In another story from NPO news, part of Obamacare requires that insurers cover anyone who applies regardless of pre-existing conditions. So in Michigan there’s now a “pre-existing condition” pool for health insurance where individuals with pre-existing conditions can buy health insurance for a mere monthly cost of $125 to $650. The clowns at NPR and the administrator of the pool can’t figure out why so few people have signed up. They said this morning that “people must just be put off by the price”. How blind can you be? The answer is as plain as the nose on your face: people just can’t afford it. They don’t have the money, plain a simple. If they did have that kind of spare cash lying around every month, do you think we’d be in the debt crisis that we’re in?

The lies in the news are calculated to make you feel as if you’re alone. If nobody else has these issues, then maybe it’s just you. Guess what? You’re not alone. On the order of half the population has these very same issues. You are being lied to while you’re being screwed over. Again. You need to make some plans.

OK, let’s say that you’re unemployed. As I’ve said before, you’ve got plenty of good company. Be comfortable in that fact and be realistic about your outlook. Be confident that you will find a way to survive. The first thing you’ll need to do is some planning. Make a budget right now listing all of your expenses and all of your income. Don’t include your savings in this budget because you’ll need them. For income include any jobs you and your spouse might have. Don’t include unemployment benefits because they won’t be available long term. Don’t include jobs that you might get or hope to get. If you have a job offer outstanding, great, but don’t base your budget on that because it might not work out.

Once you have all your expenses and income listed, total them and calculate the percentage of your total income for each expense. If your total expenses are less than your total income, celebrate, then work on your budget some more. All of your sources of income might not last in the long term. Next you need to re-arrange your list with the highest expense first and lowest expense last. Sometimes you can see the relationships better with a bar chart. Then you should have a pretty easy time prioritizing your cost reductions by attacking the highest expense until it’s not the highest anymore, then working on the new highest expense. Keep going on the cost reductions, you’ll benefit in the long run. This is known as a Pareto analysis.

For example, let’s look at a fictitious family, the main breadwinner is out of work but they do have a little steady income. As I’ve discussed in the last couple of posts, the breadwinner’s job is most likely lost and gone forever, dreadful sorry, Clementine.

Now this family is clearly in a very bad way, they’re going to have to do something drastic and soon. Remember, the main breadwinner may be getting unemployment benefits, but we’re not counting that because such benefits are strictly a bridge until the breadwinner can start a new life. Expressing the same information as a bar chart:

Right away we can see that there are several huge issues with this family’s budget. Income is going to have to go up somehow, so they’d both better be looking. The mortgage payment and credit card payments have to go away and basic living expenses have to come down to something much cheaper. They might want to talk with a bankruptcy attorney really soon. Of course children eat a tremendous amount of food, so they’ll need to find a more cost effective way of feeding them than buying so many groceries. But you do need food, clean water, shelter, and companionship to survive. Some kind of income has to be found and soon. Let’s say they find a way to eliminate the mortgage and credit card payments then find a place to rent for the cost of the property taxes. Probably someplace owned by the family, because they’ll need to grow their own food to cut the costs of survival, and $300 per month is incredibly cheap for rent. Let’s say $200 per month for food at the most.

Now here’s the new budget and bar chart:

At least there’s no single expense category that exceeds their income, but they’re still in trouble because the total expenses are just under three times their total income. By the way, they got rid of the house insurance when they unloaded the house. Like most families, they have two cars. Parking one cuts the fuel and auto insurance in half. What was that about every child is entitled to a free education? And that electric bill needs to go down, down, down. They need to figure out how to cut it by 75% right away. And $74 per month for a phone? Get rid of the land line and use a prepaid cell phone, but limit yourself to a $20 card per month.

Let’s see how it looks:

Now the budget picture is a lot better, they’re still in trouble but they only have to find about $300 per month disposable income to make ends meet. Maybe more, gasoline is up around $3.40 per gallon now and $42 per month for car insurance is a joke, even if you’re an old guy like me. Still, a part time job or two should do the trick and if they can manage to save a little they might someday be able to afford a small plot of land someplace. Let’s hope nobody gets sick, but that’s another story.

Just for fun, let’s look at the budget in terms of expenses as a percentage of total expense:

Golly, food is just short of 30% of their monthly expenses. As you can see, not only are you not alone but there are probably others in worse shape. In order to manage you need a good plan and you need help anywhere you can get it. I would not expect you to be able to manage alone, we sure haven’t. Of course achieving these goals will be an incredible amount of work and sacrifice, but I have to ask what the alternatives might be.

Here are some afterthoughts. This family shouldn’t be satisfied with this budget. The more they are able to trim from their expenses, the better placed they will be financially in the long run. For instance, if they could eliminate their remaining vehicle they would be able to save even more. Notice that maintenance isn’t in this budget. A really cheap new set of tires will cost nearly $400 and they’ll need them eventually. If they do manage to increase their income to near their old fully employed level they should continue the strict cost management. Again, they’ll be far better off in the future than if they revert to their old free-spending ways.

Why hire?

2011-02-17T19:12:00.000-05:00

Let’s pretend for a moment that I’m the CEO of a multinational corporation. Ten years ago (give or take), we started executing our strategy to restructure our organization globally. We had several concurrent reasons for creating this strategy:

- Lower manufacturing, engineering, and administrative costs
- Improve our ability to serve the growing Asian markets
- Market growth in U.S. was forecasted to be flat to negative

And this strategy is working. Not only have we reduced our operating costs, but we also grew our business. Then when the U.S. economy crashed in 2008, we operated at a profit despite the losses suffered by our U.S. focused businesses. We were even quick enough to reduce our U.S. labor force early on in the crisis to minimize the losses in those businesses.

A couple of years later, the Asian markets have continued to grow, but at a slower pace than before. The U.S. market didn’t do nearly so well. But we have hired for a few key positions in growing or recovering businesses. Additionally, we normally cut a little deep in a crisis to avoid morale-destroying serial layoffs. So, we’ve hired to fill in a few positions.

Then President Obama appealed to us to start hiring more people in the U.S. And, yes, where we see a business need we will do so. However, our responsibility is to our shareholders, not to the President of the United States (unless he happens to be a shareholder.) With 15 million fewer working Americans since 2007, we can only forecast that the U.S. market will continue to decline. With the exception of certain key positions, we are far more likely to reduce our staff in the United States and expand elsewhere.

But, I’m not the CEO of a multi-national corporation and am highly unlikely to become one. I’m just a subsistence farmer, an ex-automotive engineer. I am not one of the 15 million. I was originally laid off in 2005, then was suckered into trying to rejoin the rat race. My brief employment from late 2007 to late 2008 probably cost me more money than I made, but was rich in experience. Since then my family and I have completely redesigned our lives. We’re living pretty well on not very much, eating healthier food, and using less energy. You can do it too.

Employment – What now?

2011-02-15T14:09:00.003-05:00

As you might recall there were plenty of headlines in 2008 and 2009 about high unemployment, particularly as many people lost work at the beginning of the current economic crisis/depression. Central banks and governments took aggressive action to deal with the fragile banking system and funded special programs to support people out of work. In the U.S. we had bank bailouts, legalized accounting fraud, emergency extended unemployment benefits, and the apparently ineffective stimulus program, which was guaranteed by President Obama to keep the headline unemployment rate below 8%.

But the headline employment rate (U3) surpassed 8% rather quickly, and has remained stubbornly over 9%, although they are recently playing tricks with “seasonal adjustments” to make things look like they’re improving. Just goes to show how hard it is to predict the future, doesn’t it? Remember, though, the headline rate only counts the short-term unemployed who qualify for unemployment benefits. If you didn’t earn enough money in that part time minimum wage job that you took, you don’t qualify for benefits. If you quit or were terminated for cause, you don’t qualify for benefits. There is significant incentive for your former employer to lie about the circumstances under which you left the company AND the unemployment benefits office is predisposed to side with your former employer. Lastly, you are not counted toward the headline number if you’re new to the workforce. So, fresh high school and college graduates don’t count as unemployed in the headline number even though they’re supposedly looking for work. By the way, about 1.7 million folks enter the workforce each year either by graduating school or by immigration. Somewhere between 700 thousand and 1 million jobs were considered “added” in 2010 over 2009, but do the arithmetic and you’ll find that the “added” jobs came up short of what was needed just to cover the new entrants to the job market.

Then there’s the extended unemployment number, which provides a more complete picture, but still doesn’t count everyone who’d like gainful employment but can’t find it and have supposedly “given up”. Those folks are written off as “not in the workforce.” The extended unemployment number (U6) is still right around 17%.

Yet another alternative measurement is reported by John Williams at ShadowStats.com. His data points to an unemployment rate of around 22%. Who knows? I’ve got a high expectation that the government numbers are finagled.

Let’s check another data stream, known as the “employment rate of the population”. This data stream reports the number of people actually employed as a percentage of the total population. This data is compiled by the U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics. Again, consider the source. The graph below is from the Market Ticker.

Take a good look at the graph and you should notice a few things. First, the employment rate is cyclical, typically reaching a local maxima near the middle of the year and a local minima near the beginning of the year. Secondly, after the job loss in the 2000 – 2001 timeframe, employment never fully recovered. Thirdly, there was significant job loss from the beginning of 2007 to now, to the tune of 15 million people. Think about it, that’s right about the total populations of Michigan and Indiana together. Fourthly, running a trend-line through the data demonstrates that employment is still declining. If the cyclical pattern proceeds normally from the current level we can anticipate another local maxima near the middle of 2011, but there are no trends indicating that the local minima will be higher in 2012 than in 2011. And there are other trends, particularly the federal deficit, state budget crises, and local budget crises that would indicate a LOWER minima in 2012. Consider that Ben Bernanke, Chairman of the Federal Reserve recently said that he expects the unemployment rate to remain high for several more years. Remembering that the headline unemployment rate counts the short term unemployed only, and you have to conclude that the economy will continue to shed jobs.

Construction and manufacturing, the typical “high pay” job sectors, are still both down and the market is down. The burst housing bubble continues to depress construction and will for some time due to the high number of distressed properties on or entering the market. “Globalization” has stripped manufacturing and related jobs from the U.S. and shipped them all over the world and is likely to continue doing so. The automotive industry collapsed and is unlikely to recover, not enough people have the money for new cars and fuel prices are just going to trend upward even though they’ll continue to be volatile. Hospitality and health care, both typically low paying job sectors, are showing only modest growth. Regarding both health care and hospitality growth of a magnitude to replace construction and manufacturing, I’ve got to ask, “Who’s going to pay for it?” I sincerely doubt that these will be the engines of a growing U.S. economy.

My experience as an “employed” person was in the automotive industry, primarily as a product development engineer for automotive component manufacturers. Over more than 30 years I watched my employers shed jobs through efficiency improvements, outsourcing, and globalization. Now a lot of people react negatively to automotive industry jobs saying, “Well you know those are just overpaid, high-school dropout assembly line workers. Its about time they got their due.” Well, there may be some out of work folks in that category, but I know a lot of talented and highly educated people who are still out of work two years after losing their auto industry jobs. Of course, Government Motors is doing absolutely nothing to help the general attitude by awarding $4,000 bonus to each UAW member for a year the company lost money. Will they ever learn?

Manufacturing has shrunk from 56% of the U.S. economy in 1965 to 39% in 1988, to the current 9% in 2004. The jobs that have been lost are across the spectrum from unskilled assembly line laborers to highly skilled engineers with advanced degrees. The most recent jobs that were “globalized” were engineering jobs. A fresh graduate engineer in the U.S. has non-competitive salary and benefits needs compared to a fresh graduate with the same skills and qualifications in India. For international corporations, which are the primary employers of engineers, the decision is pretty much a no-brainer. And there go the engineering manager jobs as well, no point having managers here with no direct reports when you need managers over there. And so forth. An employed experienced U.S. engineer may still have an edge depending on his employer’s need, but that edge is rapidly disappearing. An unemployed, experienced U.S. engineer must realize that his experience is no longer valued. It’s time for that engineer to move on and re-train for a new way of living.

The same goes for people with other skill sets and experiences. If you have been out of work for 6 months or more, it’s time to realize that no jobs are forthcoming. In many cases employers are afraid to hire the long term unemployed. Excuses employers use are: the candidate has too much experience (I think this is thinly disguised age discrimination), the candidate is just trying to get back in somewhere so he can trade back up to his previous salary level, her skills are out of date, if he didn’t see his job loss coming he can’t be all that good. The list goes on and on. That’s if the hiring manager ever sees the candidate’s resume. Generally the HR department has already filtered out the imperfect fits for the job specification.

So, it’s a pretty discouraging situation for the unemployed. The jobs are gone and they’re not coming back. The employers, the states, the federal government, and the Federal Reserve have pretty much written off the long term unemployed. Extended emergency unemployment benefits are not going to last until retirement, so what now? Those currently employed must realize that their jobs are at risk as well and could easily disappear in the next several years.

Unless you’re already wealthy, it’s a good bet that you won’t be able to support your former life style without that job. You’ll need to restructure how you live on this planet for a much simpler life, closer to the earth, and with less stuff. It can be done with some planning, hard work, and dedication. You can count on growing, preserving, and preparing much of your own food or being hungry. Welcome to the decline of empire.

The Power of Advertising

2011-02-07T14:56:00.002-05:00

As we travel the path to sustenance, we’re working toward a permanently evolving life where the landscape and we are mutually sustaining as we mature and age. We’d like all of the elements of our little farm support the other elements. Herbs support woody plants, woody plants support herbs, fungi support plants and plants support fungi, animals (including humans) help plants to thrive and vice versa, microbes support us all and we support the microbes, and we interact and achieve mutual support with our community. Achieving permanence takes time, patience, effort, knowledge, eagerness to learn from others and our surroundings, and maybe a little wisdom. It definitely requires sustained focus.

But we’ve been conditioned to be a quick fix, instant gratification society. I’d like to think that I’ve broken much of the conditioning from years and years of life as a consumer in America, but have I really? When I was a boy I watched lots of TV, like many in my generation, even though I was outside playing or going to school most of the time. The visual images were powerful and are easy to remember, from the harem dancer in the intro to “I Dream of Jeannie”, to the Buddist monk immolating himself with fire in protest of the war, to “One small step for man…” Advertising in particular, through seemingly endless repetition, conditioned an entire generation to buy, buy, buy. Each repetition told us that we’d be smarter, more attractive, more successful, and just plain feel better if we just bought their product(s). The visual imagery has been proven more effective than plain audio, and the two combined are hard to beat.

Here’s an example, watch at your own risk:

This ad played for years, and not just in the evening when Mom and Dad were watching, but in daytime shows for kids. Who knows how many times I watched it, even without paying attention, or so I thought. Still, most Wednesdays find some sort of pasta dish on our table. I even remark on occasion to my family (and get puzzled looks) that it’s Prince Spaghetti Day!

My wife occasionally makes meatballs, usually with a somewhat spicy tomato based sauce. And I find “Atsa speecy spicy meatballa!” crossing my lips. The product name? Just take a guess, I bet that you know it. (By the way, old fashioned baking soda is at least as effective in my experience and much quicker and cheaper.)

How many of my decisions have been driven by the advertising on TV? Just how powerful are those images and sounds? How have we been conditioned by the ubiquitous box? Have we all been hypnotized into docile consumers?

And advertising, at least overt advertising, is not the only issue. What happened to all of the protest marches from the 1960’s? Just what are the effects of the images from the Kent State shootings, napalm drops on Vietnam, Puff the Magic Dragon (not the kids story), September 11, 2001, the chilling views of buildings selected - locked on - and destroyed during the “shock and awe” bombing of Baghdad? Just whom were they trying to shock, and whom were they trying to awe? Have we been subconsciously convinced of the futility, or even the danger of peaceful protest? And just why was it so important to switch to digital broadcasting and make sure that every American could afford a digital converter for their TV?

My recommendation for everyone, as a first step, is the same action that we took a couple of years ago, shut off the TV and get rid of it. Most of all, do not subject young children to the seduction of the boob tube. It’s just too dangerous and our future is at risk. Wake up from the programmed dream and take a giant dose of reality. You may find that you’re more powerful than you think.

Smokin' - more

2011-01-30T10:32:00.003-05:00

The other day I posted some details about building our smokehouse, but there were a couple of photos that I hadn't uploaded from my camera. First, a couple of bacon slabs hanging in the smokehouse at completion of the smoking cycle:

From smokehouse

Next the finished product. As I said, it's delicious.

From smokehouse

Smokin'

2011-01-27T20:38:00.002-05:00

I always thought that smoked meat was smoked to preserve the meat. I was wrong. As I researched the process I discovered that the preservative was actually SALT. Anyway, we wanted bacon and hams without added nitrates or nitrites or other chemicals, particularly MSG. The answer was to make our own bacon and ham. Which means a smokehouse. And lots of salt. So, here's how I built the smokehouse.

First step was to prepare the foundation, four black locust posts sunk into the ground. Next a smoke delivery system, black stovepipe routed from a recently dug hole in the ground to the location of the smokebox.

From smokehouse

Of course, we needed a place to build the fire and capture the smoke. We salvaged some bricks (my 16 year old daughter and I did the salvage work... boy was she ever embarrassed by that exercise!) and constructed a fire pit.

From smokehouse

And yes, by golly, the darn thing worked. Now we needed to build a smokebox, a couple sheets of plywood and a few 2X3 boards later:

From smokehouse

And some re-used steel roofing and we were on our way.

From smokehouse

A smokehouse produces a lot of smoke and I wouldn't exactly call it a clean process, but the bacon tastes really good. It's best to load the house up with meat to make the most of the smoke, but right now we're limited on how many bacon slabs we can salt at a time. By the time we have hams to smoke, we'll fix that little problem. Ideally, we'd only actually smoke meat a few times per year to minimize emissions.

Peak Oil

2010-10-03T11:13:00.002-04:00

The weather here recently turned cooler, it's October after all.

I'm not online very often anymore, so my brief time is divided into little snippets on various websites of interest, deleting and reading emails, etc. One blog that I seldom read, but check on periodically is written by Sharon Astyk. On a purely personal basis, I typically don't enjoy her writing. Just goes to show, you can't please everyone.

However, Sharon does occasionally post an article that I do enjoy. Take a good look at this one on Peak Oil, I've seldom read a better.

Larry's Locavore Whole Wheat

2010-09-27T16:16:00.002-04:00

Following up on my bread recipe published oh so long ago. We finally purchased (after years of agonizing discussion and contemplation) a flour mill. Yes, it's electric. I simply don't have time to crank a manual mill. So, I'm buying time with energy. One of the joys of living in rural america is that we're surrounded by farmers. One of the local farmers (about 15 miles away) is a certified organic wheat grower. So, we bought some wheat (not cleaned). First challenge is to clean it, which takes some personal attention and a shop vac. Then a trip through the flour mill to make whole wheat flour. Here's the recipe. By the way, no kneading involved.

For the sponge:

5 cups freshly milled, locally grown, whole wheat flour
1 tablespoon yeast (not local yet)
1 tablespoon locally produced honey
3 cups warm water (at our house from about 90 feet straight down)

Mix the yeast, honey, and 1 cup of the water in a container, let it bubble for a while but don't let it overflow. This is called proofing the yeast. After the yeast is proofed, pour it into the flour, which should be in a large bowl. Pour in the rest of the water and mix it all up really well. Cover the bowl and allowed it to ferment for at least an hour to overnight.

Once the sponge has fermented, add the following:

3 cups freshly milled, locally grown, whole wheat flour
2 tablespoons sea salt (we're a long way from the sea, so this is not local)
3 tablespoons locally produced honey

Mix it all really well then turn into two buttered loaf pans. The butter should ideally be made from your own cow's cream as ours is. Cover the loaf pans and allow the dough to rise until it reaches the top of the loaf pans. Pop those babies into a 400 degree F oven (or hotter) and let bake for 35 minutes or until the loaves are done. Turn the loaves out of the pans an let cool for at least 30 minutes. Enjoy.

More About Electricity

2010-09-19T10:57:00.002-04:00

As I may have mentioned before, our only utility bill is for electricity. Since 2007 we've made a number of reductions in our electricity usage for many reasons, one of which is to save the expense. Utilities, however, are for-profit businesses and are always working to increase their rates so it's a continuing battle. We cut usage, their rates increase and we're partway back to where we were before. But not all the way. If we were still using the same amount of electricity that we used in 2007, we'd be going hungry.

As of this past spring, we still had a regular upright refrigerator but it was on its last legs. As the summer went on it kept running more and more until we just couldn't see paying the cost anymore. So, we converted a chest freezer to a chest refrigerator using a separate thermostat. Here's a photo:

From energy savings

That little change brought us back to an average usage of 20 kwh per day, but we still used our electric water heater for showers. Although we cycled the water heater on and off so it wouldn't be using quite so much electricity, it still consumed an average of 10 kwh per day. That's 300 kwh per month, which adds up to a significant opportunity for us.

The next task was to put our kitchen stove, which uses wood for fuel, to work heating our water as well. Think about stacking functions. The stove already cooks our food and heats our house as well as heating water for doing the dishes. A little practice sweating copper pipe together allowed me to build a heat exchanger to go in the water tank in the back of the stove. From there I plumbed the heat exchanger into the domestic hot water system, which already had a recirculating pump. Now our wood stove provides all of our domestic hot water and our electricity consumption averages less than 10 kwh per day.

From energy savings

At this consumption level, lights, fans, and the pump for our well now have an impact. These will be next on our relentless drive to reduce our energy usage.

Container Potatoes

2010-09-01T19:48:00.002-04:00

Can you grow potatoes in a container? I've seen photos of people who had, but wanted to know for myself whether it would be less work than planting them in the ground and what the productivity would be. So, I made use of a 100 gallon stock tank that we had and piled some stones in the bottom to hopefully help drainage.

From potatoes in a container

Next came a layer of soil.

From potatoes in a container

And of course the potatoes.

From potatoes in a container

Another layer of soil.

From potatoes in a container

Then wait for the plants to sprout.

From potatoes in a container

They grew and grew, and I added more and more soil.

From potatoes in a container

I finally couldn't wait any longer, though the plants hadn't died back yet.

From potatoes in a container

Hey, look at that! Potatoes!

From potatoes in a container

An a close up.

From potatoes in a container

Truth be told, I'm not impressed by the productivity. Although I probably could have managed the container better, my potatoes in the ground do better. But, if you can't grow them in the soil, you might try container gardening with your spuds.

Don't Waste a Good Rainfall

2010-05-09T11:20:00.002-04:00

Our house is situated on top of a hill with driveway going downhill both directions from the house. During a rainfall the water collects on the driveway and used to run all the way downhill until it found bottom. In other words, we were wasting rainfalls. So I did a little work with the shovel and fixed that little problem.

Right up by the house the driveway changes from a concrete pad sloped away from the house to asphalt. Rain typically puddled there until it was able to run down the driveway to the north. And, of course, the yard right next to the driveway was always parched. So, I dug a small drain from the center of the puddle into a rain collection swale. When it rains now, the water drains from the puddle into a mini "pond" then into a swale on contour where it slowly soaks into the ground over hours and hours.

From Garden Swales

Looks kind of messy right now, but through this year we're going to sheet mulch and plant that whole area. Pretty exciting.

Down toward the south the rain collected on the asphalt and ran down the driveway, again leaving the plants higher on the hill dry. Again, I dug a couple of small drains into swales on contour. My fruit trees should be much happier now.

From Garden Swales

The tricky part is getting the bottom of the swale level. Still working on this one.

From Garden Swales

Electricity: Two Steps Forward

2010-04-15T20:04:00.003-04:00

... and one step backward. We've recently made some changes to how we manage our electricity loads which resulted in a 40% decrease in monthly electricity usage. Hooray! Not only are we using less electricity, the local utility is using less energy to generate and deliver that electricity, but we've got lower electric bills coming our way! Or do we? Same thing happened last year, we reduced electricity usage and the utility just happened to get a rate increase from the Michigan Public Service Commission the following month.

This year: Guess what? We reduced our usage and the following month the utility got another rate increase from the MPSC. We're just going to have to learn how to get along without electricity someday.

The Joy of Free-Ranging

2010-03-31T20:12:00.002-04:00

We have about 18 hens, six of which are pretty young the rest are pushing four years old. Over much of the winter they stayed inside since they really don't care for the snow. Now the snow is gone and they're outside scratching and pecking and having a good old time in our 2 acre cow pasture. Each morning I wander out and release the hens from their house. It's really an entertaining as they pop out of their little door like a bunch of clowns exiting a car at the circus.

The forage isn't growing very well yet, so my next stop is the hay bale for the cow. As I stick my pitch fork into the bale, the cow galumps up, already drooling in anticipation. Of course, cows drool most of the time anyway.

Then I head off to our north pasture to give our ewes some hay as well. I make two piles here because we've got lambs with their mommies sequestered from the other ewes who either rejected their lambs or whose lambs didn't make it. At just about a week old, the lambs are just figuring out how to control their bodies.

Then around the north end of the pasture, partly to check the fence and partly to feed the boys (our ram and companions). Scotty (our ram) has to show that he's the boss just about every morning. From here, I finish the circle around the fence. No problems as usual.

Did I mention that we haven't fed the hens lately? They get all of their nourishment from free ranging and have refused their feed. It's just the start of the spring flush, but I figure that just short of a dozen eggs a day without feeding the hens is a pretty good deal. Especially since I fed them all winter and got zero eggs. Come to think of it, it's about time the darn things paid me back.

More on Garden Swales

2010-03-28T11:16:00.002-04:00

Part of our plan has been to build garden swales in our "front yard" to hold rainwater high on the slope. Last fall we built a swale at the top of our new garden and just the other day completed one in the "front yard" between our plum trees and one group of apple trees. One challenge of this location was that we weren't able to pick a true contour line because of the existing plantings. So we picked a near miss and adjusted by making the bottom of the swale level.

Last fall I had the good fortune to have use of a tractor mounted roto-tiller. One of the spots that I tilled was the intended swale location. This spring, I tilled it again using a garden tiller.

From Garden Swales

Next, I raked the dirt from the top of the swale into a mound at the bottom of the swale.

From Garden Swales

Then began the iterative process of checking the bottom of the swale with an A-Frame level, tilling, and raking until the bottom of the swale was level end to end. This will hold the water on contour so it doesn't run away on us.

From Garden Swales

Once the bottom of the swale was level, I picked up all the stones, raked the ground smooth and broadcast annual rye to hold the soil in place.

From Garden Swales

While watering the seed, I realized some mulch would be a good idea so the spring rains wouldn't wash all my hard work away. It turns out that I had a couple of rolls of mulch in my barn from years ago. Rather than continue to provide nesting material for the mice, I laid the stuff down. Now grow Baby, grow!

From Garden Swales

Noxious

2010-03-21T10:24:00.003-04:00

Each year about this time the communities in our area publish their "Noxious Weed Ordinance" listing the definitions and penalties for harboring offending species. Named specifically in the list for our community are:

Dandelion - a food, medicine, and soil improving plant
Burdock - another food, medicine, and soil improving plant
Thistle - medicinal and soil improving
Queen Anne's Lace: food (wild carrot) and soil improving

As I recall, boxelder is on the list for many of the local communities. Now a lot of people think this is a pretty worthless tree, but it has kept us warm this winter and helped us to cook our food. Boxelder also coppices easily and grows quickly. Our hens love the boxelder bugs even though we do not. The book "Michigan Trees" says that it can also be tapped for maple syrup. We haven't tried yet.

Let's see now, difficult to eradicate food, medicine, fuel, and soil improving plants are listed as noxious weeds. And a group of plants that compete aggressively with food plants is encouraged. The grasses in your average lawn are pretty much useless except for grazing and not very good for grazing either. Doesn't this sound a little backward?

Gasoline

2010-03-05T20:29:00.000-05:00

Although we usually don’t think of including our gasoline usage in a home energy audit, we really ought to. This consumption can be a significant of your home energy budget. It certainly was in our case. Again, take a simple and thoughtful approach. There’s plenty of advice out there on how to reduce your gasoline consumption and I’m not going to repeat it here. Instead, let’s take a more radical view.

How many vehicles do you really need? If there’s only one person in the household working I suggest that you only need one vehicle and that’s if the job is further than you can bicycle. We started 2009 as a three car family. We’re now a one car family, and yes it has been a sacrifice, but our vehicle expenses have dropped tremendously. Gasoline was actually a smaller proportion of those expenses than we realized. Consider insurance, maintenance, registration, tires, etc.

How many gasoline powered devices do you really need around the house? If you heat with wood do you really need that log splitter, or are you buying time with energy? How about that chainsaw? (Currently we need the chainsaw, I’m not sure if we’ll be able to do without it in the near term.)

How about that lawn mower and trimmer? Can you change your landscaping to eliminate them? How about pulling up the sod and planting ornamental shrubs, grasses, groundcovers, etc. that produce food that you can eat? Blueberry bushes, for instance, can be very pretty. They have nice flowers, great fruit, and red foliage in the fall. Other shrubs that produce food and can be pretty include highbush cranberries, elderberries, hazelnuts, autumn olive, nanking cherry, and many others. Look for non-traditional sources for these plants. How about bamboo? There are clumping bamboos available that are supposed to be easy to contain, are quite attractive, yet produce bamboo shoots for food. I can’t imagine anyone objecting to an ornamental garden that, oh by the way, might actually produce food, culinary and medicinal herbs, and reduces the neighborhood noises and pollution. Then you can sell the gasoline powered equipment.

Think about substitution. Why do I need this equipment and what can I put in place to eliminate that need?

Electricity

2010-02-25T20:16:00.000-05:00

In last week’s post, I wrote about auditing your house for heat losses. One item that I failed to mention is the temperature inside the house. The larger the difference between the outside temperature and inside, the more energy it will take to maintain the inside temperature. Over time you will find that layering clothing, adding blankets to your bed, and using a throw blanket while sitting in your favorite chair will extend your comfort range to a much lower temperature than you might have expected. During the winter our house ranges from the low to mid-50’s to the mid-60’s depending on location, time of day, and the outside temperature. It’s actually quite comfortable. Of course, if I ever get cold I go outside to warm up. (Hard physical labor will do that for you.)

The single largest usage of energy in the United States is electricity generation and transmission losses. Yep, 2/3 of the energy that goes into a power plant is lost before it gets to your meter. (I read that on the Energy Information Administration’s website about 18 months ago, can’t find it right now.) So for each kilowatt-hr you use, you’re actually paying for 3 going into the power plant. Doesn’t that make you feel all warm inside? So, even if your electric bill isn’t huge, making it smaller is a good thing. Another bonus, if each of us reduce our electricity usage by half, then our generation capacity is suddenly double our needs. That’s a very good thing because the electric companies are clamoring to build more coal and nuclear powered generation facilities. Cut our usage in half and we don’t need ‘em anymore.

The first thing you need to do is take a good look at your circuit breaker or fuse box. The biggest circuit breakers are on the biggest loads. Eliminate or reduce these loads as much as you can.

If you have a clothes dryer (regardless of whether it’s electric or gas), unplug it and line dry your clothes. We have clotheslines in our basement and in the kitchen/mudroom that used to be the attached garage as well as in the backyard. During warmer weather we use the lines outside and cooler or wetter weather we use the lines inside. It takes longer for the clothes in the basement to dry, but they do eventually dry. This is a quick, easy, and substantial energy savings. Do it now, then come back and read the rest of this post. I can wait.

Hot water is another big expense, particularly if you have an electric hot water heater. We’ve seen a significant savings by only heating the water when we need it. The rest of the time, the water heater is shut off. Let’s also remember that a well insulated tank and well insulated plumbing will help cut down on losses. I don’t have any personal experience with the “on demand” water heaters out there, but cost per unit could be an issue if you use hot water in a number of different locations. Look for alternatives to heating the water and if possible stack functions. For instance, we use a wood fired range for cooking and heating. The range came with a water tank and a heat exchanger in the firebox. So we take advantage of the “free” hot water and use it for washing dishes, sponge baths, etc. Another savings on the hot water side is to get accustomed to the natural scent of the human body. We actually prefer that scent to the over-perfumed soaps, colognes, body sprays, and other crap on the market. Once you start to appreciate the natural scent, you’ll also discover that all the talk about pheremones is not just talk.

Another big load on your electric bill is an electric stove. Check out the size of that circuit breaker! Again, search for alternatives.

Count your lighting circuits and add up the wattages of all of your light bulbs. Don’t forget about the security lighting outside. A 100 watt bulb that’s on for 10 hours a day uses one kilowatt-hour. It doesn’t sound like much until you start adding up all of the bulbs you use. Change to more efficient lighting. It’s easy to convert to compact fluorescent bulbs, and considerably less expensive than it used to be. LED lighting is more efficient, but still pretty costly to install.

One thing people tend to forget is that they have a kilowatt meter already. There’s no need to buy one because the electric company has generously provided one for you. It’s pretty easy to cycle appliances off for a few hours and measure their consumption. The results will be more representative if you can shut the appliances off for 24 hours or more, but you can definitely get objective data this way. Many electric meters still have analog displays, including a little wheel that spins faster or slower depending on your consumption. Have the skeptic in your house watch that little wheel while you cycle the appliance on and off. I guarantee that you’ll have a convert. If there are children in the house, have them watch too. It’ll do them good and will help them conserve as well.

Generally, use a thoughtful approach. Keep things simple and do the easy and cheap things first.

Home Energy Audits

2010-02-21T10:38:00.001-05:00

Every time there’s a spike in energy prices, people climb on board with home energy audits. Honestly, that’s something you should do anyway. If you want, you can spend a lot of money to have someone tell you that you’re using too much energy and that you need to spend a lot more correcting the problem.

Or you could take the low tech, low cost approach. Take a guess which one I’d recommend.

Examine your home energy bills. Rank the bills in order of expense ($$) from highest to lowest. Work on the most expensive energy cost first. Once that one has been knocked down, work on the next highest, then the next, etc.

Heat:

If heating is your highest bill, you’ll need to reduce the heat losses in your home. Now, you could buy, borrow, or hire fancy infrared imaging or measuring equipment. And you could hire an energy audit specialist, even one who will check how airtight your house is. But I’m not going to recommend that at all. Honestly, you can get very good results from a piece of infrared and draft detection equipment that you already own. Your skin. Now, the palm of your hand is not particularly sensitive to infrared, but the back of your hand is. So are your bare face, feet, and torso.

Before you start chasing around the house feeling everything, ask yourself a few questions:
1.Are the exterior walls insulated? If so, are the wall cavities filled to the top?
2.Is the attic insulated? If so, how much is there?
3.Can you seed light around the doors (darken the room during daylight hours)?
4.Do you have insulated window coverings?
If there are issues with any of these areas, you will at least know that you’ve started your list of projects.

Assuming it’s cold outside and warm inside walk around the house in bare feet. Stop frequently and pay attention to how your feet feel. Make sure you take a complete tour of the exterior walls, but don’t forget the interior walls and vents. If your tootsies get cold in a particular area, note it down. There’s probably an air leak somewhere nearby.

Using the back of your hand, feel the areas around switches and electrical outlets. If your hand gets cold, make note of the location. Air leaks or gaps in the insulation are likely culprits.

Now walk along the exterior walls again, this time paying attention to how your body feels. The fewer clothes you have on, the more sensitive the reading you’re going to get. Carry a blanket with you and test an area by holding the blanket between you and the wall. If you’re significantly warmer when the blanket is there, you are likely to need to address insulation. That’s how I showed my wife the value of insulated window coverings. We installed some the following week.

While you’re walking around pay attention to any drafts you might feel. Make note of those areas and take care of them later.

Once you’ve completed your tour of the house ask yourself “which of these issues is the biggest energy leak and how much will it cost to fix it?” If some of the fixes are cheap and easy, go ahead and take care of them. More expensive fixes, like insulation or replacing windows, will take more thought and budgeting. If the walls and attic of the house are insulated and you have no window coverings, then you really should consider adding insulated window coverings before you add more insulation. Even if your wall and attic insulation is not up to standard, you’re probably losing more energy through your windows. If the windows are old, single pane, drafty windows, you can still do an awful lot to seal them up and insulate them for the cold weather without replacing them (which is an enormous expense).

Next week I'll write about auditing your electric usage.

Water in the winter

2010-02-11T19:42:00.001-05:00

We have a small flock of sheep, a couple of goats, and a Jersey cow and live in south central Michigan. So we get freezing weather for most of the winter. Not Minnesota sub-zero freezing weather, but our lows are typically in the teens to the single digits. Since we can’t afford to install frost-free waterers for the animals we need a lower cost solution to keep water available. Electrically heated buckets might work, but I have a couple of issues with them. Firstly, the one that I tried had a stray voltage issue. It was only a couple of volts, but that’s enough to discourage the animals. Secondly, the darn things use resistive heating elements, which I’m philosophically opposed to.

So we continued to break the ice out of buckets. The trouble was that they freeze from the top, bottom, and sides… as much as two inches of ice in a night. It gets pretty hard to break that ice and frequently the buckets can be damaged in the process. What if we insulated the buckets? So I did some thought experiments on several methods and estimated the costs. Gee, it might be cheaper to buy an insulated bucket. But I haven’t found any.

So my wife and I thought that maybe we could take the lid off a cooler filled with water and see how that worked. Son of a gun, it worked really well. Even on the coldest nights the water only freezes on the top. This ice can easily be broken and scooped out with a pitchfork. We ended up buying a total of three coolers and now hope to get several winters out of them. During my morning tour of the pastures after giving the animals hay, I just break the ice and the animals have water for the day. In the afternoon we scoop out any fresh ice and top off the water for the next day.

Staying On Top of Things

2010-02-04T20:25:00.002-05:00

A recent question posted on a permaculture networking site that I participate in asked, “How do you keep from getting depressed in the winter when there is so little active gardening to do?” Aside from the fact that winter is just as busy as any other time of the year for me, I thought about the question in more general terms. How do you keep from getting depressed when you’re among the millions of longtime jobless "discouraged workers"? Even the term “discouraged worker” sounds like you should be depressed. Maybe it’s time to think differently.

Before my sudden transition to a new career as a subsistence micro-farmer, I spent 30 years working in the automotive industry. About 20 of those years was as a product design and development engineer and the final 10 were in sales / marketing / strategic planning. Beginning in 2004 (probably a little late) I realized that significant changes to the industry were coming soon and growth, particularly for companies in automotive related businesses, was at or very near an end. Actually, growth was not only at an end but the automotive business would soon be shrinking.

On top of it all, corporations have been for years in a headlong rush to send jobs from the U.S. to low cost countries. (I always scoff when the quarterly GDP numbers come out from the ministry of economic propaganda. What product are they talking about? Pick up anything in your local hardware store and there are better than even odds that “Made In China” will be stamped somewhere on the product or packaging. Even “American made” cars have many components manufactured in China and elsewhere. Even something as American as a pickup truck.) In 2005 I was laid off. After working for a year trying to maintain a middle class lifestyle while starting a small farm, I gave up and started looking for another job. Although I did eventually find a new position, it didn’t work out and now I’m back in farming mode. But we’re not trying to maintain anymore, we’re just trying to survive.

We’ve moved from an upper middle class income to one that’s significantly below the official “poverty line”. This has required adjustments to our lifestyle and attitudes. Something that previously cost “just $100” is now “really expensive”. For someone who has derived his self worth primarily from his job and paycheck for nearly his entire adult life, this is a big change! It could be really easy to feel depressed over the situation particularly since there is no way back. There are no comparable jobs for someone with my experience now and there are going to be far fewer in the not too distant future. Which means that even more people will be in this situation in the coming months and years.

As I’ve told my wife over the last year, we’re ahead of the curve. We’re among the first harvest of the “Long Descent” or the “Long Emergency”. We all need to reorder our lives to a much lower energy and consumption level than we as a nation have seen in over 100 years. We need a “Plan C”, but we’re not going to get one from anyone but ourselves. Whatever the hell you want to call it, the future is going to be about less and surviving on less. Our children will have less than we do, their children will have less still. Our job is to prepare them for that future and to survive the best that we can.

Still, I like many others need to have a measure of success on a daily basis. So each morning I sit down and write a list of things to do that day in my handy dandy notebook. Sometimes I get them all done, sometimes things come up and they don’t, sometimes the list is just too ambitious. But I’m learning and measuring my progress. At the end of the day I’ve accomplished a lot. When I look around our little farm, I realize just how much I’ve done over the last year and I’m delighted.

I guess the point of this post is that when you stay on top of things with simple measures, all of those little jobs completed each day add up to some major achievements.

Chainsaw bar lubricant

2010-01-28T20:00:00.001-05:00

Think about this for a minute. Go to the lawn and garden store and buy a gallon of bar oil. Take it home and pour it on the ground. What?!

I’ve been thinking about that lately after reading about the spored bar oil available from Fungi Perfecti. They use a vegetable based, biodegradable oil and recommend that the spored oil be diluted 10:1 with canola oil or sunflower oil before using it in a chainsaw. So, I called them to talk about it and confirmed that those oils will work in a chainsaw on a regular basis, provided you’re careful not to overheat the chain and bar. They also said that Stihl markets a biodegradable bar oil.

So, I started thinking about it. Where does the bar oil go? Certainly some goes on the wood, some gets vaporized (but probably not much), and some goes on the ground. So, if I use a gallon of bar oil over the course of the year, how is that different from just pouring it on the ground? Well, for one thing the oil is distributed over a much larger area and time so the environment should be more able to deal with the contamination, but it’s still contamination. Maybe we could reduce the hydrocarbon loading in our environment just a little by changing to a biodegradable bar oil. At least maybe one that’s not fossil fuel based.

Keeping Chains Sharp

2010-01-21T19:42:00.003-05:00

A valuable tool on the small farm, particularly if you’re heating and cooking with wood, is a chainsaw. The trick is to keep the chains sharp so you’re not wasting fuel trying to cut with a dull chain. You could take them to the local lawn and garden store to be sharpened, but around here that costs about $5 per chain per sharpening. And they typically don’t set the depth of cut, so eventually even the newly sharpened chains don’t cut anymore even though there should be more life in them. Bonus for the store, they get to sell you a new chain. Bummer for you. Add on the cost in time and fuel (if you still drive a fossil fuel powered vehicle, just time if you walk or bike) and each sharpening gets more and more costly.

Or you could make a small investment (less than $20) in a couple of simple hand tools to do the job yourself in about 5 minutes if you’re just sharpening the chain, maybe 10 if you’re sharpening and setting the depth of cut. You’ve just saved yourself a bunch of money and time plus improved the efficiency of your saw by always having a sharp chain. You will occasionally need to replace the files, but again the cost is minimal. The fact that you’re not subjecting the cutting edges to the heat of the grinder should also help the chain stay sharper, and you will only remove a minimal amount of metal at each sharpening which should result in longer life.

Assuming the chain lasts through 20 sharpenings you'd spend a total of $116 having the chain sharpened vs. $31 sharpening it yourself. This would be kind of a short life actually, so the savings would be greater doing the job yourself. And you would only buy the sharpening jigs the first time, after the first chain you’ll just need to buy new files occasionally.

A no-brainer isn’t it?

Hasn’t failed yet, low work bread.

2010-01-14T20:26:00.001-05:00

Last year my wife spent one day a week baking bread and cookies for the week. She found it quite stressful and had problems getting the bread dough to rise consistently. Most recipes for bread require that you mix all the ingredients together, knead the dough, go through a first rising, knead the dough, form the loaves, go through a second rising, then bake. If you’ve baked bread before, you know that this is time consuming and doesn’t always work as planned because one rising or the other failed for some reason. Kate was pretty frustrated with the entire process, which really isn’t how we want to live our lives.

So, over the summer I did some research into bread. Now that Kate is working two part time jobs, the baking is my responsibility in addition to all of the other jobs at our little farm. I simply don’t have a day to dedicate to baking. So, I was looking for bread that I could prepare in advance, then bake in the morning while our wood stove is still hot from breakfast.

At the same time, I was looking for ways to preserve our harvest using low energy methods… no freezing or canning. Which leads to fermentation and Bill Mollison’s “Ferment and Human Nutrition”, which my brother-in-law loaned to me some years ago. I’m not sure why Richard had the book, but he also had Mollison’s “Introduction to Permaculture” and “Permaculture: A Designer’s Manual”. Anyway, I was busily scanning “Ferment” when I happened upon Mollison’s story about his days as a baker. It seems that he prepared a wet “sponge” the night before, then added the remaining ingredients in the morning, kneaded the dough, formed the loaves, etc.

So, I decided to experiment and have settled on the following basic recipe for two loaves of plain white bread.

Ingredients:
8 cups flour (I use high gluten flour usually, but whole wheat can be substituted for a portion or all of it)
4 cups warm water
2 tablespoons salt (I use sea salt)
1 tablespoon sugar
1 tablespoon active dry yeast

Proof the yeast as follows:
Mix ½ cup of the warm water with the yeast and sugar. Set aside for about five minutes. It should get pretty foamy.

Mix the sponge:
Measure 4 cups of the flour into a large bowl (5qt or larger). Add the proofed yeast and the remaining water. Mix. Cover and set aside overnight, at least 12 hours for whole wheat. When I cover the bowl, I use wax paper and a clean towel. The sponge gets pretty active and will stick to the towel without the wax paper layer.

The next morning mix the rest of the flour and the salt into the sponge, knead on a floured surface. The dough will still be pretty wet, so don’t be afraid to add flour during kneading, but also don’t worry if it sticks to your hands. As you knead the flour you’ll feel the dough suddenly change under your hands (less than five minutes worth of kneading, really). Stop kneading then. Butter two loaf pans, divide the dough and form the loaves in the pans. Or you can try free form loaves on a baking sheet.

Cover the loaves with a clean towel and set them aside to rise for about 1 hour. After the loaves have risen, slash the tops of the loaves diagonally two or three times then bake for 35 minutes in a hot oven (between 400 and 425 degrees F). Remove the loaves from the pans and set upright on the oven rack and bake for an additional five minutes. Allow the loaves to cool on a wire rack for a few hours.

The actual “work” time for me in the process is no more than 30 minutes total, 10 for the sponge, 10 for finishing the loaves, and about 10 minutes of managing the baking process. And there’s only one kneading and rising.

A general guideline for modifying your own recipe is to use half the flour, all of the liquid, all of the yeast, and all of the sugar for the sponge. The rest of the ingredients get mixed into the bread the next morning just before kneading. We set the sponge in a warmish location, in our house during the winter that’s about 65 degrees F tops. During the night the room temperature drops into the 50’s. The same story for the rising before baking.

If you’ve had poor success with baking bread before, try this process. It hasn’t failed yet and allows me to do other things while baking fresh bread several times a week. And it saves us money. The bread bakes while the stove is hot for breakfast, so the energy expense for baking is zero. Another win, win, win situation.

Here's a photo of two loaves I baked just the other day:

From I love coffee

Coffee

2010-01-10T10:32:00.001-05:00

A tricky part of writing a focused blog is where to draw the line about posting subject matter. I wrote the following some time ago and never posted it because it’s not specifically about gardening or micro-farming. Lately I’ve changed my mind about it. One of the keys to success is getting maximum productivity from minimum input. We all need to cut back on spending and on energy usage, why not include related topics in the kitchen? Besides, it's my blog.

I love coffee.

One of the challenges facing us is the high cost of good coffee. Now, those of you who don’t drink coffee might say, “So stop drinking it.” Well, that’s much easier said than done. Although I have gone for months, even years, without drinking coffee, I’m much happier when I have my morning cup(s) of joe.

Aside from the cost, I really would prefer that the farmers who grow the coffee make a fair wage and that the coffee is organically grown. So we looked for fair trade, organic coffee and found that it’s fairly pricey, let’s say $10 to $12 for 12 oz. roasted. I’d heard that green coffee stores well, and when freshly roasted is superior in flavor to anything else.

A quick web search turned up the Seven Bridges Cooperative, www.breworganic.com, which sells organic, fair trade green coffee, organic beer brewing supplies, and paraphernalia for roasting and brewing. (There are others, but this is the one I've used.) They also provide instructions for roasting and brewing, which was incredibly helpful. I just wasn’t into buying yet another electric contraption, so an automatic coffee roaster was right off my list. But it’s possible to roast coffee by parching the beans in a cast iron skillet.

We buy 25 pounds of coffee at a time, which for us is a six month supply. Including shipping the cost for the green coffee works out to $6 per pound - a significant savings for us.

The instructions on the Seven Bridges website said that skillet roasting would be a smoky process and they were right. You definitely want a well-ventilated kitchen far from the nearest smoke detector to do this job. The process takes longer than you might think, and uses quite a bit of energy. Stacking this job with several others on a wood fired range reduces our task specific energy usage. We know the beans are fully roasted when the splits of the beans turn completely dark. In order to keep the task manageable, but still have freshly roasted coffee, we roast about a week’s supply at a time.

Once the coffee is roasted the real fun begins, making and drinking a great cuppa. Initially, we used an automatic drip coffee maker, but again this is a separate use of a non-renewable energy source. Plus, drip coffee isn’t all that great anyway. Since the wood stove is hot for breakfast and baking, we boil water in a kettle and pour it over the freshly roasted and ground coffee in a French press. This produces the best tasting coffee I’ve ever had.

Of course, once you have a really good cup of coffee, are you going to put a powdered non-dairy creamer in it? No, no, hell no! We carefully pour the cream off the top of milk provided by Beauty, our Jersey cow. Real coffee and real cream, yum.

We each get two very good cups from our French press, then if we still want more coffee we make a ‘re-tread’ pot by un-pressing the coffee grounds and pouring in more hot water. The ‘re-tread’ is nowhere near as good as the first two cups but still is far better than most of the coffee you can buy ready brewed.

Here’s another recipe for brewing coffee from my Mom’s old cookbook. I haven’t tried this method yet, but it doesn’t require a specific “coffee maker”. When you’re on a tight budget, that’s a big deal.

Measure 2 level tablespoons of regular or coarse grind coffee into the pot for each measuring cup (8 oz) of water. To 5 or 6 tablespoons of coffee, stir in about ½ tablespoon of beaten egg or egg white, or add the inner linings from 2 eggshells. Pour on the required amount of boiling water, cover and bring to a boil. Remove from heat immediately and let stand on the back of the stove 4 or 5 minutes before pouring.

One day we’ll try this recipe, if you do, let me know how it worked out for you.

Re-Purposing Stuff

2009-11-15T10:38:00.002-05:00

As we economize, lots of things get sold and others get re-purposed. Generally, if we don't use it anymore or can't afford to keep it we'll sell it if the market will pay a good price. In the case of bicycles, the resale value is extremely low compared to the purchase price unless it's a "collectible". In this economy, and in the future, I see the number of collectors and "collectibles" declining significantly.

Way back when, in my dissipative youth, I was an avid recreational bicyclist. During that time I fell in love with the high technology of a full suspension mountain bike, namely a Cannondale Super-V 1000, which I purchased just as soon as it was available. That was the fall of 1993 or 1994, can’t remember exactly which. So for several years I had lots of fun (well worth the purchase price to tell you the truth) riding off road trails in Michigan and Colorado. In time other priorities came into play, namely a young family, and the Cannondale was hung up in the barn to collect dust. Every time I really looked at it I promised myself that one day I’d ride it again just for fun.

Well, that was then. About a month or so ago my brother asked me to go along with him to a local recreational trail and ride bikes. When I initially resisted, my wife convinced me to go along, because I really needed the break anyway. So, the bike came down, I tuned it up and got ready to go. But, my brother came down with a cold and cancelled out. Still, the bike was already to go and I had a fence to repair in the north pasture (not a long walk, but I walk a lot everyday as it is) so I rode the darn thing up there and back. Golly, it was still fun.

Now that we’re well into autumn, the forage for the animals has slowed down to where we need to supplement their diet with hay. The catch is, the hay is strategically placed near their separate winter pastures and I’ve only got one pitch fork. With the help of a couple of rubber bands, I’ve put the funky bar ends on the Cannondale to use as a rack to carry the pitch fork from hay bale to hay bale. So, until we get some pretty deep snow, giving the animals hay will be quick, easy, and fun.

I’m sure the designers didn’t have this in mind at all.

From Atlantis

Gardening in a glacial moraine

2009-11-08T11:11:00.002-05:00

Our landscape was created by the most recent glaciation. What this means for a gardener is learning how to deal with lots and lots of stones. I've already mentioned the bumper harvest of stones that I had while digging for potatoes, but I was only digging in the topsoil. The subsoil can be even stonier.

While double digging the little 3 ft square patches in my greenhouse, I kept one 5 gallon pail nearby for organic matter to be thrown on the compost pile. Another 5 gallon pail was nearby for the stones. Typically, I filled the stone pail halfway from one of the patches:

From Greenhouse

For those unfamiliar with the term, double digging requires removing a layer of topsoil then loosening the subsoil with a spading fork or similar tool. The topsoil is ultimately put back on top of the subsoil. (For a really good description of how to double dig, read "Grow More Vegetables..." by John Jeavons.)

So far so good, but there's a little challenge in a glacial moraine for the avid double digger. Namely lots of stones. The stones will be particularly challenging if the subsoil is seriously compacted. The spading fork will not do the job. I found that a six foot digging par (one long heavy piece of steel) was extremely helpful in loosening the soil before applying the spading fork. Additionally, it was helpful in removing stones like this one:

From Greenhouse

Good luck as you prepare for the next growing season!

New Garden Swale Construction

2009-10-11T10:32:00.002-04:00

For much of this summer we pastured pigs on a slope in front of our house. It's a nice south-southeast facing hillside which should be pretty warm in the summer. Issues that we need to address include fertility and managing water for the plants as well as erosion control.

First, we set up the upper border of the pigs' fence on a contour line. Next time we'll do the same on the lower border, but it didn't work out this time. Next we turned the pigs loose to root up the soil, which took the most of the summer (it's a large area!) Once we moved the pigs, we were left with a very rough and pitted area loaded with stones and bushes that the pigs left behind. Also loaded with lots of organic matter. I was dreading leveling this by hand with my shovel and rake.

Fortunately, my brother John knows a guy who was willing to loan us a five foot wide PTO driven tiller. Last week John brought the tiller over and we hooked it up to the tractor. I've got to tell you, this is an impressive piece of equipment. Not that it does a complete job of soil preparation, because it doesn't, but it does do a good job of leveling the surface and loosening the top layer of the soil. This will do for a start, but we'll still need to do the old fashioned soil preparation.

In any case, I first ran the sub-soiler through the new garden (former pig pen) on contour. Next I picked up all of the visible stones and dug out the remaining bushes. Then the rototiller did it's job leveling the surface of the garden.

From this point, digging the swale at the top of the garden became a simple matter of raking the loosened soil downhill. Now our soil, as I've mentioned before, is sandy and gravelly. With this soil, a broad shallow swale is supposed to be better than a narrow deep swale, which would be more appropriate for clay soils. The till and rake process worked very well for creating the broad shallow swale for our sandy and gravelly soil. I don't think it would work for clay soil.

After the first pass of raking, I check the swale bottom for level with an A-frame level, then touched up the high spots with a walk-behind tiller and raked more soil out of the swale until the swale bottom was level for the entire length (at least 150 feet, but I haven't measured it yet.)

Here's the garden after tilling the soil, but before raking the swales:

From Garden Swales

You can see the pigs in their next pasture further down the hill.
Here's some detail of the swale about halfway through the job:

From Garden Swales

And here are a couple of photos of the completed swale:

From Garden Swales

Keeping Your Eyes Open

2009-09-13T15:22:00.001-04:00

While digging yet more potatoes the other day, I came across this one:

From Fun With Local Food

Enjoy!

Digging Taters

2009-09-03T11:05:00.002-04:00

Yesterday I spent some time digging potatoes in one of our potato patches. The total for two 40 foot rows: 53 lb potatoes & 162 lb stones. Considering all the soil preparation that I didn't do, the soil amendments that didn't go in, the rain we didn't get, and the maintenance that I didn't do, I'm not complaining.

Of course, the 162 lb of stones should have been a clue that the soil prep was non-existent. This patch gets double dug this fall then planted with something else. I'll also work to get more sunshine on the job by removing some boxelders this winter.

Greenhouse Complete

2009-08-23T11:13:00.002-04:00

We finished the greenhouse this week. First, I continued the interior trench to the outside:

From Greenhouse

And dug it all the way to the concrete slab (which used to be our driveway but is being re-purposed.)

From Greenhouse

I piled the dirt from the original trench and some from the exterior trench approximately on contour just south of the greenhouse. The rest you can see piled next to the trench in the previous photo. Now that I've worked up the soil in both piles, I've begun planting herbs and mulching with some (free) straw from a local farmer. Aside from the herb layer, we'll be planting woody shrubs and small fruit and nut trees in this area. Already there is a volunteer plum in one of the beds, maybe some hazels and chestnuts this fall.

From Greenhouse

Now that we've installed the greenhouse film, the greenhouse is ready to plant our winter harvest plants, which will happen really soon. The planting that is, winter can wait a while.

Greenhouse

2009-08-03T15:23:00.004-04:00

Yes, I've been quiet lately. Since I'm not employed (a fast growing minority), I've been busy gardening in the hope of having enough food to feed my family through the winter. By now it looks like we'll have enough. But just to be sure, we've moved our old greenhouse (which we formerly used as winter housing for our hens) much closer to the kitchen. We haven't put the plastic over the bare frame yet, but first we needed to do some digging. One challenge with a greenhouse, the only water that gets into it is water that you take in. So, I thought "why not store water in organic matter?" So, I started digging a trench through the path in the middle of the greenhouse.

From Greenhouse

Once the trench was half complete, my wife filled the first half of the trench with wood chips delivered by a local tree service (they are always looking for places to dump the chips and I'm perfectly willing to have them drop chips off at our place.)

From Greenhouse

Yesterday, I finished the trench.

From Greenhouse

And today filled the remainder with chips.

From Greenhouse

The beds for vegetables are between the patio blocks. I wonder how much we'll be able to grow and harvest in this space? I've been reading "Four-Season Harvest" and think that we'll get a nice supplement of cold hardy vegetables, but I'm not sure we'll keep going through winter with this setup.

One challenge with all that organic matter is that it's really, really dry right now. We'll need to get it super wet, or it will just suck all of the moisture out of the garden beds. Fortunately, we've been collecting rainwater and are currently draining one of the tanks into the path in the green house. Before the autumn rains set in, I intend to dig a path from the rainwater collection tank to the greenhouse so the overflow water from the tank can run through the path into the greenhouse. Provided we get enough rain. The summer has been unusually dry, so let's hope the autumn is better.

Sophisticated Automatic Mowers

2009-05-24T11:31:00.002-04:00

Here's a photo of our sophisticated automatic mowers cleaning up the hillside next to our house.

From Micro Farming & Macro Gardening

We use portable electric netting from Premier to keep the sheep in control and safe.

Shovels

2009-05-22T20:14:00.003-04:00

Don't you just hate it when a tool breaks on you just when you need it the most? I do. After retiring several shovels prematurely, I visited my local hardware store and asked the owner for his recommendation for a shovel that will not break. About ten minutes later, and $50 poorer, I walked out with a new shovel and the guarantee, "if it breaks I'll replace it, no questions asked."

So, there I was, digging the very first hole and I heard a distinctive "crack". Then I pulled on the handle a little bit more. Snap! Now, I'm not a big guy, but there I was holding two pieces of the indestructable shovel. Frustrating.

So, another trip to the hardware store. True to his word Hermie gave me a replacement shovel. Let's hope he stays in business. While the blade looks pretty tough, shovel handles just aren't what they used to be. By the way, I've dug more holes, but I figure a shovel ought to last 30 years or more. We'll see.

Small Flock Eggmobile

2009-05-10T10:55:00.002-04:00

Let's say you have a small flock of laying hens and want to pasture them. But, your henhouse doesn't adjoin your pasture or you'd like to be able to move the hens around more. Well, you could build an eggmobile, which is a henhouse on wheels. Here are some ideas for a small eggmobile that you can tow behind a lawn tractor.

First, you build the basic platform like this:

From Egg Mobile

Then figure out a way to attach a pair of wheels:

From Egg Mobile

Now turn the base right side up:

From Egg Mobile

Attach a hoop made of feedlot panels and some ends:

From Egg Mobile

Trace the shape of the hoop on the ends:

From Egg Mobile

Trim the end panels to shape and provide openings, one for the hens and one for egg collection:

From Egg Mobile

Attach some side panels and build the nest boxes. 5 gallon pails set on their sides with cutouts in the bottom work nicely:

From Egg Mobile

Cover the hoop with a tarp and your chickens will be living the trailer life:

From Egg Mobile

We use portable electric netting to keep the hens in the immediate vicinity of the eggmobile and to discourage predators. We can move the hens to new pasture in 30 minutes or less and the moves happen once or twice a week. Not a bad investment of our time to get sanitized pastures and eggs with dark, golden yolks.

Fun With Local Food

2009-04-22T10:32:00.002-04:00

The other day while I was cooking brunch, my daughter was reminiscing about making faces with our bacon and eggs. So, I started:

From Fun With Local Food

Not to be outdone, Shannon made a face with hers:

From Fun With Local Food

And Mac:

From Fun With Local Food

Sean:

From Fun With Local Food

And Mary Kate followed suit:

From Fun With Local Food

The bacon was locally processed from a pig that we raised, the eggs were purchased directly from a local farmer because our hens haven't been producing enough, and my wife made the biscuits from scratch. Unfortunately, the flour was from afar, but that was the only long distance food on the plate.

Aside from the forage on our land, the pigs were fed Michigan produced organic feed. The hens from my farmer friend were fed locally produced grains.

Oh, and the honey for the biscuits was locally produced wildflower honey.

Why is this here? Well, it's a fun reminder to buy locally produced food or produce it yourself. This will cut down on carbon emissions and reduce our dependence on fossil fuels. Both good things.

Brilliant!

2009-04-06T11:06:00.002-04:00

The other night we got 1 inch of rain and in the morning we confirmed that the water level in the tank reached the overflow:

From rainwater collection

And the overflow reached the "pocket pond":

From rainwater collection

Given the size of the overflow opening, it's very possible that a torrential downpour will overwhelm the pipe to the "pocket pond". We'll see if this happens and adjust things accordingly.

So, the system works thus far... Brilliant!

Practicing Observation

2009-03-27T10:39:00.002-04:00

There's a lot more than pretty crocuses in this picture. Take a good look and see how many things you can see. How many different kinds of trees are represented by the leaves in the picture? What are they? Hint, no palmettos.

From rainwater collection

Market Garden Progress Report

2009-03-26T20:00:00.003-04:00

We've made some progress on the market garden. It's too early in Michigan to plant most things, but we've been busily refining our rainwater collection and building earthworks. The tank pictured in the last post now has a screen to keep the debris out, an outlet valve, and an overflow line. See the photo:

From rainwater collection

You might be able to see the "pocket pond" at the far end of the garden, but here's a closer view:

From rainwater collection

And another:

From rainwater collection

We're also developing some "swales" to capture and retain water higher in the landscape. Two views of the first "swale" dug this afternoon follow:

From rainwater collection

We've still quite a lot of work to do!

If you noticed the above ground pool, that was installed back in our "consumer" days. Now we're hoping to turn it into an aquaculture paradise. Any suggestions?

Rainwater Collection Follow Up

2009-02-08T11:00:00.002-05:00

Our January thaw started yesterday (February!). The approximately 1 foot of snow on the roof of our pole barn has deposited over 1400 gallons of water in the storage tank. And counting.

Blanket Box - part three

2009-02-01T10:45:00.002-05:00

As I mentioned in my previous post, I'd calculated the temperature decay for both conditions. Here are the curves:

From Blanket Box

I'm sure with some creativity you can come up with a design that suits your needs the best.

Testing The Blanket Box

2009-01-30T20:37:00.001-05:00

Two posts in one day, can you believe it? Actually I've been working on both and wanted to get them out there.

As promised, I ran a test on the blanket box to determine just how well it will hold the heat in a kettle. Those of you who have had Calculus will recognize this as an initial value problem resulting in an exponential decay in temperature.

What I did:

1. Filled a soup kettle with water.
2. Heated the kettle until the water boiled.
3. Measured the temperature (it was 212 degrees F, surprised?)
4. Put the kettle into the blanket box.
5. Put a 4 inch thick Expanded Poly Styrene (EPS) foam plug in the cavity over the kettle.
6. Placed the 3 inch by 32 inch square EPS foam lid on top of the box.
7. Waited for 3 ½ hours.
8. Measured the temperature again.
9. Repeated steps 2 & 3, then 7 & 8 for the un-insulated test.

The blanket box results:

Room temperature: 67 degrees F
Start temperature: 212 degrees F
Stop temperature: 175 degrees F

The un-insulated results:

Room temperature: 70 degrees F
Start temperature: 212 degrees F
Stop temperature: 145 degrees F

The USDA, by the way has defined a “danger zone” for food between 40 degrees F and 140 degrees F in which will “allow rapid growth of molds, bacteria, and yeasts”. So the question would be “how long would it take to reach 140 degrees F” in or out of the blanket box.

So, I figured the constants for the exponential decay and determined that in the blanket box the kettle would take 8 hours and 10 minutes to reach 140 degrees F. The un-insulated kettle, which was nearly there in 3 ½ hours, would have taken 3 hours 52 minutes to reach 140 degrees F.

Of course, the starting temperature is very important as is the quantity of food in the kettle. A much smaller quantity would fall in temperature much more rapidly. Now to finish the blanket box and make it pretty.

Building The Market Garden

2009-01-30T20:22:00.004-05:00

Our soil here is sandy and gravelly, in other words very well drained. Additionally, the previous owner was a chemical farmer who grew the same crop over and over again. I bought the property in 1992 then left it dormant until 1997 when we began building our house. The spring of 1998 I had the soil tested by the MSU extension. Basically, the soil was depleted and had about 0.1 to 0.3 percent organic matter. As I recall, you need about 3 percent organic matter to sustain life in the soil. No wonder there were places where even weeds wouldn’t grow.

So, we began the slow process of building organic matter and life into the soil again. First we coaxed some grass to grow. Then, our first experiment with chickens made a huge difference, but the effects on the soil fertility were short term. Next, we installed a rotational rooting pork program in which we gave the pigs lots of mulch hay to work into the ground. That definitely made a difference. Now we can grow weeds like you wouldn’t believe. So, there are still improvements to be made to the soil.

Still, the soil is very well drained. We can help that by putting more organic matter into it, but also by putting the water where it can do some good. One of the permaculture tools that I’ve learned over the past year is to hold the water as high on the land as possible as long as possible. Since we’re in the position of needing to put in a market garden, we have a great opportunity to demonstrate the technique.

When we had the house built, we also put up a 30X40 ft pole barn. Until just recently, the pole barn has not had gutters (eavestroughs). The water just ran off the roof and soaked into the ground next to the building. In our area, we get about 36 inches of rain every year. That’s a pretty decent amount, but we almost always have a four to six week dry spell in the heat of the summer and everything dries out. If you want vegetables (and lots of them), the dry spell presents quite a problem. Then again, we sometimes have rain events, like last September when we had ten inches of rain over three days. Due to our soil and elevation (our property has the second highest elevation in the county), we didn’t have any flooding although things did get a little saturated.

Storing the water for even a 100 ft square garden would also be problematic. Let’s say you wanted to store enough to have the equivalent of one inch of rain once per week over a six-week period. That would require storage capacity of 37,403 gallons. That would also require collecting more than one year’s worth of rain (one year and three months actually) from a 30X40 ft roof. Doesn’t seem very practical or affordable, does it?

The same 100 ft square garden gets 36 inches of rain each year, or 224,416 gallons each year. Because of our soil conditions and elevation, most of that water percolates through… doesn’t hang around for our veggies. So, finding a way to store that rain in the soil in the garden is paramount. We can supplement that water with the 30,000+ gallons from the barn roof judiciously applied to increase the effective rainfall on the garden by 13%.

So, here are our tasks:
1. Pile on the organic matter to hold the rainfall in the garden.
2. Build the soil fertility up drastically. See task one!
3. Capture the rainfall from the barn roof and soak it into the garden.
4. Build earthworks in the garden to interrupt the flow of water and hold it as high on the ground as possible, allowing it to soak into the garden.
5. Protect the crops from predation.

Plan for task 1:

Our county has a compost facility that will distribute compost at no additional charge (we already pay for it in our taxes) provided you load it. If they load it into your pickup truck, they charge a small fee per load for screened compost. For the planned beds in our market garden, we need about 43 cubic yards of compost. That’s a lot of trips with my pickup truck and trailer, but is much cheaper than having the material delivered.

We also plan to put wood chips on the paths between the beds to hold more water and make homes for worms and other decomposers. There are a number of tree trimming and removal operations in our area who need to dispose of their wood chips. Our hope is to convince them to drop the chips here at no or minimum charge. This will not only help us, but save landfill space as well as drop off charges to the trimming service.

Plan for task 2:

The activities for task 1 should bring our soil fertility a long way, but we don’t plan to stop there. The topic of another blog entry will be “Making Bio-Char”. Based on trials conducted by other people, I’m convinced that Bio-Char will help our fertility significantly. Of course, I plan to conduct my own trials as well.

All gardens have weeds. Ours is no exception. For additional fertility boost, we plan to rot our weeds in water then apply the result either as a foliar spray or directly to the soil. An yes, we are composting kitchen scraps and such but the volume we need far exceeds our capacity to produce compost. In time, our hope is have sufficient perennial crops in place to make our soil fertility self-sustaining. First we need to replace all of the fertility extracted from the soil by the generations of farmers before us who used unsustainable farming practices.

Plan for task 3:

We have just had gutters installed on the barn roof and routed the downspouts into a storage tank. This tank will hold 1550 gallons, so we’ll need to do something about the overflow. The plan is to carry the overflow in a pipe from the tank to a “pocket pond” at the highest point in the garden. A “pocket pond” is merely shallow, large area hole in the ground. From there the water will soak into the garden. Here are some photos:

From rainwater collection

Plan for task 4:

We need to dig the “pocket pond” referred to about, but will also dig some shallow ditches (or swales) on contour in the garden. We’ll plant perennial shrubs and herbs along the down-slope side of the swales.

Plan for task 5:

Experience on this land has taught us that planting an unfenced garden here is otherwise known as “feeding the wildlife”, namely deer and rabbits. We already have fences along most of the edges of the garden, but will need to build fences along the remaining edges to exclude these predators.

Here's a sketch of what I hope the garden will look like:

From rainwater collection

Rainwater Collection

2009-01-22T20:56:00.002-05:00

No data on the blanket box yet, but it works! Really! Today we had gutters installed on our 30X40 pole barn. The downspouts run into a 1550 gallon storage tank. The plans from there are to run the overflow from the storage tank into a "pocket pond" at the highest elevation in a garden where it can infiltrate the soil. We're on sandy gravelly soil, so getting water to hang around for a while is a big deal. Pictures and sketches coming in the next post. Think about it, 1 inch of rain on our barn will equal over 800 gallons of water. A ten inch rain event like we had last September will produce over 8000 gallons. Our Micro Farm gets nearly 36 inches of rain per year resulting in over 30,000 gallons of water on that roof. The overflow has got to go somewhere! Let's put it where it will do some good!

And yes, we're going to collect rainwater from the house roof as well.

Blanket Box - part two

2009-01-13T20:34:00.002-05:00

It's been a busy time around our place. Lots of projects in the air right now, but the blanket box project is moving along in fits and starts. Tonight I moved the box into our kitchen (formerly garage, but the car was exiled to the outside) after stuffing it full with insulation and installing the bottom. Once it warms up to room temperature, we'll do a trial run. The box isn't finished, and isn't pretty just yet, but I'd really like to get some performance data. Ideally, we'll compare starting and finishing temperatures inside the box and outside the box for the same volume of liquid. Good thing we've got a couple of canning pots!

Blanket Box

2008-12-02T11:14:00.006-05:00

What’s a Blanket Box? I’ve never seen one, or photos of one, but I’ve read descriptions and did see one sketch. A Blanket Box is an insulated box designed to accommodate a kettle and hold it at temperature for an extended period of time. What’s the point? Many foods are best slow cooked, such as soup, stew, and broth. Slow could mean 24 hours or more at a low temperature. Although the cooking temperature is low, maintaining this temperature takes energy, and quite a lot of effort if you’re using a wood fired cook stove like we are. One thing you’ll notice when you use wood to heat and cook, minimizing the amount of wood used is a very good thing indeed.

So, in times past people used Blanket Boxes for slow cooking. Starting with a pot at boiling temperature, they put the pot in the blanket box and allowed it to cool very slowly. We’ve decided to give it a go, how hard could it be?

The first step is to decide the maximum size pot. Our largest soup kettle is 12 inches in diameter and 12 inches high with the lid on. OK, the inner box should be 12 inches cubed, right? Wrong. There are handles on the side of the pot which we need to hold while putting the pot in the box and taking it out. With some creative measuring, we settled on 16 inches cubed for the inner box.

The material we chose to construct the box is plywood, which is pretty cheap and readily available. Plywood, as you probably know comes in 4X8 ft sheets of various thicknesses. At first I thought that 6 inches of insulation on each side of the cube would be nice, which would result in an outer cube of 28 inches. But 32 inches goes into 96 inches (8 ft) evenly. So our outer cube is 32 inches, which provides 8 inches of insulation. Our insulation of choice is cellulose fiber, but there are many others out there. Again, the cellulose fiber is cheap and readily available.

So there I was with five 16 inch square pieces of plywood and five 32 inch square pieces of plywood. Then I realized that with butted corners they wouldn’t be cubes and the bottoms wouldn’t exactly fit. Plus, I haven’t built the lid yet, or the top to cover the insulation. So, basically, I’ll need to cut two plywood thicknesses off one dimension of two of the 16 inch squares and two of the 32 inch squares in order to end up with cubes and make the bottoms fit.

From Blanket Box

Once the sides were trimmed to size, I ripped a 2x4 in half and cut it into four inch lengths to allow the sides to be screwed together. You can see in the second photo that I've also begun assembling the inner box.

From Blanket Box

Before we get too carried away, it's worth checking that my measurements were correct and the pot will indeed fit inside. Yup.

From Blanket Box

Even our 21 quart canner will fit with room to spare for a blanket inside for added insulation.

From Blanket Box

Once the inner box was mostly complete and assembled to the outer box, I turned the entire assembly upside down on a sheet of plywood and marked the corners as well as traced the inside edge of the inner box.

From Blanket Box

This will be the "top" of the box, but not the cover. Using yet more screws, the top was assembled to the rest.

From Blanket Box

But of course the bottom of the inner box wasn't in place just yet. Truth is, I didn't trust four screws to support the weight of the soup pot or the canner, so I decided to support the bottom of the inner box with parts of the "ripped" 2x4 as shown.

From Blanket Box

Yes, these are not just supports but also thermal bridges. On the plus side, they're small in area and fairly long so their effect will be minimized. The weight had to be supported somehow.

From Blanket Box

And this is the current state of the blanket box. More to come as I finish the construction.

Mycelium Running

2008-12-01T09:58:00.002-05:00

This weekend, while dealing with an unpleasant head cold (is there any other kind?), I finished reading Mycelium Running by Paul Stamets. Can't say that I've ever been this excited about mushrooms in my life. Paul's writing style is very down to earth and readable, covering a complex topic at a level that even an engineer / marketing guy can be comfortable with. The section on mushroom spawn propagation was truly exciting... starting with a mushroom kit, whole mushrooms, spores, etc. you can naturalize your own spawn and incorporate edible fungi into your garden and forest. If you garden, get your hands on a copy of this book, read it, then get to work. Here's a website to get started: www.fungi.com

In other news, I'm experimenting with a blanket box (otherwise known as a hay box) to reduce the energy invested in soups, stews, broth, and other slow cooked foods. My next post should have some photos and descriptions of how the box is coming together. Later, we'll see just how well it works.

Observation on Plan C Conference

2008-11-13T20:04:00.002-05:00

OK! This has tweaked me since the conference and I've just got to comment on it.

On the last day of the conference several people asked me if I planned to attend next year's conference. Let's see, the title was "Plan C Conference - Peak Oil and Community Solutions". The recurring themes during the conference were "curtailment of fossil fuel consumption" and "localization". Even the conference evaluation form asked, "what would you like to see in next year's conference?". Umm, let me see... no conference.

No. I'm not planning to attend next year's conference. I plan to curtail my fossil fuel consumption, partly by not attending any more conferences. Unless they're local, then I'll bicycle to them.

Plan “C” Conference, Food Track Part One

2008-11-13T10:05:00.001-05:00

During the Plan “C” Conference, I met John Krochmalny and agreed to write about the Food Track if he would write about the Housing Track. Then I spent last week out of town. So, before I totally forget what it was all about, here’s my summary of the “Food Track”.

The first speaker was Peter Bane, a long time Permaculture instructor and publisher of “Permaculture Activist”. Permaculture is a term coined by Bill Mollison and David Holmgren in the 1970’s and is a contraction of Permanent Culture or Permanent Agriculture. Peter’s first comments were that you must have a Permanent Culture in place in order to create Permanent Agriculture. My take on this: if you’re not willing to settle in a place and create or participate in the local community then you’re only pretending to create Permanent Agriculture. It’s not permanent unless you and your community are permanently part of it.

The next item Peter tackled was a response to a thought expressed by John Michael Greer "The Archdruid Report" during his keynote address the night before in which John wondered how a permanent agriculture system using trees and shrubs could be effective during a period of dramatic climate change. Peter’s answer is that the climate is always variable and that management of the trees and shrubs, even accounting for migration due to climate, is key to permaculture. In essence, permaculturists establish and manage woody plants over time. As the climate changes, some trees and woody plants may need to be replaced with varieties more suited to the new climate. But, remember that as the plants grow, they also adapt in place. While a newly established plant may not thrive outside of its normal range, one that has grown up and matured in that place has already adapted somewhat to the locale and may survive and be productive. But all lives do end eventually, even trees, and we’ll need to find suitable replacements.

Now, onto food.

When the system fails, for whatever reason, we need to know how to grow food and have it in the pantry. Actually, when the system fails, we should have already been growing food and have it in the pantry already!

In order to accomplish these tasks, we’ll need land, human labor, water, sunlight, and knowledge. Calories depend on photosynthesis… plants need sunlight. Soil fertility is an issue as well. Modern management of soil fertility through organic agriculture is a modern refinement. Although farmers managed for many years before the advent of chemical agriculture, they were primarily harvesting the native soil fertility. Using modern organic methods, it’s possible to restore the fertility of depleted soils.

In order to grow food for ourselves, we will need to preserve and conserve diverse seed. As you harvest plants and save seed, you are selecting seed that has adapted to your needs and location. You will also need to protect your plants (food) from predators, including deer and people.

Onto labor. Anyone who has planted a small garden recognizes how much work it truly is. From managing the soil, to planting the seeds, removing undesired plants, and harvesting and preserving the harvest, it’s a lot of work. Now think about how much food your household consumes. Just go through your grocery list for a month then multiply by twelve. Yikes! We’re talking about a lot of food. So, where is that labor all going to come from? As the economy shrinks and fuel gets more expensive, households will get larger. Maybe your brother and his wife move in. Maybe some adult children and their families. Not even a century ago households were multi-generational. Don’t let those folks freeload! Put them to work! If you move in with someone else, you’re not at a free hotel, you need to contribute.

Some things that are essential to life are shelter, warmth, food, and water. You’ll need to secure each of these but will need backup systems in case of disaster. If you have one system for providing water, get a backup system. Some ideas are cisterns, rain barrels, ponds, swales, and hand operated pumps to back up electrically operated pumps.

You will be growing food. If you have a shady yard you will need to get the sunshine in – trim or cut trees as needed. Use vertical space for growing food as well as horizontal. If you need shade for comfort in your house use trellised vines instead of trees.

You will need to bolster your soil fertility. Aside from organic matter to help the living soil, minerals are very important. Phosphate in particular is critical and most limited. Allies are bugs, birds, small animals, and people. Each excrete phosphate. Read the “Humanure Handbook”, flushing is like putting a gun to our heads… and pulling the trigger. Ash (from fires) also is mineral rich. Since you’ll probably be using wood for heat, use the ash in your garden.

Modern industrial agriculture has pauperized the soils, you will need to enrich yours.

Look at weeds in a different way, they’re actually paramedics trying to help the damaged soil. Cut them, compost them, rot them in water and spray them on foliage or use the water as fertilizer. Many weeds are actually quite delicious edible plants. Learn to recognize them and eat them. Build the soil from the top down. Use composted humanure. Bring birds into your garden, each takeoff is jet propelled. Give the birds a chance to make your garden a better place with every flight. Use urine as fertilizer, don't flush it!

Collect graywater and recycle it. Do everything you can to expand year round production. Suggestions include cold frames, greenhouses, and indoor production.

Food storage is critical. Learn to store food in jars, crocks, buckets, rooms, and pits. Learn how to ferment food.
Grow herbs, greens, flowers, small fruits, small animals, nuts, etc. Make your own medicine. Get into work bikes.

Whew! That’s a lot of information. My suggestion would be to start now. Part Two will be coming shortly.

Plan C Conference

2008-11-02T08:09:00.003-05:00

Well, I've been out of touch for a while. Relocating your family and hangers on to another state will do that for you.

This weekend I'm attending the Plan C Conference "The 5th U.S. Conference on Peak Oil and Community Solutions" at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan. Just checking in briefly before the morning sessions. For a brief summary of the conference, check out John Krochmalny's blog here: http://www.jkrochmalny.blogspot.com/

Take care and remember that less is more.

Sensible Investments

2008-09-19T13:54:00.003-04:00

Today President Bush, discussing the new federal insurance program for money market accounts said: "For every dollar invested in an insured fund, you'll be able to take a dollar out."

This is a little disingenuous, I think. You might invest today's dollar in that account and then some time later withdraw a devalued dollar, even if that devaluation is by the inflation rate. Let's do some quick math, over one year at 3% inflation that dollar becomes worth 97 cents. Ok, a little loss but at $10,000 you've lost $300. Not so little. Compounded over 5 years you're down over $1400 in purchasing power.

Why on earth is this in a gardening blog?

Because you can use that same dollar (or $100, or $1000, or $10,000) and buy high quality manual tools, plants, seed, and other gardening supplies now (even land if you've got $10,000). Or you can spend some of it to take some gardening and food preservation classes. This way, even if the entire economy unwinds and oil becomes more outrageously expensive, you will still be able to grow food.

I don't know about you, but I like to eat every day.

Disclaimer: I'm not giving anyone financial advice. It's your money, use it the way you choose!

Market Turmoil

2008-09-18T06:52:00.003-04:00

Hey folks, if you haven't been watching the stock market you'd better tune in. Take care of your investments, let's hope we all make the right choices. You'll want to be able to fund your forest garden after all!

Edible Forest Gardens

2008-09-16T12:50:00.003-04:00

This past weekend I attended a seminar titled "Edible Forest Gardens" with Dave Jacke at Oikos Tree Crops south of Kalamazoo, Michigan. Dave is the author of the two volume book: "Edible Forest Gardens".

The seminar was energizing and entertaining, if you get a chance to attend one you won't regret it. Unlike many "seminars" which really turn into lectures, this one had plenty of free exchange of ideas between the participants, host, and presenter/leader/enabler. Dave did a great job of encouraging and guiding the exchange along the outline for the seminar.

Take some time to visit the website http://www.edibleforestgardens.com/ and read Dave's book! Also visit http://www.oikostreecrops.com/ Thanks to Ken Asmus for being such a wonderful host.

Surviving Peak Oil, Preparations, and Relocation: Surviving Peak Oil: Obstacles to Relocation

2008-09-08T16:41:00.000-04:00

Surviving Peak Oil, Preparations, and Relocation: Surviving Peak Oil: Obstacles to Relocation

Energy - who are you going to call?

2008-09-08T13:41:00.002-04:00

More specifically oil. It should be pretty obvious to anyone who has his head out of the sand that the cheap stuff is gone. In forty years or so, oil will be for all intents and purposes gone. Who are you going to call then? Just think about the food on your table. How far did it travel to get there? Average in the U.S. is about 1900 miles. How will it get there without cheap transportation? Here are some products that are now dependent on oil that you might not realize are:

Food
Clothing
Electricity
Coal
Steel
Iron
Aluminum
Copper
Glass
Most minerals
Transportation
Computers
Internet
Books
Shoes
Tools of all kinds
Water

You get the picture. The situation is a little more challenging that people might realize. Try growing a garden without fertilizer and pesticides for a change. The first year you will realize that the soil fertility has been so degraded by mismanagement that the plants are all sickly. If you haven't kept the calcium content up, your tomatoes will develop blossom end rot. The pests will have a field day because the beneficials haven't built up to the point where they can help. Plus, you probably haven't planted to attract beneficials anyway.

That's the whole point of permaculture and why I've started this blog. While I'm new to permaculture, there are some things I can offer. Plus you get to come on the journey with me and learn from my mistakes.

First lesson: Admit that you can't learn it all from a book. Take a class. I went to one from Midwest Permaculture, but you can choose a class near you. Just do a web search for classes near you. Check the listing of classes at Permaculture Activist. Here are some links: http://www.midwestpermaculture.com/ and http://www.permacultureactivist.net/

Learn about energy and peak oil: http://www.theoildrum.com/

And if you think peak oil is scary, wait until you hear about peak soil, peak water, and peak food.

And stop treating your soil like dirt.

A Quick Note About Tarps

2008-09-03T15:23:00.003-04:00

As you've guessed, I've used tarps quite a lot for my projects. They're a quick and inexpensive way to produce an almost waterproof roof for shelters. But... they don't last very long. Maybe three years in a northern climate. Someplace that has longer and hotter summers might be just shorten the life of a tarp even more.

So, as a quick and cheap short term solution they do fine. For long term, I'd place my bets on steel.

A Simple Shed

2008-09-03T15:17:00.002-04:00

So, after reading about my simple animal shelter you might say, “But I need more room than that! It looks like barely enough room for a dog in there!” Actually, two grown sheep can use that smaller shelter. If your flock is larger, or you need more space, it’s pretty easy to scale the shelter up to 8 feet square. But if you want to stand up in it you’ll need to build some height. You could just make the hoop higher, but you could also do what I did. Build some sidewalls and put the hoop shelter on top.

From Simple Shed

I chose to use a plywood skin with 2X4 lumber on 24 inch centers so it would be stiff. After building the sidewalls, I enlisted the aid of a helper to stand them up and screw them together.

From Simple Shed

Afterwards, a larger helper and I lifted the hoop structure on top and attached it to the sidewalls.

From Simple Shed

A quick fence using feedlot panels and t-posts.

From Simple Shed

Then it was ready for the sheep, who seemed pretty happy with the situation.

From Simple Shed

The added height of the sidewalls made it easy to construct a lambing jug inside for spring lambing season. One challenge is the cleanout, as is the case with just about any animal housing project for over-wintering. I’m working on some ideas there and will fill you in on the progress in time.

struggling with photos

2008-08-28T14:33:00.001-04:00

Ok, trying to figure out how to paste photos in neatly... still.

Now we get to move on, although next time I'll pick a smaller size :)

Help, I need to build a lightweight animal shelter quickly!

2008-08-27T15:57:00.003-04:00

Not only does the shelter need to be lightweight and quickly assembled, but also inexpensive.

One solution is to build a quick hoop structure. If it doesn’t need to be moved frequently and your animals don’t tend to be destructive (which rules out most of them) a shelter can be built with re-bar and a tarp. Poke one end of the re-bar into the ground and bend it into a hoop shape, then poke the other end into the ground. Stretch a tarp over the hoops, weighting the edges with whatever is convenient. Bingo, you’ve got a shelter. This is also a quick way to build a greenhouse, but you would use greenhouse film instead of the tarp. Not the greatest or most durable, but it gets the little guys out of the wind and weather. Of course, if your animals do tend to blunder about a bit, or get a touch destructive (like pigs do) then this won’t work for you. It might be ok for chickens, lambs, and kids (not children, goats) though. It might even suit for feed and straw storage if you’re willing to sacrifice the bottom bales.

Another solution is a not quite as quick hoop structure that is well suited for lambs, sheep, goats (although they tend to climb up top), kids, and chickens. Pigs are too destructive for this type of shelter. First, build a square frame with four 2X4s overlapped at the corners. Good choices for the sides are 4 feet and 8 feet, we’ll deal with the 4 feet example here. Another choice would be to use two 52 inch boards and two 48 inch boards. Why? Because the next material we’ll use is a standard cattle feedlot panel which measures 52 inches by 16 feet. It’s generally easier to cut 2X4 lumber than wire feedlot panels. But then you’ll need three 8ft 2X4s instead of two. Your choice, but you’re going to have to cut the panel anyway. Now decide how high you want the structure to be. Somewhere between three and four feet will work for most smaller animals. Lift one end of the feedlot panel and start bending it to make a hoop that’s about right, then mark where you want to shorten the panel. Using your bolt cutters, cut off the excess length of the panel, taking care to cut as close to a vertical wire as possible.

From Simple Animal Shelter

Assemble the now much shorter feedlot panel to your frame using fence staples. Attach one end first, then bend the panel into a hoop shape and attach the other end in the same way. Be careful, the panel is springy.

From Simple Animal Shelter

Cut a 4X8 sheet of plywood in half, so you now have two 4X4 sheets. Using decking screws, attach the sheets of plywood to either end of the shelter. Next, trace the outline of the hoop on the plywood. Unfasten the plywood from the frame and lay it across a couple of sawhorses or other platform. Trace a door opening on one of the plywood sheets and a window opening on the other. The window opening is to allow for airflow, which not only helps your animals stay comfortable, but reduces the probability of lift off in high winds. (Lost some chickens that way once.) Cut along the traced lines to shape the end panels using your favorite method. You could use a hand saw for this task, but I find my saber saw to be much faster.

From Simple Animal Shelter

Now the panels are shaped, screw them to the frame. Now you’ll notice that the framework is pretty floppy.

From Simple Animal Shelter

Here’s what you’re going to do about that. The feedlot panel has a number of rods running from one end of the framework to the other. Drill two holes on each side of the wire in at least two places on either end of the structure. Make a “U” out of stiff steel wire and push the ends of the “U” through the holes. Twist the wire around the feedlot panel rods, leaving the sharp ends on the inside of the structure. Tape the wire to the rods to reduce the risk of injury to the animals.

From Simple Animal Shelter

Stretch a tarp over the structure and staple the tarp to the frame and to the plywood ends. Batten the tarp down with wood lath cut to length as appropriate.

From Simple Animal Shelter

I pre-drill holes in the lath to prevent cracking and attach the battens with screws.

From Simple Animal Shelter

Trim the tarp around the battens, and you’re done.

From Simple Animal Shelter

Good luck!

What's a Micro-Farm?

2008-08-27T09:41:00.001-04:00

Micro-Farm: Too big to be a regular garden, too small to be a small farm. May have a few animals for food, manure, and labor replacement.

Macro-Garden: See Micro-Farm.

They’re the same. An urban yard filled with garden counts as a Macro-Garden as does a twenty acre hobby farm with gardens, pastures, orchards, etc.