[ Another great post from Rob at One Straw. ]

A huge focus of this blog is finding creative, sustainable ways to eek more produce from small spaces.  I also love growing calorie crops, especially potatoes, and furthermore I really enjoy building things.  So when a friend recently recommended the use of potato towers, I was very interested.  So yesterday I was off to buy materials for several compost bin orders I have and wouldn’t ya know?  2×6 pine was on sale.

The theory is simple – solancea plants will root from any stalk that has ground contact – I’ve seen both peppers and tomatoes rooting from their stalks.  The important part with potatoes is that they will lay tubers anywhere between the original “seed” potato and the soil surface.  Every time the potato plant gets about 6 inches above ground, add  more soil – this is why you mound potatoes in the field.  These towers just take the mounding to crazy logical conclusions – the tower is essentially a three foot “mound”.  What I like most about this kind of tower is the ability to “sneak” potatoes as the season progresses by removing a lower strip of 2×6 and grubbing around.  As most suburbanites don’t have root cellars (yet!) this is a huge plus if you are growing 100 lbs of spuds.  Also, as the sides are opaque, spud production will occur right up to the sides, maximizing space and using less water compared to wire mesh designs.  Also, the lumber avoids some concerns that may be present with using old tires.  Old garbage cans, etc would also work.

The only major change I did for mine was that I used 2×4’s for the uprights as I had 10′ of them laying around the garage and I also put a sheet of cardboard under it to thwart the quack.  Speaking of which, this could be considered a hyper productive way to sheet mulch - cardboard out next years beds, and build potato towers along them – one could get (in theory) 600 lbs of spuds form one 20-foot bed (6 towers with 18-inch spacing) and when the towers come down you have a raised bed about 2 feet deep with compost when you’re done.  Hmmmm…

Planting the tower is easy, I took four medium seed potatoes (1 lb exactly) and cut them in half.  In the spirit of science, I used one each of Kennebec, Purple Viking, Carola, and Yukon Gold to see which liked this method more.  The growing medium I used for the first layer is two-year-old leaf mold, to which I added some pelletized chicken manure for nitrogen as it looked a little “carbon-ey”.  Weather here is mild and rainy, so they should be sprouting in no time.  The only down side is that right after the photo shoot, our new adolescent dog decided that this was a fantastic play pen and tore into it with abandon – I think I found all eight seeds, but she may have eaten one or two.

The claim is that the towers will produce 100 lbs of spuds with about 1 lb planted in 4 sqare feet.  That is freakish considering a record yield for field sown spuds is about 14:1; I was very pleased with my 8.5:1 last year.  In typical culture, 100 lbs would take at least 75 square feet, but more likely 150.  I am stoked to see this work and will certainly keep you posted.  Other great advantages – you do not need any heavy equipment to grow these – and harvesting is super easy.  Just be sure to save the soil somewhere for next year – mixing it with fall leaves and grass clippings in a compost bin would be a fantastic way to rejuvenate the soil.

Couple of post-scripts. This thing is crazy overbuilt – I would feel comfortable parking a car on it if it had a cross tie across the top!  I think the prime driver of the dimensions is cost.  In the irony of modern economics, 2×6×8′ lumber is cheaper than 1×6×8′ lumber.  Also, pine rots quickly, so using 2x lumber will buy you a few extra years -though by Year Four I expect these to be falling apart.  If it works I will likely build the next one using cedar decking for the sides and 2×2 cedar for the uprights.  That should last a decade, but would cost about double.  Another advantage would be that it would weigh half as much – this thing is heavy when built!

To make it more fun, we will likely be painting the sides with the kids – I have the idea of making each side a different person, and then we can mix and match the parts each year to create silly combinations.  I would also like to enlist my wife (waaaaay more talented artist) to paint a picture of a potato plant with a “soil view” of roots on one side.

All in all the total cost was about $30 (8 2×6×8, screws, and 12′ of 2×2) and about an hour of time in the workshop -mostly becuase my kids were running the screw guns and they are 5 and 7.  If you can truly get 100 lbs of spuds that is crazy cheap – down to literally a few cents per pound over the lifetime of the tower.  Combine that with the ability for literally every single homeowner to grow all their potatoes for a year in as little as 8 square feet, this could be huge!

[ A great idea courtesy of Peak Oil Hausfrau. ]

A gardening craze seems to be sweeping the nation, goosed by the First Family planting a garden on their lawn. As gardening becomes something interesting, popular, and increasingly accepted, you may find your skills are suddenly in demand.

Gardening can seem simple, but a novice will soon run into plenty of complications. An experienced gardener will know the difference between seed and transplant veggies, cool and warm season crops, compost and cover cropping. A gardener who knows the area will have invaluable knowledge about great varieties, special tricks, and keeping out the critters.

Advice is free, and tours of your garden might be gratis, but when people start needing help with actual physical labor, or want you to visit their yard – consider starting a business. Providing your knowledge and skills can make the difference between success and failure, or gardens getting started or languishing on paper. Offering your knowledge can save your friends and neighbors countless hours of research, reading, and trial and error.

Don’t feel bad for charging a fee to help someone set up their garden. Personally, I would be glad to pay someone to save me the labor of creating a raised bed. I imagine many older folks, families with young children, or simply out-of-shape or time-constrained people would be glad as well. People who are planting a garden for fresh taste or to have organic produce will be less price-sensitive than people who are planting gardens to save money. People charge to clean homes, cook food, do taxes, wash laundry, and cut hair. Why not charge for starting a garden?

Consider a “First Time Gardening” Package, priced reasonably for your area. Don’t price it too low – you need to make it worth your time or you will swiftly either burn out or go out of business.

Your package might include:

• One hour of preliminary consulting (you send them homework to do first – like listing their favorite herbs and veggies), to include site selection and veggie selection
• The building and filling of one or two 4 x 8 raised beds
• Planting one or two 4 x 8 beds with veggies in the spring, complete with mulch
• Printed instructions on how to care for a garden
• Printed instructions on common pests for your area and how to deal with them
• One hour of free troubleshooting time
• Money-back guarantee

You could also offer a bare-bones package that just includes the building and filling of the beds, for people who have the knowledge but not the manpower to create a raised bed. Alternatively, you could offer a platinum package for people who want edible landscaping or permaculture features – a more time intensive process.

Personally, I have always offered a money-back guarantee in my business. No one has ever taken me up on it, although I have the money-back guarantee displayed prominently on my website and even on signs in my office. A money-back guarantee builds confidence and trust. Have some faith in your fellow neighbors – it could pay you back in spades. On the other hand, there are some shady characters out there. Be sure to evaluate your clients before agreeing to do work for them.

Word of mouth and referrals are usually the best marketing, but a website can be a cheap and effective way of advertising if you make it yourself. Business cards are also cost-effective. Regardless of whether you give out free help or charge for your services, be confident that you are helping people improve their health, feel more secure, and enjoy the pleasure of freshly picked produce. The more gardens there are, the more distributed and organic our food production is, the better we’ll all be in a recession or oil crisis.

[ Another great piece by Wendy at Home Is... ]

Some time ago, I went on a quest for convenience, but I didn’t want the kind of convenience that comes in a box from the store.

Actually, that’s exactly what I wanted, but what I didn’t want is modified food starch, disodium phosphate, mono- and diglycerides (to prevent foaming … seriously, is foamy pudding a bad thing?), Yellow 5, Yellow 6, or BHA (preservative).

I’m not a purist or anything, but in learning to eat locally, we had to unlearn our dependence on commercial food products. So, when I went looking for “convenience”, initially, it was just because I couldn’t verify where the stuff in the boxes had come from, but I could find local flour and salt for the mix, and milk and butter when I mixed the pudding, and using raw vanilla beans and local vodka, I can make my own vanilla extract. So, at first, it was all about keeping our diet as local as possible, which means we had to learn to eat a lot of “whole” foods.

But sometimes, it’s nice to have the convenience. You know?

Then, I started looking at what’s in those boxes …

… and, well, as Neo discovered, once you’ve eaten the red pill, there’s just no going back.

So, I went on a quest for “mixes” I could make myself, and I found a lot of them. Currently, I have in my cabinet, pancake mix and vanilla pudding mix. I have recipe for corn muffin mix, but I haven’t mixed it, yet .

I found the Vanilla Pudding Mix recipe on Cooks.com.

It is:

1 1/2 c sugar
1 c instant nonfat dry milk
1 1/4 c flour
1 tsp salt

Stir ingredients together and store in a tightly covered container in a cool place.

For different flavors you can add:

Caramel: 1 1/2 c brown sugar in place of the granulated sugar.
Chocolate: add 3/4 c unsweetened cocoa.

Recipe yields about 5 c of mix.

To make the pudding:

2/3 c pudding mix
1 3/4 c warm milk
1 tbsp butter
1 tsp vanilla

Stir pudding mix into the milk in a saucepan, stirring constantly until mixture bubbles throughout. Reduce heat and cook over low heat for one minute. Add butter. Remove from heat and stir in vanilla. Chill before serving.

There are no preservatives – except what’s in the dry milk (Added later: I looked at the ingredient list, and the dry milk doesn’t have any preservatives, only the addition of vitamins A and D, but there is a concern as to how the dry milk is *made*). We used real butter and raw milk when we made the pudding, and added green food coloring (because it was St. Patrick’s Day .

It’s really rich! One could probably reduce the amount of sugar by a quarter and not miss it too much.

When we first started our quest to localize our diet, I assumed it would mean giving up things like pudding, which is crazy, when I really think about it, because pudding wasn’t “invented” by Jell-O, but I don’t think my assumptions were too far removed from the average American’s. I never thought *I* could can tomato soup, or that *I* could make cinnamon rolls that are at least as good as anything I can buy.

But I have, to both, and the more I learn about cooking with whole ingredients, the more I realize that food production isn’t some magic created in the bowels of the Campbell Soup factory.

I’m a little embarrased that it’s taken me so long to get where I am with regard to my food preparation skills, but, as they say, “better late than never ….”

And even better than my learning these skills, is that my three youngest are learning right along side me.

They actually know that cinnamon rolls don’t come shrink wrapped from the grocery store, that milk comes from a cow’s udder (which they’ve seen), that “chicken” is an animal that lays eggs and not just a KFC product, that yogurt and cheese can be made in our kitchen using milk and heat and bacteria, that maple syrup started out as maple sap, that potatoes and carrots grow underground, and while money doesn’t, apples do grow on trees.

They may not be able to recite the Preamble to the Constitution (thanks, Schoolhouse Rock!), but they have a great deal more knowledge than I had at their ages.

And better, it’s knowledge that has value.

Of course, if you’ll give me a dollar, I’ll sing the Preamble for you .

[ This is a guest post by El at Fast Grow the Weeds. ]

Planting red set onions.  Set onions (little bags of seed onions you’ll find at garden stores now) can be eaten at any size, and the greens can be eaten at any time too.  They’ll never get as large as onions you grow from seed but they’ll do in a pinch.

I thought I would give a bit of a primer on garden-starting, considering that we’re starting our school gardens from scratch (and have great plans for them soon).

Whenever you start anything, of course, there’s a bit of an up-front investment you must make in time and materials.  Before that first seed can sprout, some earth probably needs to be turned.  In our school garden’s case, we had a working garden: it produced pie pumpkins most recently, so the whole garden was covered first with weed-suppressing fabric and then a layer of woodchips.  To start our beds, we needed to build the beds (each bed required (2) 2″x8″x8′-0″ boards and (1) 2″x8″x6′-0″ boards cut in half), rake away the woodchips, cut the fabric away, and do a bit of weeding.  Our soil at school is rather nice, but raised beds are nicer:  they warm up/dry out earlier in spring, they’re easier to weed and water, and–probably most importantly–are off-limits to little running feet!  We dumped some semi-composted sheep poop and bedding onto the bottoms of the beds, then we filled each bed with about 4-6 loads of topsoil.

(The above steps assume you have:  1. a saw, 2. a drill, 3. a rake, 4. a shovel, and 5. a wheelbarrow.  Having access to sheep poop is a bonus, and topsoil is the dream but not reality for many gardens:  raised beds do NOT need to be filled to the brim, especially not with topsoil.  Do what you can with what you have.  I certainly do!)

We expect to end the school year with a Harvest Festival sometime during the third week of May.  Our last frost date here in chilly Michigan is somewhere between May 1st and May 15th:  and yes, I am expecting a harvest of goodies 2 weeks later!  Am I crazy?  Nope.  I am simply working with things that don’t mind the cold.  Some of these things I am starting from seed both indoors at school and inside the semi-warm confines of our home greenhouses.  Many of the seeds, though, are being planted in the beds now:  peas, carrots, beets, radishes, turnips, potatoes, set onions, lettuces.

Lettuce seedlings can take a bit of frost, and the smaller they are, the hardier they are.

Our garden’s focus this semester is Asia.  Fortunately for us, many Asian countries grow things that appreciate the coolness of a Michigan spring, and have a very short (under 40 days) growing season.  I ordered a large portion of our seeds for things like mibuna, pak choi, flowering Chinese broccoli, Napa cabbage, chrysanthemum greens, daikon radishes, etc. from the esteemed Kitazawa Seed Company in California:  they specialize in Asian goodies AND have both a fantastic selection and really wonderful literature supporting each seed variety.  At $3.50 a seed packet they’re running nearly double what you’d find at a garden center of your local big-box retailer, but the seed quantities are generous AND you can’t expect to find Oka Hijiki (seaweed mustard) on a rack at Home De(s)pot.  But say you’re not that interested in Asian vegetables.  You can still easily start your garden now by planting many of the other things I listed.  And don’t stop at the big-box stores for sourcing cheap seeds!  Get out of the city and suburbs and find a feed store in the country.  Most farmers still have kitchen gardens out back and it is at their local farm/feed store that they often get their seed potatoes, carrots, and beans.  Most feed stores sell seeds out of a bin, cheaply:  expect to pay 40-80 cents for more carrots than you could ever eat in a year.

Your gardens needn’t be (16) 3′x8′ raised beds to be productive.  A family of four could easily do quite well in trimming their grocery bill with four raised beds of such size.  The key to a great harvest, frankly, is constant production.  If I were such a family of gardeners, I would use approximately 1/4-1/3 of one bed as a seeding bed (i.e., using it to start seeds and then move the leafy seedlings around to other beds as they get big); I might even place an old window on top of this area to heat things up and hurry things along.  Most root crops (carrots, turnips, potatoes) like to stay where they’re planted, so having a seeding  transfer bed mainly helps leafy greens.  To save space, tomatoes and pole beans can be trellised, as can certain kinds of vining melons and squash; going vertical does save lots of precious growing area for other things.  There are many great get-started-gardening books out there:  I would recommend Square Foot Gardening or Ruth Stout’s method of Lasagna Gardening to get you thinking about both how to maximize a small garden and how to garden without breaking your back.  My absolute favorite beginning-gardening book is Barbara Damrosch’s Garden Primer:  she’s very approachable, and she covers more than just veggies.  I also worship her husband Eliot Coleman and have used his Four-Season Harvest to get my own greenhouses up and running.

Get digging, everybody!  Spring is here in half the world, fall in the other:  both are great times of year to start new garden beds.

[ This is a guest post by Greenpa of Little Blog in the Big Woods, originally posted last spring. He's full of unconventional wisdom, as always. ]

When we bought this farm- 160 acres- it had a “rough corner” – a steep rocky ravine, with a dry bottom. About 40 acres of forest there, some good timber, but this bit is not even close to being tillable. Brought the over-all price of the land down a little.

No water in the bottom, although just over the fence with the neighbor to the south, there is a spring that runs all year, most years; have only seen it stop running once, I think.

The ravine, which we call “the valley”, looks like it might well have once had a full time stream running in it. Typically, around here, when the original lands went under the plow, the water table dropped, and some streams went dry.

I’ve hoped, year after year, that what we were doing here might bring the water back. Year after year- dry.

But. This year:

We have water. And not just a little- there are seeps feeding this flow all the way through our land- ending, in fact, exactly at the fence with the neighbor to the north. It’s about a quarter mile of spring and seep fed creek, that wasn’t there before. (You can hear a chickadee singing “spring-soon” early on, and then a wild jungle-bird call, quite loud. It’s not fake- it’s one of our pileated woodpeckers; just lucky to catch it.)

This is a lot of water, up from nothing. It’s crystal clear- unless we’ve had heavy rain, then we get run-off from the neighbors’ fields, and it’s muddy as can be, until the next day. There are green mosses and algae living in the clear water- making oxygen.

It’s been 30 some years. For me, this is crazy exciting. And satisfying. I think, maybe, we’ve brought something back, that was supposed to be here. Is water important? What a question.

Now the stream runs, and even babbles. Middle Child says he can hear it, from the house, if the wind is still. He says it really changes the feel of the valley. I knew it would. Running water hits the human heart, and hind-brain, directly.

I can’t hear it; unless I’m close. Too much time with tractors and chainsaws. (Yes, I ALWAYS had ear protection of some kind- except once, helping out a neighbor… I don’t think the standard ear muffs do enough, over time. Now I wear ear plugs AND muffs.) Yeah, that makes me a little sad, but seeing the clear clean water, and having it there for my kids, makes up for it.

———————————————————————————

When we bought the farm, it had been managed in the locally normal fashion, since about 1845. Three quarters of the land had been cleared and plowed. About 1/4 of it had been savannah grass, that was all plowed. Most of it was really too steep to be plowed, but it was anyway; these days 3/4 of the tilled land is technically classified as “highly erodible”. There had been cows, too; the forest had been grazed periodically, though luckily about every other owner had NOT put cows in the woods, so it wasn’t totally degraded. We had much better wildflower populations than usual.

But the land had been used very hard; there were several places where clearly it had been plowed at one time, but erosion gullies had cut so deeply that a tractor could turn over in them. Now these places were pasture. Before we bought the land, a soil survey done in 1956 said there were between 12″ and 18″ of dark topsoil on the north hill- in corn and hay strips. In 1976- we found between 0″ and 6″. A foot of soil was gone, in just 20 years.

The farm is hilly, and the soil is light, a “loess” type, technically silt-loam. Good soil. The truth is, most farms in the US have been used this badly, at some point. Many, many still are. Even good farmers are pushed by many forces to cut corners, get higher yields, more acres plowed- a few more dollars for the bank. As long as you use a plow, the process only moves in one direction. You will lose the soil. I didn’t like that.

How I got to that place, philosophically, is another long story; perhaps another time. Right now, I just want to describe the directions we took. Much of this was not fully formulated when we began- we learned as we went.

——————————————————————-

Reader RC, in comments on the previous post, was kind of demanding an exegesis (careful, your academia is showing!) of my claim that the food we produce here is “Not Organic- It’s Better!”

It all ties together.

I wanted to focus on “tree crops”, building first of all on J. Russell Smith’s book with that title. Mostly because of erosion here that I felt was really out of control- far beyond “unsustainable”, moving towards “desertification”, rapidly. Did you know that there are cities in Italy- which were seaports for the early Roman empire- that are now 50 miles inland? Plows. And wheat. What do they grow on those hills now? Grapes and olives.

First- get rid of the plow. Russell Smith documented many aboriginal peoples who harvested their staple foodstuffs from trees. He, however, was not a biologist- he was a geographer. I could see opportunities he could not, because of our different perspectives. So I started focusing of some specific “tree crops”, and some specific pathways of my own.

No, it’s not “Permaculture®“. I never heard of Bill Mollison until things here were fully developed. I’m interested in crops- and feeding cities; and I really don’t think permaculture is.

Many “horticultural” crops, including apples and grapes, often include the plow still, or at least a periodic disc cultivation of the surface. We only disturb the soil during the first year of establishment. Then we have grass, which we manage in a number of ways. The grass is a problem, more often than not at this point; but we’re working on ways to integrate other practices, without going to cultivation. Cultivation is bad because; it causes erosion, it destroys biodiversity, it costs huge quantities of fossil fuel, it costs money and time- year after year.

Second- No spray. Ever. Meaning, no pesticides; no insecticides, no fungicides, no general herbicides. No toxins. Not even “organic” ones. Two exceptions; we use a little fly spray in the greenhouse (the same stuff used in dairies), and we have, in the past, used a little Roundup during year 1 of plant establishment. But I’ve almost quit doing that, too; probably will. Don’t need it. We do, rarely spray a little fertilizer, if the plants are starving. I don’t think the frogs like it though, so we try not to.

I didn’t set out to go “no spray”; in fact in the early years, I just took the received wisdom, and used the “at least!” dormant oil spray universally recommended for fruit trees. (Turns out, it’s a big mistake; don’t do it.) Little by little, over the years, I’ve experimented (I did do all that PhD work) – quite formally – and learned; and had a number of wildly useful and illuminating accidents happen. I’d need a long book to go through them; maybe some day.

It was my new non-horticultural tree crops that taught me that dormant oil is a mistake. Took about 10 years to figure that out; it was not a snap dogmatic decision, but an insight based on long trained formal observation. No, it’s not published- just haven’t had time.

That worked this way: the first time I saw nasty caterpillars eating all the leaves on my young trees- I was outraged, of course, as one is. MY plants, you vermin leave them alone! But. The scientist/ecologist/parasitologist/ethologist in me insisted that I wait, and watch; at least a couple of years. This is a new planting here; perhaps this caterpillar is exploding just because it has a new food source; and given some time, perhaps a predator, or disease, will catch up with it, and control it without having to resort to poisons. I was out on new ground, crops no one had grown this way, so there were no experts to tell me otherwise.

So I waited, for several ticks of the annual clock. You have to give predators and parasites plenty of time to show up- they may be quite rare, and they don’t reproduce at the high rates the herbivores do.

Here’s the thing. So far, in 30+ years – 100% of the time; outbreaks of this bug or that- fade. Typically, in year one of a new bug, it’ll look like slaughter, and over and over, I’d think “oh, boy, here it is, I’m finally going to have to spray.” But- scientifically; the only way to know that is to wait, and watch. And I’ve had the luxury of being able to do that. In year 2 – every time- the damage caused by the bug has dropped; away from the “where’s my spray gun?” point to at least the “that’s ugly- but not killing us” point. In year 3 – it’s less yet.

Every time.

Except once- and that pest was a foreign invader; we just needed some different genetics; it’s over, now.

That’s a really huge deal, in fact. The rock bottom dogma of conventional agriculture and horticulture is that you MUST spray, because you’re growing these plants in an intensive monoculture, and there is no alternative… oh, wait…

Third. No monocultures. All of our plantings have species mingled, a couple rows of this, then 8 rows of that. We’ve specifically striven to include diversity in species and genetics and physical structure, just for the sake of the diversity. More diversity means more critters can live here. The more species living here, the more stable the entire system is. That’s an ecological dogma. But humans have never acted like we believe it.

It’s true, and it works.

For example; back to dormant oil spray. The idea there is that you’re suffocating the eggs and dormant forms of your pest insects, which overwinter right there on your tree, all ready to start eating come spring. The scum. Sounds good, and logical, and the oil is not really even a poison, so why not? Everybody on the planet says it’s a good idea.

I did dormant oil spray on our apples for 10 years, just like everybody. Then- extrapolating from what I was learning in my other crops- it occurred to me, via my parasitologist/ethologist training. If you were a pest predator- where would you lay your eggs?

In fact, I already knew the answer- they lay them right next to their food source; eggs or dormant bugs- right there on your tree. We know this. But we don’t act like it. Spray your dormant oil spray- and it kills off your predatory insects- better than it kills their prey. Because of relative population numbers and reproductive dynamics- herbivores tend to be abundant and reproduce fast, predators are few, and reproduce slowly; even if they’re minute wasps instead of wolves.

The field of agriculture is rife with embedded double-think; and food is so sacred (the staff of life! the new oil!) that we never examine basic and hidden assumptions. All good farmers simultaneously believe, with all their hearts: a) they grow FOOD. b) the world will starve if they don’t produce all they can. c) farmers never get paid enough for their work- because they over-produce so much it’s dirt cheap.

Some of that has changed a little, just recently, but those are all rock solid core beliefs for farmers, any time in the last 50 years. And, in case you didn’t notice- they’re contradictory.

So, when my little lightbulb went off, after a mere decade, and I realized I was doing something that I knew did not make rational sense- I quit spraying my apples. At all.

Gasp! You can’t grow apples without spray! Everybody knows it!

Well, I do. Yes- I had to grit my teeth through several bad years, when bugs ate everything. But- have faith, my children- if you feed them (and don’t poison them) they will come. Predators – birds, frogs, insects, shrews, mice- parasites- bacteria- viruses- oh, my.

Hey, it’s an ecosystem.

If you plow- you can’t have one. You go back to dead sterile soil- and nowhere for the ecosystem to live. The wasp pupae need a safe, stable place to overwinter, and bare dirt is not it. We have permanent, deep sod; everywhere between the trees, with many species of plants in it. And a few pines, in the apples. Among other things.

If you spray – you can’t have one. No sprays are species specific, the claims notwithstanding. And in any case; if you wipe out the deer; you also wipe out the wolves. Guess which comes back first? Now- we’ve had multiple visitors, knowledgeable ones, who see our apples (about 60 standard trees) and ask what our spray regimen is. “No spray.” “Wow! You mean you’re organic!? I’ve never seen an organic orchard that looks this good!” “No- no spray, at all.” … “What?” …

The years do vary- sometimes, one bug or another comes up and is pesky. Two years ago, the Minjon apples had a bad apple maggot fly problem. Last year- trivial, really. Codling moth- there’s always a little, but it’s no biggie, fairly easy to spot. And- we have Amish neighbors who are happy to swap us something for the codling moth affected apples- they make great apple butter or sauce, or cider, if you can cut out the bad core; and they have the labor available to do that.

Fourth. Genetics. Most of our apples are “heritage”- old cultivars that were developed long before spray was so universal. They’ve usually got the genetic tools they need to respond to pests. One of our worst performing apples is “Haralson” – a big commercial favorite here. Born and raised in the University, released in 1922. Those were the days of dousing in Bordeaux mix- and lead arsenate sprays. I kid you not. Without spray- we get a few to eat once every 6 years, or so.

Finding plants with the appropriate genetics for your land is an absolutely critical part of this. And it’s a long process. If you’ve ever bought fruit trees, you know how the catalogs read: “Absolutely hardy; huge crops of delicious juicy peaches, every year!” The only words in that sentence that are not a big fat lie are “of”, “peaches”, and “year”. And “peaches” is questionable.

Basic hint- the cost of the trees, at planting, is the tiniest part of the investment you will make in a good food tree. Plant lots- plant them thick; let nature sort them out.

Fifth. Fertilizer. You have to feed your plants, one way or another. The organic movement decided that chemical fertilizer is evil, bad for water, bad for worms, etc. Yup, if you’re putting it on bare soil, that’s likely true. If you’re spreading modest amounts on top of permanent sod- getting to the trees, we hope, by timing the season right- or waiting (both work)- it’s just not the same thing. Most of the fertilizer used in farming is applied to naked soil- when the target crop has no roots to speak of. It rains- it runs off into the Gulf of Mexico. When we spread fertilizer, it falls on grass sod that has roots 2′ deep; or trees that have roots 12′ deep. None of it ever gets away; we’ve tested.

Plain N-P-K fertilizer is an over-simplification of what plants need, of course. But ours also get a steady rain of bird manure, from residents, and migrants; deer, raccoon, and whatsit manure galore- and- spider poo. You’d be surprised at how much poo spiders put out. If they’re not dead, and there are bugs to eat. We keep testing for micronutrient deficiencies, to keep track; so far haven’t really got any, so far as we can tell.

And, as it turns out- well fed plants just kick off pests. It’s when they’re starving that they get sick.

Sixth. Tweak, don’t Demand. Way back there, I considered talking about “Pestapo” style agriculture. Eradicate everything. And contrasting it with my own “Tweakology”.

But I decided that was just a bit too cutsey. It does illustrate a basic attitude, though; pest “control” is not something we do- we do a little pest management. But you will always have some pests, and pest damage…

And you WANT to. If you have no prey- you will have no predators. That’s a setup for an epidemic outbreak. Cheaper, easier, to tolerate low pests, and work around them.

Example: mice. Mice are a big problem in some tree plantings; they can eat the bark and roots in winter, killing even big trees in bad years. Lots of orchards put out mouse poison, on a schedule. We do two things; we mow the grass down tight to the ground before the snow comes, and put up “hawk-roosts”; big poles put up in the right places to attract hawks and owls. It works. We have mice. We also have a resident pair of red-tailed hawks, who raise their brood feeding them mice, out of our plantings, every year. Plus tons of owls, who take over the night shift.
We try to nudge a pest in the direction we want; never shoot for eradication. That kind of total control is a trap; you’ll have to do it forever, because, of course- you’ve also eliminated ALL the natural antagonists to the pest you’re controlling. There are dozens, at least- probably hundreds – (how many diseases do people get?) but if they have no place to live, they’re gone. Clean slate- ready for the pest to explode next season- unopposed.

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Ok, better stop, before you all fall asleep. RC- our stuff is better than organic because it comes from highly biodiverse permanent plantings- no plow, no toxins. And full of frogs (one spray of rotenone will wipe yours out for good) and bird nests. Eco-system based pest management.

So far, for us it’s working. Which doesn’t mean there won’t be bumps. Grit your teeth.

The water in the valley- is crystal clear, but may well have some chemicals in it from all the years this land was “conventional”. Atrazine, maybe. But for years now, all the water soaking into the ground has been free of toxins. That’s hopeful.

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Haven’t forgotten the hunger issue, but we all need a break. There IS some progress; more are becoming aware- and some of it is as likely due to the noise we’re making as anything. Take a look at the articles and links here. More before long.

[ This is a guest post by Peak Oil Hausfrau. ]

Since college, I’ve been more of a wine-drinker than a beer-drinker. I never liked the usual cheap fare – Budweiser, Miller, Coors. Even the micro-brews weren’t as good as a nice Shiraz. That is, until my husband got aboard the Peak Oil train with his new home-brewing hobby.

Homebrew Zen (See the yin-yang?)

My husband got a beer-brewing kit for Christmas, 2007. I think the equipment cost about $100. He saved up Sam Adams bottles for his brew for a few months, then received an awesome gift of some German beer bottles that have built-in, re-usable caps. At that point, he started brewing his first batch. Since then, he has brewed five batches of brew at about 50 beers each. Each time, he tries something new. A porter, a peach wheat beer, a nut brown ale. Each one seems better than the last, but each one is unique and delicious. I still have fond memories of that first porter.

Beer has a long and interesting history, having been brewed for over 9000 years. The Mesopotamians worshipped Ninkasi, the goddess of brewing. The monasteries of Europe brewed (and still brew) beer. Breweries in America originally brewed beer as strong as the beer common in Europe. When Prohibition in America forced most breweries into bankruptcy, bootleggers began watering down beer to increase profits, resulting in the much weaker beers that are popular in America today.

We have been buying beer “kits” from a local brew shop. The kits have everything but the tools and the bottles – including the malt extract, hops, priming sugar, and bottle caps. They cost about $33 – $40 each, to make about 50 beers. Less than a dollar each – I think it’s a reasonable price for top quality beer. We joke about how many kits we need to stock to have enough beer when TSHTF. Maybe we’re not joking.

The local brew shops make it very easy to get started. The proprietors are usually very helpful, sometimes even holding classes for beginners. When first reading a beer making book, the process looks complicated. But if you just take it step by step, following the instructions in a kit, it isn’t hard. The process takes three or four hours one day to brew the beer, then about an hour to transfer the beer on another day, then finally another hour or two to bottle the beer. Four to six weeks later, we have bodacious beer.

Eventually we’d like to start making beer from scratch – using real wheat and home grown hops (which were already planted last fall!). Until then, I think home brewing is an economical and ecological winner, even using the kits. First of all, you re-use the bottles over and over, instead of sending them off to be recycled. Much better to re-use than re-cycle. Secondly, although the kits do have to be shipped in from who knows where, the shipping weight is much less than the equivalent of 50 beers. Third, we CAN store the kits, whereas beer stored for very long would go bad and take up a lot of room. And finally, it’s a distributed and local process, so it builds resilience and self-reliance. Way to go, husband!

I’ll admit I didn’t know what to expect when he first started. I was prepared to be disappointed, as I’ve heard that results can be inconsistent. Now I am a huge fan of his beer. Often, I would rather drink a beer from his latest batch of brew than a glass of wine (although I still drink wine!). I definitely prefer his brew to any beer you can buy in a store – except maybe Chimay. But I can’t afford to buy Chimay all the time, that’s for sure. On second thought, it’s every bit as good as that pricey monk-brewed beer!

Hubby has even gotten several of his friends at work to start the homebrewing hobby, and they recently held a head-to-head competition between their brews and the store-bought beer. Hubby’s beer won! Congratulations to his Nut Brown Ale, the clear winner. I took a few sips of the “comparable” beer that the hosts bought and was really surprised by how much better the homebrew was. Bah, I hope I never have to drink beer from a store again.

Homebrews are nice to have on hand – you never have to run to the liquor store (cuts down on carbon emissions). Just throw a brew in the fridge when you want one. BTW, homebrews make great housewarming gifts or contributions to a potluck. You never have to go to a party empty-handed! Remember, make sure to get back your bottles before you go home. Those suckers are gold.

[ This is a guest post by Wendy. She wrote it last spring, and the book's been out for several years now, but Wendy's thoughts on it seem more timely than ever. ]

Children know things.

They listen and they see – things we, adults, miss, they don’t. They may not have any idea of what they are seeing and probably lack the capacity to logically analyze what it is they’ve seen, but they know.

When I was a child in the 1970’s, I knew that a thing could only get so big and then it couldn’t get any bigger. I had observed the phenomenon in practice with balloons. You could only put so much water or air in a balloon before it would burst.

As a child, I applied that practical experience to real-life situations. I knew that the supply of oil was finite, because as we learned in school, it was made from dinosaurs, and so, logically, there was only so much of it.

I knew this.

And, since I was a child in the 70’s, I knew that oil was running out for us. I could see. I could hear. I may not have been fully aware (and I’m still not sure about what is actual “memory” versus information I have gleaned since that I might be attributing to memory) of what was happening around me or what the implications of those events to my future were, but I knew that something was happening.

When I reached adulthood in the 80’s, I, like most of America, forgot, and I jumped right on that consumer wagon. I went to college and graduated and entered the workforce (which during the mini-recession of the early 1990’s wasn’t as wide-open as I’d thought it would be for a recent college graduate) … and started buying my happiness and that of my children.

Deus Ex Machina and I bought our house in 1997, and we were thrilled to discover a few short years later that the value had almost doubled (and we refinanced, cashed out the equity and paid off our out-of-control credit card balance).

A couple of years later, we discovered, again, that the value of our house had increased, and we opened a 2nd Mortgage, Home Equity Line of Credit, Adjustable Rate Mortgage with a really good interest rate. It was about this time that I started remembering what I had learned as a child during the tumultuous 1970’s – the party always ends – sometimes badly, and a thing can only get so big before it explodes.

And I started getting really nervous. Two mortgages are bad. One mortgage that’s an ARM – bad.

About a year after we opened the HELoC, we refinanced, again, rolling both mortgages into one 30-year fixed-rate mortgage. So, in essence, the house we’d purchased in 1997 on a 30-year mortgage, we now owed three times what we’d paid back then, AND we were still obligated for thirty years. Talk about lack of progress.

But then it happened. The balloon burst … or as they’re calling it the “Housing Bubble.” The housing market bubble burst, and a lot of people have lost their homes. I always felt that it could only get so big. I always knew that the value of our house couldn’t and wouldn’t continue to increase indefinitely. I was pretty sure that our 1500 sq ft cottage-style ranch on a quarter acre would never be worth a million dollars.

According to Kunstler, it’s just the beginning of what is going to be a very long process with a lot of weird fluctuations, of prices going up and down, but in a three steps up, one step back kind of way that will keep us believing, for a while, that things aren’t as bad as they are.

In 1998, the price per gallon for heating oil was $0.899. Last time we had our tank filled, the cost per gallon was $3.629.But the price didn’t rise steadily from under a dollar to almost four. It went up a lot, and fell a little, and went up a lot, and then fell a little, and then shot up, but dropped back down.

It’s like with gasoline for our cars – the price goes up, and we all hold our breath, and then just when we start to resolve ourselves that the higher price is here to stay, the price drops down … just a little … but just enough to lull us into the belief that things are getting better.

I heard remarked today the belief that the price of heating oil would decrease next winter, because more people were transitioning away from oil to natural gas, electricity or wood, and as such, there would be a glut of oil.

And, maybe. Maybe the price of heating oil will drop a little – down to, say, $3 per gallon* from close to $4 today. That’s a savings of a dollar per gallon, which compared to today, will look like a bargain.

But consider …Maine has seen a 6% decrease in the consumption of gasoline over the last couple of months, but our prices haven’t dropped – at all, and in fact, have steadily increased.

The fact is that as a world, we are using 85.6 MILLION barrels of oil per DAY. In short, the world is currently using as much oil as is produced each day. We’ve already tapped into Europe’s Strategic Petroleum Reserves, and the US Congress recently voted to stop stockpiling oil so that more was available to the American public. Even if everyone in the northeast switched to burning wood for heat (and please don’t, because our forests couldn’t handle that), the demand for oil would still outpace the current and near future production capabilities.

Because it’s not just gasoline for our cars or heating oil for our houses where we have a demand for the stuff. Look around you. Everything you see has been touched by oil.

Everything.

From the food you put into your body to make you not feel hungry (and I won’t use the word “nourish”, because the nutritional value of said “food” is questionable), to the plastic bottle you drink your Poland Spring water out of, to the computer screen you’re looking at as you read my words. Food packaging, deodorant bottles, toothbrush handles, fleece material, fertilizers, pesticides, all non-electric motors, lawn mowers, the crisper drawer in the refrigerator, the bottles that hold the Tylenol capsules, indeed the little dissolving capsules that hold the medicine … all of it – oil.

Every industry in the United States is DEPENDENT on cheap oil to operate.

Every.single.one.

This is the information I took away from reading The Long Emergency. I had a lot of sleepless nights, and many nights of fitful, restless sleep this month. I had quite a few nightmares, too.

The implications of the book are terrifying. The world as my parents and my peers (and me) knew it HAS come to an end. It’s not “coming” to an end. The end is already here.

Kunstler provides a great deal of historical background and research – things I knew, but only in a child’s way of knowing. And it angered me. It angered me, because we could have been a nation of people who were not dependent on oil for our very lives. We could have been developing the infrastructure to move us away from being an oil dependent nation. While we, literally, had oil to burn, we could have been developing new technologies to take the place of cheap oil. Now, it’s too late. We no longer have excess oil to burn.

Our leaders have known for a very long time what was happening. Back in 1956, M. King Hubbert a geophysicist, employed by Shell, warned that at some point, the oil would run out. Even before I was born, someone knew that the oil would run out. That the great “party” would be over.

I was very skeptical when I first started reading Kunstler’s book. I wasn’t impressed with him after watching The End of Suburbia, but having read his tome, I am no longer able to simply discount his assertions, and I can no longer deny that building a national infrastructure around dependency on oil, especially when our political leaders KNEW, and have known for YEARS that oil supplies are not dependable, was a pretty short-sighted, and, yes, stupid thing to do.

The first few chapters of the book left me pretty terrified. I’m still a little worried, but that’s because that’s what I do. I worry. It’s part of what Deus Ex Machina loves about me, and after thirteen years of him loving me for who I am, I’m not about to change .

I know, though, that there is very little I can do. I can try to stockpile resources and be comfortable for a little while longer, but at some point, those things will run out, too.

The thing I can do is to learn. I can learn to grow food. I can learn to save seeds. I can learn to mend my clothes. I can learn a new skill that could possibly provide some income for me.

Thing is, while I know that I will see things get bad, I suspect the worst of the transition will happen when I’m too old or just gone. I suspect that those people who will see the worst of “the end of oil” have yet to be born.

But that’s where I have hope. Because those people will not have grown up on a diet of MTV, Little Debbie’s Oatmeal Creme Pies and Mountain Dew, SUVs and CAFO meat. Those people will have been raised by people like my daughters, who are learning to grow their own food, and save seeds, and mend clothing, and knit, and conserve, and do without.

So, where do we go from here?

I can’t answer that for anyone else, but as for me …I’ll be staying in my suburban home – two miles from the town center, five miles from Deus Ex Machina’s job, six and a half miles from the grocery store, seven miles from my best paying client and twelve miles from my daughters’ dance school – and homesteading my quarter acre.

We’ll learn to be more self-sufficient and less dependent on oil for heat and transportation.

We’ll not only enjoy an increasingly more local diet, but we’ll also be patronizing more local, smaller, independent shops, where we’ll pay higher prices, but the flip-side will be that we’ll learn to live with less – which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

In short, we’ll keep doing what was set in motion two years ago when I saw The Good Life for the first time, and that is moving toward a less “cluttered” life.

I do recommend this book. It didn’t change my life, but it did convince me that my current path is the one best traveled … for me.

By Mary Elizabeth Allen
With S.

Nearly two decades ago, I achieved my 10 year plan (in only 11 years) of moving into a little house in the suburbs of New Jersey. It met all of my requirements. It was within ten miles of my parents’ house (later they moved 10 minutes walk away), it had a front hall (albeit it one just large enough to squeeze a wardrobe into next to the staircase without blocking the doorway into the kitchen), a large garden, and enough space for my handy, dandy, self-regulating, 100% organic and biodegradable footprint slasher – S. the wonder-housemate. We’d known each other in college; worked together on publishing projects; on and off shared apartments. Based on that and reading tastes that overlapped in many genres, we thought we could stand each other company for a while.

The plan was that she’d stay (barring unforeseen circumstance) for several years, paying rent to me that would have otherwise been going to another establishment (that had to be heated and lit and all those other carbon producing activities) to me, so that I could make the mortgage on my newly-purchased home go away. Although S. was paying rent, we wanted something other than a strictly business arrangement. We wanted our friendship to continue and we wanted to fuse our lives into a household. There didn’t seem much point in trying to cut carbon emissions and then cooking two complete meals and so on, don’t cha’know.

Both the fusing part and the friendship part went well, I think. We have a fairly small (well under the US average) household footprint. I now have 2 children, S. has a tank of fish, and we are all owned by a pair of cats. Cooking, gardening, bill payment, child care and transport, shopping, household maintenance, and housework go fairly smoothly. Right now the two of us are debating the pros and cons of different hand-powered garden tillers and lawn mowers, and tents, discussing the latest Fables graphic novels, and discovering that if you play Racing Demons by candle light, you need to use cards with very different backs.

Sometimes people say, it must be just like marriage, but without sex. I don’t agree. For a start, our finances are less much less entwined than those of most committed-to-each-other people. We have definite areas of financial responsibility and (with the exception of a couch that wore out several years ago) don’t make joint purchases of anything. Some housemates do buy things together for the house, but it just didn’t seem a good idea for us to do it that way. If S. decided to move out, it wouldn’t necessarily mean that we were not on good terms or the friendship hadn’t “worked out.” My girls and I would miss her, of course, and hope for lots of visits. There wouldn’t be any division of property, though if she wanted to sell or give me some of her bookcases, I’d be very pleased. And we are more loosely connected than most partnered people. We have our own friends (and a lot in common to be sure). There’s no conflict about spending time with each other families over holidays. There’s no question about separate vacations being a good idea, though since I’ve had children, S. has been a trooper about coming along to help out when we go away. We are an inter-faith household, but have never had to have any of those discussions that people in an inter-faith family have to have about what the children should be taught.

While we don’t think there is a one size fits all system for having a good housemate relationship, any more than there is only one way to parent or to grow a garden S. and I put together a list of a few things that need to be in place when you start a shared housing arrangement or the going gets very tough, very quickly.

What constitutes a housemate? Do you share only the kitchen? Does each have a sitting room? Do you both have run of the house excluding each other’s bedrooms? If a lack of closets dictates that one person’s clothing or ski equipment or power tools have to be kept in the other’s space, what is the protocol for retrieving items? When S’s. fax machine had to be kept in my bedroom, the plan was, door open, S. could go in and use it, door shut, she knocked. This is, IMO, a pretty good rule for most grown-ups and private spaces. The one PC that has an internet connection is in S.’s room. Same rule, but I have to be careful not to step any cats when I go in. That’s also a good rule: cats have a nasty way of getting back at people who step on them.

Consider the finances. Are you trading money for space, work for space, both? Will the expected contribution go up? Can it be re-negotiated? What happens if someone loses a job? Who pays for what? There isn’t a wrong or right answer, but you need to have this worked out, or have a mechanism for working it out in place before you start.

How long is the arrangement going to last? Short term with a definite ending or open-ended? What happens if one of you gets into a relationship? Can the SO move in? But what if you can’t stand that person? What if one of you acquires children? Or a cat? What about guests?

How is the housework and cooking and shopping and laundry going to be divided up? Here’s a hint: never watch someone else clean the loo, just accept that even if they wash it from right to left instead of left to right, you won’t die of typhoid if you use it.

How well can you fight? It’s hard to imagine a conflict-free situation. And it’s the silly little things that start the fight. Try keeping your temper in the middle of a hot, sweltering night when the power is out, a toilet is overflowing, and one of you silly people can’t read the other’s mind and keeps pointing the flashlight in the wrong place.

Keep a household calendar, especially if you share a car or child (or elder) care. Write down everything you are doing that might affect the other person. If S. puts down a dentist appointment for Tuesday, and I know she’ll have to drive past the Girl Scout leader’s house on the way, I can ask her to drop cookie orders off. (Still cutting those emissions, you know.) And I’ll also know I can’t ask her to pick up a child in the opposite direction at that time.

If you can’t communicate in person because of conflicting schedules or whatever, leave notes, email, phone messages. Just keep the lines open.

Honesty is good – comments along the lines of, “I appreciate your cooking your famous stuffed peppers for me and offering to share your family tradition of eating this favorite dish every Saturday, but I’m afraid that I just can’t digest peppers. Could you bake a potato for me the night you are cooking this?” But too much honesty is bad – such as, “It’s great that you do the washing up every time I cook, but if you’d put all the knives in one slot and all the forks in other on the draining board, it would look more aesthetically pleasing,” is only likely to make the hearer think the speaker might look aesthetically pleasing doing the washing up him or herself.

Finally, if one of you owns the house or apartment or is the one who signed the lease (hereinafter referred to as the Owner), and isn’t the Owner, the Owner is going to have the final power (barring some sort of psychological situation that would make a good novel about human behavior). Because I like to think of myself as a fair minded and equitable person, it’s hard to admit, but there have been times I’ve pulled Owner rank on S. When it was time to have the windows replaced, my choice of style won over S.’s choice. She got the bedroom with the still-not-replaced (sorry, any year now) nursery wallpaper. It’s one of those situations where I think it’s better to just acknowledge the inequity than have it become a large gorilla in the shared living room. Just remember, if you are both reasonable grownups, if it’s important to you, you’ll find a way to make it “work out.”

Is there a downside? Sure, no one and nothing is perfect. At time we get on each other’s nerves. We don’t agree about how to make trifle. I am not always the neatest person to live with and I have a nasty passive aggressive streak. S. has had her moments, too. But all in all, it’s been great, not just for the environment, but for the company, the mutual help, and the shared history that two friends have developed over more than half our lives. When you know a person that well, you started to think that you can support each other through almost anything.

This is a guest post by Ed Bruske. He writes at The Slow Cook. Ed lives in the District of Columbia. A reporter for the Washington Post in a previous life, he now tends his “urban farm” about a mile from the White House in the District of Columbia. Ed believes in self-reliance, growing food close to home and political freedom for the residents of the District of Columbia.

Warning: The following may contain dangerously subversive thoughts.
Young children should probably leave the room….

Although I believe in food gardening, I am also convinced that we will only get so far trying to persuade Americans that there is a healthier way to eat, and that growing your own is a big part of the answer. But I also know there’s something else Americans care very much about: money. That’s why I am proposing right here and right now a big fat tax break on kitchen gardens that will not only spur our fellow citizens to start digging up their lawns like crazy, but will fit right in with President Obama’s economic stimulus efforts by getting everyone busy buying seeds and garden tools.

This proposal has the added benefit of creating a perfect opportunity for the kind of political bi-partisanship that Obama has been yearning for. I am certain that Republicans, who have never seen a tax break they didn’t like, will jump at the chance to support one that will provide fresh fruits and vegetables to every man, woman and child in these United States. This is more than a bread and butter issue. This is more than a Mom and apple pie issue. This is a beets and potatoes issue that people of all political stripes can easily sink their teeth into.

Why shouldn’t kitchen gardens get a tax break? We give tax breaks for home offices, which encourages workers to stay off the roads. We give tax breaks for mortgage interest, which encourages people to buy homes. We even give tax credits for children, which quite needlessly encourages couples who otherwise would not get along to have more sex. Written as they are into our federal law, these measures are a form of universally accepted social engineering, designed to create healthier, more productive, more satisfying living conditions for our entire society. So I ask you, what could be healthier, more productive, more satisfying than fruits and vegetables we can grow and harvest right outside our door? In fact, we can easily do without a home office, or our own house, or even more children. But we cannot do without food. Living without food would be hard if not nearly impossible. We should be encouraging people to grow more of it.

There is a deeper, more profound reason to use the federal tax code to promote kitchen gardens. As we all know, Congress has been unable to undo the corporate-government love knot that is responsible for so much of the bad food in this country. By that I mean the way our government uses our tax dollars to subsidize the production of a huge glut of corn and soybeans, which then finds its way via a chemical laboratory in New Jersey into nearly everything you see on supermarket shelves. Obesity, diabetes, hypertension, irritability–there’s a whole litany of unhealthy repercussions from government-supported agribusiness that we needn’t bother to repeat here. Try as it might, Congress hasn’t been able to wrap its arms around this problem. So I say let’s just put that one to the side. Let’s not pull out our hair over it any more. Let’s move on and consider tax breaks for healthy alternative foods, the kind you grow in kitchen gardens.

The reason I think our elected representatives in Washington will go for this idea is, first of all, it will get radical food groups off their backs about the cozy relationship they have with agribusiness. Once these tax breaks are passed, Congress can continue to accept those fat contributions from Monsanto and ConAgra and Archer Daniels Midland and nobody will care. That won’t be where the action is any more. Everybody in the country will be focused on how to take advantage of the new tax breaks. Secondly, these new tax measures will win wide support because they embody two cherished American values: fairness and competition. Tax breaks for kitchen gardens will help level the playing field where growing food is concerned because up to now all the federal subsidies have been going to corn and soybeans. Nobody subsidizes carrots and broccoli. In fact, nobody even pays to advertise carrots and broccoli the way they do, say, Doritos and Pepsi, two products that just happen to contain a lot of corn. Giving tax breaks to people who grow their own collards and tomatoes will inject a fresh new competitive spirit into the business of producing food. With every family in America growing their own food, we can surely expect agribusiness to respond with a more efficacious high-fructose corn syrup, for instance, even a better tasting fry oil.

This is how it would work: If you are just starting your garden, you will be eligible for a federal tax credit on the land you put into production, up to one acre. I think $1 per square foot is a fair rate, which means that virtually every home owner could probably knock $1,000 right off the top of their tax bill. If you don’t pay any federal income taxes, it would mean a $1,000 check from Uncle Sam. Even better, you wouldn’t even have to own your own home. You could claim the credit if you rent, even if you are starting a garden on the roof of your apartment building or just planting basil in some window boxes. Starting your new garden will probably also require some tools and a good deal of labor. My plan provides a further tax credit of $500 for the purchase or rental of appropriate garden tools and any help you might have to pay for. The only catch is, you cannot claim tools that use fossil fuels. This conforms with our previously announced scheme to reduce greenhouse gases wherever possible in the gardening realm. Instead, this is what you do: When you go to Home Depot to buy your garden tools, grab a couple of those immigrant guys who are hanging around looking for work and take them home to help dig the garden. You can claim whatever you pay them on your tax credit form, anything within the $500 limit. Just remember to ask for a receipt.

As you might suspect already, this proposal would be a huge stimulus to employment, and not just for the guys hanging around Home Depot. Millions of gardeners will need their soil tested, which will instantly create jobs at state universities and other testing facilities nationwide. There will be a huge demand for shovels and trowels and watering cans: more jobs by the thousands for a nation hungry for employment in the manufacturing sector. Ditto for those factories that create compost and other soil amendments and are now sitting idle. They will be humming with new work. (Note: no deductions for artificial fertilizers or chemical pesticides. This is a sustainable, strictly organic tax program.) And what about seeds? You will certainly need seeds. My plan envisions a $50 credit for seeds, meaning lots of work for seed collectors.

What if you have never gardened before? Won’t you need some instruction on how to prepare your garden, what to plant, when to plant it? For that I have a very special feature in mind, something that is sure to take thousands of unemployed horticulturists out of bread lines and put them to work. I call it the “Kitchen Garden Corps,” whereby the federal government, as a further stimulus measure, would fund new positions in every single county extension service in the country, people trained and ready to show erstwhile kitchen gardeners how to grow more food and how to cook it for dinner. (And if we need to train the experts first, so much the better. More jobs for trainers.) Additional positions could be created to teach gardening on-line, a boost for the telecommunications and computer industries.

That’s all well and good, you are saying to yourself, but what’s to prevent cheating? What if somebody digs up their lawn but doesn’t plant anything? Do we let garden scofflaws just kick back and collect their checks? I struggled with that one, too. Perhaps we should require some sort of site visit and certification by an extension agent. Or maybe we could require that people claiming the credit provide photos of their garden at appropriate intervals in the growing season. But I think an even better remedy–one that market theorists will like–would be to provide further incentives to grow as much food in the garden as possible, to garden as intensively as soil and local weather conditions permit. Remember what Earl Butz told farmers back in the 70s: “Plant fence row to fence row!” Well, we would be telling home owners to plant from the back of the patio all the way to the wooden fence that separates them from their neighbor on the next street over. The incentive would come in the form of a subsidy check for the produce you grow, very much like the payments the federal government makes to agribusinesses that produce corn that can only be eaten after it’s been subjected to a complicated chemical process. You would be paid by the pound for all the organic eggplants and zucchini and butternut squash you grow. But you would need to weigh everything and keep very precise records. The IRS will print a form for this purpose, much like the one you fill out when you are claiming a profit or loss from the sale of your stocks. (The cost of the scale would be tax deductible, of course.)

In subsequent years, the tax credits that helped you start your garden would turn into tax deductions. Hopefully these incentives would be enough to keep you gardening year after year, producing food for your family and possibly even for the fruit and vegetable co-op you form with your neighbors. By then, there will be an enthusiastic response to the idea of further tax breaks for chickens, goats, rabbits and other small, food-producing animals. The entire nation will be healthier and happier, hooked on fresh, local food. That could mean hard times for traditional supermarkets and fast-food restaurants. But surely they will evolve in this competitive new food environment, perhaps even learning to serve healthy foods themselves. Thanks to these new federal tax measures we will be eating most of our food fresh out of the garden, which could lead to much less disease (less demand, hence lower costs, for health care) and much greater longevity (better days for retirement homes and registered nurses).

Which leads me to wonder: Will I still be gardening when I’m 140 years old?

[ This is a guest post by Rob Frost at One Straw. ]

You can heat and power your home with WOOD!

A year or so ago I learned about the technique of biomass gasification while talking over a beer or two with some sustainable farming friends and other contrarians. From that day on, I can honestly say that the way that I view sustainable living in semi-rural areas has never been the same. I’ll let you all in on one of the best kept secrets of the century – all the talk about “Green Biofuels” is missing a key player. It’s not just about corn vs. cellulosic ethanol – you can run internal combustion engines with wood just as easily!

The technology is amazingly simple – over a million engines ran on this simple technology in Europe during WWII after the blockade cut off oil supplies to Germany. It involves taking the waste gases inherent in the combustion of wood or biomass, and further processing them to allow the powering of all manner of heat engines – by harnessing hydrogen and other combustible gases from a process know as ‘gasification’.

This article will not get into the How-To’s of gasification or too deeply into the physics of it. (Check the resources at the end for further study.) Furthermore, I am not a scientist or engineer, I’m just a concerned guy living in Suburbia who happens to know a lot of cool people that like to weld. What this article WILL get into is why I am convinced that gasification is a paradigm shifting technology that allows us to begin to envision not only a carbon neutral future, but also one that is powered by carbon negative technologies.

We should start with a high level description of how wood chips & pellets can power an Internal Combustion Engine (ICE). When organic carbon (the wood chips in this case) burns hot and clean in a gasifier, you create water vapor and carbon dioxide (don’t try this with treated lumber!) – and you also get a bunch of heat. Gasification takes these three byproducts of combustion (heat, water vapor & CO2) and uses them to fuel a second reaction by concentrating the heat onto a bed of charcoal. These coals reach 1600+ degrees in the gasifier, which is hot enough to break the water vapor (H2O) into hydrogen, and the CO2 into carbon monoxide (CO) in a reaction permitted by the consuming heat created in the combustion process. Both of these gases, H and CO (syn-gas) are combustible, which is great because if they weren’t this whole process would be a flop. A cooling tower then cools the syn-gas (a cooler gas being more dense) to less than 100 degrees, and also filters out any ash, water vapor or tar. The resulting syn-gas is 20% hydrogen, 20% carbon monoxide, and roughly 60% nitrogen (which is merely a background gas). When under 100 degrees or so, this mixture is roughly 118 Octane and will run an I.C.E. with a modified carburetor that will deliver a roughly 1:1 air/fuel mix. Check the Gen Gas site and our Videos describe the process in much more detail. The model in our videos is sized to run a 30hp engine, which should be enough to power a 15kw generator on about 1o-20 pounds of pellets per hour (will vary by engine and wood pellet type). By collecting the waste heat from the internal combustion engine, the gasifier itself, and the cooling tower you also have a significant source of usable heat for any number of purposes from home heating to aquaculture.

So, with the intro done, I’d like to simply explain more about why I think gasifiers rock.

Accessible

Biomass gasification, in its current state, is open source and grassroots. Most of the people cobbling together gasifiers are normal Joe’s and Jane’s: backyard tinkerers. We and hundreds of others have put thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours into our units – and we will email you all the info you care to read. Using the FEMA plans (located in the Resource Page of my blog) normal people, using normal tools like welders and saber saws, and normal items like steel drums and pipe, can make a fully functioning wood chip gasifier just like we did in a few days of work. No CAD designs, no high tech fibers imported from China – just good old grime-under-the-nails tinkering. The plans are free, the parts are usually salvaged, and the skills are not hard to come by. What I find exciting about it is that you and I can make our own energy at home for little money. Plus, if you build it yourself, you can fix it yourself should it break. And, since you built it, sourcing parts is no problem. The alternative is that manufacturing small home gasification units from salvaged parts can become a nice little cottage business for the entrepreneurial tinkerer to provide clean, low cost renewable energy to their communities.

Heat and Power

Gasification makes both electricity and heat in one unit, simultaneously. I guess to be entirely honest, the gasifer makes heat and syn-gas, and our Co-Gen system uses the syn-gas to power a gas generator. Most energy systems today do one or the other. You can heat your home very well with a wood burner or masonry stove, but you still need to power the lights and computers with something else. PV and Wind produce electricity and are getting slicker by the year, but do not provide heat. Both are still very expensive and difficult to build at home. More importantly, neither is a very workable option in Wisconsin where our winters are cloudy and cold and our wind resources are spotty. Also, making hot water from a PV unit is insanely expensive, and while dumping excess wind energy into a hot water tank has been done, it is not nearly as efficient as using the waste heat from the gasification process to heat a home. Since heat will always be available whenever we are using the unit, it means we can design heating with waste heat into the home energy system as a main component, not just something to use as an extra should we have a surplus of wind. Another way to think of it is that if we need heat we get electricity as a by-product (damn!) or if we need electricity we have extra heat on hand. I like that a lot. Finally, the emissions from burning the syn-gas in an ICE, results in a reversion of the H and CO back to water vapor and CO2, both very clean combustion gasses.

The next two features are my favorites though.

Fuel

While we have yet to run the math on how many tons of wood a gasifier will need to power a home for a year (which will depend greatly on size and efficiency of the home of course), it looks to be a favorable equation. A lot of the concern about heating with biomass is that there simply isn’t enough wood to do it. That is especially true with cordwood burners that need slow growing hardwoods to reach their claimed efficiencies. But the gasifier runs well on many biomass sources, including chipped softwoods. This opens up a lot of fuel source possibilities since you do not need a large trunk diameter.

In Europe, where biomass energy is more common, many countries practice Short Rotation Coppice (SRC) management of their productive forests to maximize their yields. Most managed woodlands in the upper midwest are pine for its pulp – taking 20-30 years to reach harvest size. But in an SRC system, fast growing deciduous softwoods are grown rather than coniferous trees allowing harvest to take place in as little as 3 years with some hybrid willows and poplar. This allows a significant increase in tonnage per year -as high as 20,000 lbs. annually on an acre of willow. Many types of softwood like maple, box elder, poplar, aspen, etc will re-grow from their stumps after their trunks are harvested. This means that the root structure is in place after harvest and no replanting is needed. Because the full root system is there, the re-growth is very vigorous, as anyone trying to cut down a box elder knows! This means that once your acreage needs are known it is possible to set up a rotational stand of trees where one section is cut every year – you cut the first section, then move to the second the next year while the first re-sprouts. If you designed your plot right, by the time you get to the end of your plot, the first row has re-grown to a sufficient thickness that you can start over. Now that is sustainable forestry! Entire industries could be rebuilt on sustainably grown woodchips as a fuel source rather than corn, or on a smaller scale, willow could be incorporated into the windbreaks of a CSA farm to allow the production of energy in addition to food.

Bio-Char

The main “waste” product from gasification is charcoal. For every pound of chips you put in, you get about .5 pounds of charcoal out the bottom. Importantly, this charcoal, has a plethora of uses: it can filter water, it can be used as a secondary fuel source (it cooks veggie brats nicely!), or it can be used to create Terra Preta or bio-char.

Terra Preta is so amazing I can only begin to explain it here. Terra Preta enables soils to lock its fertility in for millennia as the charcoal prevents leaching. Carbon molecules are hugely attractive to most water-soluble nutrients. This means that dissolved nutrients in the soil, which are normally washed away in a strong rain can be “locked” up in the bio-char. These nutrients hang out on the carbon molecules until a plant’s feeder root or a merry little symbiotic fungus ambles over and breaks a bit free using some mild acids. The plant then uses that nutrient to grow, and eventually dies or sheds its leaves, returning the nutrients to the soil via the decomposers. This is not new, except instead of that unused nutrient washing away and breaking the cycle, it becomes reattached to the carbon to begin the cycle again. This is HUGELY exciting for us sustainable farmers! This step in the process closes the energy cycle – replacing the removed wood with bio-char ensures the sustainable fertility of the soil for future generations.

Also, since the carbon in the wood was captured from the atmosphere by green plants, and since the gasifier consumes less that 50% of the carbon in the wood, (the greater percentage remaining sequestered as charcoal), the process is truly carbon negative. Charcoal is very stable in living soils -Terra Preta discovered in the Amazon is over a thousand years old! This means that if we return the charcoal (bio-char) to the soil, 50% of the carbon input into a gasification system is sequestered for centuries … And we begin to heal the atmosphere with every killowatt of energy we produce with these systems!

Possibilities

Now you can hopefully feel some of the boundless excitement I do when I think of the possibilities of making electricity and heat sustainably with a rather simple machine that one can make locally from salvaged parts. So let’s talk about those possibilities and applications. In 2008 we created a working gasifier based on plans from FEMA. We took that simple design and were able to power a small generator and make electricity. But we had no good way to capture waste heat and the syn-gas was a bit dirtier than we would have liked which fouled the engine. So we took our learnings from 2008 and designed a dedicated gasifier that is intended to recapture significant amounts of waste heat while producing high quality (clean and dense) syn-gas. Our current gasifier + Co-gen system is destined for the home of one of the designers where it will provide all the heat in his radiant floor heat system and electrify his small home while producing extra electricity in a grid tie system.

In the very near future we intend to build another unit intended to be the heart of a greenhouse/workshop. In this iteration, the gasifier will provide the power and heat for the production of biodiesel using a modified Appleseed Processor while boilers will also be set up to heat a 2000 gallon aquaculture system where we will raise fish in a system modeled after Will Allen’s tilapia (or lake perch) tanks. The tanks are filtered by watercress and other bio-filtering plant beds (tomatoes, hyacinth, duckweed). Ethanol and methane production would also couple well with a gasifier’s heat and electricity outputs. We estimate about $2000 in material to reproduce the Gen 2 unit, though our use of salvaged items cut that at least in half. At this cost, which is similar to that of a new furnace, the technology is attainable to a very large portion of America and makes it feasible for a truly vast array of applications.

So there you have it: Biomass gasifiers provide a do-it-yourself Co-Gen heat and energy system that allows the use of renewable, sustainably grown forestry products, while creating bio-char in a carbon negative process that will allow you to farm sustainably for generations. This technology is not the science fiction of hydrogen, nor bears the fiscal expense associated with currently available sources of renewable heat and energy production. Gasification is here, now, and possible within the economic means of many Americans.

The challenges that we currently face are powerful and diverse. To overcome these challenges, we need to implement as many options as possible if we are to leave the future in the state I envision for our children. We can do this. Be the Change.

Interested in learning more? Check out the following resources for more information:

• Videos of our Gasifier Project (our own video list – mostly our Gen 1 (FEMA) unit)
• Gen Gas (info and where we got our plans)
• Wood Gas (technical site with lots of info including stove plans)
• The Gasifier Experimenters Kit (a.k.a. the Lego gasifier)
• Additional Resources