Chris Martenson recently did a very condensed presentation of his amazing Crash Course for WGBY in Springfield MA. If you don’t have the time to watch the entire Crash Course, you can see this 40-minute “cliff notes” version in either Windows streaming media format, or a downloadable Quicktime format.
This is a pretty good, non-technical biochar overview out of Australia – about 11 minutes long.
Here’s a new one. Ok, so it’s not quite new, but new to me anyhow…
A greenhouse insulated with soap bubbles:
Apparently the soap bubbles insulate relatively well, while still letting plenty of visible and UV light through, and blocking infrared and convection.
More info
http://www.solarbubblebuild.com/
and
http://www.midwestpermaculture.com/GreenhouseDescription.php
Ed from The Slow Cook (which is a fantastic site, you need to start reading it) asked a question recently. His idea is that community gardens have gone the way of the dodo bird and should be replaced by community CSAs.
I want to know what you think. Read the two posts and let me know what you think about Ed’s idea.
Picture courtesy of Ed’s site, The Slow Cook.
In case anybody else missed it, like I did, Gene Logsdon’s great short story, The Man Who Created Paradise, has been published online, in it’s entirety: http://organictobe.org/index.php/2008/09/02/the-man-who-created-paradise-by-gene-logsdon/
What does a small farmer look like?
Well, according to Senator Pat Roberts (R-Kansas):
“That small family farmer is about 5′2″…and he’s a retired airline pilot and sits on his porch on a glider reading Gentleman’s Quarterly — he used to read the Wall Street Journal but that got pretty drab — and his wife works as stock broker downtown. And he has 40 acres, and he has a pond and he has an orchard and he grows organic apples. Sometimes there is a little more protein in those apples than people bargain for, and he’s very happy to have that.”
By contrast, here’s the picture Senator Roberts paints of a big farmer:
“That person is in Iowa. He’s got 2,000 acres and he farms and he farms with his dad. Two brothers are gone because they can’t really sustain that on the farm. His counterpart in Kansas, in my part of the country, has 10,000 acres. And his tractor costs about $350,000. It’s amazing, in terms of the costs. But these folks are the folks who produce the food and fiber for America and a troubled and hungry world.”
You can read more at The Ethicurean.
So what do small farmers actually look like – as opposed to the ones Senator Roberts’ comic book?
You can add your own photos by uploading to Flickr with the tag robertsmeetsmallfarmers
I often walk around our yard or pastures looking at weeds and wondering what they are. Identifying plants from a book is pretty hard, and I don’t have an expert handy to ID them for me.
Well now I’ve got the next best thing. Apparently “Green Deane” at EatTheWeeds.com has been putting these videos out for a year now, but this is the first I’ve heard about them. There are 63 videos and counting, all about identifying edible wild plants.
Each video covers where and when to find a given weed, which parts are edible, how to use them, if there are look-alikes, and anything else he thinks is interesting, like how they got their name or what their history is.
I’m not necessarily after a meal when I’m wandering outside, so the plant identification is the interesting part to me. But even so, it’d be pretty sweet to walk out to get the mail and come back with a salad.
The videos get better over time – I guess if you do anything 60+ times you gain some new skills – but just to get you started, here is Episode 01:
For what it’s worth, his web site, while not the prettiest thing on the web, is a treasure trove of articles and information. So if you have a slow connection or you’re already a plant ID expert, there’s still a lot of great stuff to be had.
Patti Moreno, The Garden Girl, has recently started publishing an electronic magazine called Urban Sustainable Magazine. The cover for the current issue is above. It was quite an interesting read featuring real examples of people and what they are doing at their houses. I love stuff like that.
You can sign up and have it e-mailed to you too so you wouldn’t necessarily have to go back to her site all the time looking for it, but that would be a shame since she has a wealth of information available on her site that would help any potential homesteader.
Mother Earth news had a few articles recently I thought I would point out.
This is a link to a series about raising chickens for eggs.
Organic Pest Control information.
An article about Healing Gardens.
(These last three are over 30 years old but still relevant, in my opinion)
If you need one comprehensive spot for a bug out list check here.
