Patti Moreno shows you how to make three simple medicinal herbal teas….

I originally posted this item on my personal blog, but thought perhaps others would want to see what I was doing in my city, and maybe use the ideas in their city.  It has actually been easier than I thought to find people who want to do this and get them together to talk about what we can accomplish.

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.

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.

Announcing the 2009 Hen & Harvest Garden Challenge:

If you are reading this, chances are food is important to you. You are passionate about gardening, or local food, or healthy eating, food security, organic farming methods, land stewardship… All of the above?

Maybe the seed catalogs are piling up. Maybe next year’s garden is taking shape in your head — and this time it’s going to be perfect. Maybe you’ve decided to take the plunge and finally get a few chickens. Maybe you want to give your children the healthiest food possible, or restore the land in your care to a more natural state. Maybe the headlines you see every day scare you just enough to browse that seed potato catalog. Or maybe you’ve been running a successful market garden for years now and are thinking about how to make it just a little bit better.

And who could blame you? Our primary food system is a mess. We increasingly rely on fossil fuels and chemicals to create processed foods that are probably eligible for frequent flyer miles. Poor nutrition is leading to increased obesity and other health problems. We have no idea who grew our food or how it got to our table. Or even what it’s made of in some cases. Large-scale farmers are struggling to get credit from banks, and commodity prices have fallen so far they may have trouble making their money back anyway. When you walk into the store, you worry that the milk is full of hormones, the grains are genetically modified, the meat is irradiated, the vegetables are contaminated, and the soil that produced it is lifeless and disappearing all too quickly.

For all his charisma and leadership, Barack Obama can’t fix this problem. Tom Vilsack won’t fix it either. Michael Pollan and Barbara Kingsolver and Wendell Berry can’t even fix it. Fixing it is up to me, and you ,and anyone else we can influence.

This is why we are challenging you, right now, to turn your passion into something bigger.

It’s no secret that food pantries all over the country are struggling right now. As the economy falters, soup kitchens, shelters, and other under-the-safety-net entities are getting fewer donations and more clients every day. But… If we were to collectively donate ten percent of our harvest to our nearest food banks, soup kitchens, or other appropriate organizations, think of all the positive benefits. The people with the worst access to healthy food would at least get a little delicious, fresh, local produce. Kids whose only fault has been bad luck will get nutrition from something other than a box. Chances are very high that we’d get to meet some wonderful, dedicated people. We’d have one more excuse to get dirt under our fingernails and sunshine on our faces. And our gardens might even have fewer weeds if we’re doing it for a cause, rather than just killing time on the weekends.

Besides all that, it probably won’t even take much extra time, effort, or money on our parts. So our seed packets are a little lighter at the end of planting. So our lawns are a little smaller. In exchange, our local food security will get a little better, and our hearts might feel a little bigger. And we can drool over those seed catalogs a just little longer.

We’re challenging you to give at least one tenth of your produce to some worthy cause. If you can’t find a charity or other appropriate organization, see if a school cafeteria can use it. Or even your neighbors. Maybe it’ll inspire them to start a garden of their own. Food security is food security. And if the economy keeps going down the path it’s on now, food security is going to become more important all the time.

If you’ve never grown a garden before, we’d suggest you not worry about donating this year, and just get your hands dirty. Learn from the rest of us, and aim for donating next year. And if you get a bumper crop of something the first time out, find it a good home.

To keep everybody honest and on the ball, we’re going to have regular check-ins and discussions in The Barnyard, on the fifteenth of every month. In February, we’ll ask you about your plans, and maybe have some discussions about starting seeds indoors. In March we’ll look at some more details on what you’re doing, whether you’re using cold frames, row covers or any other tricks to get an early start. As the season progresses, we can all share tips, ideas, troubleshooting techniques, successes, and failures.

Once that garden finally starts to produce, we’ll have you report back with what’s growing well for you, how much you’ve been able to harvest, and who you found to donate it to.

Remember that every garden has its duds from year to year. If something’s not growing well, let us know and somebody will share ideas for next time. And there will be no garden police. If you only harvested ten strawberries, you don’t have to deliver one of them to the church basement. You can make it up in zucchini later.

We know we’re not the first to come up with an idea like this. (Plant a Row for the Hungry has been around for more than a decade.) But we also think that it’s more important than ever to issue a challenge like this.

We’ll primarily focus on gardening, but maybe you’re in a better position to donate baked goods, or eggs, or meat, or honey… whatever you feel is appropriate is fair game and welcome in the discussion.

So who’s in?

Head on over to The Barnyard’s brand new Garden Challenge group and tell us about yourself. Maybe where you live, how long you’ve been growing food, how big of a garden you’re hoping to grow, what level of commitment you’re willing to take on, who you might donate to, and anything else you want to share.

Let’s see what we can do…

[ NOTE - You don't have to join The Barnyard to participate. You can also just leave a comment on this post to let us know you're in. ]

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 pretty good, non-technical biochar overview out of Australia – about 11 minutes long.

[ 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

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