farming

We moved in to our new house (5 acres!!!) in the middle of May. This meant that we didn’t have time to get any gardens ready, but we still did manage to get some things in the ground. PE is working on some lovely permaculture gardens for next spring that we will post pictures of soon! There are already 2 apple trees, 2 pear trees, lots of black walnut trees, and some wild blackberries on our property. Other than that we have a fairly clean slate to work with! As our friends say, we have less work because there isn’t anything to undo :)

After the last post about taking care of our friend’s chickens, the same friend decided that she had the itch to incubate some eggs! She decided that she was going to get Araucanas (they lay light blue eggs) and asked us if we wanted some. We decided that with our new knowledge of how easy chickens can be that we would go for it. We should be getting them sometime in November and are really excited about it! PE junior is also quite excited, he really liked going over and taking care of the chickens (including throwing food down on the ground for them to scratch).

Plant something: 7 tomato plants (from a friend who had extra) using a cool method (direct planting into sod) that some of our favorite CSA farmers taught us! 2 chocolate bell pepper plants and 2 yellow bell pepper plants using the same method. In our fall garden that I made using 3 boards and lots of organic soil (that I bought because I was itching to get things planted!) we have beans, peas, lettuce (several varieties), carrots, radishes, marigolds, and a really small variety of corn. We have 3 whiskey barrels that I planted grape tomatoes (a huge hit with my 2 year old and his friends!), basil (purple and regular), sage, parsley, and spearmint.

Harvest something: Tons of tomatoes, lots of bell peppers, beans, peas, lettuce, radishes, basil, sage, parsley, and spearmint. PE has been experimenting with some hay cutting and putting it up in our small barn.

Preserve something: I did several types of tomato preservation (before we got late season blight ARGH!). A couple of times I made a big pot of tomato sauce for dinner with carrots, zucchini, etc. (from the great farmers market that we have in town) and froze the rest in ball jars for later. I also made salsa and canned it, cold pack whole tomatoes (which I did not like the results of, but I will wait to make a decision if I will do it again until I eat them!) green tomato salsa, and green tomato chili sauce. We went to a friend’s house the day she was working on canning a deliciously wonderful smelling tomato sauce (the kind that baked in the oven for 4 hours!) and helped her so in exchange we got a jar of the sauce. We also made tomato paste using her cool hand powered food mill which she later brought all 3 jars over for us! She calls it PE junior sauce because he was such a good helper making it :) I also went to a friend’s farm with PE and his parents and PE junior and we picked 32 pints of raspberries! So lots and lots of jam in July. It is so good on fresh baked bread. I also made basil olive oil and froze it. The next thing for me is canning all of the pears from our trees! I’m excited to try out some different recipes and figure out what we like. I also need to get the rest of our herbs in and dry them/make something from all of the basil (mmm pesto!).

Waste not: Our usual compost and recycling. We took all of the CFL’s (that we bought we aren’t stealing from the landlord!) from the house we were renting and brought them to our new house. We took the light bulbs from the house here and put them back in the rental house. We are looking forward to having chickens to help with the cleanup of the apples and pears under the trees. For now the bees are in them and the deer come along and snack. The dog also does a great job cleaning up after PE jr. Also using all yard clippings, leaves, etc. on our new garden beds.

Want not: We got a Vermont Castings wood burning stove put in a few weeks ago and are hoping that we can have that be our only source of heat this winter (instead of turning on the propane heater). We also have a great exchange going on with a friend. I babysit for her one day a week when her childcare provider does not work and in exchange she gives us food from her farm, maple syrup that they make, and the latest is firewood. PE goes and uses their splitter and gets wood from their huge pile of wood that they were feeling like they would not be able to get through before it rotted. I also did an order from Raintree, raspberries, blueberries, cranberries, loganberries, gooseberries, and some other things I can’t seem to remember at the moment. We have some decent planting coming up in the next week or two! I have also been working on winter type projects; knitting slippers and scarves, making draft dodgers, and my next project is making corn heating bags.

Eat the food: We made the tomato sauce, and I have grand plans for some stuffed bell peppers. We also have lots of salad and beans. I hardly get the peas inside the house before PE junior is chowing down on them, and the grape tomatoes were his favorite snack this summer. I have been considering a special snack garden for him next year.

Build community food systems: I have already mentioned a couple here (friend with chickens, making sauce with a friend, and the friend who has an established farm that we exchange with). PE is working with people at our church to create an indoor winter farmers market either at our church or another church in town. I have also been going with a friend on some farm tours around the area. I get to see what different people are doing and get some ideas for what we should do around our farm, and also meet some more people who are doing lots of the same things that we are doing. I love that we are not the crazy ones anymore!

That is what we have been up to this summer! How about you?

I was out with some other moms today and the topic of soy came up. They were telling me about how it can cause sterility in boys and has other adverse effects. I decided I should do some research on my own and found two very interesting websites. I am going to post them both as they both have very different opinions. One talks about how soy is horrible and the other site refutes the first. I was most concerned about how soy would affect my 4 month old boy, but most of what they talk about is based on soy formula (I am breastfeeding exclusively). I do eat some soy since I have cut out all dairy products from my diet (again because of the breastfeeding, it hurt his tummy!) I eat tofu, edamame, and soy ice cream. I don't drink soy milk though I drink almond milk. Basically what I have decided is that soy is not bad as long as you eat it organically as is the case with most other foods! Also I don't think that you should eat too much of it, again the same as most other foods!

Anti-soy article
Article refuting the first article

The staff at the Energy Bulletin put together a great article today examining the peak production rate of phosphorus. By applying the same methods used by Dr. M. King Hubbert (the man who accurately described Peak Oil in the 1950s) to phosphorus production, the authors discovered that not only had the U.S. reached its peak production in 1988, but the world had peaked in 1989!

Why is phosphorus important, you might wonder? From the Energy Bulletin article:

The current major use of phosphate is in fertilizers. Growing crops remove it and other nutrients from the soil... Most of the world's farms do not have or do not receive adequate amounts of phosphate. Feeding the world's increasing population will accelerate the rate of depletion of phosphate reserves.

and

Phosphorus may be the real bottleneck of agriculture.

Population growth was only possible because we found phosphorus deposits and cheap energy to extract, transform and transport it to farms. When we plot data of world population versus world phosphate production, we find a significant correlation.

The problem of phosphorus depletion is just one more example of the imminent crunch in resource reserves we face. I wrote about a similar concern in my Peak Salt article nearly a year ago. The difference there is that we don’t actually face a salt shortage until we face an oil shortage -- an example of a subtle but critical interaction between resources. What we in the Peak Oil community are discovering is a complex system of feedbacks and tipping points, just as the world is discovering in the issue of global warming.

Why the similarity? Because the resource extraction/consumption system is of the same type as the global climate system: chaotic. Despite the name, chaotic systems have a certain elegance and structure; however, they present severe problems when we attempt to model them.

In the next post, I will discuss the true nature of the chaotic Global Resource Crunch we’re already experiencing.

Peak Oil and global warming are enormous problems, but are still only part of a network of impending disasters -- all of which appear ready to juxtapose at the exact same instant. Between the riveting news debates over Donald Trump’s hair and the wardrobe malfunctions of Britney Spears, there recently appeared one of the most frightening (and shockingly underreported) news stories in recent memory: populations of the North American Honeybee -- the workhorse pollinator of American agriculture -- are plummeting rapidly.

As sources like CNN noted casually, pollinator species (including honeybees) have been in persistent decline for decades due to factors such as an invasive parasitic mite. But the mite is now ruled out as the cause for the current collapse -- the main suspects include commercial pesticides, genetically modified crops, or an unknown pathogen. Given the past evidence of pesticides’ effects on bees, my money lies on careless commercial operations indiscriminately spraying killer chemicals.

I have a knack for asking simple questions that have complex answers. With thoughts of sustainability and self-sufficiency on my mind for many months now, I’ve asked myself quite a few of these questions. One question related to these topics is ‘How much food is required to feed a small community, and how much land will that take?’ This is a seemingly simple question, but an important one if your intent is to build a small, completely self-sufficient community. What makes the answer to this question complex, at least for me, someone with absolutely no experience growing food, are the number of variables involved. I started Calorie Calculating to answer this question, and chose PeakOilDesign as the home of this blog because it seems a nice fit with the efforts being made here.

Please be clear on the point that I have no experience in growing food. The vast majority of content contributed by me will be book-learned. My posts at times will be me simply thinking out loud, and at other times sharing my newfound discoveries in the world of agriculture.

What I hope to accomplish in addition to answering this question is to create a formula that anyone can use to determine the volume of grown food needed to meet their caloric needs, whether that be a single homestead or small community, and how much land will be required. The purpose of the formula will be to give newcomers like myself a starting point. Its focus will be on what’s desirable, not optimal, and will not pretend to be a replacement for experience. The formula will take on two forms, one written and the other computerized.

I only recently started to answer this question using Google, the library and bookstores. What I quickly realized is that I will need to approach this topic methodically. An initial formula will be created that only takes a small number of variables into account. After that’s created a few more variables will be added and the formula modified accordingly. This will continue until the formula takes all variables into account.

My next post will be listing as many variables as I can think of. See you then.