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money public domain With the cost of everything going up and the future uncertain, stretching your resources and re-purposing items becomes more of a necessity. I am always looking for new ways to get the “max for the minimum.”

Some recent posts here reminded me of some of these things. My grandparents and parents were a young family when the great depression hit. What kinds of things did they do to make ends meet when things were expensive or scarce?

Unfortunately, many of them who went through this period in time are no longer with us. However, I remember a few things they did or heard of them doing, that now, looking back, were obviously brought about by the times they lived in. Even after times improved somewhat, some still stuck to certain ways of doing things. Old habits are hard to break.

Hunting and gardening were basically a given back then. Most everyone outside the city limits did one or both of this along with bartering services for goods. A little carpentry or plumbing work for a couple of chickens.

I remember my grandfather mixing his old used motor oil with a little bit of kerosene and spraying the underside and inner fender wells of his pick up truck just before winter. He claimed it helped protect the truck from incurring rust damage over the winter months. Getting more serviceable years out of the truck.

I am sure environmentalists would have a cow over this nowadays, but it was a way of taking something that didn’t appear to have any usefulness left ,and yet, finding one more use for it. The county used to spray old used oil to keep the dust down on dirt roads during the spring and summer months. Don’t see that happening anymore.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Backyard Carbon Sequestration: What Does Synthetic Fertilizer Have to Do with It?

October 22, 2015

Backyard Carbon Sequestration: What Does Synthetic Fertilizer Have to Do with It?

Part two of a series exploring how regenerative gardening techniques can enhance carbon storage while improving soil health. In part one I discussed some of the principles behind the factors involved in soil health and how plants and the soil biological community work together to store carbon and build appropriate fertility. “Why Not Start Today: Backyard Carbon Sequestration Is Something Nearly Everyone Can Do” can be found here.

A brief digression about the term “regenerative gardening”
So what is regenerative gardening, anyway? Regenerative gardening is an umbrella term that embraces many styles and traditions of organic cultivation and adds explicit intentionality regarding carbon sequestration. The recent Rodale white paper, “Regenerative Organic Agriculture and Climate Change,” says that, “regenerative organic agriculture refers to working with nature to utilize photosynthesis and healthy soil microbiology to draw down greenhouse gases.” The same goes for gardening. Like regenerative farming and ranching, regenerative gardening aims for land cultivation and management that builds soil health and helps improve the health of the ecosystem within which that garden is located, while growing plants and harvesting crops useful to humans, whether food, medicine, fiber or wood—and along the way, creating beauty. And, doing all this while, importantly, helping mitigate climate change by sequestering carbon in the soil and reducing nitrous oxide emissions. So what’s so special about that? Isn’t that what all farming and gardening aims for, or should? I can imagine many readers asking this, especially those already practicing some form of ecosystem-based gardening.

The City of Cahokia, at the confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers, boasted 20,000 inhabitants in 1200 C.E.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Where the Rubber Meets the Road: Community, Health and Enterprise

September 6, 2015

Where the Rubber Meets the Road: Community, Health and Enterprise

What are you doing every day to build community, health and productive enterprises?

Every month I have wide-ranging conversations with three long-time collaborators: Gordon T. Long of Macro Analytics, Chris Martenson of Peak Prosperity, and Drew Sample of The Sample Hour.

I do dozens of interviews in the course of the year, with an amazing spectrum of talented interviewers (Max Keiser, Kerry Lutz, and many others), and in many cases I’m lucky enough to be a repeat guest.

But doing a monthly program enables me to really get to know the host, and over time it becomes less of an interview and more of a conversation. I may ask the host a question rather than vice versa.

Gordon and I tend to dig into key macro-economic and social topics (check out our years of programs in Gordon’s Audio/video library), and Chris and I tend to delve into markets and the full spectrum of resilience-related topics.

Drew is 30 years my junior (he’s 30 and I’m 61), and as a result he’s in the dynamic phase of life of exploring and assembling enterprises and projects.

This is where the rubber meets the road: it’s important to understand the larger macro-economic and social contexts, but in terms of daily living (i.e. we are what we do every day), it boils down to what are you doing every day to build community, health and productive enterprises that generate value, wealth and positive social roles for all participants.

This is the context of my latest podcast with Drew Sample (56 min) in which we discuss the progress, challenges and future of each of Drew’s many endeavors, which include community-building and for-profit enterprises.

Here’a a photo of Drew’s garden–a new project he brought to life this year.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Self-Reliance: Control What You Can (Food/Fitness)

August 16, 2015

Self-Reliance: Control What You Can (Food/Fitness)

Self-reliance boils down to taking control of what we can control and depending as little as possible on what we can’t control.

Self-reliance is a grand-sounding phrase, but what does it mean in real life?Does it mean total self-sufficiency?

To my way of thinking, even the most self-sufficient still rely on energy pulled out of the ground somewhere far away, grains grown far away and a host of goods manufactured far away.

For most of us, living in urban or suburban zones, self-reliance boils down to this:take control of what you can. We can’t control monetary policy or the shared infrastructure; we’re at the mercy of authorities at the top of highly centralized hierarchies.

But that doesn’t mean we have no control. We can control what we put in our mouths, what we do with our time and what we pursue with our minds.

The dynamic here is well-known: garbage in, garbage out. Garbage food in, garbage health out. Garbage financial planning in, garbage finances out. And so on.

As longtime readers know, we maintain a messy postage-stamp sized urban garden. Despite my lazy gardening style, the garden produces more vegetables than we can eat, so we share much of the yield. In summer, we only buy what we don’t grow: round onions, carrots, etc.

Here’s a few photos of this summer’s bounty.

Fitness is like food: garbage in, garbage out. Any 6-foot/2-meter square of open space is a gym. You don’t need any weights, machines or special equipment. If you want this stuff, much of it is available used at a huge discount to the retail price. If the weather allows, a bicycle replaces many auto trips. Fitness does not have to be a separate activity–it can be part of everyday life.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Foodroom Gardening: No Rows, No Woes

July 24, 2015

Foodroom Gardening: No Rows, No Woes

As I battle mud and mosquitoes in this wet year, in the wallow that used to be our garden, I think faraway, crazy thoughts. I keep trying to imagine a future time when all human beings would be responsible for their basic food necessities just as they are responsible for their own bodily cleanliness and cooking meals. Could every home have a sort of foodroom adjoining the bathroom, where the basic yearly food could be produced? Ideally there would be a composting bin or two, plus a cistern or rain barrel to catch water, all geared to take no more time than a daily shower, shave, teeth brushing, and hair combing.

The first thing that would have to disappear to save space would be garden rows. Have you ever thought about how stupid rows are? Rows came into existence to accommodate machine and human traffic. Without them, a garden can produce twice the amount of plants or more. My imaginary foodroom would be elevated even more than raised beds, walled up so I could sit or stand next to it on either side and accomplish all planting and weeding comfortably by hand. Weeding would be done with a trowel from a standing or sitting position. Gone would be all the primitive backbreaking bending over that makes gardening by hand so tiresome. Once a plant produces its food, it could be pulled out and another started in its place. Elderly people could go on gardening until they were a hundred years old and never once have to get down and crawl along like I do now. Kids would be more easily cajoled into the work because you could describe it to them as merely playing in the dirt, like a sandbox. Adults who like office work would see the garden bed was just another desk.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

How to Grow a Survival Garden (and what to do if it dies)

July 17, 2015

How to Grow a Survival Garden (and what to do if it dies)

I love growing my own vegetables. I spend many fulfilling hours outside every summer, tending to my plants, nurturing my soil, and babying things along, with the birds for music and a basket full of delicious organic food to show for it each day.

Except this year. This year, my garden is a flop.

Eaten by deer, killed by the heat

It’s pretty embarrassing to admit on my own website that my garden is not doing diddly squat this year. I am normally pretty good at growing food (or just extraordinarily lucky) but this year, circumstances beyond my control have thrown up one challenge after another. First of all, we moved July 1. I started my garden in containers, earlier in the summer, and then transplanted them into my lovely new fenced garden full of raised beds.

Only, the fences weren’t high enough, and unbeknownst to me, I had set up a deer buffet with a low hurdle. Garden #1, GONE. Decimated. Wiped out. And I didn’t even get venison in retribution.

So, I went and got some new plants and put them in. Better late than never. I deer-proofed and nurtured my soil and paid top dollar for plants that were a bit more advanced, since by now it was the first week of July.

And then a heatwave hit the day after I transplanted them. 107 degrees. Most of the plants withered immediately and no amount of TLC would bring them back.

I was determined that I would have at least SOME vegetables and bought even more plants. I added some shadecloth to protect them from the sun. I fed them some white sugar to help them recover from the transplant shock. They’re growing but not providing me with a whole lot of produce, for numerous reasons, including heat, a late timeline, and slightly low phosphorus in my soil.

Aggravating. I’m a wannabe farmer shopping at the farmer’s market to get my summer veggies. Not cool.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

An ecological look at vegetable gardening systems

June 2, 2015

An ecological look at vegetable gardening systems

I’ve examined some different systems of growing vegetables in earlier posts, viewing them primarily from the standpoints of yield (pounds produced per unit area) and inputs required. Now I want to view them from another perspective: that of ecology. What does the science of ecology suggest about how we might best grow vegetable plants, and how do different growing systems support ecological insights or work against them? Fighting against the ecological tendencies of a plant makes extra work for the gardener and causes the plants to grow less well than they otherwise would. If we understand the ecological needs of the vegetables we want to grow, we can create a garden habitat that is better able to meet their needs. That might lead to a better yield of the vegetables that we grow or if not a better yield, at least a better use of our limited time as folks with lives outside the garden.

Caveat: I am not a trained ecologist. While I have studied aspects of ecology that relate to gardening, I cannot guarantee that I have applied them correctly. I think this topic deserves more study, especially by people who know a lot more about ecology than I do.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Gardens of Plenty

June 2, 2015

The Gardens of Plenty

Editor’s Note: In France, Gardens of Plenty help provide not just vegetables but training and job skills. Yardfarms can be developed not just in backyards but in community spaces around towns and cities, helping to train others to not just make a living but to make their communities more sustainable, more food secure, more resilient.

Jardin Cocagne. Photo (CC): PHOTO CLUB de St Hilarion

In the Jardins de Cocagne gardens the jobless and homeless find self-confidence and support in creating a future.

How can people in difficult circumstances build autonomous lives? The answer might be found in the Jardins de Cocagne: by cultivating vegetables. Initiated in 1991 by Jean-Guy Henckel, the project has now taken root in several French regions. These gardens, whose name translates into the “Gardens of Plenty”, take in men and women in precarious living situations, such as welfare recipients, the long-term unemployed, or the homeless. Hired under a government-supported employment contract, they grow organic produce, which is then sold to subscribers by the basket. For up to two years, the gardeners work 24 hours a week for minimum wage under the guidance of professional vegetable farmers and social workers. “The objective here is not to exploit people out of commercial interest,” Henckel explains. “We are conflict mediators, because we manage to unite three feuding sisters: Society, Business, and Ecology. The Jardins de Cocagne must be economically viable, yet without turning a blind eye to human beings in their existential need, and without harming the planet.”

Networking and expanding

In order to consolidate its activities, the Cocagne network is currently building a donor fund consisting of tax-exempt private as well as corporate and public donations. Following the concept from the earth into the basket, the new Planète Sésame restaurants are now defining the motto as from the basket onto the plate. The restaurants are operated by people in reintegration programs and supplied with produce from the gardens. New projects are being launched, such as the Fleurs de Cocagne gardens that specialize in flower production. The latest Cocagne branch is located in “Europe’s Silicon Valley” on the Saclay plateau, right next to the technological research center Commissariat à l’énergie atomique et aux énergies alternatives, the business college École des Hautes Études Commerciales, and the Centrale, AgroParisTech, Polytechnique—an ambitious project featuring a farm, a restaurant, a hostel, and an 18-hectare organic vegetable garden.

Human manure: Closing the nutrient loop

May 24, 2015

Human manure: Closing the nutrient loop

Using human urine and faeces as fertiliser may seem an unappetising concept but it’s been common practice for centuries. In the sewage systems of today, which deal with millions of tonnes of domestic waste and industrial effluent, this human fertiliser comes in the form of treatedsewage sludge.

Promoting a waste product that some consider hazardous as a resource to grow your food may seem like a paradox, but in Britain, a world leader in recycling sewage into agriculture, it is recognised by the government and the EU as the best environmental option. It diverts waste away from oceans and landfill and provides essential plant nutrients to the soil. Nevertheless, EU organic regulations don’t permit the use of sewage sludge on organic farms. So, what are their concerns? Is this form of manure safe for agriculture? Are we putting our health and our soils at risk when we spread human waste on land?

“1% of wastewater is waste. The rest is wasted water.”

Human urine and faecal matter are a rich source of essential plant nutrients. Historically, human excreta, ‘nightsoils’, were collected from towns and villages and spread in raw or composted form on fields in the surrounding farmland. This informal treatment is still practiced in some areas of China, South East Asia, Africa and Latin America, where municipal sewage works don’t exist or are poorly functioning. In the 1850s, Europe’s growing urban populations and the discovery of the link between raw sewage and cholera led to the implementation of large-scale sewage systems. These water-based systems combined all domestic waste, industrial effluent and road surface run-off. For the next century the resulting sewage sludge was disposed of in landfill and directly into the oceans.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Bloom Where You’re Planted: Prepping to Survive Where You Are Right Now

May 23, 2015

Bloom Where You’re Planted: Prepping to Survive Where You Are Right Now

Have you ever heard anyone utter some variation of one of these comments?

“I’m going to start prepping as soon as I can move.”

“I can’t prepare because I live in a tiny apartment.”

“Well, once we are able to get moved to our farm in two years I’ll start prepping hardcore.”

“I’m saving the money for moving instead of using it for preps.”

“There’s no point in prepping here because if the SHTF I’ll be dead.”

Maybe you didn’t overhear someone else saying it. Maybe you said it yourself. One of the most common excuses that people use for prepper procrastination is the unsuitability of where they currently live.

This is the kind of thinking that will get people killed.

While your current situation may be less than ideal, you have to remember that very few locations are actually perfect for prepping. Nearly anywhere you live will be subject to some type of extreme weather, be it crippling cold, blazing heat, drought, tornadoes, or hurricanes. Chemical spills can taint water supplies anywhere. Riots and civil unrest can occur outside of the big city.

The point is, to borrow an old saying, you just have to bloom where you’re planted.

There are many things you can do to create a viable preparedness plan wherever you happen to live. Apartment dwellers at the top of a city high rise, folks in the middle of the desert, those in a beachfront condo, and people in HOA-ruled suburban lots all have to examine their situations, figure out their pros and cons, and work towards resolving what they can.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Real Need for GMO and Industrial-Scale Food

May 16, 2015

The Real Need for GMO and Industrial-Scale Food

I’d like to start off with a story about a woman I know who works full time, takes home a below-median income, and raises two kids in Silicon Valley. This woman also has an organic garden in her tiny back yard, partially for her own enjoyment, and partially so she can afford to eat good food.

Every year, her tiny part time garden produces far more than she needs. She shares the excess, and I mean huge excess. She shares peppers and lettuce and lemons and cucumbers and spinach and beets and all else with dozens of people. This full-time worker, part time farmer produces more food than her and her friends know what to do with.

And her story is not unique.

Let’s pause here to think about what this means for a moment, about this woman, her part time passion, and how much she and those around her receive from it.

Now, think about this single instance of plentiful food, and multiply it across your block. How many people could all the empty yards in a suburban block feed if they were put to use growing food?

Now multiply that across your neighborhood, all the empty yards, lawns, abandoned lots. How much of a bounty in food could you have?

Now think further, across your entire city, your entire region. Imagine yards and blocks and rivers and valleys filled perennials, fruits, berries, filled with lush vegetable gardens.

A silly agrarian dream? The United Nations Doesn’t Think So, nor does its Food and Agriculture Organization, or decades of research by Rodale Institute, or the millions of Regenerative Farmers, Natural Farmers, and Permaculturists who are working today to feed most of the world.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Joel Salatin: How food can restore America’s integrity

May 2, 2015

Joel Salatin: How food can restore America’s integrity

While I was in Australia in February, imported Chinese raspberries carrying Hepatitis A (from human sewage) hospitalized a dozen people and heightened interest in my seminars to a fever pitch. The news media and individuals fell over themselves trying to learn about local food systems and integrity food.

Here at Polyface Farms, our business always thrives when recalls and food illness outbreaks hit the news. Why? Breaches in food safety continue to be our best advertisement. While these acute issues make headlines and instill panic, the most egregious food safety issues remain imbedded as a part of our cultural orthodoxy.

If it kills you or sickens you fast, the issue dominates discussions. But if it kills you or sickens you slow, it’s buried as a non-news item. Such is the current state of the industrial food system. Isn’t it amazing what gets people excited and creates societal movement?

To be sure, nobody wants people killed with tainted food. But isn’t it amazing that a couple of deaths and hospitalizations from an E. coli or salmonella outbreak creates hysteria while rocketing autism and childhood leukemia receive scant attention. The U.S. leads the world in the five chronic causes of death.

While our hospitals fill with leaky gut syndrome and bowel problems and our wealth goes from farms to pharmaceutical companies, collectively we just assume these societal changes follow capitalism’s success. If we really loved our children and really loved our neighbors, we’d be staying up at night trying to solve this terrifying trajectory.

– See more at: http://transitionvoice.com/2015/05/joel-salatin-how-food-can-restore-americas-integrity/#sthash.gqv4Sd1D.dpuf

Tossing and Turning: Our Disturbed Soils and Troubled Sleep

April 25, 2015

Tossing and Turning: Our Disturbed Soils and Troubled Sleep

I’m sitting under a halogen light right now and staying up late to write about soil.

That probably doesn’t sound ironic to you. I think it should.

How I came to reflect on soil and sleep as functionally related and analogous in their processes is something of a mystery, though the sequence of events that led to the idea is clear enough. I recently spent a weekend learning about soil in a workshop that outlined some of the basic science. Weeks later, a person I spent time with at the workshop emailed me late one day wanting to connect about a soil-related project we’re working on together, but informing me that, at the moment, sleep was a higher priority. My response upon reading the email was that no person who is seriously interested in soil would dismiss the importance of sleep.

At first my response puzzled even me. As I thought about it, though, I realized that the work of the body in sleep and what I’d recently learned about the life activity of the soil are very much connected. Shrouded in layer upon layer of darkness and opacity, both the body in sleep and the soil beneath the surface teem with important goings-on. Interestingly, much of this activity has to do with the movement of nutrients through their respective systems, and the regenerative and growth processes that require these nutrients.

As we fall asleep at night, if everything is working correctly, we shift focus, our eyes and somatic sensibilities adjust to new surroundings, and we engage with these. We move in a different world. We awaken to our dreams. And these dreams, whether we acknowledge it or not, are absolutely essential to the functioning of our daily waking consciousness. Certain processes of the body wake up in sleep, and the body needs sleep the way the mind needs dreams.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Food Not Lawns!

April 11, 2015

Food Not Lawns!

The mission of Food Not Lawns is just what you’d think from its title—grow gardens instead of a useless beds of monocropped grass. The organization is actually about much more than that though. Perhaps most importantly, it’s about having communities come together with a common purpose to transform wasted lawn space into a productive food source for families and the local community.

The organization helps people get started in the local food movement by hosting events that allow neighbors to share tools, seeds,land and skills with each other. They also advocate for communities that want to have control over where their food comes from and be less reliant on industrialized farming.

Food Not Lawns is also becoming a more networked movement by having local chapters across the world. Like-minded individuals can come together in their local areas and create a network of change in order to bring fresh, local food and yardfarms to their city. You can take a look at the local chapters section of the website to see if there is one in your area, and if not you can even start your own!

One of the co-founders also wrote a book with the same title, Food Not Lawns, which describes how you can create a sustainable local community where you live. The book has practical knowledge to share on both farming (yards or larger lots) and urban gardening (if you have less space). It discusses the reasons behind the push to grow food instead lawns and offers tips on how to get your community involved. There are also ideas on projects like organizing shared meals or building garden play areas for children.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

WHAT DO YOU FEED YOUR FOOD?

April 2, 2015

WHAT DO YOU FEED YOUR FOOD?

Often we focus on what animals such as cows or chickens were fed prior to becoming our dinner meat or producing milk and eggs. But how often do we question what plants were fed before we consumed them? For those of us growing our own produce or acquiring locally grown food, it is relevant to know what the plants have eaten. What should I be feeding my food?

I am approaching this with the same question I ask when supplying all our needs. What are the healthy answers and how can we provide and make it ourselves? Not surprising to me at this point, my answers came after sifting through many conversations and articles on the web which, as usual, firmly repeat opinions as statements of fact both from one side of the pro-chemical GMO side versus the organic and heirloom foodies on the other. It requires invoking Cognitive Dissonance Rule #4: believe nothing but consider everything.

For those like me who have close to zero training and knowledge about growing plants, especially under the pressure of attempting to regularly supplement the family’s food supply, allow me to share the beginnings of my education in shedding my brown thumb. When filtering through information on the web and in books, it is easy to become intimidated by the complex explanations describing fertilizers, compost and soil amendments. Scaling it back to my level of comfort, here are the basics.

I thought all that was needed to grow food were sunshine, water and dirt with good drainage. It turns out there are three other vital factors. The first is the NPK available to the plants. NPK are the symbols for Nitrogen-Phosphorus-Potassium. The second is other trace elements which plants need, much the same way humans need a variety of vitamins and minerals to thrive. The third is considering the pH level of the soil and understanding what the pH needs are for various plants.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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Eaten by deer, killed by the heat

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