sastyk | February 20, 2011What I stand for is what I stand on. - Wendell Berry
Note: You've got to give the Dervaes' some credit - their asshattery has inspired a wholel lot of focus on urban sustainable agriculture, homesteading and making a good life in the city! Today is "Urban Homesteading Day" and in its honor, here are some meditations on the relationships we need between city homesteaders and farmers, country homesteaders and farmers and everyone in between.
Urbanization is the biggest trend in history. For the first time, more human beings live in cities than in the country. More than 50,000 farmers worldwide…
sastyk | February 18, 2011Somehow this week has turned into a lovely, but incredibly overscheduled period. Besides the usual sabbath (which I can use this week), and the fact that it has finally melted off enough to clean the buck pen, move the bucks up the hill and move the chicks out of the bathtub (adorable as they are i somewhat prefer poultry not in my house), and the seed starting (going apace), well, there's more.
Monday is devoted entirely to running a talk and workshop by Rabbi Shalom Kantor (the US's only Conservative Schochet) on ethical kashruth and slaughter. The talk will outline the religious and…
sastyk | February 17, 2011From The Ineffable Crunchy Chicken:
There's a bit of hub-bub going on on Facebook right now about how the Dervaes family (of Path to Freedom fame) has successfully trademarked the terms "urban homestead" and "urban homesteading" and is forcing Facebook to shut down pages that use the term and sending legal notifications to businesses with the term "urban homesteading" in it.
I don't know where this is all going or how much of this is true, but if it is, I'm going to be seriously disappointed in the narrow-mindedness of their actions. I do hope they clarify what they are up to. I can't see how…
sastyk | February 15, 2011One of the projects we're working on is ways to bring more people to our farm. A lot of folks want to see what we're doing, and we've been contemplating open farm days, and possible ideas for classes we might teach. Well, while Eric and I were discussing it the other night, we came up with the idea of the "realistic farm tour" that gives people a real sense of what actually goes on on a farm - we could market ourselves a unlike all those other agritourism ventures that sell the dream - we sell the reality! Here are some of the activities we are sure people would pay us to do!
"Explore the…
sastyk | February 14, 2011"Everyone says I love you, but just what they say it for I never knew. Its just inviting trouble for the poor sucker who says I love you."
sastyk | February 14, 2011I'm a bit short on time today, given that I told my boys that today is "smooch day" and Moms have to kiss their kids as much as possible. Since my boys are all deep in the "ewwww....kissing" phase this means that they are spending every spare minute following me around and daring me to try and kiss them. This is awesome because while they may be starting to outrun me, but I'm still wilier and trickier. So I didn't write a luuuuuvvv post - I'm busy being vewy vewy quiet, and hunting boys.... I have, however, written a few over the years, and I thought I'd put them up here:
You'll note,…
sastyk | February 14, 2011This is a lightly revised and updated version of a piece that ran at ye olde blogge and at Grist, but it seems just as pertinent now as it did in 2007 when I wrote it. At the time, some people doubted that the boom we were seeing in biofuel production, which was pushing up grain prices, would be followed by any kind of a bust. Farmers were predicting many, many good years - but we all know what happened. Farm incomes dropped by more than 20% during the recession. Just another reminder that busts are part of the boom and bust cycle, no matter how little we like to admit it.
There is no…
sastyk | February 13, 2011I have to say, learning to replace a zipper now and again has extended the life of a number of favorite items of clothing. It is a very simple thing, but a bit of a pain, and useful to see how to do it. The Matron of Husbandry at Trapper Creek has kindly provided a great post and a great commentary on how odd bits of handiwork get done in any relationship:
Dear, dear Hangdog really appreciates what he calls Woman Craft, and all things being equal (wink, wink); he feels the same about guys and expects them to know their Man Craft. (His terms, not mine.) So somewhere in this past 32 years…
sastyk | February 11, 2011"Did you look at the forecast?" "Is this it?" "Should we get them out?"
My children keep asking, and I keep telling them that I think so, but that no one can know for sure. We are talking of the change in the weather, slated to begin today, warming us up from the last wave of bitter cold with night temperatures last night around -12 (we hit -29 earlier this winter, so that's pretty balmy), to days in the 40s (gasp, and maybe even near 50) next week, while nights are just below freezing.
It is possible, of course, that the warm spell will turn and go south, although the predictions are…
sastyk | February 10, 2011
(Yes, I will eventually explain this ;-))
I don't usually participate in the Huffington Post bashing that goes on at science blogs. Not because I don't often agree with it, but because my colleagues seem to have it covered when it comes to autism/vaccine links and dubious medical studies. Still, Raymond Learsy's column about Wikileaks did catch my attention, and it seems to have all the best qualities of a bad HuffPo piece.
If it's in Wikileaks, it's got to be true. Certainly it was a moment of triumphal satisfaction for the Peak Oil Pranksters. There it was in "cloud" black and white…
sastyk | February 9, 2011
The first thing you need to remember is to think ahead, and bring in the compost before three feet of snow and ice lands on top of it. That was my big discovery two years ago, and like so many big discoveries was a. unpleasant and b. completely obvious - in retrospect. Living in a linear society, it can be difficult to get cyclical.
You see, I knew you could start seeds in lightly sifted compost - in fact, I'd seen Rodale Institute tests that showed that some varieties seeds did best in finished compost. So, the year before, I'd gone out in February, dug up some compost, let it defrost, and…
sastyk | February 9, 2011It was only a matter of time - Bart Anderson of Energy Bulletin even predicted it in the ASPO-USA predictions piece I put together this December! From the Guardian:
The US fears that Saudi Arabia, the world's largest crude oil exporter, may not have enough reserves to prevent oil prices escalating, confidential cables from its embassy in Riyadh show.
The cables, released by WikiLeaks, urge Washington to take seriously a warning from a senior Saudi government oil executive that the kingdom's crude oil reserves may have been overstated by as much as 300bn barrels - nearly 40%.
The revelation…
sastyk | February 7, 2011Ok, I have to go frantically clean my house. Objectively I know that the social worker wants to know that the house is clean, safe and appropriate for kids, not to look at the shine on the linoleum (of which there is presently none ;-)). In my inner heart, however, I'm pretty sure she's going to do the Miss Gulch thing "You people think you can adopt?!?! In this dump?!?! Are you out of your minds? That's it, I'm taking away your kids...and your little goats too!
I realize this means I have too much imagination, but I will be responding to my own nervousness by trying to create some order…
sastyk | February 7, 2011In all the chaos of having interrupted internet and lots of stormy weather, I never posted a January Anyway Project Update - oops, sorry! So here's an early February one, and I'll try and do one in late Feb. as well, because, of course, I'll definitely be accomplishing double in this short month. Sure.
If you'd like to participate in The Anyway Project - redesigning your life to make it work better - please just join in. There are no deadlines (obviously ;-)) and no pressures. Wondering what I'm going on about? Here's a quick summary of The Anyway Project:
The larger idea of the Anyway…
sastyk | February 3, 2011These were taken before the 18 inches of snow that fell the other day, so you can actually see the ground, but the scene is still basically the same - white, with scattered critters. We're all definitely starting to dream of spring!
The creek in winter
Asher at the Creek
Isaiah, finding material to repair our (very primitive) footbridge
Hauling wood is a daily chore. When the snow is falling hard, my fuzzy, frosty spouse looks vaguely like a yeti after a few loads ;-).
With all this weather, it is good thing all the stuff in the root cellar is still holding up! At least we don't have…
sastyk | February 1, 2011There's a great scene in the book _Cheaper By the Dozen_ (which had almost nothing to do with the recent movie Steve Martin was in, although there's a fairly good old one) in which Lillian Moller Gilbraith, mother of 12 (11 surviving) is offered by a joking friend as the ideal host for a Planned Parenthood organizational meeting. The PP representative, who has been told that Gilbraith is a model organizer, a professional woman and a leader in her community - but not that she has 11 kids. "Within 15 Miles of Organizational Headquarters!" announces the representative of Planned Parenthood in…
sastyk | February 1, 2011I once wrote an essay about my son Isaiah's wish for a farm. He has a farm, of course, but he also dreams of a different one, the one in his imagination. What was funny was that all the adults that saw his wish understood it so very well. Many people tell me how much they want a farm. But other people show me that farms are easier to find than you think, even if they aren't perfect. These are all real people, who I know. As i start our garden design class today, I started thinking about all the farm dreams I've known!
I know a man who wanted to start a farm. So he worked and saved for…
sastyk | February 1, 2011Note: I wrote this piece in 2009, when my boys were younger. By now they chop food for dinner, Isaiah can indeed use the hatchet and Simon and Isaiah have their own flocks of birds, and the sale of any eggs they raise. The general principles are still the same. We still don't give allowances per se, but allow the children to do extra labor to earn money, over and above the chores they do simply because they live here. I found myself thinking about this book in the context of the discussion around the "Tiger Mother" book that advocates all of children's attention be focused on purely…
sastyk | January 31, 2011Stuart Staniford has a terrific piece that offers a little visual clarity about food, energy, unemployment and the Riots in the Middle East and North Africa:
Tunisia is a minnow in the global oil market, Egypt slightly more important. Algeria, however, matters a lot as its oil production is probably close to total demonstrated OPEC spare capacity. Thus serious social instability in Algeria would have major effects on global oil prices. If instability spread to bigger oil producers than that (eg Kuwait or UAE), the effects could be very dramatic.
Presumably, the regimes in those countries…
sastyk | January 31, 2011From The Onion:
According to anthropologists, untold millions of slaves and serfs toiled their whole lives to complete the gap. Records indicate the work likely began around 10,000 years ago, when the world's first landed elites convinced their subjects that construction of such a monument was the will of a divine authority, a belief still widely held today.
Though historians have repeatedly disproved such claims, theories still persist among many that the Gap Between Rich and Poor was built by the Jews.
"When I stare out across its astounding breadth, I'm often moved to tears," said…