sastyk | February 18, 2010In many ways the enormous outpouring of support for Haiti after the earthquake was very moving. In other ways, not so much - consider the International community's total lack of interest in whether Haitians will be able to feed themselves in the upcoming year - "We're very happy to send our surgeons, engineers and food aid - but hey, when we're done, we're done" seems to be the dominant worldview, as the UN reports:
"At a time when Haiti is facing a major food crisis we are alarmed at the lack of support to the agricultural component of the Flash Appeal," UN Food and Agriculture Organization…
sastyk | February 18, 2010Yesterday, I spent a long time filling seed flats and pressing seeds into dirt - and then I took them outside and set them to germinate. The temps were hovering right around freezing, and there was light snow coming down - the perfect conditions for growing things. Or at least, for winter sowing
(Note, there was originally a link and short quote from a website about the subject, but the owner of the site apparently took offense because I attempted to drive traffic to her, so I strongly recommend you avoid her site, to avoid offending her. I will go out of my way never to mention it or any…
sastyk | February 18, 2010Note: This is a repost from ye olde blogge (which, I am informed by the kind gentleman who is helping me debut it will be back to function by early next week - thank you all for your patience!). Aaron Newton and I are starting up our farm and garden design class today, and we'll be posting a lot of material on growing of all sorts for the next six weeks. I've got a post about winter sowing and stratification coming up next, but thought I would preceed it, since so many people don't realize this, with the observation that you can actually start an astonishing number of woody and herbaceous…
sastyk | February 17, 2010Just a quick reminder that tomorrow Aaron Newton and I will begin our next Farm and Garden Design Class. The class covers everything from the very basics of design - how to get started planning for a garden or small farm, soil, sun and water issues, seed starting, choosing perennials, making the best use of space etc... to small-scale livestock keeping, making money and long term design. We've done the class a number of times, and we've had people with 100s of acres and people with tiny city lots, and people with no land at all gardening in community gardens, on public spaces or sharing…
sastyk | February 16, 2010Robert S. McElvaine's _Down and Out in the Great Depression_ is a fascinating look at America during the Depression. Compiled from letters written to Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt and Herbert Hoover, it presents Americans in their own words, saying what they thought was most important in the Depression. Besides the pleas for help and the accounts of the situation on the ground, there was a profound anger at those who needed help. "Paddle your own canoe or sink" one letter wrote. A "Poor Southern Arkansas Woman" wrote that she felt she was a slave required to carry thousands of idle men on…
sastyk | February 16, 2010My happy-happy-joy-joy of the day. Apparently Independence Days needs a second print run, only 3 months after its release! Yay!
So just in case you are wondering why the heck you'd want to store food, and wanted to start from the beginning, well, there will be no shortage of copies.
sastyk | February 16, 2010With any reasonably successful blog, you have a conversation going on, often between an author and commenters who have a long history and background, and people coming into the conversation for the first time. Sometimes the people coming in are hostile, sometimes curious, sometimes troubled by what they are learning, annoyed by you or dismissive. Sometimes they stay, and sometimes they look in and look out. Balancing the degree to which you write for the regulars and to those new to you is always an interesting exercise. That's been an issue for me lately - I've now been at science blogs a…
sastyk | February 15, 2010I imagine after the last few weeks, the idea of storing food isn't seeming quite so crazy to a lot of folks in the country, but still, I hear all the time "I want to start building up a reserve but my husband/sister/mother in law thinks this is nuts." So I thought I would repost this piece, on how to get your family on board (and what not to say).
Ok, I've convinced you - you need a reserve of food, you want to learn to can and dehydrate, you want to start eating more local foods. But you haven't done anything yet, because, well, the rest of your household isn't on board. Before you go…
sastyk | February 13, 2010The jars are emptying out here. Despite the fact that it was an unbelievably awful gardening year, somehow the canning jars filled up all the same, to the point that we actually ran out of pint and smaller jars. Now, boxes and cabinets are filling up with emptied jars, put away until I begin putting things up again.
I still dig out the canning kettle once in a while in the winter - some apples going slightly soft inspire some applesauce now and again, but the season of preservation has not yet begun, and the time of emptying is upon us. Every day, our stocks decline.
Every year there is a…
sastyk | February 12, 2010Everyone needs to read Don Peck's superb Atlantic Magazine piece on why the jobs aren't coming back anytime soon. It confirms what I began writing back in late 2008 - that most often economic crises of the kind we have been seeing last a decade or more.
Most recessions end when people start spending again, but for the foreseeable future, U.S. consumer demand is unlikely to propel strong economic growth. As of November, one in seven mortgages was delinquent, up from one in 10 a year earlier. As many as one in four houses may now be underwater, and the ratio of household debt to GDP, about 65…
sastyk | February 12, 2010I shouldn't complain - the Telegraph's energy columnist, Rowena Mason is technically affirming that even non-crazy people can believe in peak oil. Her essay, titled "You Don't Need to be a Mad Max Survivalist to Take Peak Oil Seriously" at least acknowledges the point. Her equation of Mad Max survivalism with "grows root vegetables" is obviously going to annoy me, but I know the kind of people she talks about in the article too, the ones who say we'd better hurry into our bunkers now, so I can forgive that.
But the part that is a little problematic is that she doesn't seem to get the oil…
sastyk | February 11, 2010
You'd be surprised at how warm our barn is on winter nights. A few nights ago, the thermometer read -10 as I headed out the door, and the wind was howling, but inside the barn it was below freezing, but surprisingly tolerable. Close down a comparatively small space, insulate the floors with dry bedding and fill it with warm life, and the combined body heats make it surprisingly pleasant.
Up in the rafters, some of the chickens and the turkeys are nested for the night, and they snuggle together. In the rest of the barn, they also nest in a heap. The goats snuggle together for warmth,…
sastyk | February 11, 2010Not promising anything - and definitely not promising anything until the book is done, but does anyone have topics they'd like your blogiste to cover? What do you want to hear me go on about?
BTW, if you are interested in more in-depth going on (plus a whole lot of awesome other stuff), Aaron and my next farm and garden design class starts 1 week from today. I'll post details and syllabus up here today or tomorrow, or you can email at jewishfarmer@gmail.com for more info.
Also, I've still got spots in my next apprenticeship weekend - come to my house in rural upstate NY and see how we do it…
sastyk | February 11, 2010Once upon a time, before I descended into parenthood and dull stability, I was out with a group of friends who had, let's just say, been drinking quite a bit. One of the young men in this group proposed to two others that they do something that was, to put it bluntly, totally moronic and likely to get them into enormous trouble. One of the gentlemen to whom this had been proposed thought for a moment, and then observed that this was likely to bring down the authorities upon them. The third gentleman responded to this with, "Yeah, but it would be awesome!" After a brief moment's…
sastyk | February 11, 2010
In _Depletion and Abundance_ I write about the difficulty of committing to a lifestyle change in a world where you always seem to have more time, where defining events are always on the horizon but never present. I use the phrase "time to pick up your hat" which I take from a short story by Robert Heinlein, as a way of thinking both about how difficult it is to change and how necessary.
On the one hand, the story is a typical 1950s nuclear era tale of apocalypse - in it, the main character, a bartender, is dealing drinks when two scientists walk into his bar. Both are terribly, terribly…
sastyk | February 10, 2010Increasingly, the cost of staying wired is eating up a huge part of people's budgets accordinging to The Times:
It used to be that a basic $25-a-month phone bill was your main telecommunications expense. But by 2004, the average American spent $770.95 annually on services like cable television, Internet connectivity and video games, according to data from the Census Bureau. By 2008, that number rose to $903, outstripping inflation. By the end of this year, it is expected to have grown to $997.07. Add another $1,000 or more for cellphone service and the average family is spending as much on…
sastyk | February 10, 2010A lot of big snowstorms get people who do not grasp the difference between weather and climate all excited. Consider the VA Republican party who claimed in an ad last week that if it snows, we can't have global warming. But it isn't just the skeptics and denialists here - among the believers we routinely see people citing weather, such as the lack of snow in Vancouver for the Olympics. I know that people think this helps, but in the great scheme of things, it doesn't - if people hear people who are trying act against global warming using their weather as an explanation without evidence,…
sastyk | February 10, 2010Note: This is a lightly revised version of a post from ye olde blogge (actually ye older blogge, the original Casaubon's Book). At the time I wrote it, I didn't know about Dan Savage's brilliantly funny book on the seven deadly sins _Skipping Towards Gomorrah_ and if I had, I probably wouldn't have written this, since it seems so derivative in retrospect. But since I didn't, and it was a fun one to write, I'm re-running it here.
I got a very funny email from a correspondant who asked that I not use his name when I write this. He tells me that he's newly aware of peak oil and climate change…
sastyk | February 9, 2010I've often wondered what I should write after everyone is already living the Zombie attack and is bored with hearing about how to grow food and mend your socks. I figure at some point, the market will be saturated by such things, and people will want to escape - and I should start thinking now about escapist fiction. I was thinking detective novels, but I clearly should have been thinking "porn."
Apparently IPCC head Rajendra Pachauri has already begun preparing for his post-climate crisis second career, by writing what nearly every review suggests is an unbelievably bad smutty novel with…
sastyk | February 9, 2010This morning, during school time, Isaiah asked me just how many Aunts and Uncles he had. Asked to clarify what the parameters of the question were, Isaiah asked me how many people he would call by the title "Aunt" or "Uncle." Which led me to do some quick addition - and to a number that came out above 70.
Now Eric and I don't have that many siblings. In fact, I have two sisters, and until into adulthood, Eric was an only child. Nor do my parents make up for it at the great-level - each of them had one brother. So how on earth do I get 70 aunts and uncles for my kids?
Me, Eric and the…