2012 alt op # 6. fixing this economy is like shoeing a dead horse

             Just a quick reminder that I’ll be showing the last of two Permaculture DVD’s at Community Seeds this Saturday starting at 10 am. One will be on Urban Permaculture and the other on Food Forests.  If you want to find out how to grow your own food cheap and easy, with less work as the system you set up ages come on down. Otherwise, you can end up buying your food from me and Community Seeds when it gets too expensive to buy gas to run your tiller or drive to Wally World.

            Just saying.

            But on to those other things that tend to make me say “GRRRR!”

            Politicians who keep saying they are going to “fix the economy” if elected really irk me. They are at least a little better than those who are ignoring that problem (and the environment) so that they have time to harp on things that patently are not their business! They seem to think its fine, in this day and age, to tell us ‘girls’ what we can do with our own bodies. What? We suddenly don’t have brains anymore?

            But back to my economy rant.

            They say, those in office already and those wanting to be elected, that they are going to “fix the economy.” My opinion there is that what they are trying to do is shoe a dead horse.

            I’m not saying give up! I’m saying find a better way! A sustainable economy that we can pass on to the kids and grand kids is what we really need. Be nice if it came along with a sustainable world and frankly I don’t think you can have one without the other.

            Of course anything sustainable is a lot of work, especially at the beginning. You actually have to do something hard. You have to think. You might even have to change your habits. Heck, even change the way you think. A good example is the usual way folks think about their lawns. A great lot of folks go along with the ads on TV that say you should have this huge lushly green carpet of a specific kind of grass that needs lots of fertilizer, lots of insecticide, and lots of mowing, mulching, dethatching and other kinds of hard labor or expensive machines. This works out to a costly investment all the way around. On the other hand you can say, “too heck with it,” and never mow again except maybe in small areas. Yeah, the health department might get on you for that, unless you’ve replaced that green carpet with all kinds of garden beds. Gardens full of flowers, vegetables, fruit and nut trees and bushes and such edible kinds of things that could feed you and maybe even your neighbors.

            That’s the kind of thinking shift I’m talking about that we need for the economy. Yes, we all need to make some kind of profit but that is the point I want to make! We ALL need to make enough to live on with enough left over to fix and repair the worn out stuff. We all also need to learn to do real work again, with our hands, our minds and our hearts.            

Alt Op # 5 for 2012, More about Geoff Lawton's DVD's

Well folks, this is the first of two weekends where you can find out more about some of this stuff I have been talking about. All you have to do is show up at ten in the morning at Community Seeds this Saturday and the Saturday after. This Saturday, the 11^th, I’ll be showing three DVD’s. One is “Introduction to Permaculture” and it gives a far better overview of the subject than I can usually communicate. Come and see it if for no other reason than to try to figure out how to get me to hush up about this subject!

            All of these DVD’s are from Australian Geoff Lawton, one of the pre-emanate Permaculture Teachers. The other two DVD’s I plan to show this Saturday are on building soil and harvesting water. Why should you be interested in that you may well be asking yourself? I’ll tell you. Modern agricultural practices have been degrading the soils our ancestors found when they first came to this area. Those big tractors have compacted the soil, the fertilizers and insecticides have killed off all or most of the beneficial bugs and other critters in dirt that make it rich and productive. Now days, in order to have just about any crop at all you must depend on both big machinery, lots of chemical fertilizer and lots of herbicides and insecticides. All of that stuff is costly and will only get more expensive as time goes on. Those costly things are why the old school “family farm” just can no longer work, unless at least one person living on it has a super high dollar job in the big city, a huge income from somewhere else, or is just plain filthy rich.

            The methods shown in these DVD’s work anywhere and everywhere. You just have to use your brain and modify them to your local conditions. Yep, most of the things shown in these are in Australia, so there are a lot of tropical and sub-tropical plants mentioned. To use these methods here you would just have to use local plants that do a similar job. That information can be found on line or even just ask a local nurseryman. Of course if you go from ‘normal’ agriculture practices to the Permaculture methods there will be at least one to two years where you will actually be doing nothing but rebuilding the soil on your land so that it can grow things. So that you are no longer doing what I call “in the ground hydroponics” where you and only you are responsible for supplying all the expensive nutritional needs of your crop.

            Yes. If you turn to the Permaculture methods of agriculture there is some start up cost and possibly even heavy duty earth working needed. But after that is done, providing adequate thought and planning have been put into it, there will be little more that needs to be done other than up keep, repairs, and management. Those would be things that can be done while you walk around gathering your breakfast, lunch or dinner if all you want to do is feed yourself and family.

            So come on over to Community Seeds and see what all the fuss is about. You might learn something new. See you there.

  

Alt Op # 4 for 2012, Why Sustainability?

Why am I harping on this sustainable stuff?  Because, I care about how the rising price of energy is going to affect all of us who don’t live inside a big city somewhere. I care about how that rising cost is going to affect the big cities populations which could eventually spill out here looking for something to eat!

            The sad part is us country folks need the city folks and they need us. We need the high tech, the concentration of information and knowledge the big cities represent, not to mention the potential customers for our products. While they desperately need us country bumpkins to produce food and various other materials they need to survive, and oh yeah, we are all potential customers for their products of information and knowledge. See how that works. We just need to learn to get along and respect the products each of us can create.

            Later this month, on two separate Saturdays (Feb. 11 and 18), a total five DVD’s are going to be shown over at Community Seeds here in Lone Oak starting at 10am. All of them are about Permaculture and Permaculture is all about valuing variety in every aspect of life. It is about designing a sustainable life centered on a sustainable home in a sustainable community.

            Most of our lives now are not sustainable as they depend heavily on the constant input fossil fuels. These fossil fuels are getting harder and harder to get and are poisoning our air, land and water while we spend ever more fossil fuels to get the stuff out of the ground.

            These five DVD’s will show how we can use what we have now, investing some of that high dollar energy in permanent to semi-permanent structures that can supply generations with a secure and sustainable source of food.

            Yeah. You might not be able to have fresh tomatoes in the depths of winter but if your home is designed right you will be warm, dry, clothed and eating tomatoes from your garden that you canned, dried, or otherwise preserved. I might have to switch to eating pears from eating apples (and I do so like apples!) because I’m not sure I can get a micro climate going that will let me grow Red Delicious apples here in Texas.

            However, as I pointed out last week, I could be wrong. Some scientist playing around in a lab somewhere may come up with a cheap, safe and sustainable form of energy that can fuel our constantly growing greed. Still, between now and then money is going to get tight. I already have to watch how many times I dash into Greenville, down to the Tawakoni Grocery, or Point. I just can’t afford the gas for it. I am also sure I’m not the only one in that bind. These DVD’s can show us all how to modify the way we live so that we save money and grow food as well as live more lightly on the planet. So come on over from 10 to 4 those two days and check it out.

2012 alt op #3 Cheap, easy food in your yard

            Been kind of on a downer the past two articles haven’t I. So let’s just suppose that I’m wrong. Those things I’ve been yapping about just won’t happen. I’m fairly sure they will, I just don’t know when, but I’m willing to admit that I could be wrong.

            So, how would you like to find out about way’s to grow nice healthy food in your own yard?  A place where you can control what goes on them or in them? I’ve mentioned this to a few folks around here and been told that it costs too much and is just too much work to keep a garden when all you have to do is drive to Wal-Mart to buy food. Yeah, it costs a bit but its still less than you’d have to pay for all the city water, the herbicides, the insecticides and don’t forget the tilling, the hoeing, the planting and all that hard work.

            So what if I said you could get together with a few neighbors and set up your front yard, back yard, heck maybe even one of your fields if you have several acres, so that after that initial hard work you almost didn’t have to do anything. Well, maybe walk around clipping a few limbs or bushes and such and just dropping them on the ground. No more tilling or plowing. No more herbicides or insecticides or even gasoline for the tiller or diesel for the tractor. Maybe you’d need a little oil and gas occasionally for the chain saw.

            Impossible! Nope. I’ve seen a video of how it can be done. Even in our drought prone area with only an initial input of city water. Yeah you will have to keep working it, but it shouldn’t be hard if you’ve planned it right. The cool part is you can tweak it as it grows.

            What the heck am I talking about?  I’m talking about a food forest. It doesn’t have to be big either. It can be your front yard, back yard or both. It can be out in the pasture behind your house or around your barns. It is complicated to explain. You start with a ditch and some weeds.

            This is a special kind of ditch called a swale. It’s dug along the contours of the land with the soil from it piled up on the downhill side. The bottom of this ditch is not compacted or covered with clay or water proofing and it is kept as level as possible. Yes it will catch all the rain runoff from uphill. That’s the whole idea, to catch that water and hold it there until it soaks into the ground. The “weeds”, the specially selected weeds, are planted on the mound of dirt below the ditch. These will be the fast growing, nitrogen fixing and soil building plants that also make food for you or your animals. There will be ground covers, bushes and even trees of a type you might normally rip out of your yard or pasture. Mesquite, clover, alfalfa, hairy vetch, even bluebonnets! You’d plant lots of those and among them you plant things like fruit and nut trees and trees for timber or firewood        

            One big trick is to mark the trees that will eventually be your food trees because all the others are going to be chopped on and their limbs dropped around the fruit or nut tree nearest them. Meanwhile down on the ground you’re also growing sweet potatoes, tomatoes or whatever, wherever. So all you need to do is go out and pick them. Sound good?

            “But what about the bugs and weeds!?” you may well be asking now. Simple answer: forget about it! If you design it right there will be so many different flowers, scents, colors and shapes that the bad guy bugs will be all confused. Meanwhile there will be lots of hiding places, nesting places and such for critters who like to eat bugs. That would be good guy bugs, and various kinds of birds, amphibians and lizards that won’t be killed by the poisons if you don’t use them.

            Yes, I remember the plague of grasshoppers we had this past summer. The answer to that is simple. More ground birds such as turkey’s and guinea fowl should solve the problem and they taste good to. I’ll say more on this later. Meanwhile you can go to Permies.com to have it explained better.

2012 alt op #2 More gloom and doom with a ray of hope.

             Was I gloomy or what last week? Actually in my opinion (and that’s what this article is anyway, right) I wasn’t being gloomy! I was just being honest. Absolutely everything we do now days is either made of or fueled by oil. Most often it’s both! Even our economy is dependent on it! Why? Because everyone, top down to you and me, has wrongly assumed that we could just keep making more and more of everything, selling it and then taking home an ever increasing paycheck. That whole idea is based on the assumption, also false, that there will always be an ever increasing supply of three things: 1. Cheap energy, 2. Cheap material, and 3. People to make products at low cost and buy products at a high cost. Here’s a clue for you. Every one of those things depends on cheap oil! 

            Now, if you did your homework assignment that I gave last week, you already know that living out here in the sticks we are in big trouble when the oil runs out. No more delivery trucks showing up at our local grocery store or restaurants. No more gas delivered to the two local gas stations or the prepackaged foods they sell there either. Even the DG will run out of stuff because the folks who sell them the stuff they sell us can’t make anything or even manage to send out what they have made!

            Yeah, I know. Seems I’m just making it worse aren’t I. Well that’s cause I think we all need to decide right now what we want to do when oil gets so pricy we can’t afford to use it. Are we going to crash and burn right along with the economy or are we going to survive?

            I vote survive.

            Here’s how. Stock up now on the one thing that energy we are using so lavishly can get us that can be used and used well after that energy dries up like our ponds did last summer. That one thing is knowledge. Not how to shoot guns and kill folks but how to grow food and feed people without chemicals of any kind. You won’t have a choice about doing it organically because all those chemicals, fertilizer, insecticides, and herbicides almost all come from oil. Heck I can’t even think of any non-organic things like that that DON’T have petroleum products in them somewhere! Even some so called organic products do!

            Where can you get this knowledge? There are lots of places on line (like permies.com) and then there’s the library here in town and the ones in the other towns nearby as well as the big one up in Commerce on the TAMU-C campus. In fact on Jan, 28^th at the Rockwall library from 10am to 4pm there will be a little get together where you can swap seeds and watch some video’s about how some other folks have already survived the oil suddenly not being there and how to grow lots of food in an urban environment without all the chemicals. If we start doing this kind of thing NOW we might not even notice when the oil does dry up. Next month I’m planning on showing even more videos here in Lone Oak on ways to grow organically and cheaply just about anywhere. I’ll tell you when and where later, when that’s all ironed out. 

2012 alt op #1 Oh, woe. The end is near. Again.

             Well, going by the prices at the gas pump I’d say we were well past “peak oil” now. For those of you who just said, “Huh? Wassat?”   Imagine that nasty old bell curve you always hated for your English or Math teacher to grade to. You know the one where the folks who scored the average grade were the ones at the highest point and they all got ‘c’s while those at one end or the other got either ‘A’s or ‘F’s depending. Only in this case instead of representing the class scores on a test it represents the oil left that we can cheaply or affordably get out of the ground! So let’s say that a point to the left of that big middle hump on this chart would be a point in time when we still had oodles of oil down there. A time when if we poked holes in the right spots that black gold would just jump out of the ground and beg to be used. That would make a point at the very top of that hump a point where we would be about half out of the stuff we could get hold of easy.

            Guess what. We are on the right side of that little hump now and sliding down fast. Yep. There is still oil out there, BUT! And it’s a whopping big but. It is starting to take more to get the stuff out of the ground, lots more. Worse, part of the greater cost is the products of that black gold we have to spend to get more of it. Yeah that’s kind of convoluted I know. What I’m trying to get at here is that we are rapidly approaching a catch-22 situation where it costs more in gasoline, diesel, and other petroleum based chemicals to get oil out of the ground than we CAN get out of the ground. In simpler words: We goin’ broke folks.

            Yeah. I can see some of you out there saying “So! Aren’t you the one yelling about green power, solar panels and windmills and all that other stuff.” Yep, I sure am but I have to point out a sad truth by asking a question. What do you think is needed to make those nifty keeno things that make electricity out of wind and sunlight? I’ll tell ya. You need plastic, a lot of plastic, and a lot of energy to make and transport the things to where they can be used. Where does that plastic and energy come from? Fossil fuels, mostly oil that’s where.

            So we’ll go back to coal, you shrug. Ah, but there we run into another problem. Unless you like the really harsh and odd weather we’ve been having. That’s that global warming you might not want to believe in kicking in. Then again, with coal there is also the simple question of if you want to be able to breathe or drive your car. Personally I prefer breathing. It makes living easier that way.

            Now, I think I’ll assign some homework. Sit there and think of all the places you go from your home and how you get there. Think about the work you do and what fuels that work you do or even makes the materials you work with. Now, what will you do when the oil runs out? How will you get to work, to the store, raise a garden, or even just go fishing? How will you eat? How will you stay warm in the winter or even cook your food? I’ll give hints next week.

Alt Op. # 50 End of the year

Well, this is the last article I’ll write. This year, that is. There will be more next year, unless some weirdness intervenes.

            But what shall I write about now? Traditionally, articles, news reports and such tend to go over the major happenings of the past year and a few try to predict what might come to pass in the coming year.

            Last year gas prices went up. At one point they got near $4 a gallon or more, I stopped looking. Other sad things happened. Some good folks we will miss passed on. No not the big name stars though that is sad for their families; I’m talking about the everyday folks we will all miss meeting down at the Lone Oak Grocery, the Buffalo Grill, just passing in the street or getting e-mail from (Sorry, Boe. Even DSL won’t connect to Heaven.) Some really bad folks also left this mortal coil in the past year. They aren’t missed and I won’t waste more time on them.

            There were glad tidings as well. New lives came to give people joy. Some have two legs, wear diapers, and cry a lot. Others have fur or hide, hooves, horns or at least flowing mains and tails. Yeah, I’m an animal lover. Sue me for cooing as much over a picture of a puppy, a new foal or goat kid as I do over a baby human.

            As for next year, well, it looks to be more of the same as it is every year. We will certainly be entertained by the politicians as they jockey for position in the presidential race. Some will surly get a kick out of arguing politics with friends and family which can be an enjoyable pass time if it isn’t taken too seriously.

            I’m looking forward to spring and to planting something tasty both on my property and over at Community Seeds. I plan on trying some techniques I’ve been reading about that can let you grow tomatoes and other plants without bothering to weed, fertilize or even water them. I will be talking about these methods more in next year’s articles. After all I am an opinionated gal and happen to think these Permaculture ways of doing things is a darn fine idea.

            In fact there is only one part of the Permaculture idea’s that I have a personal problem with. You see, Permaculture believes everyone should cooperate. I can cooperate fine, but I’m also a loner at heart, with a bad habit of hauling off and trying to do things beyond by present physical abilities. Why? Because I hate waiting around for someone else to get the time to help me, then having to try to explain why I don’t want whatever it is done the way they are used to doing it.

            Hmm. Sounds like I have my New Year’s Resolutions right there. “Be more patient, especially with yourself as well as others, and try to remember to ask for help when you need it!”  What’s yours?