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?