Get Ready for the BIG one

Beekeeping

2008-02-08T15:51:00.000-08:00

Emily's new obsession, which I think will be awesome to implement (eventually), is backyard beekeeping. Not as hard as you might think, it does take some specialized equipment, but you can get something like 60 pounds of honey in a year from a single hive! And in an urban homestead, sugar and beeswax can be extremely useful commodities. Not only can you take honey and use it anywhere sugar is called for, but you can ferment the honey to make alcohol, and furthermore, although I haven't heard of anyone doing it, I imagine could make vinegar from the alcohol (as is the case with most any alcoholic beverage). Furthermore, you can use the beeswax for candles, furniture polish, and probably a number of other things, too. I haven't yet gotten hip to the many uses of beeswax, but having lots of it around could be useful, if for no other reason than you can sell it...

Personal Food Security

2008-01-16T10:53:00.000-08:00

There was an article recently in the New York Times that points out what's been happening as a result of the rising price of oil - the price of food has been rising, all over the world. As more and more food crops have been devoted to biofuel production (stimulated by high oil prices), less and less have been going to food, for people and for livestock. In addition, higher fuel prices mean higher cost for producing the food due to our reliance on fuel for cultivation, fertilization, and delivery of the food. Thirdly, the rapidly growing economies of the two most populous countries on earth - India and China - has put increased demand on the production of meat, since people moving into the middle class tend to increase their consumption of it. Of course, the production of meat uses far more food, water, and fuel than the production of the same amount of plant-based foods. So, compound the problems of lower supply, increased demand, and increased cost of delivery for basic foodstuffs like corn, soybeans, and grain, and you have the makings of serious price pressure. And that's not to even mention the probable effects of global warming on agriculture. As the New York Times article puts it:

A startling change is unfolding in the world’s food markets. Soaring fuel prices have altered the equation for growing food and transporting it across the globe. Huge demand for biofuels has created tension between using land to produce fuel and using it for food.

A growing middle class in the developing world is demanding more protein, from pork and hamburgers to chicken and ice cream. And all this is happening even as global climate change may be starting to make it harder to grow food in some of the places best equipped to do so, like Australia.

All this means it's a better time than ever to resurrect old ways of creating food close to home, preserving it, and valuing the food that we buy.

Part of our solution has been to begin increasing the amount of food we produce at our house in the city, and learning ways to make good use of it. We just planted four fruit trees - semi dwarf cherry and apple (both grafted with multiple varieties on the same root stock!), and two different types of plum. We're also planning on transforming most of the backyard into raised vegetable beds instead of grass. Already, we save quite a bit of money by keeping chickens; over the past three weeks, we've started getting four or five eggs per day from our seven chickens, which keeps us in high-quality protein. The excess we'll have by the time spring production rolls around will go up for sale or trade with our neighbors. Now that's food security...

Irrigation in California

2008-01-02T18:28:00.000-08:00

I recently returned from a road trip through California to visit all of my daughter's grandparents over the holidays, and drove through most of California's Central Valley, all the way from Redding down to Porterville. Man, does that place have a lot of agriculture, and all of it is dependent on irrigation. It's a pretty arid valley, I'd say a lot of it bordering on desert, and if the water were ever to dry up, the whole country would feel it. California's Central Valley is the main reason we have tomatoes in the winter, and all the other "luxury" fruits and vegetables that would otherwise be out of season throughout the colder parts of the country in the winter. With the combination of the climate heating up, and the price of oil rising (it just hit $100 a barrel today for the first time ever), it could be a one-two punch that would dry up a huge amount of the agricultural output from California, whether because of the lack of water, or because of the expense of transporting it. I'm really glad that Portland has had an urban growth boundary in place since the early 70's. It means that there are farms not 15 minutes drive from the center of town, and in hard times, you'll definitely want your food close by.

The Story of Stuff

2007-12-05T17:01:00.000-08:00

This is so great - The Story of Stuff

Annie Leonard presents a cool little cartoon about, well, stuff; where it comes from, how it gets to us, how we use it, and what happens to it when we're done with it. It's really thought-provoking, and she describes it in such a sensible, straightforward, and entertaining way.

Really, check it out.

Learning Electricity

2007-12-04T11:12:00.000-08:00

I'm currently learning about electricity, as I realize that the ability to build, customize, or repair electrical or electronic systems would be a very handy skill to have in an energy-depleted, economically-depressed world. What I want to be able to do is install and repair a solar system for our house, but I've also started becoming interested in pedal-powered generators and battery storage systems. Knowing more about the efficiency of anything that uses electricity would be very helpful as well in being able to identify the areas that energy is wasted. I'd also love to be able to repair electronic things that don't work anymore, instead of junking them. That would certainly require more than just the basics, but you gotta start somewhere...

LETS get trading!

2007-11-27T16:34:00.000-08:00

My newest interest gets me very excited. It's a system whereby a community of people trade goods and services without using any cash, called a Local Exchange Trading System, or LETS. There are some great links and a decent description of a LETS at the WIKIPEDIA article. This would be a perfect system for protecting one's ability to get necessities in an economic crisis, not to mention it can save a lot of money in the short term. Imagine you could provide services, or home made goods, or whatever, to people in your community, for an agreed upon number of credits. You could then use those credits to acquire goods or services you need. It keeps "value" in the community, and it means that you can directly benefit from your talents. I like the idea a lot, but I have to find a way to easily implement it in my area. There are some cool open-source software or web-based Exchange Systems I've found (my favorite one at the moment is here), but I have to do some more research.

To wrap up, here's a great little story I found on a community exchange site based in Bellingham, Washington, that kind of gets at the crux of the matter:

An American businessman was at the pier of a small coastal Mexican village when a small boat with just one fisherman docked. Inside the small boat were several large yellowfin tuna.

The American complimented the Mexican on the quality of his fish and asked how long it took to catch them. The Mexican replied, "only a little while." The American then asked why didn’t he stay out longer and catch more fish? The Mexican said he had enough to support his family’s immediate needs.

The American then asked, "But what do you do with the rest of your time?" The Mexican fisherman said, "I sleep late, fish a little, play with my children, take siesta with my wife, Maria, stroll into the village each evening where I sip wine and play guitar with my amigos. I have a full and busy life, senor."

The American scoffed, "I am a Harvard MBA and could help you. You should spend more time fishing and with the proceeds buy a bigger boat, with the proceeds from the bigger boat you could buy several boats, eventually you would have a fleet of fishing boats. Instead of selling your catch to a middleman you would sell directly to the processor, eventually opening your own cannery. You would control the product, processing and distribution. You would need to leave this small coastal fishing village and move to Mexico City, then LA and eventually NYC where you will run your expanding enterprise."

The Mexican fisherman asked, "But senor, how long will this all take?"

To which the American replied, "15 or 20 years."

"But what then, senor?"

The American laughed and said, "that’s the best part. When the time is right you would announce an IPO and sell your company stock to the public and become very rich, you would make millions."

"Millions, senor? Then what?"

The American said, "Then you would retire. Move to a small coastal village where you would sleep late, fish a little, play with your kids, take siesta with your wife, stroll to the village in the evenings where you could sip wine and play your guitar with your amigos."

New Topic for the Blog

2007-11-20T13:50:00.000-08:00

So, I started this blog with the idea that I would just have a place to write whatever was on my mind, but I've now decided that it's going to have a real purpose. I'm going to start covering topics that relate to what I see as the (almost) inevitable hard times ahead. With an obvious convergence of factors staring the world in the face (oil prices rising, war in the middle east, dollar value falling, and global warming) , it's been on my mind a lot lately, so I'm going to put my thoughts about it out here in the blogosphere, and talk about what my family and I are doing to prepare for it. I just read another article on wired news that talks about a different facet of the peak oil theory, essentially stating that even if we have enough oil to feed the world's demands in the coming decades, we don't have the production capacity the GET it:

"At the rate oil fields are being depleted, simply maintaining our current production of 85 million barrels a day will require producing at least another 4 million daily barrels every year. That, according to the Journal, is roughly five times the daily production in all of Alaska, and doesn't account for any increase in demand at all."

Yikes!

ugh...

2007-11-16T17:29:00.000-08:00

I hate being a wage slave.

Fall

2007-11-08T14:15:00.000-08:00

I haven't posted in a while, summer is long gone now, but the rain hasn't really started up yet. Oil has been getting very expensive, the dollar is weakening, the mortgage crisis is widening - in short, the economy is starting to crack. This has been making Emily and I think more and more about ways to prepare for a looming depression. We've been thinking about the "peak oil" phenomenon for a while now, and all signs point to it coming true. This, added to the fact that the economy is really on the brink, has made us start to ever more seriously consider self-reliance. So, we've been slowly acquiring skills that can help us save money, food, and energy, and hopefully we can build up a skill set that will serve us well in a barter economy. I'm thinking about investing in gold, in case the markets crash (we have a few thousand in stocks in an IRA), researching methods for becoming energy-independent (solar arrays, diesel generators, wind or even pedal power), reading about food production and preservation, and rolling over ideas in my head about securing economic depression-proof work. There are markets that completely fall flat in a depression, and markets that continue to thrive, I would think based on what is actually necessary to survive, and what can be dispensed with. Everyone still needs food and clothing, but I imagine the bottom drops out of the luxury-good and disposable-income markets. Anyways, I feel like we'll be much better prepared for something like this than most Americans, who are blissfully ignorant of the situation.

Summer Harvest in Portland

2007-08-27T16:03:00.000-07:00

Well, last week was the first big harvest week this summer (for us at least). We're growing cucumbers, tomatoes, peppers, raspberries, butternut squash, pumpkins, leeks, a few carrots, figs, 3 kinds of lettuces, 3 kinds of greens, and some herbs, and the tomatoes just hit big. The cucumbers have been tooling along, with a few ready every couple days, but they just hit big as well. We're getting dozens of little tomatoes and a few big ones every day or so, the cucumbers are delivering 3 or 4 a day, and now we have peppers ripening, the second round of raspberries just started, the lettuces are big enough to start picking leaves from, and our 2 older chickens are giving us about a dozen eggs per week! I pickled and preserved every night this weekend, and I'm going to make another few jars tonight. I made pickled potatoes saturday (with our own small harvest of carrots), tomato chutney last night, and I'm doing cucumbers tonight. Next will be lots more rasperries, a ton of figs (which I'll probably dry), and the squashes, which will be nice for fall and winter meals. The leeks should be ready to start lifting in the late fall and winter, which will be extra nice, since they've been growing since spring!

Raccoon attack!

2007-08-04T00:42:00.000-07:00

I just rescued our dear chicken, Bubble (named by our daughter Georgia), from the clutches of an evil raccoon! I was fighting Strogg in a game of Quake 4 when our dog Hannah began growling and barking, and I suddenly heard our chickens raising a ruckus in the yard. I figured one of the neighborhood cats was messing with them, but as I ran outside with a flashlight, it became clear that one of the chickens was having a serious crisis from the sound she was making. I ran down the side of the house and was still hearing the sounds, so I picked up a big branch that was laying around (part of a pile of branches from a "tree of heaven" - aka a weed tree - that I cut down last summer) and ran toward the sound. Next I heard a scuffling, and saw what I thought was a cat jump up onto the fence, and when I shined the flashlight on it, sure enough, it was a big fuckin' raccoon. I ran at it and shouted, and it looked at me for a second, and then took off. Bubble was cowering in a corner, and Vivian was hiding under the back steps, so I checked them both to see if there were any injuries, but everyone seemed OK. Bubble had a wet spot on her back, probably from the vile beast trying to bite her or something, but other than some missing and ruffled feathers, she seemed fine. After putting the chickens in their coop (we've been letting them roost outside at night in the grapevine), I checked around and found a whole lot of her feathers leading down the side of the house. I suspect that the raccoon had her and was actually dragging her away. YIKES! Anyways, three cheers for Hannah for alerting me, and good for Bubble for being such an awesome chicken. I brought Hannah back outside to get a good sniff of the scene of the crime, and made sure she knew how good she was.

Oh, and then I heard a whole bunch of gunshots a few blocks away. Nice!

My first post

2007-08-02T23:25:00.000-07:00

So I just set this blog thing up, and I chose the font "GEORGIA" for the formatting, because that's my daughter's name. She's amazing. You can't even believe how cool she is. At 19 months old, she eats almost everything, although she goes through different favorites. She could not get enough blueberries when they were in season a few weeks ago. At one time she loved broccoli, but now she just kind of eats it with vague interest. The weird thing is she isn't into the things they always have on the "kid's menu" at restaurants - grilled cheese and PB&J sandwiches. She sure likes jelly though. If you give her toast with jam on it, she eats it from the top - as in, the surface of the toast - and then she eats the bread after that.

Anywho, that's enough for my first post.