I hope we all realize ...

I haven't preached this point too much so far because I figured it went without saying, but permit me a (hopefully) short rant.

Nearly all of the the food that we buy -- and then eat -- relies on cheap gasoline, cheap trucking and other non-renewable resources that we're sucking down by the ten thousands of gallons. Go to a grocery store, even a high-cost organic one and look around. Everything there would be gone with something as simple as a three-day transit strike.

Does no one else find that terrifying? And on a less catastrophic scale, rising oil prices (which are and will continue to be an absolute reality) will by necessity equal rising food prices. Maybe you've got pounds and pounds of food stored up in your house, but my apartment, not so much. Maybe the trucking companies will come through for us before oil costs are prohibitively expensive and run their trucks on biodiesel, or something.

Personally, while I think these more optimistic scenarios could certainly play out, I'm not willing to bet my starvation on it. I don't think you should either, to be honest.

So some solutions, please, miss gloom'n'doom?

Well, the most obvious and most direct answer is to grow some of your own food, more each year (pick your damn figs, oranges and pecans, dad. Get some wrist and ankle weights and do it instead of a workout or two. And then call Alli and she'll walk you through cooking delicious things from them). Don't have enough space? Get creative, vertical space is space too.





You'd be surprised how productive a small amount of land (or a balcony, or a patio, or a rooftop) can be . There's an Urban farm in Chicago (note: short mid-western growing season) that can produce enough food for 2000 people on two acres. Well, that's an advanced aquaponics system with a lot of full time employees, but then you're probably not trying to feed 250 people from your 1/4th acre, either.

Another answer that doesn't involve you digging in the dirt is to join a CSA. Community supported agriculture has you pay up front for a "share" of the produce from a farm over the course of the season. There are usually several drop off points to pick up your share, or some CSAs deliver to your door. There's a searchable and pretty comprehensive list of CSAs at localharvest.org.

This answer helps the small farmers by giving them money to cover their overhead expenses, and gives you the best produce available. There are countless other advantages, like the accountability that exists when you meet and establish a relationship with your food producer and the support of a local food economy. Let's say that transit strike does materialize: your CSA share is safe. And the rising oil prices probably won't affect it too much, either, because small local farms running CSA's are typically organic, thus not needing petroleum based fertilizers and pesticides and the local nature of the food exempts it from rising shipping costs.

(I have skimmed over the obvious environmental implications of shipping all of that food long distances in refrigerated trucks and train cars because all 12 of my readers are very bright and have almost certainly made that connection on their own.)

Another link

Yup, it's about urine.

Human urine as a safe, inexpensive fertilizer for food crops

That's the headline. It summarizes a study done by some Finish researchers.

Some interesting things

Heya.

So here's a link to the website of a Canadian (of course; they're way ahead of us in innovative ag) couple who figured out a way to profit $52,000 on the sales of crops from less than an acre of farmed land. About half an acre, in fact. And they only own about a 5th of it. And the rest? Back yards in their neighborhood. In some cases they rent the space to farm from neighbors and usually pay for the space in produce and in others they're actually paid to farm other people's property. As people start to realize the nonsense of lawns, some families have seen this "SPIN Farming" (stands for Small Plot INtensive farming) as an alternative to landscaping costs.

Their profitability key is to use high value crops like salad mixes, micro-greens and specialty beets all of which can be harvested very young and spaced very tightly. So they get several harvests from a small space all of which are quite valuable; especially since they weigh and package them at home, charging per bunch instead of per pound.

Speaking of the evil of lawns: heard of edible estates? I'd link to its website, but it's sort of a disorganized mess. Basically this guy started this project to teach people how to use edible plants in a front-lawn-replacing landscape. If done correctly it reduces water need and certainly pesticide and herbicide need and also produces something useful, unlike lawns, which produce nothing but neighborhood homogeneity and cover thousands of square miles of America.

Speaking of the horticultural applications of pee...

But not my pee this time. I'm talking about the rather intriguing idea of aquaponics.

Aquaculture is the practice of growing fish as a cash crop.
Hydroponics is the practice of growing plants in a medium other than soil using a nutrient solution to provide them with the elements they'd usually pull from the soil.

Each of these practices on its own produces a harmful by-product. In aquaculture it's all the fish sewage. In hydroponics the nutrient solution is often not completely utilized and it's an expensive sometimes chemically intensive input.

Aquaponics combines the two systems to mimic a more natural polyculture where the plants clean the water and the fish provide the nutrients. In a perfectly functioning aquaponics system the only inputs are fish food, water to top off from evaporation and a minimal amount of electricity to run the pumps that circulate the water from fish to plants and back. I've seen these run from solar cells housed above the unit.

Tilapia is a common fish grown in this setup, since they're tolerant of a lot of conditions and can be fed table scraps (but they're vegetarians. awww). It's sort of like worm composting, but with fish. Feed them your scraps, scraps avoid waste stream, fish make "waste" into plant nutrients, plants make it back into human nutrients. Cool. I love neat, clean, all tied up in a pretty package ideas like this.

I realize, of course, that a perfectly functioning system is by no means an easy feat. One home experimenter wrote that hobby aquaponics is a good way to become a serial fish-killer until you get it right. Still, this whole thing makes me want a yard/greenhouse/place to experiment/even a big balcony really badly. And it's making Alli nervous that we may someday be that crazy house on the block with all sorts of abandoned experiments and lengths of plastic tubing in the back yard.

It's not my fault; I was born with an inherent need to tinker with things.

Oh and here's a link to a video of a home-made aquaponics system.

Pee!?!?

I figure my long gap between posts is merited, since it's winter, and all my garden was doing was decomposing the organic matter that I piled there. I took my straw mulch and put it in a pile, and added some leaves and some kitchen scraps and hoped for compost.

I knew that this was mostly an unrealistic hope, given the low outdoor temperatures and the low levels of nitrogen in the mix. Finally, I decided that the pile just had to have a nitrogen boost. I searched around all the forums and various other resources that I frequent before I resort to trial and error, and found many suggestions for adding nitrogen. Some were good suggestions, but expensive. Some required that I own a 50 gallon aquarium.

I settled on the easiest and cheapest nitrogen boost, one much touted in every forum I looked at, after I did some research on its safety. I'll give you a hint, it involved a wide mouthed empty plastic jar and we flushed the toilet way less frequently. Human urine, as it turns out, is very high in nitrogen.

I also recently found this gem, an article on organic container gardening adapted to the slums of Mexico City, which relies heavily on urine use. Very interesting.

Garden in late October

Just after the first frost, I decided it was time to pull all of my lettuces. They were holding up quite well, but the weather is supposed to take a colder turn very soon. So on Monday Alli and her friend Tim and I pulled up all the arugula and mustard greens. I picked out the damaged leaves and we made a big salad for all four of us who ate dinner at home that night and still had a ton left over.

So it's been salad week, over here, and the only thing left in my garden is some beets, that feral mint and the decomposing hay mulch. The hay is much larger in quantity than the last time I noted it, because I bought a big bale of it when Alli, Brynne and I went to a farm selling pumpkins (and also cider, cheeses and hay, among other things). You should have seen Alli trying to wrestle that hay into the back of her perennially pristine car trunk. There's no better way to say "I love you."

Been a while

So I have gone quite a while without an update. And quite a few things have happened since I last posted.

We finally got some much needed rain around here, which all came at once and preceded the first frost by only a few days. And it's still a very dry year.

Hannah and I went apple picking, oh ages ago now. My garden is one part of my general eating locally and seasonally efforts and I've decided to include a few others from time to time. So we went apple picking. We each bought an absurd quantity of apples (about 25 pounds?) and I also got a lot of winter squash. When you re trying to eat seasonal and local there are times of year where you just have to make your peace with apples and squash. We've been able to supplement these things with the greens, root vegetables and late tomatoes from my garden and our experiments in bread making.

If you were to look in my refrigerator and freezer for a while there (and also now) you'd find a plethora of squash and pumpkin soups and homemade apple sauce. Alli can cut up apples REALLY FAST as I learned while I was trying to peel them and keep up with her when we were loading our crock pot for the applesauce. It was a truly delicious applesauce but all those apples and apples products went surprisingly fast.