sastyk
Posts by this author
February 20, 2011
What I stand for is what I stand on. - Wendell Berry
Note: You've got to give the Dervaes' some credit - their asshattery has inspired a wholel lot of focus on urban sustainable agriculture, homesteading and making a good life in the city! Today is "Urban Homesteading Day" and in its honor, here…
February 18, 2011
Somehow this week has turned into a lovely, but incredibly overscheduled period. Besides the usual sabbath (which I can use this week), and the fact that it has finally melted off enough to clean the buck pen, move the bucks up the hill and move the chicks out of the bathtub (adorable as they are…
February 17, 2011
From The Ineffable Crunchy Chicken:
There's a bit of hub-bub going on on Facebook right now about how the Dervaes family (of Path to Freedom fame) has successfully trademarked the terms "urban homestead" and "urban homesteading" and is forcing Facebook to shut down pages that use the term and…
February 15, 2011
One of the projects we're working on is ways to bring more people to our farm. A lot of folks want to see what we're doing, and we've been contemplating open farm days, and possible ideas for classes we might teach. Well, while Eric and I were discussing it the other night, we came up with the…
February 14, 2011
"Everyone says I love you, but just what they say it for I never knew. Its just inviting trouble for the poor sucker who says I love you."
February 14, 2011
I'm a bit short on time today, given that I told my boys that today is "smooch day" and Moms have to kiss their kids as much as possible. Since my boys are all deep in the "ewwww....kissing" phase this means that they are spending every spare minute following me around and daring me to try and…
February 14, 2011
This is a lightly revised and updated version of a piece that ran at ye olde blogge and at Grist, but it seems just as pertinent now as it did in 2007 when I wrote it. At the time, some people doubted that the boom we were seeing in biofuel production, which was pushing up grain prices, would be…
February 13, 2011
I have to say, learning to replace a zipper now and again has extended the life of a number of favorite items of clothing. It is a very simple thing, but a bit of a pain, and useful to see how to do it. The Matron of Husbandry at Trapper Creek has kindly provided a great post and a great…
February 11, 2011
"Did you look at the forecast?" "Is this it?" "Should we get them out?"
My children keep asking, and I keep telling them that I think so, but that no one can know for sure. We are talking of the change in the weather, slated to begin today, warming us up from the last wave of bitter cold with…
February 10, 2011
(Yes, I will eventually explain this ;-))
I don't usually participate in the Huffington Post bashing that goes on at science blogs. Not because I don't often agree with it, but because my colleagues seem to have it covered when it comes to autism/vaccine links and dubious medical studies. Still…
February 9, 2011
The first thing you need to remember is to think ahead, and bring in the compost before three feet of snow and ice lands on top of it. That was my big discovery two years ago, and like so many big discoveries was a. unpleasant and b. completely obvious - in retrospect. Living in a linear society,…
February 9, 2011
It was only a matter of time - Bart Anderson of Energy Bulletin even predicted it in the ASPO-USA predictions piece I put together this December! From the Guardian:
The US fears that Saudi Arabia, the world's largest crude oil exporter, may not have enough reserves to prevent oil prices escalating…
February 7, 2011
Ok, I have to go frantically clean my house. Objectively I know that the social worker wants to know that the house is clean, safe and appropriate for kids, not to look at the shine on the linoleum (of which there is presently none ;-)). In my inner heart, however, I'm pretty sure she's going to…
February 7, 2011
In all the chaos of having interrupted internet and lots of stormy weather, I never posted a January Anyway Project Update - oops, sorry! So here's an early February one, and I'll try and do one in late Feb. as well, because, of course, I'll definitely be accomplishing double in this short month…
February 3, 2011
These were taken before the 18 inches of snow that fell the other day, so you can actually see the ground, but the scene is still basically the same - white, with scattered critters. We're all definitely starting to dream of spring!
The creek in winter
Asher at the Creek
Isaiah, finding…
February 1, 2011
There's a great scene in the book _Cheaper By the Dozen_ (which had almost nothing to do with the recent movie Steve Martin was in, although there's a fairly good old one) in which Lillian Moller Gilbraith, mother of 12 (11 surviving) is offered by a joking friend as the ideal host for a Planned…
February 1, 2011
I once wrote an essay about my son Isaiah's wish for a farm. He has a farm, of course, but he also dreams of a different one, the one in his imagination. What was funny was that all the adults that saw his wish understood it so very well. Many people tell me how much they want a farm. But other…
February 1, 2011
Note: I wrote this piece in 2009, when my boys were younger. By now they chop food for dinner, Isaiah can indeed use the hatchet and Simon and Isaiah have their own flocks of birds, and the sale of any eggs they raise. The general principles are still the same. We still don't give allowances per…
January 31, 2011
Stuart Staniford has a terrific piece that offers a little visual clarity about food, energy, unemployment and the Riots in the Middle East and North Africa:
Tunisia is a minnow in the global oil market, Egypt slightly more important. Algeria, however, matters a lot as its oil production is…
January 31, 2011
From The Onion:
According to anthropologists, untold millions of slaves and serfs toiled their whole lives to complete the gap. Records indicate the work likely began around 10,000 years ago, when the world's first landed elites convinced their subjects that construction of such a monument was the…
January 31, 2011
Remember how I said I was going to do 31 book reviews in January, and well...didn't? On Friday, I finally got reliable internet back, just in time to shut down for the sabbath, so now I'm playing catch up. Got to get about 25 book reviews done today. That should happen, right?
Just a reminder…
January 26, 2011
I am *still* without full access to my email, although new stuff is at least being forwarded to Eric's account. I apologize profusely for the difficulties, but I know that some people who tried to register either got bounces or got through, but are buried in my gmail account without my having…
January 26, 2011
The good news is that everyone was more or less happy about Obama's stated energy policy last night. The Republicans were happy because Obama was talking about a "clean standard" which actually means "let's burn fossil fuels in a barely less harmful way" - ie, let's switch some dirty coal to…
January 25, 2011
Paul Kingsnorth has a brilliant article on what underlies the disproportion in attention between flooding in the Global South and Global North, and what it says about how we see the world:
This imperial narrative morphed, after the death of the Western empires, into the narrative of 'development'…
January 25, 2011
There's quite a bustle among my colleagues about the deficiencies of recent studies about whether X female thingie evolved as a strategy to prevent rape. My favorite such study is one that seems to think that the only critical thing that happens when women ovulate is that they might get raped.…
January 25, 2011
A number of readers asked me to comment on the recent Argentine report that predicts disaster for world food supplies based on Climate Change in the near term. I hadn't done so because I was honestly puzzled by the report, which got a lot of attention, and raised awareness of climate food issues,…
January 24, 2011
Note: I'm way behind on my 31 books resolution - I'll have to hurry to catch up. In the meantime, will you count these 12? I bet you don't own them!
Worms Eat my Laundry by Alcea Grovestock - Worms are hot - in-house domestic composting is everywhere. But have you considered the way red…
January 24, 2011
Gardeners like to compete with each other over who has the worst soil. You wouldn't think we'd be proud of this, but what can I say, we're a strange bunch. One will argue for his hard clay, baked in the sun, another for her sand, without a trace of organic matter. I've got my own candidate for…
January 20, 2011
Sorry for the extended radio silence. A combination of Apprentice Weekend, followed by Fellowship Application due, followed by ice storm related power outage, followed by internet outage of indeterminate cause, followed by visitor, followed by a series of family administrative things put off…
January 13, 2011
I'll be offline until Tuesday of next week, running my winter apprentice weekend (or Goat Camp as one attendee called it ;-)). The next one will be offered in May, and will be a family-friendly long weekend (tentatively Memorial Day weekend - I'll confirm that in the next week). You can bring the…