sastyk
Posts by this author
The Report "The Potential for Urban Agriculture in New York City" reveals that there's a lot more open land even in one of the most densely packed places in the US than most people think. This simply backs up what we know from other cities around the world which do much more urban farming than New…
Hi Folks - I've gotten (rightly) a number of emailed complaints about the number of comments that are disappearing, and more questions about whether I am censoring comments, or moderating them.
Other than a few occasions for egregious attacks on other posters or sucking up my time until I had no…
Here's the syllabus - I still have a couple of regular spots and one scholarship spot available, so please email me at jewishfarmer@gmail.com if you'd like one. The class runs six weeks starting tomorrow and is asynchronous and online. Cost of the class is $100. Hope some of you can join us!…
One of our families favorite things to do is check out old cemetaries - my kids love to read gravestones and talk about the stories that came behind them. I love cemetaries - I find them comforting in an odd way, although I'm not fully sure I can explain why, and I'm glad that my children have the…
I won't usually publish ID updates here, but I did want to remind everyone who wants to participate that this is going on - please feel free to jump in, post updates at your blog, on facebook or in the comments of the update threads (posted on Fridays) at www.sharonastyk.com. In the meantime, here…
Kurt Cobb has a great article at Resource Insights about why I think the best case against fraccing in my area isn't the water, it is the boom and bust cycle - with a predominance of bust. The last thing rural PA or upstate NY need is another short term boom and bust cycle that leaves them with a…
Are you gearing up for the new garden season and thinking ahead about what to do to make your garden work all year long for you? Concerned about the rising price of food and looking for ways to feed your family through tougher times? Want to get in on the fun and wonderful flavors of home…
Fairly often, when someone comes to our farm to make a purchase or do a job, the implicit assumption is that they should talk to Eric. The first time I remember seeing this was when we were farm shopping back a decade ago - we met our first realtor and visited our first farm, and the realtor led…
I am a homeschooler, a private schooler and a public schooler, and as such, don't have a strong ideological commitment to any of the above - I think they all have their place. My oldest son has severe autism and attends a private school for children with autism, but paid for and managed by the…
Now let's be clear - we all knew Mitt Romney did not give a flying fuck about the poor. Other than the occasional service provider, he's never met any poor people, first of all. Moreover, it is a fact that no presidential candidate, Democratic or Republican for the last 30 years has cared about…
Counting Out Rhyme
Silver bark of beech, and sallow
Bark of yellow birch and yellow
Twig of willow.
Stripe of green in moosewood maple,
Colour seen in leaf of apple,
Bark of popple.
Wood of popple pale as moonbeam,
Wood of oak for yoke and barn-beam,
Wood of hornbeam.
Silver bark of beech, and…
My fellow geeky Jewish goat-farmer Reb Deb sent me this, and I couldn't resist posting it:
Kari Hamerschlag has a post up about the upcoming Farm Bill and its potential to move money away from large scale industrial agriculture and towards smaller producers. For most small farmers producing for local markets, the idea is heady - after all, the economics agriculture are tenuous for many…
Christian Parenti has a really good article in TomDispatch about the reasons why Climate Change may change people'st thinking about the role of government:
Global warming and the freaky, increasingly extreme weather that will accompany it is going to change all that. After all, there is only one…
What I think is most important about the Nature article (unfortunately behind a paywall - Energy Bulletin has a summary here) is that part of its underlying presence is that it is possible to make major changes in the use of fossil fuels on the peak oil issue in ways it is not possible to make…
I try really hard to ignore the presidential election, I do, but this was too funny not to post! Yes, a hoax, but hey, shoulda been.
Sharon
This is a revised version of a post that appeared three years ago, towards the start of the recession. It seems just as relevant, maybe more relevant, now.
A while back there was a study that suggested that it is more expensive to be poor in the US in some ways, than it is to be rich. And to…
Well, as the republican donnybrooks narrow down, the enemy becomes evident - the American poor. Newt Gingrich particularly dislikes poor folk, especially poor children, because after all, if they were good people they wouldn't be poor, they'd be working 50 hours a week in some nice sweatshop!…
No, not the kind used in track and field (although if you really want to jump over them I won't stop you), I mean the sort used to keep livestock in without breaking the budget on fencing. They look cool, and now is the perfect time of year to prune out branches and hurdle making materials. We…
I've always read cookbooks the way one reads novels, not only for recipes but for plots, stories and bits of detail, and one of the details I always look for are acknowledgements of particular tastes in my cookbook authors. The reason I look for this is that cookbooks are usually a uniquely…
Given that January is the season for regretting excesses and making new starts, I thought I'd offer Sharon's patented formula for losing 10lbs fast - absolutely guaranteed to take off the weight like lightning.;
Day 1: Spend most of the day getting ready for a weekend event - running errands,…
If you have followed energy issues from anywhere other than a cave on a mountain peak, you've probably heard technoutopians utter some variation on the following sentence two or three hundred times "We walked on the moon - of course we can do whatever it takes to shift from fossil fuels to some…
If you aren't familiar with the Export Land Model for oil, you should be - I've posted about Jeffrey Brown's incredibly important work many times in the past, but it is still common for even people who otherwise grasp the basic points of peak oil to not thoroughly understand that internal…
In college I lived in a house where I was the only female resident among a largish group of guys. Along with assorted boyfriends, girlfriends and hangers on, our house became a hang-out for a lot of people, and we regularly sat down with 15-20 people for dinner. Our food budgets, however, were…
On January 1, it was 48 degrees on my farm. My sons were at the playground, dressed in sweatshirts and jeans, rather than winter coats and mittens. Their ice skates had yet to be used this year. Their sleds haven't even come out of the garage. Walking out in the warm weather among the goats, I…
First of all, I owe y'all an apology for the radio silence. Somehow this month I've felt a deep need for some quiet, rest and offlineness. It was quite an autumn here - it started with the destruction of Irene and Lee (and dealing with those disasters are still a major part of life in our…
Meg emails to ask me "How much work is small-scale farming, anyway?" I want to farm and I'm planning on trying it out over the summer as an intern, but what I'm worried about is not being able to keep up with everyone else. I'm healthy and reasonably energetic, but everyone makes it sound so hard…
Megan Quinn Bachman has a fabulous piece on the problem of net energy ignorance. Megan followed a group of ASPO attendees who visited congressional offices to talk about peak oil, and found pretty much what you'd expect - but what you'd expect has serious consequences:
During our congressional…