My absolute favorite kinds of presentations to give (even though they are by far the most work) are the one's I've been doing increasingly often, giving analyses of regional food security. I focus on both present and prospective food issues in a lower energy, less economically stable and warmer future. in them I set out both the historical crops and food source of the region, and what is currently produced there, and explore what steps a community or a bioregion might take to enhance their food security. I examine underutilized resources, and what else might be brought into play. I…

Check out ASPO-USA's first webinar, with Art Berman. Note that full membership will get you the whole webinar series. It is coming up on Thursday, so don't delay! Sharon

Your blogiste will be getting ready for Passover, spring planting and travelling to visit family. So don't expect too much from me. I'll be back to normal mid-week next week, by about the point that I never, ever want to see another piece of matzah again. Back to Passover cleaning. Hope all of your houses are tidier than mine (which would not be difficult ;-)). Sharon

We're very tiny maple producers, and only on a home scale. I boil the syrup down on the back of our woodstove, and collect the syrup from old plastic buckets. Our operation is stone-age compared to our more serious neighbors. We don't have much of a sugar bush - most of our land was open 30 years ago, and we have only a moderate number of maple trees and many of those too small to tap. In twenty years, it should be respectable, though, as maples replace many of the other first growth trees. If, of course, it isn't too warm for them. This year we tapped for only two weeks - the warm…

The mother of mulch gardening explains how she did it - in her 90s. My favorite part is how she grows all her own vegetables, does all the housework, preserves her vegetables and never does anything after 11am.

I know some of you have already BTDT or started earlier this season, but I do know I have some readers expecting their first mammal babies and maybe a little bit nervous about it. My feeling is that there are three things you should remember in kidding. 1. 99% of the time, the animals should be able to do this fine without you. 2. Even if you have to intervene, 99% of those times, everything goes ok. 3. It gets easier if you know what to expect. Here's a (very silly, non-technical, done by someone who likes to make a big deal of how gross it is - of course, he's a guy and never given birth…

In Mildred Kalish's brilliant memoir, _Little Heathens: Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm During the Great Depression_ she writes of the ways that children and adults alike were blindsided by fear in a crisis. For children, the fear was that events out of their control terrified and shook the stable human anchors of their lives. For the adults, events were just is incomprehensible, but they had the added burden that they were supposed to understand what was going on: "Though we didn't understand them, we children were seldom protected from the harsh realities of the period, and…

I've always liked Tom Murphy's "Do the Math" work, and I really like his latest piece on phantom loads and electricity cutting. That's one of the very first steps for most of us whe we seriously try and cut our electrical usage, but one that a lot of people don't know to do about. We've been able to radically reduce our electric usage by a lot of the same strategies, and they really work: One of the most important reductions one can make is reduction of baseload power: devices that consume energy 24/7. Every 1 W eliminated removes 9 kWh from the yearly tally and about $1 of yearly cost at…

I would like to create more oil. Specifically, I'd like to create it up on my field - a gusher of light, sweet crude would be just the thing to fund my farming habit, plus provide some neat little tax benefits. Rural upstate New York has a sad lack of oil fields, and given its recession-prone economy, I think it would be just the place for some oil. Fortunately, all I have to do, according to Forbes Magazine, is help along the development of new technologies that will extract all the oil that I'd like upstate New York to have. Because, of course as any dimwit knows, we don't consume…

...My laundry pile was empty. I mean, empty. Nothing more to wash. This unprecedented state of affairs (in a working farm household with 6 people, four of them attracted to mud like magnets) didn't last long - then Asher dumped his muddy socks on the floor and Eli took a bath and pushed the towel into the tub and then the kids got out of the clothes bearing the day's accumulated grime - but I did briefly have no laundry to do. None. Other people may think this is a weird thing to worry about, but you have to understand my life. There is ALWAYS laundry in the pile, there are ALWAYS…

If you are interested, check out my peak oil review commentary for this week, which explores what collapse really is - and what we might do about it. The main issue is that it is a heck of a lot more normal than most folks imagine. The piece is a shortened excerpt taken from my forthcoming book _Making Home_. Looking at the history of collapse is really important for us to gauge from history how likely it is - and what we find is that collapse - in the sense of a radical, long term and consequential step down in complexity and comfort - is part of the background of a lot of human lives. I…

Richard Heinberg has a nice piece about drawing conclusions from present trends. Among his observations: If current economic trends continue . . . China's economy will be 8 times as big as it is today by 2040. China's economy will surpass the size of the present global economy before 2050. The US federal debt will double--from $14 trillion to $28 trillion--by 2022. In 2072, the federal debt will amount to $896 trillion, or $1,629,091 for each American (assuming a US population then of 550 million). By the end of the century, each American will "owe" over a billion dollars. Thanks to the…

Check out the celebrity cow tippers, of course. What else? Harrison Ford owns a property out by me and he's out in the pastures ALL THE TIME. "Han Solo is messing with the cows again" is practically the neighborhood refrain. I swear. Sharon

The always-thoughtful Gail Tverberg has a great post that simply shows in visual terms the history of world energy consumption - well worth a look. I've reproduced one of her graphs here, but please read the whole thing. One graph not in her post (not suggesting it should be, but I like the contrast) is world discovery of oil over about the same period - anyone who implicitly believes we are discovering vast reserves should contrast the two: (Source, Colin Campbell) Gail goes on to write about how an economist might be misled by past trends to disregard "facts in the ground" - lack of…

The season cycled over the weekend - officially it is not quite spring, but in fact, spring now has a toe hold. Even if it goes back to chilly or even snows, the ground is too warm for it to last, by the end of an unusually warm week the grass will be green and the soil dried enough to move forward. That doesn't mean my (optimistic) plantings of peas and bok choy, spinach and sweet peas may not stagnate or my fruit tree blooms get caught by frost (we can't even say a late frost, it is two months to my last frost date, and anything can happen in upstate NY and usually does), that the boys in…

It has been a few years since I've done a really close examination of how much of our food we're producing/getting locally/getting from elsewhere. In that time, some things have changed at our place - some of our fruit trees have begun producing, we've gotten more and different livestock, we've built relationships with some new sources. On the other hand, foster children have meant we are required to provide some purchased milk and other items we didn't buy previously, and we also have been the beneficiaries of a lot of things given to us by our dumpster-diving buddy. I think it is time…

This was an important discussion back when I wrote it in 2007, and somehow, I've never re-run it (although it does appear in Aaron and my book _A Nation of Farmers_). It is definitely time to talk more about this model, and I'm hoping to enlist many of you in doing an evaluation of the real productivity of our home gardens and farms - using this as a model. So time to run it again, as a starting point for seeing how much progress the local food movement has really made in the years since it began! The 100-mile diet has gotten trendy - but there's a problem with this model. The idea that…

Probably the biggest loss to last year's flooding in upstate New York was my potato crop. I could have dug them by the end of August, but as the saying goes "shoulda but didnta." It was a warm summer and potatoes stay better in the ground in August here than they do in my house - unless, of course, they are under 3 feet of water. The big loss wasn't the potatoes I had planned to eat all winter, although that was a pity - I can buy potatoes from farms that weren't flooded, up on higher ground. What I lost were 5 years of saved potato seed, varieties initially purchased and now adapted to…

(Mac, doing the guard thing) I don't live in New York City, so I don't have to go quite through what these folks did to adopt a cat. If one of my neighbors hasn't rescued a cat some idiot dropped off (because that's what you do with cats you can't take care of, right, throw them out of your car in the country where they will totally be fine ;-P), we have a long-standing and deeply friendly relationship with someone who does cat rescue, and she is happy to pass cats on to us for adoption. Still, I did come into contact with the Stalinist dog rescue folk shortly before we BOUGHT Mac: "I'm so…

Spring is a trick of the light - it should be, after all, since ultimately the shift of seasons is about angles and sun. At some point in March the light changes - a new "certain slant of light" and thus, spring is here. It will be a while most years before the green and the daffodils or even the spring peepers arrive in upstate NY, but in the meantime, the sky and the air and the angle of sun says spring. Seed starting is in full swing now and I sometimes feel I spend far too many of my days elbow deep in potting soil - but the smell of moist compost is energizing as well. It is…