sastyk | July 13, 2012There's a fascinating article using Zillow analysis to figure out the value of food gardens to residential housing. This isn't news to a lot of us, but it is nice to see the numbers quantified:
Minor Kitchen Remodel. Cost: $14,917 Return on resale: $14,645 Percentage Return: -1.8%
Major Bathroom Remodel. Cost: $26,060 Return on resale: $24,264 Percentage return: -6.9%
Here’s how a garden stacks up:
Average cost of a garden per year (what people spend today): - $70
Average value of a garden per year (in produce): + $600
Average value of a garden per year: + $530
So, the…
sastyk | July 9, 2012Just as I was getting back in the swing of regular blogging again, I got quite a surprise - this afternoon we got called and asked to take an additional foster placement - a 2 day old newborn. As I write this, I have a tiny, sweet little person asleep in my arms (it turns out that like riding a bicycle, you never forget how to type and hold a baby). And yes, Z. is yet another boy! I shoulda known - just when someone gave me a buttload of girl baby clothes and Barbies ;-).
So, umm, if I don't post much in the next few days it is because I'm sleep deprived, drunk on new baby scent and…
sastyk | July 9, 2012As you probably know the 2012 Farm Bill has food stamps on the block. I write a lot about food stamps because they are incredibly important - one in seven Americans uses them. One in four children is on food stamps. When you subsidize food for this many people, you functionally transform the larger food system. America, it turns out, subsidizes food just as many other nations do, because without it, people would be hungry. Although food represents one of the smaller budget items for many Americans, an increasing number can't afford it. The transformation of our society into one…
sastyk | July 8, 2012Remember I told you that New Society Publishers, in honor of the forthcoming _Making Home_ would sponsor a spot in my Adapting-in-Place Class, in exchange for someone offering up a weekly blog post about what it is like to take the course. Well, here's the first installment - it will go up at New Society's "Word Out" blog tomorrow or the next day as well.
Who is reporting live from the AIP class, well, she's going by the name of M. - here's more about her. AIP can get pretty intense, and we all share a lot about our lives that we might not put out there to everyone, so I totally support…
sastyk | July 8, 2012http://whyy.org/cms/radiotimes/2012/07/06/preserving-our-backyard-bounty-in-jars-cans/
I was on WHYY in Philadelphia the other day talking about canning with _Food in Jars_ author Marisa McClellan. 'Twas awesome!
sastyk | July 4, 2012The most important thing about the power outages in the mid-Atlantic is that no one expected them to be this bad, so no one was ready. The storms on Friday were stronger than expected, so no one, including the power company, was prepared. That meant that for 3 million homes, the loss of electricity was a total shock, arriving in the middle of a heat wave. Almost a million households still lack power five days later.
For many of those households, had this been a blizzard or a hurricane, bottles of water would have been purchased, gas cans filled up, prescriptions refilled, pantries stocked…
sastyk | July 3, 2012
In honor of Making Home, my new book on Adapting-In-Place which comes out in August, New Society has offered to sponsor a spot in my Adapting-in-Place class that starts tomorrow. In exchange for a sponsored spot for a low-income participant who couldn't otherwise afford to take the class, New Society will ask for a weekly blog post on what the class is doing, what it is like and what you are thinking about. I'll post them at my site, and they will also appear on the NS blog. I already have one blogger doing this, but I have one more space (sorry, only one). Email me at jewishfarmer@…
sastyk | July 3, 2012A little while back we took our current foster sons to visit the university where Eric teaches physics. The boys had never visited a university before, and were curious about who goes there and what they do when they are there. This led to a discussion of the value of a college education, what kinds of jobs require college, and what kind don't.
From here, we segued to "What do you want to be when you grow up?" and it was here that the enormous gap between my biological children, trained from birth to see an adult profession/vocation, mixed perhaps with informal economic activities, as…
sastyk | July 3, 2012I can't really blame George Monbiot or anyone else for buying the narrative hype. Right now the overwhelming narrative is that we have no energy constraints at all. Folks wonder aloud whether the US should join OPEC. Increasingly ridiculous projections are made about the potential of shale oil and new drilling techniques. Slight upticks are assumed to be headed to their logical extremes, and Harvard's Kennedy School of Government issues a report saying we've got all the oil we could ever want. So is it really surprising that Monbiot, who has been focused on climate change, not peak oil…
sastyk | June 28, 2012There's this Onion Column - I'm pretty sure she wouldn't want a bunch of dirt covered farming hicks being able to get their tetanus shots. I shoulda thought of that!
The only reason this is even being considered is because a majority of voters want it. Well, of course they do—they don't have it! But you don't see 33rd Degree Freemasons letting any old average citizen into their inner sanctum just because he's curious. And you won't catch me sharing my God-given right to affordable lifesaving medical procedures with every bum who's got a jones for another hepatitis vaccination. It's…
sastyk | June 28, 2012While I recover from a nasty case of food poisoning, I thought in honor of the SCOTUS decision, it would be worth re-running this piece from 2009. For all that this is not the national health care system the US needs, it is, in the end, a small step in the right direction.
A while back, at a talk I gave, a small scale farmer asked me why my family didn’t farm full time. I observed that one of the reasons we don’t is simply that we have young children and we feel that we have a need for benefits. He pointed out that my state, New York, has a program to provide health insurance for the…
sastyk | June 22, 2012Well, since the Rio Summit failed to save the world (again), and we're slipping back into economic crisis, and _Making Home_ my book on Adapting-in-Place comes out in August, it seems like the right time to teach my AIP class again. It helps to renew my sense of purpose as well - there's nothing like sitting down and sorting out all the work we're doing to get ready for the world we actually are emerging into again to feel a sense of excitement and purpose about it.
The class will start on American Independence Day, July 4, and we'll declare our independence from corporations and the fear…
sastyk | June 22, 2012So everyone raise your hand if you are shocked, shocked and appalled, that the sum up for the Earth Summit Rio+20 conference was, as the UK's Deputy Prime Minister put it "Insipid."
The meeting, marking 20 years since the iconic Earth Summit in the same city and 40 since the very first global environment gathering in Stockholm, was aimed at stimulating moves towards the "green economy".
But the declaration that was concluded by government negotiators on Tuesday and that ministers have not sought to re-open, puts the green economy as just one possible pathway to sustainable development.
Mary…
sastyk | June 20, 2012Apologies to everyone for the radio silence - lots of stuff going on here and the blog has been horribly neglected. Between trying to get the final garden push done, a bunch of goat birthing (including four beautiful babies yesterday for Eric's 42nd birthday - Urania gave us Tybalt and Mercutio in the wee hours while Calendula delivered Beatrice and Benedick), a lot of legal and medical proceedings involving C. and K, our foster sons, and the end-of-school stuff (Eli is transitioning from the program for kids with autism that he's been in since kindergarten to a new program for middle school…
sastyk | June 7, 2012I really wish I could share pictures of K. and C., who are having their first farm springtime, complete with baby goats, dam building in the creek, their own gardens, finding nests of newly hatched chicks, catching toads and salamanders, eating salads made with wild greens they collect themselves, but that would violate their privacy. Still, I think I can give you at least a sense of the Hun-like decimation of food that goes on in my house with six little guys - they all stuck their hands in over the jambalaya to show how a pan the size of Idaho makes just over one meal:
Meanwhile the…
sastyk | June 5, 2012The first person to ever refer to me as middle-aged in print was my friend Rod Dreher. On the one hand, I appreciated the publicity. On the other hand, I was 34 at the time, and I may never entirely forgive him. Still, the shock has waned, and I have come to terms with the fact that if I'm not middle aged now, I will officially be so on August 15 when I cross the line into my 40s.
To be absolutely honest, hitting middle age bothers me not in the slightest - my feeling is that every year that takes me away from being 14 is a really, really good one - and the further the better. I would go…
sastyk | June 5, 2012Greenpa asked me to talk about how we cook in the summer, and that's a very good subject to talk about - what does a woman who "dances with wood" and cooks on a wood cookstove all winter long do in the summer? Well, part of the answer is that when we're lazy, we use the electric stove that came with the house. Now from an environmental standpoint, electric stoves are a pretty lousy option. Using electricity to create heat mostly means burning coal in the US. Now my family purchases renewable electricity and also my region uses a fair bit of hydro-power, but that's something of a grey area…
sastyk | May 30, 2012I try to post this once a year or so, because most of the people who read my blog also play in the dirt, and with playing in the dirt comes minor injuries that you really don't want to turn into anything nasty. So, if you haven't had a tetanus booster in the last decade, or don't remember having one, now is the time to get updated. Tetanus is not avoidable by good health practices, boosting your immune system, etc... - it is caused by a bacteria in the soil entering into your body through a wound - often wounds so small it would never occur to you that it could threaten your life. You…
sastyk | May 30, 2012From The Nation, Laura Flanders has a piece on what happened to all those long-term unemployed people who have given up - with a flattering quote from yours truly (the quote is further along, to give you an incentive to read the whole thing ;-)).
Look around, it’s much more likely that the officially “unemployed” are busy, doing their best to make ends meet in whatever ways they can. Sex work, drugs and crime spring to mind, but the underground or “shadow” economy includes all sorts of off-the-books toil. From baby-sitting, bartering, mending, kitchen-garden farming and selling goods in a…
sastyk | May 30, 2012Hi Folks - Just to let you know, I do know about the disappearing comments, and I'm sorry about it. ScienceBlogs is working on getting the bugs out of the new format. Apologies for the inconvenience - I'm hoping some of them come back one of these days! If it is any consolation, a number of my replies to your comments have also disappeared...;-P.
Sharon