Scaling the Peak

A January thaw

2012-01-26T07:44:00.002-05:00

After piles of snow and sustained subzero weather, we received... a thaw. Temperatures pushed up above freezing, turning drifts into mists, revealing grass and dirt in some spots.

Charlie Hohn points out that a January thaw is a Vermont tradition.

After weeks or even months of almost entirely below freezing temperatures, the weather warms for a couple of days, usually around this time of year, it often rains, and all of the life in the forest (and the city) that has trouble getting through the winter gets a little breather.

I love these counterintuitive moments here, like snow in May.

Into a season of whiteness and storms

2012-01-17T11:08:00.000-05:00

We just entered the snowstormy phase of winter. January through March is when snowfall is frequent enough to not be remarkable. The temperature sometimes stays well below freezing for a while, like it did earlier this week, which keeps snow already on the ground from freezing. Occasionally the temp lifts up to the 30s, which seems to summon snow out of eager-to-appear clouds.

So white is and will remain the major landscape theme for a while. This is when the ground is deeply blanketed in white, and that blanket's upper level rises steadily. Snowbanks and drifts are just parts of the landscape. Trees, cars, fences, outbuildings are always covered. We cut and recut trails and trenches for daily routines: to the chicken house, the wood piles, the lower compost pile, the main sledding cut.

It's also the season of continuous ice. Ice sneaks under snow and crusts on top of it. Bodies of water are partly or entirely covered with ice, as Charlie Hohn reminds us.

About once a month comes a huge storm, and we prepare like our southern friends do against a hurricane: stockpiling emergency supplies, assuming a loss of electricity. We've been lucky so far.

Naturally we're not growing any crops now. In fact now is when our autumn harvests become even more precious. Each potato feels like a victory against the suspension of growing, a treat stolen from time. And yet the limitations of our larder remind us how far we have to go in becoming self-sustaining. That's a goad for our spring planting planning: more plots, more plants!

Meanwhile, Ceredwyn's chicken house light hack continues to bear fruit, er, eggs. Every night we see the solar-powered lights glow, illuminating brave hens. Every morning Ceredwyn hauls hot water out to the coop, and brings back eggs, like this tremendous haul from two days (!):

So we keep feeding ourselves even in this Nordic time: fresh eggs from chilly chickens, potatoes from storage, chicken meat from the freezer. Progress.

It's January and feels like winter

2012-01-15T22:47:00.003-05:00

The temperature dropped seriously yesterday. Things barely got over 1 F today, and have declined after dark:

That means:

Two fires going, in the main basement one and the kitchen stove.
Winter gear a necessity for going outside.
Despite that, Owain and I love running outside without coats or shoes, then scrambling back inside, laughing.
It's too cold for more snow to fall.
No wind to speak of.

The appearance of the landscape changes somehow, becoming sharper, clarified:

Ceredwyn cooked potatoes for dinner, which came from our fall harvest. That provision of spud stores feels urgent, now, considered against the biting cold.

(weather report from Wunderground)

A wall grows

2011-12-26T09:39:00.003-05:00

Progress on one of the stone walls:

That's all drystone - i.e., no mortar, no cement. All stones from our land.

On the darkest day of the year, chicken eggs

2011-12-21T19:34:00.000-05:00

Here's a problem with chickens: not laying eggs in winter.
It's not the cold, but the darkness. Hens need to experience a certain amount of daylight to be able to lay.
In Vermont, the winters can get pretty dark. We've grown used to no eggs from November through February.

Until now. We figured out how to light up the chicken house without wiring it to the grid.

First step: solar collector, mounted nearby:

Next, solar light within the structure:

Next, enjoy eggs.

"Please, Missus...I'm 'ungry"

2011-12-19T17:23:00.002-05:00

Had something of a Port Au Prince flashback yesterday, when a woman came up to me, panhandling in the local grocery store parking lot. Asked for a couple of bucks for dinner.

Years ago, I worked in a few different homeless shelters, so I got pretty good at spotting the different types of panhandlers. Women tend to be of two types--either mentally ill and/or druggies or so far down on their luck that everything looks up.

She looked too good to be a meth head or a crack addict, so I was curious about her. And to be honest, it was cold enough that I might have given her a couple of dollars even if she had told me she was going to go find her dealer. Whatever gets her through the night, you know?

I asked her about her situation. She told me her husband was out of work and she had a couple kids. She wanted a few dollars to make it to the end of the week. She said they'd applied for food stamps, but they hadn't been approved yet. Possible, since I don't know the availability of emergency food stamps at the moment.

I told her I didn't have much cash left. She was alone, and I hate to say it, being approached like that makes me suspicious. On the other hand, she approached me in the middle of the parking lot, in daylight, so I could see she didn't have any nefarious companions. If it had been a couple, I would have been more wary, I think.

I asked her if she wanted the extra gallon of milk I had just bought and her face lit up. So, she really was asking for food rather than drug money. I fished a couple of dollar bills out of my pocket to go with it and drove away wondering how long it would be before one of our good citizens complained to the manager of the store and the local cops asked her to move on.

As I drove away, I saw her take the gallon of milk back to her car, where a girl about the same age as my daughter sat, looking cold.

The last time I was approached by a beggar like this was in Port Au Prince. It was very common for both women and children to come up to anyone white, "Scuse me, missus. " they'd say, "I'm 'ungry." This was, more often than not, the only English they had. It was not safe to give them anything. There were so many, one risked being mobbed. I'd hold up open hands and say, "No, I got nothing."

The same sort of thing is common in many cities in the world, that children and women are seen begging. But it is unusual in the States. At least in my lifetime. This woman was a strange sort to be begging, here. Clean, neatly dressed in jeans. Her coat a few winters old. No makeup, in her thirties.

As I said, normally, women panhandlers are mentally ill or have drug habits. You might see buskers in some places, but they're generally teens...runaways without any skills to get work. Prostitutes, of course, but again, teens. Women tend to have different reasons than men for becoming homeless and they will put up with far worse conditions to remain in a "home"`than men will. They will stay in hideously abusive situations to mantain a roof over their heads and their children's heads.

And normally, a woman will generally turn first to family and friends. Go shopping in mom's cupboard, maybe. Next choice would be Welfare, food pantry or maybe church. They're all pretty tapped out this years.

More than likely, she's subsisting on Snickers. She's probably got the kids eating at school, so they at least, get two meals a day during the week. Naturally, Sunday afternoon would suck for everyone. No community dinners that I know of anywhere around here. Do church services still do coffee and donuts?

I was visiting my friend in Virginia not too long ago, when her neighbor who's down on her luck came by, asking to borrow a few dollars to buy a sack of groceries. My friend doesn't keep cash in the house and was also a little nonplussed. She gave the woman a bag of groceries out of her own cupboards instead.

My mom and I never did welfare. I don't think she knew we could have qualified. I did have Federal lunches and I ate at my friends houses a lot. The Christmas after my dad left (I was 16) my mom gave us a choice. We could have presents, or we could have Christmas dinner. We decided we'd rather have Christmas dinner and my brother found a tree somewhere for five dollars. It was like some movie of the week thing. My family never exchanged Christmas presents much after that. We always just tried to help out when anyone needed it. My mom liked to throw big holiday meals, although I'm not so inclined.

Wondering if there's going to be a lot more families at the free church meals this year, rather than just the old people and homeless.

Wondering if walking through any American city is going to become like walking through Port Au Prince, everywhere you look, a woman or a child saying, "Ma'am, can you spare something?"

Some New Englanders are running out of winter fuel

2011-12-15T12:42:00.001-05:00

New England is running into a winter heating crisis, as federal programs providing fuel to low-income people are being cut.
It's a bipartisan thing, this desire to cut back heating support:

The Obama administration has proposed cutting money for the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program in half — to about $2.5 billion nationwide. A spending bill in the U.S. House calls for cutting spending to $3.4 billion; the Senate is proposing $3.6 billion.

In Ripton we built an assistance program called REAP. On our own we find good wood, haul it to a town shed, cut it up, then stack the pieces in an accessible location. Here's a post on doing some of that community work.

If we're in a national economic crisis, this kind of local, grass-roots, peer-to-peer mutual aid is essential. Hopefully we'll see it grow, as "outside" support declines.

Lessons for a declining economy

2011-12-10T14:26:00.001-05:00

What does life look like when the economy turns bad? John Robb extrapolates from some of the northern Mexican experience, looking at the impact of rising criminal enterprises.

Let me extract some lessons which might be useful for us, just in case. One caveat: we don't have a lot of crime up here.

National networking: "There will be a diverse mix of local and national organizations" - this seems right, given the deep national nature of much of American life, especially with digital networks. Even if the national economy seizes up, there's a lot which can still operate. For example, "[m]ost of the rest of the municipalities (90%) are either on a smuggling route or a market." I imagine some Vermont towns would serve as such connectors, especially the ones pointing towards others, more populous areas: Brattleboro->Massachusetts, Bennington and Vergennes->denser parts of upstate New York.

Local violence: "The election of'"law and order' politicians/parties at the local level increases violence" - this makes sense for Vermont to a degree, since we have huge amounts of guns, and a very strong libertarian streak (for civil rights). Robb's vision of how this plays out - "gun fights/battles, lots of bodies, collatoral damage, kidnappings" - makes sense.

Towns take on new networking roles: "Crackdowns in other municipalities may cause your municipality/town to suddenly become a node in a smuggling network" - a key thing to look out for, especially given the sheer number of towns up here.

Regendered work - "When a town becomes a node on a smuggling route... leads to a fall female workforce participation (fear)." Vermont doesn't have the conservative/Catholic gender role heritage Mexico does, but I can definitely see a shift like this happening.

First December snow

2011-12-08T16:56:00.001-05:00

Snow started falling last night, commencing at dusk as a kind of rain. It became snow with darkness and dropping temperatures, then persisted overnight.

Dawn came through snow-dusted trees, across snow-covered land.

Looking east from the front porch, upslope.

The cats very much wanted to go out, but two quailed at the presence of snowfall. Two brave ones, Spider and Hunter, ventured forth. Spider did a quick dash out then return, but Hunter was stronger, braving his morning perimeter.

Until he wanted to come back in, and told me so:

Noticed late at night, outside

2011-12-05T00:05:00.001-05:00

Quick thoughts on stomping around outside just short of midnight:

Ice on the ponds, glimmering in moonlight.
Question: what keeps one's fears of the dark night forest at bay? Answer: the awareness of doing work on that land, and having to do more.
The heft of big rocks that make up my new wall.
My pupils dilating against the dark behind the house, then widening again when the only light comes from stars and moon.

And inside?

The loveliness of firewood dried these past two years, burning in the main stove.

Venus Cloacina

2011-12-04T20:38:00.000-05:00

Goddess of the Sewer

Just finished putting in all my flower bulbs. It's amazing that it's the first week of December and we still can, but it is a bit of luck for me (Ceredwyn).

At left you see the little statue I've added to the garden. Hopefully, in the spring the bulbs and wildflowers seeds I've planted will come up around her. She will also hold a butterfly/hummingbird feeder when the weather is again freezing.

She is my Venus Cloacina, Goddess of the Sewer. The Romans were very sensible people and did, in fact, have a shrine to this deity right in the middle of Rome. They said the Health of Rome depended upon her.

Hummingbirds and flowers are especially sacred to Her, according to the Wikipedia entry.

So, right over our new leach field, we have a small statue of Her, 'cause it just seems like a good idea.

Homesteading and Progress

2011-11-29T10:58:00.001-05:00

If we have to learn to slow down, Vermont is a pretty good place to do it.

Are we homesteading against the end of progress?

That's one thought underpinning our practice here. Ceredwyn and I are both Generation X kids, raised with the thought that our parents' generation could well represent a high-water mark for American social/material achievement. As adults, we perceive several specters: peak resources (water and especially oil), climate change, and financial crisis. Against the enormous stressors our homesteading is a tiny bulwark, or a small lifeboat to sail rising, turbulent seas.

This Vermont Digger post recently brought the end-of-progress idea before our eyes. Will Patten (where's your Web presence, man?) summarizes the grim big picture, then focuses in on how Vermont can cope.

The new localism is important, but it's not an unmitigated good:

Local economies will be strengthened by this development; local manufacturing will make a comeback. However, both manufacturing and retail will be hampered by reduced buying power and product selection.

I wonder how our family will rethink having access to fewer goods and services over the next decade. We're used to variety, but mostly cultural, often digital. Will having a smaller menu for non-digital items irk, down the road? We've taken steps to disengage from hyperconsumerism: no tv, not living in a city, making few shopping trips, not celebrating consumerism. I hope that's enough to train our expectations.

Patten moves on to regulations:

We “leak” billions of dollars out of state every year for food and energy that will be needed more urgently than ever to sustain the new economy. New state regulations will be needed to encourage “main street” investors to fund local generation of food and energy. The return on these investments will become more attractive as the market value of both food and energy increase.

I don't know if Vermont is ready for this. At the state level, we have a mixed record: pro-civil rights (gay marriage) and health care, but weak on connectivity and tech. For our little town and homestead I'd love to see some regulatory support for our local efforts.

Here's another very Vermont issue:

Employment will no longer serve as the prime distributor of social services such as health care and retirement plans. Self employment will increase and micro finance will be available for micro businesses. More importantly, quality of life will replace career as the definition of success.

On the one hand, this is bad news. It means less health care, probably less insurance in general, reduced purchasing power, and smaller nest eggs. On the other, quality of life is something Vermont has in abundance.
...unless one has to work feverishly to stay afloat, knitting together multiple microjobs. Then one might find oneself commuting in beauty, falling asleep from exhaustion amid lovely forests.

Put another way, homesteading in Vermont is the creation of a parallel life, a world in opposition to the other world:

Fresh water, lush farm land and healthy forests are much more attractive assets today than credit default swaps and securitized mortgages.

We have two of those three good things here, fine water and trees. Our farmland isn't lush yet, but we learned how to amend it, and are building the soil back.

What practical responses can we make, if Patten's right?
One good avenue for us is education. "Workforce training will become the focus of secondary schools and continue in online, technical and community colleges." That's my area of expertise, so perhaps it will keep on being so.

Another is microeconomics: "Labor and purchasing cooperatives will flourish and bartering will gain new acceptance." Our town-based networking is vital for this future.

Perhaps we and Patten are incorrect. Our forecasts of grim times will be disproven by a blossoming economy, powered by a force we can't see right now. The financialists will solve their problems, or a new technology save the day. That's a fine subject for another post.

For now? Raising animals, growing crops, hewing wood, drawing well water, learning woodcraft, building with stone: this is all an assertion of possibility amid beauty and danger. Our homesteading is a hedge against the hedge fund world's decline.

Hitting the limits of homesteading: some thoughts on septic

2011-11-23T13:52:00.001-05:00

What can't we do ourselves? What are the limits of homesteading practice?

We ran up against some of those limits this fall, and they smelled bad. Yes, readers, we had a septic crisis. We blogged it a little bit, earlier. Short version: we replaced our entire septic system.

Note that sentence's active voice. Passive voice is more appropriate, as in "we had our septic system replaced." Because we couldn't do it ourselves. From start to finish, we were simply passive spectators and paymasters (i.e., debtors).

Machine dropping boulders.

At best we did some manual labor, just to clear the way. We relocated a couple of compost piles, hauled around a bunch of rocks, ended one sweet flower garden.

Here's the problem. Septic work is very resource-intensive. It requires very specialized knowledge, rare skills, and big machines. None of these are readily accessible to the average homesteader. It would take a long, long time to get good enough with an excavator, for example... assuming we'd have access to one (we didn't), and know how where to dig (ditto). Or consider the septic tank, a huge construction of concrete, steel, and plastic. A new septic tank isn't something we have the skills or tools to make. That's an industrial-age artifact. Or assessing the land to make a plan: we're intimately familiar with our land, and know enough technology (GIS) to start to make a basic map. But we're not surveyors, so we had to hire someone skilled who could stomp around with lasers and other equipment. And an excavator-driving genius. Ultimately, we had to pay for many someones, by the end of the thing, along with lots of equipment and material.

One part of the work: ad hoc road cut through the land.

The only way to obtain these things is through money, and lots of it. Barter won't do. Giving eggs or hours of labor won't pay for a smidgen of septic work. Paying for it out of our monthly expenses budget: nowhere near the costs. Instead, we ended up running further into debt, in a big way, to stage the whole thing. This meant Bryan had to add more work on top of his current job to start paying for it. We plunged further into the financial world, deepening what we owe, and reversing our previous direction of reducing debts.

The old rank, ripped out and crushed.

Another homesteading problem: this project was an involuntary one, triggered by a hidden failure we couldn't anticipate. Septic tank, pipes, the leach field all live underground. They don't send date to our home network, because they don't have sensors. Septic overhaul is not something homesteaders can do on demand, just because they want to. "Say, let's add a new cold frame!" No.

When septic fails, you have to fix or replace it asap, for health reasons. Moreover, recently implemented Vermont state regulations require massive work to bring a home's septic up to snuff - i.e., not just replacing, but aggressively expanding and improving. Which is a good thing for the environment. Therefore we risked serious penalties, both financial (fines) and practical (stinking sludge, followed by health problems), until the thing was redone.

So we couldn't do it by hand. We couldn't afford it normally. It wasn't something we chose. On top of that, this was also something we had to do offline. Yes, we could research septic online, which was very helpful. But blogging about it during the process risked drawing attention to its incompletion, risking fines. So we were told by folks who've lived here much longer, and work in the government world. That process took several months, meaning two seasons of social media silence. We live online, in many ways. The Web is essential to how we learn, share our work, get feedback, network. We shared small, even cryptic hints via Facebook updates, one (1) post here, some Flickr images. But essentially this septic thing had to happen asocially, in darkness, buried.

Spot the buried tank.

When we describe this process, we sometimes compare it to going through a dangerous medical crisis. Like recovering from a heart attack, it's expensive, time-consuming, impossible to do (successfully) on your own. And when you're done? ...you're right back where you started. The cardiac survivor isn't healthier. Our homestead doesn't have some super-septic. The difference is being out a lot of money, or being deeply in debt. Very little learned, and nothing through hands-on work. I know a little more about septic systems, but am nowhere near being able to dig the right trench, or site a leach field.

I (Bryan) am still mad about it. I understand the benefits of a functioning septic system, of course. Ceredwyn regaled me with horror stories about bad septic in Haiti. But the costs burn, especially given the longer hours I work. Worse yet, and most instructive, is the hard limit to our homesteading. This is something like electrical power, or surgery, or automative construction: essential, irreplaceable, and way beyond our abilities.

Gray month

2011-11-14T21:07:00.001-05:00

This is the time between green and white, the period of gray. Leaves have fallen, grass curled back, plants all done for the year. But snow hasn't seriously fallen.

Blue skies, when they occur, have that fierceness we associate with gleaming over snows. Otherwise the skies are white and gray, as if paused just before delivering snow:

The ground is chilled, not completely frozen, so we take stabs at some little digging. Ceredwyn put down some bulbs against spring, and I pry loose some silt in the driveway's drainage ditch. But the 2011 growing season is over, and we are already settling into assuming frozen soil through March.

(photo source here)

Into winter: the heat routine

2011-11-07T10:26:00.003-05:00

It's wintertime now. Just the outer layer of that season, being November. Leaves are gone, but snow hasn't taken over. The ground is freezing, but ice has yet to coat every other surface. Driving is free of black ice's curse.

Temperatures are low enough that we need to start a fire: below freezing at night, in the 30s or 40s during daytime.

So the daily routine looks like this: I (Bryan) rise around 6 or so, and tromp down to the basement in the dark. That's where our main stove is, an old iron thing plugged into the house's central chimney. I spin open two iron valves, which admits two trickles of air into the firebox. Opening the box's front door (an iron slab, about 10 inches on a side), I poke last night's embers and dessicated sticks, provoking tiny fires and glows.

A few minutes later heat rises from the box. It might need some more fuel, so I can turn to various basement supply sources:

Pieces of wood, stacked against the south wall. These work if the fire is hot enough.
Dried bark, standing in several boxes. I stored these over summer, and they make for fine kindling.
Paper, found in our recycling containers. This is for when the fire is very low, and needs easy fuel.

Fed, the heat usually builds. I scan the temperature gauge on the exhaust pipe... and this is crucial. We read that thermometer all day long, keeping a sometimes nervous check on just how hot the fire is. Too hot and the chimney catches on fire. Too low and the house chills. We steadily check the thing, adding wood or subtracting air, in an ongoing feedback loop.

At night we tamp down the firebox. Spinning the valves shut chokes off the airflow. We fill the box up with wood, so the thing has something to chew on overnight.

Come 6 am the next day, we resume the burning cycle.

First snow of October

2011-10-27T09:33:00.002-04:00

Temperatures fell last night, and by dawn a light rain turned into snow:

Autumn takes us from summer, handing us over to winter

2011-10-25T19:56:00.000-04:00

As leaves gradually flee trees, the horizon opens up. The western ridgeline emerges with increasing clarity, day by day:

Summer exists only in those few green leaves, waiting their turn at the bottom of denuded trees.

Meanwhile, winter gears up all around us. It is 40 degrees (F) as I write this, one room away from the crackling of the main house fire. And there are rumors of snowfall to come this weekend.

That ridge will beckon a little more every day, as trees become skeletal, and then the ground freezes. When snow covers all, we will strap on snowshoes and stomp down.

Home work

2011-10-20T10:19:00.002-04:00

This week our homestead is being ripped up. That's literally true: a swath of torn-up earth, felled trees, hauled boulders encircles our house like a weird cross between medieval moat and WWI trenches.

The trenches and pits are dug as far down as twenty feet below the surface.

Note the cat exploring.

Soil layers and strata are exposed to air and light.

We'll post more about this as time, and issues, allow.

Winter is coming

2011-10-18T09:54:00.000-04:00

Last week was Indian summer, here in Vermont. Those amazing autumn days where the temperature can get up to 70 or 80. The light falls at an angle now, so the red hues in the sunlight are more visible. The angle of light is very important to us here.

The wood is stacked. I am working on getting the house ready for winter. I put in new insulation in the crawlspace last summer and I can already feel the difference.

We slaughtered chickens last weekend. I still have cabbage in the garden and I brought in the last of the tomatoes and made them into pasta sauce.

Autumn in New England is a sweet time of year, made more so by it's brevity. Six weeks or less and we'll be sunk into winter.

This year, winter comes after the damage of Irene. It's going to be a tough winter for many.

There's more rain falling on the saturated ground and the rain would turn to sleet if it had its' way.

New England winters are always tough, to be sure, and this one will be no different. The state government is assuring tourists that the leaf peeping is as good as it ever has been, but farms and businesses are devastated. The mood here since Irene ranges from sad and scared to desperate.

First fire, and thoughts of months

2011-10-18T09:40:00.001-04:00

Last night I laid the first fire of the season. It was very cold - 40 F and dropping - and also wet. Owain was chilly (he enjoys saying "shiver" and "chatter" while enacting what the verbs describe). Much laundry needed to finish drying. So I grabbed some wood and thought: April.

The end of a stack, in the basement.

April. These pieces of wood I set aside six months ago, at winter's end. I had stacked them the previous year, in spring or summer 2010. The wood around them was burned last winter. These were left over, nicely dried by the winter's lack of humidity. They dried further over the course of the following spring, summer, and autumn. In my hands last night were bits of a winter's end. The oak summoned up sounds of the little creek running, overfull with snowmelt runoff. I remember the way my boots slipped and dug into April mud, that mini-season's freshly thawed, quickly drenched earth.

April in October: last night was the first step on a new winter's road, which leads all the way through next April. Burning bark's crackle tells me of darkest December to come, of coldest January, of ice dragging tree limbs down to heaped snowpack. This would I hauled inside a few months ago; the next stacks will be schlepped in over paths made of hard-packed snow, trenches maintained between looming drifts.

Lighting the fire last night, winter habits immediately came to mind and muscle: how far back to shove wood in the firebox, how often to scan the temperature gauge, how many layers of which materials to stack. Memories of hanging wet laundry on the lines around the stove, and, up above, on a rack set in the kitchen. These are muscle memories from a cold time, often built through exertion in the dark.

This morning the sun decided to rise in a clear sky, warming the surprised if grateful land. So I let the fire burn itself out. Soon I won't be able to. Instead I'll be getting up 30 minutes earlier than usual, stomping down to the basement to stoke up the previous night's embers into something for warming my family. I'll spin open the air inflow valves, remember not to touch hot iron with my unprotected skin, place carefully chosen dry bark over some of the embers, and coax the ruddy blackened wood bits into fire. The children will eventually descend to our basement stove, shivering and chanting the anti-morning dirge of teenagers, warming themselves as near to the iron black box as they can.

For now it's not yet freezing. It's October, but we hold April in our hands.

Yellow, green, red, orange

2011-10-14T17:09:00.001-04:00

Autumn is working through our trees. Now the colors are all over the place.

The forest below the lower plots.

Walking up to the homestead

2011-10-07T21:55:00.003-04:00

Here's a little glimpse of our homestead in early fall.

You can start your visit by stepping off of Pearl Lee Road, a class 4 dirt road. We're on the left:

Behind that "753" sign is Gwynneth's sculpture, which apparently scared off some visitors.
Our driveway's on the right. On its right edge is a run-off trench (the dark line).

Down the driveway a bit a "cut" or track veers off the the left, and sharply downhill:
:

That's Owain's main sledding hill, come winter.

Continue down our driveway some more, and a low stone wall appears on the left:

Our house is coming up, dead ahead.

More potatoes

2011-09-25T23:07:00.000-04:00

We harvested these from two plots, the one next to the chimney and the long one along the hill:

Motivations for homesteading: economic woe

2011-09-14T14:42:00.001-04:00

Why do we homestead?

There are multiple reasons, which we're touched on before, and will return to. The specter of peak oil, the useful pleasure of learning practical skills, the aesthetics of homegrown food and wood-burning fires: yes, these and more fed into our decision to build an outpost of the 19th century in the 21st.

Here's another one: fear of the economic future. As John Robb starkly warns in a WELL discussion,

I think most of the folks reading this are missing the elephant in the room on resilience. Simply: we are in the first stage of a global economic depression. That's the event that is going to frame your life for the next couple of decades.

Now, economic forecasting is famously tricky, and even dubious in light of the 2008 crash (largely unanticipated by academic macroeconomists and the lords of finance). So we cope by opting for continuous research and speculative scenario analysis.

Research: we've been reading and reflecting like mad. Books, podcasts, Web sites, blogs; economists and analysts: just about everything except tv news. We aim to attend to multiple perspectives, left and right, divergent economic schools, quantitative and qualitative methods. And, social media style, we push out our thoughts to the world in order to learn more, via Facebook, in email, Twitter, Google+.

Scenarios: it's traditional to generate three futures across a spectrum of desireability, one happier than the present, one unpleasant, and one which looks like more of the same. So the third option for the near-to-medium-term future looks like Japan's lost decade, a grinding, ongoing recession. What about the first option, the better outcome story? We can imagine a minor recovery ahead, maybe driven by health care's steady growth, or a surprising technology boom (say, nanotech).

The negative scenario tactic we see is one where things keeping getting worse, which would mean that the present Great Recession deepens into depression, as Robb lays out. Depressed employment and consumer spending keeps businesses from expanding, which leads to shrinkage over time. Financial crises continue to shock the world, such as the one unfolding now in Europe. America's population continues to grow, as do federal and state budget woes. Oil shocks recur. Unemployment rises, depressing spending, weakening business, which then sheds more jobs, as the economy spirals downwards.

That worst case scenario has enough likelihood to merit further consideration, based on all of our research and discussions. It's not a Black Swan rarity, but a seriously possible future. Like any seriously possible worst case, this depressive scenario therefore merits present planning, along with action:

Within that context, resilience is about bootstrapping an economy that works for you, your family, and your community. About taking control and being in charge of your future.

Our homestead practice is precisely that. On Pagan Lane, we have been steadily building towards sustainability, from food raising to off-the-grid infrastructure. It's incomplete, hence our parallel practice of working closely with Ripton's community.

And it's a strange way of life. Most folks regard us genially, but quizzically. The more people buy into credit- and oil-fueled consumerism, the likelier they are to not see the point. Politically, partisans of sitting governments - both parties - tend not to share our thoughts (nowadays it's easier to get into conversations with Republicans). Simply talking about economic worries can alienate listeners/readers into silence. Again, Robb:

Granted, it's a big shift in thinking. We live in a culture that's based on complete and utter dependence (I don't buy into the fantasy that just having a big savings account or a pile of gold makes you free).

It's taken years of our lives to get to this place, both physically and mentally (especially Bryan). Somedays it feels like we've seceded from the world of malls, credit cards, and tv. In another post we could deal with the criticism we've received. But for now let's establish this one link out of many, between homesteading in the Green Mountains and our fears for the global economy worsening.

More on Robb: his blog is content-rich. This wiki looks like a fine resource for disaster preparation, homesteading, resilience, and sheer practical knowledge.

The End of The World, Again.

2011-09-07T21:28:00.000-04:00

I keep saying that I'm not prepping for the end of the world, just the end of my world

Here in Vermont, many people's safe ordered worlds have ended. Property damage is bad in many areas. A friend in Upstate New York tells the story of a co worker who now has nothing left but the scrubs in her car and the pajama's she was wearing when the Sheriff banged on her door, yelling "You have to evacuate now! Not ten minutes from now! NOW!"

I read a statistic that said that, after a major disaster, 40% of small businesses fail. I see farms that just won't be able to make it past the crop failure this year, business that will just have to shut their doors and be done with it.

I also see homeowners who, without flood insurance, will just say "screw it" and never return to their home, maybe moving in with family or friends. The saddest part is that some of these people TRIED to buy flood insurance but were told, "No. Your house came through the 1927 flood. No way it's going to flood now."

Perhaps I'm being overly pessimistic, but all I have to do is talk to my friends in Louisiana to feel that I am not. An area with no road access is called a "wilderness". Going by this, we've got more a bit more wilderness today than two weeks ago.

The political bullshitting has already started, with Congress creatures from both sides wondering where the money is coming from. I got an idea...How about we start means testing Congress creatures? Like we do with other government program? If you are worth more than $1 million, how about you donate your Congressional salary to a fund for recovery, rather than taking it out of Medicaid funds? And if you're a pauper, living just on your Congressional salary? How about you donate 100K out of it. I'm sure you can get by on 50% (roughly) more than what the median US income is (median income is 42K. Congress creatures make about 175K). That'll give us 5 to 7 million to get started with.

Better yet, let's go back to taxing the rich at 90%. That's how we built all those freeways in the first place.

I'm just ranting because I'm frustrated. In the end, it isn't even about how much money there is or is not. This is the new normal. I keep hearing that phrase. Usually with a shrug and a "What are you gonna do?" sort of gesture. Disasters will happen, because they always happen. People will get on with their lives, doing what they have to do. In three days time, we're on to the next news item. If CNN's really lucky, some celebrity will do something egregiously embarrassing, and they can stop talking about disasters for a while.

When that palls, they'll move on to the end of someone else's world.

Rise of corn

2011-09-05T09:53:00.001-04:00

Success: the corn continued to flourish, despite hurricane Irene.

Yes, those plants are much taller than me.

The plants are audacious things, huge spears poking up despite torrents and winds. It's an eerie, sweet experience to walk among plants taller than yourself, and only a couple of months old.

A couple of months, and these fast-growing types are ready to harvest. Notice the way the ears lean out, in the picture up above? Time to pluck.

We won 2-3 ears/plant this time. Each was about 5-6" long -not so big as grocery-store-bought ones. Boiled up, they were excellent.

So, Ceredwyn and I are strategizing, with friends. It seems like we can grow corn* up here on the mountain. How to proceed?
(Well, immediately we turn the green leaves to compost, and feed the husks to chickens. Eat some of the corn, and freeze the rest)

Perhaps we should build a much larger plot for next year. At 2-3 ears/plant, how many should we plan to sow? Let's do some rough calculation.

Assume we four people eat five ears per day, cooked and consumed in various ways. Some days we eat more, some less. That's 1825 ears per year.
Assume we can store corn sufficiently for a year (frozen, canned).
Looks like 730 plants are called for, total.
We now know that a grid pattern is essential for planting, so that plants cross-fertilize to maximum growth. Assume a square layout - 27 x 27 plants.

If that's right, we need to start clearing extra space now, before the frost locks up the soil.

If we do this the right way, it's another step towards sustainability. Corn's excellent food, and all four of us eat it (amazingly).

*Corn: I'm talking about sweet corn. Field corn is a different thing, and we haven't tried it yet. I'd like to, so we can mill it into corn meal.

Family in a hurricane

2011-08-31T12:49:00.000-04:00

We lived through hurricane Irene. We'll post about different aspects of the experience here.

Owain by the river, downtown

What was it like, as a family? Quick notes:

The women - Ceredwyn and Gwynneth - are emergency services volunteers, medical and firefighting respectively. They were "toned out" (summoned by radio) several times, night and morning, then just stayed away. They pumped basements of houses by the Middlebury river, ones where electrical systems were in danger of being immersed. They staffed the firehouse, as a community relief and information site. With little sleep and enormous stress, they worked hard and for many hours.

All of us suffered internet deprivation. Once the power went out, all kinds of devices died. Since Vermont has poor cell phone coverage, we couldn't hit that network. So back to the 19th century we plunged, heading out to find people and learn news. Owain in particular fretted, as he wanted - very conscientiously - to finish a summer writing assignment for school. (His sister advised longhand; he demurred)

The children disliked the lack of electrical light, while we adults were fine with it. Owain wrangled flashlights with grim determination, fearing the dark (which is dark indeed here in the country, especially without moon or stars), wanting to sleep in the firehouse (more appropriate for emergencies). Gwynneth hated reading by oil lamp. I think all four of us felt our internal clocks shift back to pre-electrical times, feeling sleepy with the dark, and rising with the sun.

I (Bryan) was grimly focused on my family's safety. Each scrap of news struck deeply into the brain, shaping the things needing to be done to keep us dry, warm, fed, lit, unharmed. I sawed off tree limbs with martial glee, seeing each as a potential enemy.

I also felt two simultaneous hungers. My work became an imaginary creature, perched on my shoulder, whispering in my ear about the many many things needing to be done. Papers, books, white board loomed large for me, when we couldn't drive to another town for access. But I also felt a deeper attachment to the pre-industrial homestead work, a hunger to haul wood and stones, to walk among the various plants, to weed, chop, saw, pull. Homestead and work: dual harvests, pleading to be done.

And winter crept closer, as some leaves turned, and post-Irene temperatures settled. The fans didn't restart with the electricity's return. We welcomed the sun to dry things out, but also as the last solar bit of fading summer. I protected unstacked wood with tarps, and stacked what I could in rain or even in the dark.

More thoughts on Irene:

Some photos
Ripton's town blog
Ceredwyn and Bryan on Facebook

Don't come to Ripton today.

2011-08-28T17:42:00.000-04:00

This from the Ripton Fire Dept:

Route 125 from both East Middlebury and from Hancock are closed. Route 7 in East Middlebury is closed. Old Town Road is closed.

The rest of the roads are somewhat iffy.

Rain from the south

2011-08-28T16:00:00.002-04:00

Our driveway in Irene's first rain:

Along the driveway's left edge you can just make out the drainage ditch. It's bright-colored, due to being filled with coursing water.

Involuntary harvest

2011-08-27T11:43:00.002-04:00

It's late August, and we harvested a pile of potatoes:

...but we weren't planning to. See, these are new potatoes. Like the tasty ones Ceredwyn harvested in July.

We returned from a trip late at night to find one of our potato plots wiped out. All the green leaves, shoots, and vines were simply gone. Ceredwyn and I stomped around in the dark, waving a flashlight around, to learn that in a very few days these healthy plants were killed off by the cursed blight.

Yes, that's the same monster that did in mid-19th-century Ireland, and ate up our potatoes last year. It's hard to describe the mix of horror and wrath any sign of it brings to our hearts, but perhaps Ceredwyn's pithy observation does the trick: "Now I know why the Irish drink."

We're learned to monitor each crop daily - sometimes twice daily - in search of telltale blight signs. Acting quickly, we cut off the corrupted bits and secure them in isolated trash. The uninfected plant usually survives.

But we were gone, away for more than a week, while the bastard settled on this patch and ate it to the ground.

So how do we have spuds? The plants had generated potatoes right until their death, and the tubers remained underground. Their skins are thin at this stage, so that they will rot, unless discovered and harvested. Which is what we did.

Without the usual spud's thick skins, these can't be stored for long. What you see in that photo is potatoes for about one week, maybe more, if refrigeration holds out. A small victory snatched from blight's vile defeat.

On the positive side, our other plots were uninfected. Our strategy of setting up a series of potato patches distributed around the land seems to work, so far. These guys are ok.

Another positive note: the spuds' high quality is a vote for the mulch method. This poor plot was one of our experiments. Here's what we did.

Waiting for Irene

2011-08-26T21:46:00.000-04:00

We just hightailed it back form visiting friends in Virginia, yesterday. We didn't want to risk being caught up in the evacuation crowds, nor did we want to leave the homestead for as long as it might be if we rode out the storm with our friends in VA.

So, we're mostly set. Three days worth of water for each person. Food for a week (for animals and people). Doing laundry, in case we lose power. Got a power invertor to charge laptops. Repairing a window so its done. Picking up the yard.

What worries me: Wind ripping up corn. Trees falling on chicken coop. Trees on house. Hopefully, that won't happen.

Best of luck to everyone on the East Coast.

Herbal mortuary

2011-08-25T16:24:00.000-04:00

Now here's a nicely Gothic-themed way to set up an herb garden.

Combines our Addams Family flair with homesteading.

(thanks to Arnaud Leene)

Night thoughts on resilience and shocks

2011-08-24T12:37:00.003-04:00

I've been putting too much trust in distributed networks. That's where I ended up last night, after driving through the east coast earthquake's aftereffects.

USGS map

We were in Virginia when the quake hit. Nobody and nothing got hurt by the shock, although we were surprised (first quake for all but one of us in the house). Naturally we turned to the internet for information and news - avoiding tv - and were richly rewarded. Social media offered first, freshest stuff.

Networks: power remained on. Internet stayed up. Our computers worked. Beyond that, the outside world of networks thrummed: ISPs, users, etc.

Cheered, I got ready to drive to a nearby meeting. Normally I'm a bit obsessive about travel planning, especially when it involves driving: Google Mapping my route (checking several alternates and StreetView), printing the results, adding some local maps (which I annotate and save in carefully organized folders). When I drive, I monitor distances via odometer. And yes, I violate gender norms by asking strangers for directions.

This time I decided to rely on Onstar. If you haven't used the thing, it's a phone + GPS-like system built into your car. You press a button to call them, and they come up with a Mapquest-like route. OnStar then calls your back, and talks you through the trip. Usually it's pretty handy.

But yesterday the thing simply wouldn't respond. I sat in the parking lot, waiting patiently (at first) as call after call timed out. Then I started driving, working from memory of Google Maps. I hadn't printed anything, because I trusted OnStar. The map I had didn't have the right local details (state level). As the car worked its way down a road, my memory got fuzzy, and I couldn't recall the right turnoff. OnStar kept failing.

Now lost, and sinking into horrendous traffic, I pulled out my cell phone to call OnStar's 1-800 number. Things got weirder - it took a while to get to an operator, who then put me on hold for more time. Next operator's sound quality quickly degraded to static. I called again, working the phone tree from start, enjoying another delay as traffic stalled around me and my meeting time approached. A tired-sounding OnStar operator came on line to agree that yes, there are technical issues, but no, she couldn't explain them.

I began to worry. I was lost in a town I didn't know, and my network support was failing. So I pulled over and tried to contact Ceredwyn for help over the cell phone. Four calls simply failed. Texting was iffy.

At this point comprehension started seeping into my driving-addled brain. The earthquake hadn't done physical damage, but the various networks were probably being overwhelmed by usage spikes. An hour earlier I'd retweeted a call from New York's police department to get people off of emergency lines. Our social reaction to the quake was stressing our communications apparatus.

Eventually my wife coaxed OnStar back to life, and OnStar managed to reach me in the car. I drove around, found the meeting, humbly apologized, and got back to work.

So what to learn from this? First, our American networks are pretty fragile, if a non-lethal, basically non-destructive event can sap them. Note that weather was fine (no hurricane yet), and this was a very advanced part of American infrastructure (northeastern Virginia) (one nuclear plant). It's a cliche to observe that modern civilization is fairly thin on top, but important to feel it through lived experience.

Second, I'm too reliant on said networks, at least in a live, synchronous way. Obviously I should have printed stuff out to carry, and committed more details to memory. An attitude from circa 2005, rather than 2011. More, a forward-looking attitude - assuming nothing gets better, but probably worse - means it's essential to prepare for failure in travel.

August and the end of summer

2011-08-20T20:12:00.003-04:00

Found on the fine Thoreaublog:

It is still cool weather with a northwest wind. This weather is a preface to autumn. There is more shadow in the landscape than a week ago, methinks, and the creak of the cricket sounds cool and steady.
The grass and foliage and landscape generally are of a more thought-inspiring color, suggest what some perchance would call a pleasing melancholy. (1858)

Yes.

Fortifications against the cold

2011-08-12T11:53:00.002-04:00

Some wood arrived, for us to stack:

Dumped here by awesome wood guy.
"Here" is just below main driveway.

A word of explanation: we heat our home during the long Vermont winter entirely by burning wood. Two stoves steadily consume pieces of wood, warming all three floors. Our family stacks said wood outside to dry in the seasons preceding snow and ice.

These stacks are located in various spots around the house, either at the same altitude or just below. They consist of, from bottom to top:

A wooden support platform. That's usually old planks, pallets, or scrap, sometimes elevated by bits of wood or stone. (In this post's photo you can make out two long, old 2x4s, running horizontally along the bottom.)
Stacks of cut wood. No higher than the children's heads.
Coverings: tarps or plywood or sheet metal, or a combination. Weighted down with rocks, after the past two winter's high winds.

These small walls of wood sit outside all year long, on average, drying slowly and steadily. In summer we haul in a stack to really dry out in the basement, ready to burn once winter makes its presence known.

So caring for this precious supply - buying or cutting wood, stacking it, protecting it from weather - is a yearlong thing. The stacks are part of our homestead landscape, at their largest looking like fortifications. This work is a homestead chore, derided but glumly performed by the children. I (Bryan) associate each spot with podcasts, as I listen to mp3s for (professional) work as I (do homestead) work. The longest rows, for example, are linked forever with episodes of the very fine Digital Campus.

The total amount of wood is very large, around 12-14 cords by October. This is a form of prudence. If we go on to experience a ferocious, drawn-out winter, one far worse than the norm, we're amply supplied. If winter turns out to be less dire, the stacks which remain come May will stand until the following winter, seasoning well.

Corn doing well

2011-08-05T08:53:00.002-04:00

Our corn is making a lot of progress, especially given how difficult it is to grow up here.

From a few weeks ago, our patch varied in height between one and four feet:

Looking across from a potato plot.

Today the tallest plants are up to my nose, and still growing. The stalks are massive and strong, reminding me of bamboo.

We started this patch in late June. That's when it's warm enough to allow corn to survive.

2011-08-02T18:03:00.000-04:00

Working the land during summer's end, with fall drawing nigh: Barbara Ganley has another fine post.

[E]verything points to fall. The baby rabbit who lives under the potato leaves is not such a baby anymore. The swallows have left the nesting boxes to line the telephone wires down by the road. Any day now they will fly off and won’t return until spring...

Kate is making pesto. I need to do more of the same. Much more of the same. I walk the gardens and orchard each dawn to plan the morning’s harvest, the evening’s canning, freezing, drying, storing.

First spuds of 2011

2011-07-22T10:41:00.001-04:00

Our first new potatoes of the year are in. Ceredwyn dug up a few from two of the plots (dirt, mulch beds).

It's always sweet to grub potatoes. There's a buzz from discovering goodness in the dark unlike, say, peas or tomatoes, where the fruits grow visibly, over time.

Ceredwyn cooked 'em in a stew. Said stew was made from our land's products: potatoes, goat meat, peas, other greens.

Towards sustainability, step by step.

Winter is coming, especially in July

2011-07-21T19:48:00.001-04:00

Here's a post I guest-blogged at another site, about winter and homesteading.

(That's Open View Gardens, maintained by my inspirational friend Barbara Ganley. Required reading.)

Silence from the road

2011-07-19T09:06:00.001-04:00

We haven't posted for a few days, and there are two good reasons.

One is me (Bryan) being on the road for a week. While travel for work can block posting to other blogs for logistical reasons (i.e., being busy on planes, giving talks, driving, having meetings), this blog is different. It's tied to our land.

Homesteading drives me to write here, be it in response to something sweet (corn's growing!) or awful (blight). This post box comes to mind when I'm pulling weeds, digging soil, or sawing wood. It doesn't really leap to mind when I'm returning a rental car on the other side of the continent, or dehydrating in a crammed airplane.

Homesickness tears into me when I travel, but that doesn't spur writing here. Reading old posts, maybe, but not writing about missing the doomstead.

Salvage-fu: a new skillset?

2011-07-07T14:08:00.000-04:00

How good are we at making old stuff work? Salvage trade is what John Michael Greer calls this ability.

Instead of buying new things, we find old items and bring 'em back into functioning life. It's one part handycraft, one part DiY, and comes from thinking past the end of industrial-petroleum culture:

[L]earn skills that could well become income sources in the not too distant future; as I’ve suggested more than once here, salvage trades – that is, anything that involves taking the leftovers of industrial civilization and turning them into something that people need or want – will likely be among the major growth industries of the next century or two, and the ground floor is open for business right now...

Personally, I (Bryan) have a lot to learn here. I don't buy stuff, generally, unless I can help it. But I don't know anything about making old machines work. Cars, sewing machines, refrigerators, power saws, farming equipment: where do I start schooling myself, and how?

Summer storm on the mountain

2011-07-06T16:37:00.001-04:00

Our internet is back up, after a sudden lightning storm. Here's what that's like, up here on the mountain:

The storm blew in quickly. Bright skies suddenly turned gray, then black. Rain began to patter down, and thunder rumbled up the mountain from the east.

Then the rain went berserk, a ruthless calamity of drumming, rattling, hissing, pinging. Lightning leaped into being with it, striking crazily all over the mountain, flashing through mist. Our community internet went off right away, and our satellite backup fell down as well. I imagined I could see lightning flashes through my closed eyelids.

Thunder rolled and rolled, back and forth, like a giant ball bearing hurtling along the mountaintop, swelling and dwindling in volume. It was a mutter, then a titanic roar, then a bemused snarl.

The rain kept coming down in full elemental ferocity, thickening the air into a fog laced with diagonal striations. Then the rain built rapidly to hail strength, making every tiny bit of metal rattle from the car to the tin-covered woodpiles to our fine new roof, beating the hell out of leaves and branches. Our plants shuddered and flickered in the storm, gradually starting to bend down toward the soaking earth.

Inside, the cats were terrified. Hunter meowed a deep, ecstatic, nearly lupine howl, again and again, stalking from room to room, before fleesing to hide in a pile of clothes. The dog paced back and forth, both wanting to offer and receive succor.

We unplugged vital electronics (laptop, phones), in case an especially ambitious lightning strike blew past our surge protectors. The UPS unit gleamed, clicked quietly a few times. I snarled to see most of my work cut off. The children shrugged grimly, switching to offline digital pursuits while the power held.

Community broadband and satellite backup down: without internet we were cut off from the world of news. We have no tv, and radio reception is vile, so we were thrust back upon land line telephone and Ceredwyn's emergency services radio to find out anything. Said radio crackled with reports of problems across several towns.

Water pooled outside, then clawed its way in: a single pipe running from roof to basement began sweating, then dripping. I opened the back door to see puddles standing amid rocks and soil, twitching and growing in the torrent.

Gradually it passed. The rain steadily reduced its volume. Thunder stalked west and down that side of the mountain, still audible as distant booming on the way to New Hampshire. Lightning stopped. The satellite internet resumed, and I can type this blog post.

Early July homestead activities

2011-07-05T21:59:00.000-04:00

It's July, and outrageously hot up here. Temps have hit the upper 80s F, even the 90s down in the valley.

So what are we up to?

Chickens. Ceredwyn has nurtured the little chicks (and ducks). Today she hauled them outside, with Owain's help, so they could get their first taste of the world. Note image to left: that's the huge metal tub, which is a great thing indeed.
Our adult, laying hen keeps gifting us with eggs. She's happy to let me grab 'em from under her.

Corn: two of the four rows have sprouted, hurrah! Ceredwyn weeded the area, and is getting read to resew the two lacking rows.

Potatoes: all five plots are coming along. Very green, dense foliage. No sign of blight so far.

Broccoli: the main part of the plant, the bit we want to eat, has finally emerged at the heart of most of them. We can break them off and devour the nubbly goodness right in the rows. The heat and rain is a problem, making some "bolt" (flower) before their time, so we need to watch that.

Greens: some delicious lettuce is there, now, for our picking and munching.

Compost: starting up a new pile on the remains of an old one. Lots of weeds and lawn clippings to add there, along with chicken-leavened straw, new and old.

Wood: I continue to saw deadfall. Am behind schedule, due to work. Even in this heat, I murmur to myself: winter is coming.

Electricity: no outages for a month, which is a pleasant surprise.

Internet: rock solid and fast. (All first-time visitors need to know about our community broadband)

Children: home from school, and enjoying some time off. They are still ruthlessly exploited for homestead labor: Gwynneth does the dishes like mad, and Owain helps with laundry and chicken-hauling.

There's more, much more, but this is a snapshot for today.

New chickens on the mountain

2011-07-01T15:22:00.000-04:00

New chicks have arrived!

Some of the chicks. Blurry to do their frantic running around.

They arrived in the main, to the... delight of our community postal worker. We call these "peeping packages", after Owain's reaction to one years ago.

Ceredwyn set up the 50 or so chicks into a big metal tub. She placed heat lamps overhead, put down bedding, gave them water and food.

Some of the birds are for egg-laying. Others will become meat.

Speaking of the latter, both cats and dog are fascinated by the new arrivals. We closed off the room where they are staying, for now, and mind Hestia when she comes in.

In dirt

2011-06-28T12:12:00.001-04:00

I spent a lot of time with my hands in dirt this week.

The upper compost pile needed turning. This involved dismantling the wooden pole structure, rebuilding it next to the pile, then pitchforking the stuff into the new framework. I stuck in some chicken- and goat-amended straw in, to speed the rotting.

What it looked like last November.

Now the compost is clearly dirt, brown and crumbly, hard to distinguish from the soil around it at first glance. One difference is plentiful worms, which I found throughout the pile.

Two years of piling and rotting, and we now have a cubic yard of fine dirt. Egg shells and coffee grounds, grass cuttings and leaves, rain and urine have transmogrified into something like soil. Slow, easy alchemy. We'll let it mellow for the rest of the summer, then shovel some in to a couple of needful plots for overwintering.

Also this week we worked on the driveway, yet again. If you haven't read here before, our driveway is fine farming earth, unfortunately: soft, eager to hold water. So it becomes swampy during rain season, and quickly rutted and hard to drive on. The default state used to be something like this:

In good weather.

So our excellent snow removal guy came and graded the thing, dragging a heavy iron blade down the driveway's length. The results were flat, and also broad, as he widened it at a couple of points.

My runoff ditch, which runs the whole length from road to house on the uphill side, was partially blocked by fresh dirt. So I dug it clear again, heaping the spilled earth onto the driveway's main rut lines. I pulled out some rocks (always, in New England) to use elsewhere. And I moved ten feet of trench sideways a bit, digging a new and wider path, which widened that piece of driveway.

I feel a child's delight in this work, a sense of gleeful play in making shapes out of earth: a long trench, a cubic stack, humped lines to be flattened by cars. A couple of days after fixing up the runoff trench a squall hit, and I enjoyed seeing the trench fill with muddy, coursing water. There's the playing-in-mud delight, combined with the low tech pleasure of seeing wet kept off of the damned driveway.

Low tech: working on compost and driveway, I could see the tree which holds our broadband radio. I worked with an mp3 player in my pocket, playing podcasts about history, technology, and culture. Yet my mind was occupied with the other end of history: shoving rocks, feeling my back stretch, watching worms wriggle through compost. I thought about each layer of compost added to the earth, the soil being rebuilt and refined year after year, stretching into a dim future. I envied the Romans and their engineering might, and tried to recall what made their roads so sturdy as I plopped dirt onto my little via.

Corn experiment, year 2

2011-06-23T13:39:00.000-04:00

We reached back to the American colonial past last week, and put in a corn patch.
It's tricky growing corn up here, since the average temperature can be low. But several other homesteads in Ripton have successfully grown corn (some have failed), so we wanted to give it a try.

That's actually "another try", since we managed a tiny yield from last year's first corn-growing experiment. I (Bryan) did nearly everything wrong then, too, which heartens us now. Then I made a single, long row, instead of the grid or circle pattern necessary for cross-fertilization. I failed to amend the soil (remember the Native American fish story?). The soil was poor, too. And I didn't make any anti-bird defenses. But some small ears resulted, which makes us think we can do better this time.

We all eat corn, too. Especially important with Owain's celiac.

So we created a new plot between the mulchy potatoes and the broccoli, using a patch of lawn and the ground exposed once we tore down the rotting, inherited wooden playstand. Rather than digging up the soil, we went no-till, hauling in many many buckets of soil from the goat enclosure. That's the special soil, generously amended by years of chickens and goats, er, sharing their goodness.

We built four beds of this black soil, each about 4-6" tall, and around six feet long, separated by one-foot-wide walkways (we'll fill in those paths with soil as the plants grow). Ceredwyn sowed a lot of seeds, as we expect to do some culling.

Soil added to plot. Not the most impressive visual, alas.

Then we covered the whole thing by laying down rolls of chicken wire, to protect the seeds and subsequent shoots from various birds.

Our sources tell us 100 days is the rough lifecycle of the plant, so we're looking forward to late September.

June planting; minding the spuds

2011-06-16T09:39:00.000-04:00

It's mid-June, which means hilling up potatoes.

Let me explain. Potatoes grow in two phases, simplified a bit. First, they push up stems and leaves above the ground, in the way we expect most plants to do. Green stems extend upwards towards the sun, leaves appearing along them. This classic upwards foliation goes on for a while, then stops, leading to the second phase. That's when the plant turns away from the surface world (literally, the leaves droop), and spends all of its energies underground, plumping up roots into gradually thickening tubers - i.e., the taters we eat.

Potato plants in the upper plot

To help these plants make as many big spuds as possible, we need the plants to grow as much as possible, which means assisting the first phase by helping each plant grow taller. That way they have more energy and more underground room to make more potatoes.

We do that by "hilling". When a plant extrudes another few inches upwards, we gently shovel some soil around it, leaving about an inch of remaining stalk above the earth's new top. We check back every few days, and repeat the process if the plant keeps on getting taller.

The results are ever-ascending mounds, with potato plants poking out of the top. Once this phase stops, each plant fills up their human-made mound with spuds (ideally).

Readers of this blog may recall that we're growing potatoes in three different ways this year: in dirt, in mulch, and in barrels. Hilling works for all three. I just described the all-dirt method. For the mulch-bedded tater plants, we hill with more mulch hauled in from the goat/chicken shed (those animals continue adding to our homestead, months and years after their demise). For the barrels, we add more compost, carefully dropped in between plant and barrel wall.

There's something deeply satisfying about seeing these mounds rise. It's a physical, tangible sign of successful growing. Each mount becomes a ministorehouse of potatoes to come, in my imagination. And while what often comes next - plants pushing even higher from atop their new mounds - means a call to more work, that's also a sign of progress.

Each plant is also a reminder of winter to come. I see the gleaming green leaves, and am achingly aware of how short-lived they are, how brutally important the tubers beneath are for survival. Hilled-up mounds are ultimately hedges against starvation.

A delightful machine

2011-06-12T14:23:00.000-04:00

Last Sunday I had my first experience with a wood-splitter, and loved it.

If you're never seen one, these machines (also "log-splitters") are small, hydraulic monsters. That have three parts:

A metal track, horizontal.
A gas-burning engine, like a lawnmower's, mounted at one end.
An iron wedge, mounted at the opposite end.

Users stick a piece of wood onto the metal track, then throw a switch on the engine. The engine pushes a simple slab of metal down the track, shoving the wood chunk forward, until it connected with the wedge. Then the engine keeps shoving, ruthlessly, with industrial might, until the log splits across the wedge's blade. The engine then quietly retracts the shover plate, or the user throws another switch to make that happen, and the thing is ready for the next.

I started using this gloriously satisfying machine with the help of a small group of town locals. This group is a volunteer effort, devoted to accumulating stove wood for Riptonites who can't afford their own, come our long, intense winter. From time to time during the year REAP meets to cut or stack wood, growing a supply against the recession. People pitch in as their schedules and abilities allow. There's no hierarchy; each contributes what they can.

I contributed mesmerized attention and gleeful muscle power last Sunday. It was a rush to see the splitter bisect or trisect vast, tough pieces of wood. I tried to imagine with what delight woodsmen must have viewed these machines a century ago. Nice example of Clarke's law, probably. Two hours went by quickly, as I heaved bigger and bigger chunks of wood into the unprotesting machine's metal maw. My REAP colleagues chainsawed giant trees, dragged logs around, and quickly stacked the small pieces as they toppled from my new friend's gleaming iron wedge, the wood splitter.

Feeding the soul

2011-05-28T19:35:00.000-04:00

I, Ceredwyn, have spent a considerable amount of time and money this spring working on our flower garden. I have doubled the size of our rock garden, planted a bunch of flowering plants and herbs.

I haven't done flower gardening in a major way before. It's always seemed impractical and I am nothing if not practical.

One big practical reason for cultivating flowers is to give our friends the bees a hand and to attract other pollinators (I've seen a few hummingbirds). Bees are dying and no one is entirely sure why, so they need all the help they can get.

More than that though, I am coming around to the notion that art, be it stories, drawings, music or flower gardens, becomes more important in austere times rather than less.

I had the opportunity, a few weeks ago, to go to a show where two gentlemen were doing an act straight out of the 1900's. Their instruments were banjo, harmonica, jaw harp and their own hands and feet. As well as being fine musicians they were historians and reenactors, giving us a wonderful lesson in musical history. I learned how the banjo originated in West Africa and it was once made of cat gut and gourd. They showed us a musical form they called "hambone" that uses nothing but the rhythms one can produce with slapping hands and stamping feet to accompany the sound of singing voices.

The songs they sang were traditional and their act vaudvillian, but you could see that they were performing the direct artistic ancestor of punk, rap, and hip hop. Not the polished stuff the corporations keep trying to sell us, but the stuff that catches on in spite of the bosses and the banksters, the robber barons and the overseers. The "What the hell is that noise?" songs that get the church lady's knickers in a twist. The songs that slaves sang to remind themselves they were still human. The songs that the strikers sang on the picket line, 'cause it was cold as hell and singing might possibly keep you warm. The songs protesters sing because it gives them the courage to march into lines of riot police.

Song and dance require no equipment. Instruments are nice, but can be improvised. The visual arts are a bit more difficult, but people manage. In any urban landscape, one can find graffiti artists. Their chosen medium walls and cheap paints or inks. Even a bit of charcoal on a concrete floor is can be lovely.

In some of the most distressed parts of the world, women still adorn themselves in fashionable clothes, even if it's under a chador or niqab. Astonishingly, in Haiti, one category of business that still thrives is the hair stylist. The people are very meticulous about their clothing and presentation. A trip to the clinic requires that one be dressed as well as one can afford. It is a mark of respect, both to the doctor, but also to oneself, using the art of fashion to raise oneself up.

As a teenager in the eighties, I was part of punk culture. We shopped at Value Village cause we were broke and our ripped jeans were mostly natural. I was never extreme, but I knew people that were. The kids who wrote for six hours a day and published little 'zines, or painted, or played some instrument instead of doing something "constructive". We never went out to events that cost money, because we never had it, so sometimes we went to listen to unknown bands play. Some were good, some weren't.

I have noticed for a long time, that the more one spends, the less one creates. When you can buy cool and pretty art that's a million times better than what you can produce yourself, why bother? Art becomes a thing "talented" people produce. It becomes something that only an "artist" can create

But always when the money's tight and people are living on the edges, art appears. Angry art, desperate art, sad art, peaceful art, even joyful art; anything but polished "high" art.

So maybe I'm flower gardening for the Revolution or against the Man. Anyway, it's nice to look out of my window and see the flowers bloom.

Thoughts going out to the Midwest

2011-05-25T20:51:00.000-04:00

My thoughts go out to Joplin Missouri as they face their second day of tornadoes. I can't even begin to imagine what it must be like. We had a couple of close calls when we were in Shreveport, and Michigan is also tornado country, but we have never had a stretch of weather like this spring.

Yesterday, someone emailed me pictures from Iowa and Louisiana of towns that were flooded by the Mississipi. All the buildings will need to be rebuilt, but because of the advanced warning, no lives were lost.

Hoping the rain dies down and the wind stops.

Working from home

2011-05-24T10:02:00.000-04:00

This is Bryan: I work from home, which is a great thing. From a homesteading perspective, there are a lot of benefits.

Since my work is mostly based on laptop, phone, papers, and books, I can set that stuff just about anywhere in the house, and sometimes outside. So I get to spend a lot of time next to nature, with occasional forays into it. My office windows look out onto the back yard: some grass, one big plot, the new mulch plot, that rain garden, some wood piles, the start of one path downhill, and the forest looming broadly viridian behind all.

In the office, air comes through the screens, when I open the windows. Scents of grass and birch. Sounds of chickens and flying birds. The occasional cat face, claws slammed against the screen to demand entrance. Breezes come up the mountain and enter my office through the mesh.

So much for senses and delight; this also means homesteading work. I take 10-minute breaks to do household tasks (laundry, dishes, etc), cut a little wood, move a rock, haul in some firewood. When I need to think hard about a problem, I step out of the office or wherever I'm working, then do more of this non-thinking stuff.

It's a fine thing, all around. A more pleasant environment to working in, compared with an office. Some time to do homestead work. And a deeper connection of my two worlds, old and new, land and cyberspace, knitted together in learning.

(photo from 2007)

Potato experiment #2

2011-05-18T16:25:00.000-04:00

We're trying a different way of growing potatoes. No digging for this batch.

Instead we set potato bits on the ground, then covered 'em with mulch. Mulch consists of old, rotted straw, which our goats and chickens have been, ah, adding to for a couple of years. Ceredwyn says our now-vanished animals continue to feed us, even months and years after their demise.

We'll see how it goes, compared to our other potato plots: some in barrels (potato experiment #1), many in deeply-dug dirt trenches.

Attack planting!

2011-05-15T15:40:00.000-04:00

Onward to the soil! Everything came together last weekend: no snow, no ice, no rain. Instead we basked in warm weather, and pried loose some precious unscheduled hours. So we plunged into planting.

Digging: we re-dug the plot we created last year, the one on the rise just below the house. We used shovels to dig down about one foot, carving long rows. Rocks kept coming up, so they were added to piles for later use. Then we dug in compost from our 2009 pile, black and soft; this plot is still clay-ey, and desperately needs good stuff added to it.

We re-dug potato trenches in the big old plot, pulling out rocks and the occasional, surprising old potato (always in good shape, too). Compost from a really old bin got tipped in, too: brown trenches lined with black.

Onions and garlic sprouted in their rows, planted by Ceredwyn last fall. Green stalks bravely towering from dirt are a deeply heartening sight.

Other already-growing plants were glorious to behold in the bright sun. The young apple tree, just forcing out little blossoms aimed at summer fruiting and fall fullness. The grass across our lower lawn, set up last fall.

Walking in a May night

2011-05-08T08:09:00.000-04:00

Here's what it's like to walk about a mile at night, along our mountain lane:

I walked home from our friends' house around 10 pm, walking a short stretch down North Branch, then up along Pearl Lee Road to our house (see map). There are no streetlights, and the very few houses along the way lit few if any lights. I didn't bring a flashlight, because I know the way, so it was a very dark ramble.

The road is dirt, pitted by holes, slashed with some runoff cuts, humped up in the middle, laced by tire ruts. My feet remember the biggest gaps, the sudden breaks. When they don't I stumble for a second, then proceed.

When I reached the halfway home mark huge animals moved in shadows, on my left side. These are Cecil's cows and horses, big beasts. I couldn't see anything of them, utterly invisible beyond the rare occultation of a few stars, but could feel the vibration of the earth through my feet and legs when they ran. Run they did, curious about me, wondering if I brought food. They ran for short distances, booming charges cut short by trees and perimeter fences. I found myself staring into the shadows on my left, hunting for the flicker of a star blocked or revealed by a tall shoulder, listening hard for chuffing breaths.

All kinds of sounds crowd the night, especially those from birds and insects. I listen with one ear, as my other listens to a podcast through an mp3 player's earbuds, leading to a comfortably surreal mashup. Insect gnawing, quantum computing, birds desperately singing for mates, Scots science fiction. My imagination extends into the dark, seeing foxes pace me, writers finishing novels, information racing from site to site.

There is neither snow nor ice. I can recall their late presence easily, seeing last week's surviving drifts along one side of the road. My muscles remember vividly how to walk on the lane when covered with ice (my back and shoulders tense automatically). But walking, now, brings up thoughts of snow and ice for the future. I see fallen tree limbs, sawed-up stumps, and want very much to cut them into proper shape for stacking against the first cold November day.

Early May, first touches of growing

2011-05-04T12:01:00.000-04:00

I just walked around our land in some very cold (40s F) rain, checking out growing things. Here's where we are, days after the snow vanished:

Garlic: a whole row has risen, new shoots sticking up greenly in the drizzle.

Apple tree: blossoms budding on branches.

Grass: shady grass seed has sprouted in the lowest lawn, a creation of last fall.

Meanwhile, each compost pile collapsed down about a foot. It's the interior ice thawing out, at last.

The dirt looks good for digging. Now for the rain to let up.

Nearly May, and maybe we can call it spring

2011-04-27T20:36:00.000-04:00

Spring is icumen in.

Nearly all the snow is gone. Owain's Fort Vengeance finally melted this afternoon, unmarked even by damp mud. A broad drift three feet high still lurks coolly under the living room window, where it's shady most of the day. Some fugitive white spots lurk at the base of trees, biding time in tall shadows.

My little apple tree, the scores of birches and maples, the numberless verticals of the forest stretching out to the horizon on three sizes of our land, have started fuzzing out nubs for leaves. Such hazardous stabs into the future they are, brave little gestures of hopeless trust that winter has been suspended.

The great mud of April is gone, and the earth merely satisfied with a good amount of water. Our driveway is spastic with ruts, only somewhat mitigated by my digging and rock placement. The little ponds behind our house are already stocked with splashing frogs, stalked by canny cats who pause to observe sadistically from rock perches.

Today insects made appearances: gnat, ants, spiders. Winter is a vast death to bugs, so spring resumes the ancient empire of our predecessors. The cats glory in plenty of chases and dismemberments; chickens strut over dirt and grass, pecking out bounty from a target-rich environment, clucking their triumph.

I've started sawing and stacking deadfall wood against winter... which is really just six months off. Today winter feels like an immense slab of white, a laminate installation I can sense in the muscle memory of my back and shoulders, a kind of augmented reality layer just this side of manifesting, waiting only a silent toggle.

More chickens

2011-04-23T12:00:00.000-04:00

We increased our chicken population this week. Which sounds far more dramatic than it was: two more hens.
They were a gift from a neighbor who didn't want to raise them any longer.

This happened in the dark, late at night. Our friend used the cover of darkness to snatch the sleeping chickens, because it's easier to catch them when they can't easily run away. So in the chilly night we carried a peeping cardboard box over the cold mud to the old goat shed, and tipped the birds out. They pecked around, squawked lazily at our surprised, sleepy current chicken, then settled in for sleep.

The next day, the new chickens and the old spent hours getting away from each other, scratching over the earth, occasionally sending bursts of bird noise at each other. There's the pecking order in action. By nightfall all the chickens roosted together in the shed.

One day later, and the immigrants started laying eggs. We humans are happy.

Speaking of which, Sharon Astyk has a good post on feeding chickens sustainably.

Ides of April, or the persistence of winter

2011-04-15T08:12:00.000-04:00

It's the middle of April, and winter is fighting spring in a desperate rearguard action.

Lots of snow has melted, revealing autumnal survivors. We had the usual mud season wet, as melting snowpack oozed downhill, soaking our land. Owain and I picked out little waterfalls and short torrents of rushing, clear, very cold water.

Several mighty drifts remain: Owain's Fort Vengeance exists in defiant, if truncated walls. There's a small mountain of white behind the living room wall, which doesn't get much sunlight. Snow lines the swampy driveway in serrated lines, each strongpoint marked out by the shade of tall trees.

These guys have plenty of snow left.

And this morning? Temps were below freezing, starting around 20 F. I restarted the fire, building up a familiar pile: scrap paper, old birch bark, thicker tree bark, bigger chunks of wood. Outside the swampy driveway froze in shape, revealing contortions of firm earth.

Any day now, this will tip over into growing season.

Slaughtering Goats and the Value of Food.

2011-04-06T22:02:00.000-04:00

Spent my weekend slaughtering and butchering goats. Actually, the neighbors came over to do the slaughtering, I just did the butchering. We killed both goats. We've been intending to do this all winter. The last time we slaughtered goats, we took them to a slaughterhouse and got them back weeks later all wrapped up in plastic, like you'd see at the grocery store. This was a much more intimate process.

First off, the goats were hand gentled. Specifically to my hand. This meant I had to catch them to tie them to the post. Which I did with some sense of betrayal--these girls come to me because I feed them. They even seem to have some affection for me. I, certainly, am fond of them.

But, we always knew this would be their eventual fate

My neighbor with the shotgun did the deed. I didn't watch.

After that they were hung to help them drain. Once they were hanging up, the neighbors gutted and skinned the carcasses, splitting them to hang overnight. I took the entrails and hides far out into the woods where the coyotes will make quick work of them.

Today, we just finished cutting up the last one into edible pieces. For those who've never done it (I'd never done it before and was going by the advice of my neighbors and a book), the large cuts through the bone are done with a sawzall. After that various knives are used to cut them into cooking sizes.

On Sunday, daughter helped me. Today, neighbor did. Several hours of hard messy work, but oh, what a reward. I love goat meat.

I will submit, that if one is going to be a carnivore in this day and age, one should have the experience of raising a meat animal. Even if it a family project where one pays a farmer to keep a pig or keeps a couple backyard chickens.

We are so removed from our food. It is easy to forget that those neatly wrapped plastic packages were once living, breathing critters.

I know some use this argument to promote vegetarianism, and for those who consider killing animals to be repellent, well sure, ok. And it is true that much of the land used to raise food for our meat animals could be better put to use feeding people. Surely, we don't need to eat as much meat as those of us in the West generally do, however, if all of humanity woke up tomorrow and became vegetarians, many species of animals would become extinct a short time later. Almost all breeds of cattle, sheep, chickens and goats. These are animals that have thrown their evolutionary lot in with us (figuratively speaking). These are animals who cannot survive without our protection, feeding and care. We are certainly not going to be caring for them if they no longer provide us with food (I don't see too many pet cows).

I think to be an ethical carnivore, one needs to have had the experience of at least cleaning an animal. Heck, I think even cleaning a fish probably counts.

It's interesting that the obesity epidemic comes at a time when so many people are divorced from even the preparation of their own food. Without understanding the work that goes into preparation, it is difficult to value a thing properly. So our relationship with food becomes more dysfunctional

We eat food that is produced on factory farms, by almost slave labor and complain that it is too expensive. We spend a lesser percentage of our incomes on food than almost any other country in the world. We have driven the small farmer out of existence. We make it very hard for new farmers to start. Laws and regulations are designed to favor the big agri-corps in the name of food safety (when most of the safety issues in recent years have come from big ag). Our food is picked, cleaned, harvested and killed by people we name illegals when American citizens, even in this economy, are very hesitant to take those jobs

The list goes on, but in the meantime, I have a freezer full of delicious meat. More than that, I have a freezer full of meat that I am well aware of the value of.

A glance at 1866

2011-04-01T03:40:00.000-04:00

This homesteading schedule feels familiar to me, even thought it's from 1866:

sugaring in the spring; planting oats, wheat, potatoes, beans in May; shearing sheep and “drawing muck”—spreading of manure in June; harvesting hay in July and August and cutting oats and wheat; In September cutting corn, picking apples, and marketing sheep and lambs. In October and November, husking corn, plowing and picking and drawing stone.

Sugaring spring - well, February or early March, yes. Not this year, but check.
Planting in May - we do the third and fourth of those, but not the first two. Check.
Manure in June - not yet. Animal manure goes into the compost all year.
Hay and cutting - not stuff we do.
Cutting and picking in September - yes, into October. No marketing of animals, but killing some.
Husking, plowing, picking - plowing under, yes. Prepping some food, yes. (What is "drawing stone"?)

What a new connection this is, a resonance across a century and a half. The differences are clear, especially based on our different crop emphasis.

Mid-March land thoughts

2011-03-17T11:43:00.000-04:00

The land is still covered in snow. "Snowpack" is a good word: one to four feet of white over everything. At times the top is frozen crust. Sometimes the snowpack is really ice, or mostly so. Viz this stairway I chipped out of the stuff blocking our back door:
Many woodstacks remain. These are deeply gratifying, bulwarks against the rest of this winter, and firm anticipations of the next one (think: October).
Ceredwyn has started growing seedlings indoors. These are broccoli, warming in plastic containers under a lamp. I protect them from the very interested cats.
Temps remain in the 20-40 range.
Spring is a theory.

Mutual Aid. Citizen Action Triumphing Over Adversity--Again

2011-03-16T12:30:00.001-04:00

On the BBC this morning I watched the various pictures coming in from Japan. Evacuees in shelters, empty store shelves, devastated landscapes. It's cold there and people have been out in the weather. Right now, hypothermia is a bigger danger than radiation sickness.

For all that the news is grim, what strikes me, is the overarching theme to many of these stories. The Japanese citizens are not passively waiting for rescue, nor allowing themselves to descend into chaos, but rather standing up and getting the job done.

I saw a story this morning about a tiny Japanese village of about 800 people. They're cut off due to the condition of the roads. Rescuers have been bringing in supplies by helicopter, but it's not easy and the supplies are not nearly enough. As always, the biggest need is water.

The reporter names some young man who has "emerged as a leader" and is organizing makeshift mass water purification. He tells the reporter that currently, "The water isn't clean enough to wash our faces."

The video shows an elderly man using a small power tool to remove the top from a 60 gallon metal drum to make a fire in. They're using melted snow and puddle water, they filter it and boil it. They are supplying 800 people this way.

If they waited for the authorities, they would be 800 more casualties.

When I talk to people about preparing for disaster, I always say, "The most important preparations are in your head."

What I mean by this isn't that you should go out and take classes in survival, although skills are always good, but that one needs to get a survival mindset.

Since 9/11 disaster survival psychology has become a oft-studied subject. Some interesting conclusions have been reached. It appears that the Mad Max everyone-for-themselves attitude is one of the LEAST conducive to individual survival, second only to the "I'll wait for someone to rescue me" attitude.

The best strategy for survival? Mutual aid.

EMT's, firefighters, cops, doctors, nurses, teachers, social workers and other helping professions are the people most likely to make it out of a disaster.

"OK," one might say, "I understand EMT's, firefighters and cops. They have specialized skills, but what about the others?"

The answer is that they are HELPING professions. In all of the various studies that looked at this, it has been discovered that those people who help others increase their own odds of survival.

The reasons why are numerous. People make less reckless decisions when they have other people to worry about. A group usually has a mix of skill sets. A group can accomplish more tasks than an individual. A group offers mutual protection. A group lessens anxiety and increases alertness.

The first thing people do in a disaster is look for others. We mill, we check in with each other, we look for consensus. If there's no plan, we look for a leader. Often that leader is the one who says, "The exit is that way."

A survival mindset is not about becoming that leader, although that may (and most likely will) happen if you have given any thought, at all, to disaster planning, but understanding that there is nothing so vulnerable as a human being alone.

This is not to say you put aside your own needs for the sake of the group, but that you care for yourself for the sake of the group. In the fire service we say that the first priority is yourself. The second your fellow rescuers. Everything else comes after that.

If you want to survive a disaster, find someone else to look after. Don't wait for the "proper authorities" to come to do it. They're too far away to help you. Whether it's a burning building or a hurricane, you put yourself in more danger if you don't attempt a self rescue. And you are the only rescuer who can get to your fellow victim in time.

Grab hold of someone's hand and say "The way out is this way." Keep enough water purification chemicals on hand, that you could share. Tell someone you'll hold their baby while they eat.

This strategy has worked for our species since the first clever monkey said, "Hey, guys! There's lots of food over here!"

Bug Out Bags

2011-03-14T14:31:00.000-04:00

Also known as go bags, get out of Dodge bags, earthquake kits, hurricane kits.

I've had a few requests for information on how to put one together, so here's the list.

Food: Often found in the form of food bars, MRE's or backpacking meals.

Although people think of food first, its really not the top priority. The average person needs between 1800-2400 calories per day, but can get by for three weeks without food.

Many people go with the survival food bar option, but children may not eat them. They're not very tasty and people with allergies might have trouble with the standard ones.

For instance, my son has celiac disease and almost all of the standard bars have wheat, so we have to find alternatives to that.

MRE's are all right, but again we see the allergy thing.

Backpacking meals are an option, but many need to have the ability to cook them.

Make sure that whatever you use are palatable as well as portable. You might be best off with three days worth of granola, trail mix and dry fruit that you can actually eat, than weird calorie bars that you can't choke down.

Water: Water is the biggest priority. Dehydration is, quite literally, a killer.

Store enough so each person has a gallon a day for 72 hours, preferably for one week. Realistically, you might only be able to store one or two five gallon jugs in the trunk of your car, if you're evacuating.

Store in airtight containers (aformentioned five gallon jug) and replace it every six months. Store disinfectants such as iodine tablets or chlorine bleach, eight drops per gallon, to purify water if necessary. Or get yourself any of the nifty backpacking water purifiers. Note that purification only works for viruses and bacteria, not pollutants. Stay away from using water that is known to be contaminated with chemicals.

First aid kit: Make sure it is well stocked, especially with bandages and disinfectants. Make sure you know how to use everything you store! Whatever over the counter medications you might normally take should go in there. If you are a coffee junkie, you might also want to think about caffeine pills to prevent headache.

Fire extinguisher: Your fire extinguisher should be suitable for all types of fires. Teach all family members how to use it.

Light sources: Keep flashlights beside your bed and in several other locations. Do not use matches or candles until you are certain there are no gas leaks. Glow sticks are also very handy for go bags. If you have kids, store a lot. They make a great non combustible night lights.

Weather Radios: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) weather radio, with battery backup: Telephones may be out of order or limited to emergency use. The NOAA weather radio, portable radio or portable television may be your best source of information.

For Sleeping: Tent(s) that will house all members of household. In a pinch this can be a couple of blue tarps (one for the shelter, one for the ground) and a rope.

Sleeping bags and extra bedding. You may have to sleep at a shelter. You may need to sleep in your car or in the tent. Ear plugs for if wherever you end up is noisy.

Clothing: At least one full change of clothing for each member of the party. Extra socks and underwear if you can.

Wear sturdy shoes just in case you need to walk through rubble and debris. If you are someone whose footwear is often on the impractical side (dress shoes, pumps, sandals) put some sneakers or workboots in your kit.

Cash: Assume your credit/debit cards won't work.

Special items: FEMA says to have at least 72 hours of medications and food for infants and those with special needs. You're better off with two to four week supply. If you end up at a shelter long term (think Katrina evacuees) these things will be in very short supply.

If you have medication that must be refrigerated, make sure you have cold packs and a small cooler.

Hygiene supplies: Diapers, sanitary pads, tampons, toilet paper, baby wipes, bar soap, and any disposable medical supplies like insulin needles or colostomy supplies.

I also keep a bar of Fels Naptha laundry soap in my kit. When I was in Haiti, I found that it worked very well when I had to wash my clothes by hand in cold water. It has the advantage of not being able to tip out into my pack as dry or liquid detergent did.

Tools: Have an adjustable or pipe wrench for turning off gas and water, and a shovel or broom for cleaning up. Work gloves, in case you have to move stuff.

Pets: Assemble an animal emergency supply kit and develop a pet care buddy system with friends or relatives to make sure someone is available to care for or evacuate your pets if you are unable to do so. Be sure each of your pets has a tag with your name and phone number. Whether you decide to stay put in an emergency or evacuate to a safer location, you will need to plan for your pets.

Optional items: Think of your needs and your climate. Are you likely to need mud or snow boots? Do you need insect repellent and sunscreen?

M&M's or other candy that doesn't make a mess goes a long way to normalizing a situation. This is absolutely invaluable to keeping one's wits. If you have children, doubly so.

A little bottle of scotch or whatever you favor can calm the nerves of the adults. Please note I said a little (I mean a shot glass full. For the whole day). Anyone who gets drunk in a disaster deserves a Darwin Award

Weapons: If you are trained in it and own it legally, go for it. If you are not trained in a weapon, it is only dangerous to you. Unless you spend time at a shooting range, leave the firearms at home. The same goes for Tazers and pepper spray.

Better protection is always going to be other people you trust. Stick with your friends.

If you must have a weapon, go out and get trained in it. Now.

Documents copies: Birth certificates, passports, etc. If you have time to gather the original documents, great, otherwise, they're a lot easier to replace if you have copies.

This is by no means an exhaustive list, and there are other supplies you might want to have on hand for special situations. But this is a start.

Best of luck.

What Are We Prepping For--Thoughts on Japan

2011-03-13T09:51:00.001-04:00

I've been following the news from Japan pretty closely this morning. I've also seen some blog posts from online acquaintances, who've had their electricity turned back on.

Grim stuff. Although the doomers are moderately better prepared with food and fuel, etc, no one is prepared for this kind of thing. Not really

It got me thinking about my own disaster preparations.

Up until the last couple of years, many of my friends (who were not doomers themselves), have often looked at my "preps" (doomer nomenclature for the preparations one makes against disaster) with a mixture of amusement and indulgence. Most of them probably figured that, as long as I didn't go off the deep end and become a card carrying survivalist, it was just that I had weird hobbies and I was a little paranoid.

My husband became a real prepper about ten years ago after a nasty ice storm we had when we were living in Shreveport, Louisiana. We lost electricity for ten days, but we had water, food and heat because I was a little paranoid. Bryan got it.

I'm not prepping for a "Mad Max" end of the world scenario. I'm prepping for the more common End Of The World As We Know It (referred to in doomer circles as TEOTWAWKI) scenario. You know, the one where your world ends, not neccessarily the world.

Now, in Japan, it is the end of their lives, as they've known them. Like Katrina survivors, like Haitians after the earthquake, like Americans after 9/11, there will always be a Before and an After

The news reports are horrific enough, but the blog posts I'm reading from the people on the ground are so much harder. BBC talks about people queuing up for food and fuel, and some of the blog posts talk about people listening to the radio to discover what stores might be open.

Interestingly, there is a tone of surprise from the BBC for how darn orderly it is. They go on to say they're sure it would be different if it happened in Britain--as if British culture had become especially hooliganish.

But the reality is, in a disaster people become more helpful to each other. Chaos only sets in after the social order has broken down. And, indeed, the Japanese are sturdily maintaining their social order.

My thoughts and prayers to the Japanese people.

What I did with my weekend

2011-03-08T13:57:00.000-05:00

On Saturday, I (Ceredwyn), trained as an ice rescue technician. This involves getting into one of these suits and spending several hours pulling each other out of icy water. We had lots of fun, but I'm sore as hell.

The fire department from the next town over owns several of these suits. We train with them so we might have the skills to go with the suits. None of our departments have many people, since we're all volunteer. We have automatic mutual aid agreements with several other departments

Here in Vermont we have uncounted numbers of lakes, streams and rivers that freeze. And every year we have numerous ice rescues. The number one reason for ice rescues is, frankly, human error. The assumption that the ice is thicker than it really is.

It's a big problem in a heavy snow winter like this. The ice doesn't get that thick before the snow comes and the snow insulates it. The result is patchy ice that is full of air bubbles. People make the assumption that since the ice is solid here (wherever they happen to be testing it) it must be solid all the way across.

There's a Peak Oil metaphor here somewhere.

London in March

2011-03-03T13:59:00.000-05:00

That's Jack London, and March in Vermont. I remembered a passage from "To Build a Fire" as I walked the land this morning, when the temperature ascended as far as zero degrees, and cloudless sky seemed to devour every shred of the Earth's little warmth:

The cold of space smote the unprotected tip of the planet, and he, being on that unprotected tip, received the full force of the blow.

Although we're not that high up, it's still a powerful image: our little homestead being struck by the cold behind the sky.

It is March, and in theory spring lies not too far away. But it is a hard thing to bear in mind, as a frozen snowpack entirely mediates us from the earth's surface, like shoes separating bare feet from ground. It is not a time of buds nor incipient green. All of that is conceptual, residing in a theory of latency.

And yet I saw dirt. One of our woodpiles is bracketed by two trees on a sharp slope, and hence gets some weird wind effects. Its leeward side retains very little snow. So just behind the stack, under a protective tarp, lies several square inches of autumnal soil. The dirt is frozen, of course, and seems about to be smothered by the cubic yards of snow just next to it. When we clear the woodpile, the next gusts will carry snow across it, reminding the Earth of just what time of year it is.

Grieving for the illusion

2011-03-01T17:45:00.001-05:00

I've been hit hard several times this winter by Peak Oil grief. I think I keep flipping between anger and depression. I'm watching people around me wallow in denial.

Recently one of my friends came to the stunning conclusion that the technology to prevent a crash is just not there. Perhaps if we'd had a Manhattan Project for energy thirty years ago, we might have something practical by now, but now, there's nothing on the horizon. Nothing but what Shell Oil calls the Scramble Scenario

This is SHELL OIL's scenario. Not a group known to have a lot of sympathy to the Peakniks.

This week, the scramble's happening in Bahrain and Libya. Saudi Arabia's bracing for it. When people lose the ability to feed themselves, they march.

At the moment, I'm sitting in a coffee shop in New England. I wish I could believe the illusion of safety and security that exists here.

These are "The Good Old Days", folks. Make the most of them.

Snowshoeing, from Chronopsis

2011-03-01T17:12:00.000-05:00

Walking through the snow: a beautiful little meditation by Patrick Kelley. Be sure to listen to the tromping sounds.

Chicken tractor in winter

2011-02-24T11:04:00.000-05:00

It was heartening to read this Tiny Farms post about chicken tractors. Yes, "chicken tractors", which our family calls "the chicken Fort Knox."

These are mobile chicken houses, basically, built of lightweight metal. They protect the critters within, but are open on the bottom, which lets the birds scratch up the soil and, ah, enrich it with their fine leavings. The "tractor" is mobile, being light and equipped with wheels. After a time, we haul the thing to a new spot, leaving a rectangle of nicely improved earth. Very neat.

Reading this now, in the deep of winter, is bittersweet. I badly want the snow to be gone, so we can dig out our tractor. It needs a little repair - one sheet of metal got whacked by a falling tree limb. It needs more chickens (we're down to one). But the sweetness comes from thinking of the sheer elegance and practicality of the thing, the though of soil growing, the happy industry of the birds. It draws my imagination forward to warmer times.

Mid-February: cold, snow, sun

2011-02-14T10:02:00.000-05:00

Impressions from the middle of February:

I have dug out one of our major woodpiles. We stacked it last fall, a single line of wood braced against a decades-old tree, standing on runners of old wood. Since winter began snows have accumulated on either side of this stack, eventually rising above its three feet top. So I shoveled and dug, gradually exposing hidden treasure: dry wood, smelling of last summer's cutting.
Snow is the stuff of temporary architectures all over our land. There's Owain's grand fortification, Fort Vengeance, which now sports supporting trenches and an escape slide. There are also several paths made of repeatedly trodden snow, firm lines snaking through softer drifts. Come thaw they will persist for days, lineaments of colder times traced across wet grass.
Changed spaces: we stack wood in the basement all winter long, once the first few freezes hit in late autumn, killing any insects which might dwell in the pieces. Stacked up like furniture or bars, they dry a little bit, becoming better fuel for the wood stove.
Weeks of clouds gave way to astonishing sun. A 5-minute walk bakes my eyeballs with searing white: white of snowdrifts, of clouds, of snow hanging from trees like Spanish moss.

Snow falling from roof

2011-02-09T08:00:00.000-05:00

A typical deep winter scene, shot by our friends and semi-neighbors Mr. and Mrs. Megadoom:

After the video, note the deep stresses show in that post. This can be hard stuff.

Storms and stress

2011-02-08T08:31:00.000-05:00

Sometimes homesteading is just frustrating, surprising, grinding work. A week of nearly continuous snow spurred on our most recent bouts, as ice suffused the land and drained our muscles:

Snowshoeing up to repower the broadband transmitter in the dark was the hardest yet. The snowpack had reformed, erasing our hard-won trail. Then several days' worth of weather froze the top layer, added more on top of that, then froze the newest stratum. A 30 minute tromp became a 2 hour saga of seemingly endless baby steps. Each snowshoe-step forward required a forceful near-kick downwards to punch out something to stand on. Each step had to abut the previous one, and each show not catch the other.
Broadband has stuttered, thanks to multiple coverings of snow-ice-snow on multiple antenna. (This ain't part of the always-on broadband concept)
And our car got stuck, again, at the end of the driveway, in a mix of spinning wheels, slick surfaces, and constricting snowbanks. It took a while to free ourselves, with Owain hauling buckets of ashes (stored in the basement, from our wood-burning stove); me digging around each tire, then hacking back a snowbank; Gwynneth howling about being late for school; Ceredwyn using her fine driving skills to twitch the Saturn back and forth, sideways, and eventually out onto... a very slick, snow-covered road.

All of these pains are immersed in wintry beauty, every step of the way. We knew about these things when we got into homesteading. But here I want to pause to... sit a spell, rest my back, and acknowledge the drang that comes with the sturm.

Night thoughts on snowshoes

2011-01-26T12:53:00.000-05:00

Last night I snowshoed up the lane again, along the mountaintop, in order to feed more power to one of our community broadband radios. It was a rerun of the errand a few days ago.

Pearl Lee Road during daytime

The night wasn't that cold, around 10 F, but I geared up to be safe: Russian fut hat, giant snowshoes, snowpants, sweater, coat, two pairs of gloves. A backpack carried water, snacks (nuts, sausage, cheese), and a book to read (see below), since I'd have some time to kill once I reached the destination. A flashlight was strapped to my head, like a headlamp, since it was already dark, and there are no streetlights here.

After stomping up our land to the road, I crunched along the snow-covered dirt lane for a while, listening to the few sounds the quiet forest emitted: the gentle breathing of snow across snowbanks; the creak of trees flexing slowly under weight of frozen snowfall; a branch cracking, perhaps trod by sneaky animal.

I eventually reached the point on Pearl Lee Road where plowing ended, marked by a huge snowpile. The lane beyond was covered as far as could be seen in a thick, solid, layer of snow about a yard off the ground. Another community volunteer and I had already broken a trail through that stuff, so I found the end of it, slowly climbed up, then set to tromping away in that elevated cut. The trail stretched before me, lit of up my headlamp, like a trench, or a dry river bottom between banks of unmarked snow.

This proceeded for a few minutes, until I found new tracks, which appeared across mine, perpendicular. A narrow set of footprints ran from the right, out of the forest, across the snow, and right into our path. They continued off to the left, making a straight line, and ending in more trees and darkness. It was hard to make out which animal had done this, as the tracks were blurred by snow - a deer? dog? - but the direction was starkly clear. It was both slightly frightening to discover, especially in the dark, and also somehow cheering, meeting another traveler on the road, separated by a few hours, maybe.

Up the road a ways, and another animal track crossed the path, again from the right. This time the creature struck the trail, then moved along within it for a few yards, resuming its direction further on: a zig zag across our footsteps. Still further and new tracks appeared, hitting the trail then running alongside the human path for some yards. Animal footsteps appeared on either side of my booted snowshoe, step by step, until they ceased.

As I pushed on I sometimes turned my head to face the forests, sweeping the headlamp's light across the horizon. The beam picked out a treeline, the smoothly warping contours of wind-molded snow, a single baby pine tree, an ornamental bridge arcing across an invisible, snow-choked stream. My breath fogged out before me and drifted in the slight wind, the light punching through it and stalling out in the vast dark.

After completing my power errand, which took a little more than an hour, I retraced my steps in the colder night, and mused on how the experience resembled space travel. In my gear I felt like an astronaut, armored against a potentially dangerous environment, steadily exploring an alien world (largely invisible, dark, mysterious). The sky was clouded, and the occasional plane burred overhead, a bit of light peeping out. I'd been reading a new science fiction novel, The Ouroboros Wave (Jyouji Hayashi, 2010), which I'd enjoyed. I had read into it inside a cold and dark room, next to the roar of a generator, holding pages open with mittened hands, my headlamp playing across pages. Hayashi's stories of deep space and Europa's seas reverberated in my mind as I stomped slowly across the nonhuman landscape.

Once I left the trail and returned to the plowed lane, I turned off my headlamp and kept going in the sudden dark. My eyes adjusted, revealing the levels of snow before me: high, low, then high again. I urged memories of walking this lane to my mind, and let my legs pick out the way home.

Cold, late Juanuary

2011-01-24T09:46:00.000-05:00

Notes on a cold night and morning:

I snowshoed up the lane last night, between 9 and 11:30 pm. The temperature was -20F when I left, with a bit of rising wind, and I had to get an internet radio's power supply restarted, or else we'd lose connectivity. So I strapped on snowshoes, strapped on a flashlight to my head, added one earbud connected to an mp3 player full of podcasts, and trudged away.

The stars were brilliant, lushly spread across the sky. The night's sounds were lively: tree branches brushing against each other, sometimes crackling; wind working its way over the ground; dry crunches of snow underfoot; scrabbling of broom bristles across a broad solar array.
Owain and I are reading At the Mountains of Madness, H. P. Lovecraft's classic tale of Antarctic terror. It's fun for all sorts of reasons, especially for expanding Owain's reading. But here's one cute bit for this post:
For the most part, the thermometer varied between zero and 20° or 25° above, and our experience with New England winters had accustomed us to rigors of this sort.

source: D-bytes

It's cold enough now to see our breath in the house, as of 9 am.

Away from the ancient sunlight

2011-01-06T16:40:00.000-05:00

Re: the previous post - note that those permaculture activists take the long view. They see the present day as a transition from one form of sunlight to another:

This generation is probably the or one of the last fossil fuel generations. Our children or theirs will be the transition generation from stored ancient sunlight back to present local sunlight. Remaining fossil fuel reserves are probably best used for permanent infrastructure projects — use a tractor today to swale your property, build a water farm storage pond or develop an urban gravity water system. We need more energy decent tools — a hand crank flour mill or nut huller is more useful than an electric one when the power is out. You get the idea.

We'd better get used to it, in other words. More muscle-powered tools, more animal power, and a lot more in the way of plants.

(photo from our town's school, back in 2007)

Morning on January 1st, 2011

2011-01-02T14:14:00.000-05:00

Some glimpses of the homestead during the first morning of 2011:

Things are good. We have electricity and plenty of firewood, broadband internet and functioning hot water, healthy animals and enough stored food. We humans are healthy enough.

Items:

Huge slabs of ice and snow have been falling off the roof. Ka-THUD! as the temperature warms to the freezing point of water. We had this new roof put on last summer, a fine metal thing, red and grooved. It is warmer in the house than it once was.
Goats and chicken are pleased to receive breakfast, as ever. I brought them two scoops of food, plus a bucket of hot water, walking over clearly visible paths (trails of compressed snow, formed over repeated tromping).
There is nothing we can do with growing things. We did more planting than ever, last summer, which makes not doing it more present in our minds, now. It's frustrating, like phantom limb.

Krugman discovers peak oil

2010-12-28T09:59:00.001-05:00

Peak oil: Paul Krugman seems to believe it.

Conventional oil production has been flat for four years; in that sense, at least, peak oil has arrived.

He even starts to grok the tar sands angle:

True, alternative sources, like oil from Canada’s tar sands, have continued to grow. But these alternative sources come at relatively high cost, both monetary and environmental.

Perhaps this will mean greater discussion of peak oil, at least among liberals/progressives, given Krugman's stature.

Pens and M&M's

2010-12-26T14:19:00.001-05:00

I've been asked several times, what I would take with me to Haiti if I went back.
I always reply "Pens and M&M's".

More on M&M's in another post. Right now, I want to talk about pens.

Last week I was running errands in town and I was writing a lot of checks. Halfway through the morning, I lost my pen. My experience in Haiti really made me notice having lost my pen. As an experiment I spent the next couple of hours using other people's pens and noticing using other peoples pens.

Pens are a funny thing. If you have them, you never think about them. You lose one, you find one.

You walk away with someone else's accidentally and unless its one of those fancy expensive ones (which I never use anyway, because I hate the way they're so heavy in my hand), its a sort of "no harm, no foul", thing.

If I need a pen, I can borrow one, I can buy one, I can even steal one with little fear of retaliation. Societally, we don't even register it as theft.

You will know the world has ended, when there are no pens.

It's a terrible feeling for there to be no pens. No pens, not even a pencil. It felt like everything else could be replaced or jury rigged. You can give less or save it for those who are in dire need. There's always some technique or Macguyver-esq hack you can try.

No penicillin?
All right, we've got amoxicillin somebody sent us.

Running low on normal saline?
Shit. All right. Only give it to the ones who really need it.

No pitocin?
Damn it. All right, I'm going to show you how to do uterine massage.

But pens...That's like the last thing in the world you can do without. Hospitals run on paperwork. Even if the paperwork is only to remind you what you've already done for this patient. You need to record vitals, drugs given, treatments, symptoms. Even if you're not actually in a hospital, you need to record what you've done for a person.

Pencils might do it, but you need to be able to read what you're writing. If you have a lot of paper together, the pencil smears. And pencils seem to come from the same place pens do.

This begins to apply to all those little ubiquitous supplies that we think nothing of picking up when we start to run low. Often we have to have a whole system for getting rid of the excess. Sticky notes, labels, markers, trash bags. These are the things that will disappear in SHTF collapse, because everyone always thinks of toilet paper and MRE's.

Me, I'm putting aside a few boxes of pens for the next time I have to deal with some variety of collapse.

The machinery of heat: drudgery

2010-12-24T20:49:00.000-05:00

Last week offered another lesson about the fragility of systems. It's the kind of story which means diving deeply into homestead mechanisms in a geeky yet unpleasurable way. It reminds me of just how far we have to go.

Once again, we lost hot water. Our hot water heater's pilot light went out, and the tank's water grew cold. In late December, in Vermont.

"Again": here's the problem. Some of our house is digital, such as the broadband router. Some is pre-industrial, like the wood fires which heat the home. In between those epochs lies the twentieth-century hardware setup for hot water, which is lodged in the basement.

Off in the northeastern corner, mounted on cinderblocks, stands an electric pump. The tall, gray cylinder draws water up from the well slightly above the house, then feeds it into a Rheem Fury. The Fury also stands on cinderblocks, and is also a cylinder. It takes the well water, then heats it up, using propane from our tank and electrical power from the grid. It holds the warm water, until pumps from upstairs haul it up to kitchen or bathroom.

Just writing this suggests the complexity of structure: multiple units, multiple connections, segmented flows each depending on others. External forces are key: the well, to supply water; the electrical grid, for power.

Like a lot of 20th-century tech, it's good when it works, and a mess when it doesn't.

The damned pilot light is impossible to restart without professional help.

Item: if the house electricity goes off, the pilot light goes out.
Item: if the propane tanks gets low, the pilot light shuts off.
Item: if the wind is high, out goes the pilot.

Restarting the pilot means crawling on one's belly upon the concrete basement floor, in order to reach a metal-edged, hand-chomping slot helpfully located on the water heater's bottom. Above the slot is a how-to decal, written in stilted, jargony style. It tells us that a tough, plastic button needs to be pressed down, hard. At the same time a cantankerous plastic knob must be turned... just so. (Before doing this we need to let the thing sit for 5 minutes, to allow gas to seep away.)

Holding those two buttons takes one hand; with another hand one must light and a match. Said match needs to be driven deep into that metal-fanged, too-narrow slot. Deep into the cold dark, goes my hand and then my fingers, match shaking as it inches past several metal lines, while the smell of gas all around invites visions of combustion.

If I do all of that correctly, ever button turned and pressed, the match shoved into the dark bowels... the pilot light glimmers, then dies. If we follow the decal's instructions, we do this several more times. Usually the pilot light dies time after time.

Why? Some a complicated series of additional problems are described by specialists. Too much air in the works. Weak couplers. Thermocouplers are cranky, air persists in lines way later than it should, other electrical connectors need kludging together. We're not really sure, and they aren't fixable. They do require the intervention of a specialist.

We call the company, perhaps on a phone line which is the only working electrical item in the house, if it's a power failure. An hour later some doughty, much put upon technician arrives. After coaxing a vehicle along our dangerous drive, they stomp downstairs and then take up to 15 minutes and a modicum of cursing to coax the little flame into life, bringing my family back to the 20th century.

So many dependencies. Such specialized skills. Layers of hardware stretching between our colonial and postmodern competencies. Yes, we could learn all of this, given a lot of time. Or, yes, we could replace it all, given substantial funds. Our entire homesteading enterprise runs smack up against these blockages, these knots of frustration, built of intertwined decades.

Treating Childhood Illness in a SHTF Scenario Part 4

2010-12-13T07:23:00.000-05:00

This is the last part in this series:

General recommendations:

· Hydrate, hydrate, hydrate. Water should be top priority in your preps.

· Try to avoid using any medications in babies under six months old.

· In older babies and children, if you choose to use OTC medication, make sure that the ones on hand are single medication formulas to avoid double dosing.

· Follow medication dosing instructions

· Never give a child or adolescent aspirin

Preparations for people with children:

· Take Infant and Child CPR and First Aid. As always, the most important preparations are the ones you carry around in your head.

· From the beginning of your baby’s life, breastfeed, if at all possible. It is free and always available. Nursing moms should have preferred access to drinking water, this is much more important than food. It is important for the other adults around a nursing mom to realize that, nursing a baby is a full time, strenuous, occupation. In a SHTF scenario, mom may find her milk supply compromised due to stress. Keep at it, stay well hydrated and nurse every time baby opens his mouth, eventually the milk will flow again.

· If you’re a nursing mother with a well established milk supply, you may be in a position to offer feeding to a child other than your own. It's generally only practical to nurse one other. Women have done this for the entire history of our species. Don’t be afraid that another baby will “steal” your own child’s milk. Keep properly hydrated and the more the children nurse, the more milk you will have.

. If breast feeding is not possible, remember, in a true collapse (Katrina and Haiti come to mind), infant formula will become unavailable. Formula made with contaminated water or formula that is made dilute to “stretch” it will make your child sick. Therefore, formula and water to mix it with should be on the high priority list in one’s preparations. Powdered formula is easiest to transport and store, but it may be impractical to sterilize bottles and equipment.

· Premade formula in single use bottles can be stored in the bug out bag for immediate use or in the event that water is unavailable. Store enough for as many days as you have food for the adults.

· Comfort food is essential in the bug out bag for everyone involved, but especially children. A bag of M&M’s or Hershey’s kisses can calm everyone’s nerves as well as supply much needed calories

· OTC medications to include in one’s first aid kit for children: Children’s Ibuprofen, Children’s Tylenol, Chewable Dramamine (this has the same medication as Benadryl), oral rehydration solution; either commercially prepared or homemade.

I’ve covered only a few of the more common illnesses that can happen to children. In any child’s illness, it is important that the parent be as calm as possible, doubly so in a SHTF situation. My goal here is to foster calm and provide parents with tools to treat a sick child, without waiting for the power to come back or the road to be plowed out..

What would you do?

2010-12-12T17:04:00.001-05:00

There's a question that floats around Doomer forums from time to time:

What do you do when your unprepared neighbor comes around to your doomstead, asking for handouts?

Often, they ask it as though it's never happened before. They ask it as though it's in the far off SHTF future. They ask it as though its a rhetorical question that most people have never faced in real life.

Actually, most people have faced it. People have walked by panhandlers, seen the need for charitable donations, seen the unemployment numbers.

The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior. That's a good thing to think about.

How do you act when you walk by the guys on the street begging for change?

Do you give to the United Way or your local food shelf?

Do you buy him a sandwich and a cup of coffee so he doesn't buy beer and smokes with your money?

Do you give him a dollar and hope he enjoys the joint he's going to buy from the local dealer to get through the night?

Do you give him one of your smokes because you spent the last of your money on them and its good karma to share?

Another question that makes the rounds, to jack up the emotional intensity, is what if the neighbors were actually starving children?

When I was in Haiti, I discovered exactly what I would do, confronted with starving children.

Children who came to our clinic were often more than malnourished, some were actually on the brink of death.

In the city, children would follow anyone with a white face around saying, in English, "Please, missus, I'm hungry.

I held my hands up, to show they were empty and said, "I got nothing."

No one gave the street beggars anything. That was taking your life in your hands, Distributing anything was a risky business, it wasn't uncommon to get mobbed.

We treated the severely malnourished for worms, and we distributed things like vitamins when we could.

I handled the knowledge that, steps from my table, people were starving by being frugal with what we had. I took only what I needed and was grateful for every bite. I focused on the fact that if I didn't feed myself, I was no good to them.

The first rule of emergency services and the last is; Do Not Become Another Casualty.

My coworkers had other ways to handle it. Some of them adopted families or children and would bring them food. I couldn't do that, my own internal sense of justice would require that, if I fed one of them, I'd have to feed all of them.

I focused on what I could do. I could take care of their illnesses and their injuries. I could give a sympathetic ear to their troubles. I could catch babies.

One of my fellow aid workers was a lovely, kind young woman. She was trying to help a mom who didn't have any milk, figure out how to re-lactate, that is to say get her breasts producing milk again. This can be done, but its hard and requires mom to be dedicated.

As I talked to the mom, I realized that this woman was not dedicated. Probably for reasons beyond her own control, she didn't have the wherewithal to do what she needed to do. I explained patiently that she needed to keep baby with her 24/7 and give the baby the breast every time it opened its' mouth. At least every two hours.

I explained how vital it was. We had no formula to give the woman, so she was supplementing with Pedialyte.

My colleague was full of optimism, and in love with both the mom and the baby. I gave the mom what advice I could and let it go.

I wonder sometimes how my colleague took the baby's death. I never asked her and she wasn't on my team, so I don't talk to her now.

Sometimes I feel hard hearted. I am a person who is slow to warm up to people. I don't bond easily. It protects me in places like that. I don't make myself another casualty and I can turn around to treat (and maybe save) the next dying baby that way.

Treating Childhood Illness in a SHTF Scenario Part 3

2010-12-11T21:41:00.001-05:00

Fever

Fever can be a part of almost any illness, as well as be caused by something as simple as teething. Its important to keep in mind that the body will never produce a fever over 106 degrees, however, outside environmental factors might raise the body temperature above this dangerous threshold. Fever is part of the body’s normal immune system: the increased internal temperature helps to kill off the bad bugs. Many health care providers now believe that low fevers (under 101 degrees) do not require treatment.

The most important thing to do for a feverish child is to prevent overheating. If they kick the covers off, leave them off. If they are sweating, they are over covered. This is especially important to remember in a baby who can’t undress themselves.

It is not uncommon for an infant to run a quite high fever for relatively minor illnesses. A simple cold can cause a baby to run a fever of over 102. The degree of fever does not indicate the severity of illness (as it might for an adult).

Young children occasionally have seizures due to fever. These look much scarier than they really are. They have nothing to do with the height of the fever, although they might have to do with how fast a fever gets high. If the child has a seizure due to a fever, do not do anything to restrain them and most of all do NOT put anything in their mouths. They cannot swallow their tongues.

The good news is that these seizures (called febrile seizures) do NOT cause brain damage of any kind and they are not generally indicative of epilepsy. It is important to seek medical care when it becomes available, of course, but most of the time, the child will have no after effects.

If OTC medications are available, they can be given according to directions, to keep the child comfortable.

Do NOT give cold baths or alcohol rubs which can chill the child. If the surrounding temperature is warm, or the child is very uncomfortable you can give them a tepid (NOT COLD) bath or rub them down with tepid water. Always be guided by their comfort—if they are cold give them a blanket, if they are hot take one off.

· Ear infections

Most parents will recognize the symptoms of these; the baby or child is in great distress, often crying inconsolably. The outer ear may or may not be red. Acetaminophen (Tylenol) and ibuprofen administered according to the directions are the best treatments. If you stagger the dosing, giving acetaminophen first, then three hours later, ibuprofen (or vice versa) you can achieve the same level of pain control as if you were giving the child a more powerful medication such as codeine. Typically, these run their course in a few days.

One good thing to include in your preps if you have children is an otoscope. This is the gadget that the doctor uses to look in your ears. Most of the ones that you get in the drugstore have charts that show what the eardrum is supposed to look like. These are helpful for two reasons; the first being that you can make sure your possibly hysterical or non-verbal child is crying due to ear infection, not some other reason. The other is that if the eardrum is not perforated (that is to say, it doesn’t have a hole in it) you can warm a few drops of olive oil to put in the painful ear. The direct heat is very soothing. If there does appear to be blood or discharge inside the ear canal, do not allow anything (including water from bathing) to enter the ear canal. Heat can be applied from the outside with either a hot pack or sometimes just a warmed dry washcloth.

A perforated eardrum may or may not bleed. A bleeding ear looks scary, but if it is from an ear infection and not from an injury, in all likelihood it will heal itself with no permanent damage to the child’s hearing--they may have some loss of hearing until the rupture heals, however. What has happened is that the pressure of the fluid in the middle ear became too great and the eardrum ruptured under the pressure. In fact, after the eardrum ruptures, you will see an immediate diminishment in the child’s pain as the fluid drains out.

More on the shrinking American economy

2010-12-10T18:49:00.000-05:00

Here's another article supporting my suspicion that the American economy is collapsing into a health care state:

Thanks to deindustrialization, which is caused both by productivity growth and by corporate offshoring, the overwhelming majority of Americans now work in the non-traded domestic service sector. The jobs that have the greatest growth in numbers are concentrated in sectors like medical care and childcare.

The rest of the article heads off into a mix of satire and nationalism, but I wanted to nail down this part. As the American economy struggles, the medical sector remains one that can't be outsourced, generally.

So imagine an America in a few years, where the growing jobs involve health care: nursing, home care, technological applications. Elders cared for by younger generations. Manufacturing and scalable service jobs have disappeared.

Why do we homestead? To survive shocks like these.

(via MetaFilter)

Treating Childhood Illness in a SHTF Scenario Part 2

2010-12-07T20:02:00.011-05:00

The second in the series.

Upper Respiratory Illness

Characterized by snotty noses, cough and general cold symptoms, this is usually a virus.

Cold medicines are not recommended in children under four; therefore one can use a bulb syringe, better known in my house as a “snot sucker”, to clear secretions. This is a completely mechanical solution.

To use a bulb syringe:

Squeeze the bulb of the syringe

Inserts the tip

Suck the snot out of small nose.

MAKE SURE BULB IS SQUEEZED BEFORE INSERTING INTO NOSE! Otherwise you will blow snot further into nose.

Vicks Vapo-rub is no longer recommended for children. However rubbing a child’s chest and back is helpful to break up the congestion. If it’s available, using olive oil or baby oil will have a similar effect to the one once attributed to Vicks

Older children can take cold medicines (assuming they were included in your preps) as directed, but should be in single medicine formulation. Multi symptom cold medicines can lead to unwanted side effects or overdosing. It’s also a bad idea to suppress coughing too much unless the child is completely unable to sleep due to coughing—coughing is the body’s way of ridding itself of the gunk.

Another purely mechanical solution is to use a nasal rinse (neti pot) if your child will tolerate it and you have it available.

Steam is very helpful for respiratory yuck, assuming you have water and a way to heat it. Boil a kettle of water and have the child lean over the hot (not boiling) steam. If a tent can be made with a towel or a sheet, all the better. Encourage them to blow snot out of their nose rather than sniff it up.

It is helpful to give the child oral rehydration solution, but unless they’re also vomiting, use it to replace only half of the fluids they drink. Otherwise let them drink whatever you have.

Hot drinks, even just hot water, can clear the nose and sooth the throat. Lemon juice, honey and hot water create a good cough medicine that is soothing, reduces phlegm and is completely without side effects. Soup, is good alternative, as well. Stay away from hot chocolate, though—milk will thicken the secretions.

A normal cold or flu will run its course in 7-10 days.

My Favorite Kind of Evening

2010-12-06T16:46:00.000-05:00

Got our first real snow today--something that was more than a dusting anyway. Stayed in the house all afternoon, moving furniture around, tending the fire.

When I went to get the children it became evident that Daughter was not going to make it to ballet tonight. Roads are just a little too slick for me to want to go into town. This was confirmed when I got a call that the school board meeting I was going to go to tonight was cancelled.

So I have nothing to do tonight except watch it snow and feed us.

I brought in some wood, fed animals before it got dark. I am now enjoying the coziness of my fire and wondering if I can finish the mittens I'm making for myself this evening.

This is why I moved to Vermont.

Treating Childhood Illness in a SHTF Scenario Part 1

2010-12-05T09:52:00.014-05:00

One of the things people told us they wanted to see in this blog when we asked them, was practical homesteading tips. This week, I'm going to be posting some practical instructions on healthcare in situations where the Shit Has Hit The Fan (SHTF).

I'll start with childhood illnesses. The worst thing about being a parent has to be sick kids. Having children lowers the bar on what constitutes an emergency. The same symptoms which, in an adult, would result in popping an ibuprofen and going back to bed, often induce panic when in a child. Not without reason; we are programmed to react this way both by genetics and culture. Unfortunately, our culture also programs us that only “experts” can take care of these problems. Hence we depend heavily on pediatricians and emergency rooms to simply give us psychological first aid—a hand pat and “Don’t worry Mrs. Alexander, it’s just a virus”.

I don’t intend to cover the preparations for chronically ill children, or injuries; both of those subjects require discussions all their own.

In these posts, you’ll find how to treat everyday symptoms of illnesses that are usually minor and will take care of themselves if, given proper at-home treatment. For the purposes of these posts, we’ll assume that the SHTF scenario is a temporary one; think hurricane, earthquake or ice storm.

Modern medical care is three to ten days away—this might as well be forever when you have a sick child. In a true collapse situation, these suggestions would still hold true, but that’s outside of the scope of what I want to talk about here.

In this series, I’d like to discuss how to make illnesses easier to bear for mom, dad and children and also how to prevent a minor illness from becoming life-threatening.

Stomach problems

Stomach aches, nausea, vomiting and diarrhea will often accompany emotional distress, especially in children. Most of the time, it resolves on its own and requires no treatment. Encourage the child to eat and drink water as tolerated.

If vomiting continues for more than an hour, or diarrhea occurs more than twice, it’s important to begin to treat for dehydration. Don’t wait for the child to show or complain of symptoms.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), the most common cause of death in children is dehydration.

Dehydration is caused most often by diarrhea or vomiting which can be traced back to emotional upset, viruses, spoiled food or contaminated water.

In the majority of cases, if the child is given adequate fluids, their immune system can take care of the rest.

In order to help the body retain the fluid, it should be in the form of oral rehydration solution. This is available commercially as Pedialyte, in dried package form (probably most convenient for the medicine cabinet or bug out bag) or one can make one’s own. Find the recipe here:

Homemade Oral Rehydration Solution recipe

Whatever formulation you use, give the child one teaspoonful every fifteen minutes until vomiting subsides. In cases of diarrhea, feed to child as much as they will drink in small sips.

Remember that this is not intended to stop the vomiting or diarrhea, but to keep the child from drying out. The symptoms will stop on their own.

For an infant, breast milk is considered a clear fluid, and nursing should be continued at all times, even during the initial rehydration process.

The oral rehydration solution can be given in between breast feedings. This is an exception to the "no water for babies" rule, as the salts and sugars even in breastmilk are not the correct balance for rehydration purposes.

For non nursing babies, who are normally formula-fed or who eat solids, formula and foods should be stopped during rehydration and restarted as soon as the child is no longer showing signs of dehydration several hours later. Changes in formula usually aren't necessary.

The same goes for older children. Until the child is no longer dehydrated, other foods and liquids should be stopped.

Something to note, other "clear liquids" often used by parents or recommended by doctors, in the past are no longer considered appropriate for use in dehydrated kids.

Drinks to avoid include: water, soda, ginger ale, tea, fruit juice, gelatin desserts, chicken broth, or sports drinks. These don't have the right mix of sugar and salts and can even make diarrhea worse. NOT something one needs in a SHTF situation.

The American Pediatric Association does not recommend giving a child anti-diarrheal medication such as Imodium or Kaopectate. The reason is that over-the-counter medicines for diarrhea or vomiting can have potentially dangerous side effects. Vomiting and diarrhea are the body’s way of removing the toxins or the bacteria from the digestive system. Appropriate fluids to support that process are the key to treatment.

When the child’s stomach has settled, bland foods such as applesauce, crackers, rice or toast can be offered.

For stomach ache, with or without other symptoms, often the child’s instinct of staying still is the best treatment. If they are not hungry, don’t try to force food. If they are hungry and food is available, allow them to eat. Most serious abdominal illnesses include lack of appetite, so hunger is good sign.

In the case of more serious stomach problem like appendicitis, one might to see some vomiting but diarrhea is unusual. Commonly the most prominent symptom will be pain that begins around the belly button then moves to the lower right. The stomach will often be hard and sore to the touch.

Until medical help becomes available, let the child rest quietly—they will be disinclined to move anyway. What will happen is that the body will attempt to wall off the infection. Lying still encourages this.

Under no circumstances, should one give a laxative to a child who is experiencing persistent abdominal pain.

Dreams of Haiti

2010-12-04T10:00:00.006-05:00

I keep dreaming of my time in Haiti. I suppose I'm trying to integrate the whole surreal experience.

When I sit down to write about the experience it seems to slide away from my grasp into the indescribable. I try not to devolve into cliche.

I am trying to keep this post focused, so while there are many stories I could tell, I won't.

I will not tell you about the strength of people who began every meeting with a prayer and ended it with a song.

I will not tell you about the sweet, kind translator who was so protective of the foreign aid workers; I found out later he was wanted in Brooklyn for murder.

I will not tell you about the young man (only one of many) who lived in a tent because he couldn't bear to be in buildings made of concrete.

I learned more about collapse in two weeks there than I learned anytime before. I long to go back because it was a place where great good could be done. I can't read about the cholera epidemic without looking at flight prices to Port Au Prince.

Its a powerful example of how truly fucked up the world's governments are. From my admittedly small spot on the ground, it appeared that the NGO's were where it was at in terms of providing services and relief. The UN was there, providing security, but the NGO I worked with was the only one in the area who had backhoes, rubble removal teams AND had a place to remove the rubble to.

There was some question about whether we should be there providing services to people. I've seen discussion about how to evict the people from the camps, perhaps to the green spaces around Port Au Prince where they could farm or something.

Why is it so many Americans assume that, naturally, these people are all peasant farmers and would be happy to have a chunk of land? The people I met were all pretty much urbanites, with no more knowledge of how to grow a stand of sugar cane or a rice paddy than I would. The people I met were shopkeepers, construction workers, nail technicians, hairstylists, nurses, secretaries and doctors. One of the reasons for the existence of the camps is that Port Au Prince is their home.

In no way did the Haitians I met react any differently than a group of Americans might react, except that perhaps they had a better sense of their own circumstances. When I was there, I saw nothing very different from the way the people of New Orleans reacted or the way New Yorkers reacted to the sudden ending of their worlds. The good, the bad, and the ugly were all present.

While I was there, I saw wonderful examples of the sheer resilience of humanity. I also saw heartbreaking things that will keep me up nights for the rest of my life. I suppose we consider things are cliche precisely because they tend to be experienced by so many in such a similar way.

The health care lifeboat

2010-12-03T11:53:00.000-05:00

Back in spring Ceredwyn and I talked about what economic sectors were likely to do well in America. If we are correct about a future of steady decline*, most sectors will do badly. After much discussion during planting and weeding, we concluded that health care was one of the few areas that would grow in terms of jobs and income.

Why? Simply put, the eldercare sector. It grows in numbers, thanks to aging Baby Boomers and relatively low numbers of younger folks (like us, and our children). Most care can't be outsourced or otherwise scaled, so there's a big, deep demand for sheer numbers of workers. And seniors have potent political power: we see Medicaid slashed before Medicare gets touched, for instance. The powers of modern science ensure at least a medium-term continuation in longer lifespans. More folks to care for in all kinds of ways = growth industry.

So this Planet Money story has a small confirmation of our hypothesis. As you see in the chart above, "Health care, the big winner during the downturn, continued to grow this year." Note their explanation, which ties into our hypothesis:

A big chunk of its funding comes from the government; the aging population means more people need more health care; and health-care spending is one of the last things people cut back on in tough times.

This plays a role in our career discussions with the children, yes indeed.

*Actually, we think of decline as rappelling downhill. The nation arcs from side to side, bouncing up and down, describing local variations on an overall downward curve.

Dress Rehearsal for Collapse

2010-12-02T12:03:00.004-05:00

Our power went out last night. We had a pretty serious windstorm and a lot of the county went without power. I always treat power outages as dress rehearsals for the proverbial Shit Hitting Fan.

As always we had water, food and flashlights. We heat with wood, so that's never a problem. Our well pump is electric so I always store enough water to cook with and some to flush the toilet.

One of the preparations we're intending to buy in the next year is a hand pump that drops in next to our electrical pump. Ostensibly for emergency use. Not looking like a crazy survivalist is all in the way you frame things to your neighbors.

This is the first outage this winter to last more than a few minutes. In fact, my husband just got off the phone and it appears we'll be out of power for at least the next twenty four hours. As I type this, I am currently taking advantage of the public library which is still firmly in the 21st Century; complete with lights, internet and access to coffee shops.

I must wonder though if, say two years ago, the lights would have been repaired sooner. We were out of electricity for only a day after a similiar 2006 storm. I seem to remember news items last year talking of lay-offs. Maybe there are just not as many electrical repair crews. Perhaps I am in error, or perhaps I'm merely paranoid.

In 2003 after the big blackout, NM governor Bill Richardson said the U.S. was "a superpower with a third-world electricity grid." Seven years on, this is even more true. Worse yet, we don't have the resources to reverse this trend.

Our next round of prep buying will also include a couple deep cycle batteries and some more canning materials. Freezing is an ok option because we have a large chest freezer (they tend to stay frozen through blackouts), but I find that my canned goods are more reliable.

Every power outage is a learning experience. It also seems that we might need to become accustomed to these becoming longer as the power companies struggle to pay the wages and fuel costs for their crews.

Collapse with Children

2010-11-29T22:51:00.007-05:00

Our daughter, going on sixteen in March, joined the Fire Department last summer as a cadet. Sunday, she came with me to her very first actual car accident.

It was a slightly snowy day (oddly mild for November, actually). The car slipped on a patch of ice and hit an electrical pole. It was a major road and it had to be closed as we waited for the the electrical company to come and shut off the power and repair the downed line. We directed traffic for a little under two hours.

It was a minor accident, the driver and passengers declined transportation. That is to say, they decided that they didn't want to be checked out at the hospital for injuries.

It was surprisingly pleasant to stand out there with my daughter, training her to do a grown up job.

My mother, a child of WWII, used to claim that we were kept in school far too long, that many teenage episodes of rebellion and angst could be cured with a little real work.

I'm finding myself starting to agree, although perhaps not in the way my mother meant it. My daughter has a hunger to do something real. Not what she sees as useless make work some of her classes seem to joy in creating for her.

When she talks about her experiences as a fire cadet, she points out that all the "team building" exercises she's done in school fall far short. In fire camp she learned to trust her compatriots because they were men and women who might have to pull her ass out of a fire sometime. She depends on her fellow cadets (and the grown up firefighters on our squad) in a real-no-kidding-survival sort of way, rather than some fake social clique, cheer leading squad, school rivalry way.

Daughter is old enough to be considering career options after HS. She thinks she doesn't necessarily want to be a professional firefighter, but she sees the need for community involvement. She also is aware of the economic realities of our limping economy. We discuss how carpenter or electrician might be a good option, as well as artist and illustrator.

She complains that in her HS, during career aptitude tests, professions like law enforcement, firefighter and EMT are not even mentioned. Apparently too blue collar to be considered "real professions" and in our rural farm state, no one even whispers about their ambition to become a (cue shudder of contempt) farmer.

I think that four years on, when the class of '13 graduates, collapse will be more evident to my daughter's peers. Meanwhile, I'm trying to let my daughter know her options so she isn't caught unaware.

Gleaning the cold land

2010-11-24T14:32:00.000-05:00

But not for grains. I've been picking up and repurposing various items across the homestead today:

A pile of ashes, left over from Ceredwyn's burn last month. Sifting them crudely, I carried the less chunky stuff over to compost piles. The bits of wood ended up in a pile for burning, with other burnable goodies (rotten wood). They barely smell of char, at least to my chilled nose.
Rocks pried up (what our friend and neighbor calls "Vermont Dentistry"), then hauled to several useful places: an incomplete pond border, a slight runoff trench.
Shovelful after shovelful of gravel dug up from near the chicken enclosure, dumped into buckets, then schlepped to the driveway's most... challenging holes.
Heavy pieces of wood discovered in hiding places, prised loose, then put on top of woodpile coverings. To protect against unusually high winds.

This kind of thing is a kind of economy, wringing value out of things already present.

It's also a form of knowledge: knowing the various crannies in the land, connecting them to needs elsewhere.

Above all, so tactile: the microclanking of gravel spilling on top of gravel, the lightness of a bucket of charred wood, the gentle crunch of earth so recently muddy, and now curiously friable.

Winter's November advance

2010-11-23T10:17:00.000-05:00

It is now late November, and winter has advanced. While we prepare for turkey and friends, the earth has frozen, whitening grasses:

We burn wood every day, now, to fend off the cold (30s F in day, down to teens at night). Woodpiles are being taken down, hunk by hunk.

Ponds have frozen more seriously than before:

Darkness cuts short the afternoon, dimming the day after 3, ending the light after 4.

No accumulation of snow right now. No major slicks of ice on the roads.

Morning routine, mid-November

2010-11-17T10:16:00.001-05:00

Here's what the first 2 hours of my day look like, up here on the mountain.

6:30 - wake up to alarm clocks beeping and whining. It's later than I'd like, so my body is sneaking in more sleep to make up for never getting enough. One alarm clock is my phone, running on battery power, because the house electrical power could have failed overnight, which happens often enough up here.

Quick visual check outside through the bedroom window: rain is falling onto sopping earth, meaning it's been raining overnight.

Some woodpiles have lost covers: damn. Visual check inside: wife, cats, dog, son, more cats are sleeping.

Did I mention that I wake up in a good mood, bereft of critical thinking for at least one hour?

6:30 - 6:40 - getting the fire going is the first thing to do. I trundle down stairs, then down again to the dark basement where our main stove lives. I spin open the two air vents, pull open the chimney vent, open the door, and poke around last night's ashes until they glow. I toss in some kindling (big slab of dry bark) and a fresh piece of wood from the nearby rack. Poke, blow, prod, add a bit of paper, repeat, until the black metal box shows warmth. The basement air around me will gradually warm, then rise into the rest of the sleeping house.

6:40 - 6:45 - the holy ritual of coffeemaking. My sleepy fingers fumble with coffee bean jar and grinder, then add water, start up the black plastic godlet. Reassurance of blurp-blurp noises. Praise be, Mr. Coffee.

6:45 - 7:00 - first pass of morning news. I don't watch tv news (whew), nor listen to radio; instead I tromp down to my basement office and check to make sure the internet is on. Check. Then work through RSS feeds, plus Google News, and any news stories sent to my emails. Politics, economics, international relations; no .edu nor tech stuff yet. My morning good mood gets gnawed upon. Time for coffee.

7:00 - 7:40 - get the rest of family roused and schoolbound. I clomp upstairs to pry children from sleep (Gwynneth, older, is harder to do, and protests epically), feed wife her coffee in bed, then start Owain's breakfast. That's fried eggs, which are fine for his gluten-free requirements. The women refuse breakfast, so after Owain eats his, I prep mine, while washing dishes. Ceredwyn and I get Owain's lunch together (ham sandwich, apple)

The basement fire has warmed the house, and the morning dark has faded. Kids and wife get dressed, stagger around in morning light, find belongings, then head out to car. It's about 4 miles to the school. Owain attends there; Gwynneth catches the high school bus in the parking lot, which takes her down the mountain.

7:40 - 8:00 - breakfast and newsreading. That means heading back down to my office with plate and cup, setting them next to my laptop. A quantum array of kittens prowls around, making insidious noises of interest. Sausage, RSS, cheese, RSS, more coffee, eggs. Stomp across basement to check on fire. I'll do that last part throughout the day: winter's strong habit.

8:00 - 8:30 - head outside to fix wood piles. Last night's winds were huge, as evidenced by twigs down everywhere. Wet, too, as the ground is soaked. Little snow remains. I re-cover stacks with their tarps and/or plywood and/or tin sheets. One pile has toppled, so I restack it, damp wood in my damp gloves. My little, old mp3 player talks in my ear: recent podcasts from Start the Week (BBC) and Starship Sofa (sf).

The rain draws down, and sunlight starts seeping into the forest.

8:30 - back into the office, for coffee, laptop, and my morning work routine.

Last call in the garden

2010-11-02T21:52:00.003-04:00

Spent this weekend harvesting the last from the garden and planting garlic.

I brought in carrots and stored them. Found some volunteer onions and pulled up the last of the broccoli to give to the goats. Other stuff I pulled up to throw on the compost heap. Bryan raked leaves for the last time this year.

The Neo pagan holiday cycle makes a great deal of sense at this latitude. Samhain is the counted as the beginning of the new year. For an agrarian society, this makes a great deal of sense. It is the Feast of the Last Harvest. Anything worth harvesting should already have been harvested and the garden put to sleep. The symbolism of celebrating the dead is fairly obvious. It is the beginning of many hunting seasons and one of the best times for butchering large animals outside (they'll cool quickly in these temperatures).

On the homestead, we turn our thoughts and labors to inside work now. Cozy, evenings spent near the fire, in the glow of the computer screen...

Third World America

2010-10-27T12:00:00.000-04:00

Just having visited Haiti, a Third World country in a state of absolute collapse, I am urgently reminded that I am living in a Third World country with delusions of First Worldom.

I don't mean to say that people are starving (yet) nor are in the midst of any public health crises that come anywhere near the scale of the ones that plague Haiti.

Of course, we have roads, clean water, free schools, food that is somewhat affordable and can be nutritious, and topsoil.

Those things make us infinitely better off than the actual Third World, I agree, but we are sliding down the same slope

To illustrate:

A neighbor of mine had to go to three different pharmacies to fill a prescription of a fairly common drug.

A friend with a chronic condition finds herself waiting six weeks to get an appointment with her primary care physician (PCP), for routine care. He's always swamped.

Earlier this year, my husband had to have a complicated dance with our insurance company to remain on a medication that has stabilized his asthma for the past five years. In the end it was changed to a different one because of cost (never mind that the other one worked just fine.)

In fact we had a complicated little dance happening over getting insurance in the first place. For no other reason than my husband's employer changed who was administering his paycheck. So we were able to get a policy through Byzantine Cafkaesque B*** S*** of Vermont after weeks of trying to find out if we could legally do so. We sent so far as to talk to our state senators office trying to find out what to do.

Another friend of mine is searching for a therapist for her daughter who is in need of counseling for some pretty serious trauma. She has insurance AND she has the $$ to pay out of pocket, there's just no therapists taking new patients at the moment.

A friend in Michigan has just been denied insurance because she is "high risk" due to blood pressure issues that respond quite well to a $4.00 blood pressure medication.

I wouldn't be so irritated with all of this, if it wasn't for the fact that I live in what is ostensibly a First World Country.

In Haiti, it is common to see children begging on the street.

In Vermont, we don't have children begging on the street. We do have 86,244 people on food stamps. In a state with 621,000 or so people. We had in 2009, 55,000 children receiving federal school lunches. In a school system that has less that 100,000 students.

So, most (something like 60% !)of the children in Vermont are at or near poverty.

In Haiti, there is a shortage of mental health professionals. Of pharmacueticals. Of scanning machines. Of PCP's (so they're always swamped).

Hmm. Here in Vermont, we have a shortage of mental health professionals, pharmacueticals and PCP's. We have the scanning machines, but they're so prohibitively expensive and apparently so esoteric that it takes a week of consideration to even consider ordering one.

The French are rioting because they see their government as breaking their social contract with the people and looking out for the interest of corporations.

Here in Vermont, there is much contempt among the people who have even heard of the riots. As if paying your taxes and then expecting your government to actually provide those services said taxes are supposed to pay for is somehow suspect.

In Haiti, the expectation is that the government (and any service it provides) is for the rich people.

Meanwhile, it appears that corporations that were bailed out by the US governement have been committing widespread fraud. And we've yet to see any arrests.

Americans are not rioting in the streets over any of this and I have no idea why.

The scope of the problem, the feel of the present

2010-10-19T09:46:00.000-04:00

How huge a problem is peak oil? In this blog we focus on the very immediate stuff, homesteading in the face of the end of oil. But let's try some context, through the lens of climate change, and via Bruce Sterling:

It's about an old, huge, growing threat to world civilization: the climate crisis. That is a two-hundred-year-old planetary problem. It spares no one. No verbal maneuver can escape the science there. It's a worry we will surely share with our great-grandchildren. It's a huge, persistent, global calamity.

That's the kind of big picture we carry around in our heads, up here on Pagan Lane. Yes, we worry about next month's snow levels, but also how to best teach homesteading and global economics to our children, who may well grow up in an age of oil scarcity. We're figuring out how many maple syrup sap buckets to hang for February, but also wonder what global warming could do to our sugarbush in 30 years.

We are thinking about building a barn, too. We're thinking about good it will do us (mostly for housing animals and their associated stuff, also some wood storage). But we're also wondering how to pay for it, in case the markets where my 401K live tank and that money ceases to have value. So, should we build a barn now, while that retirement money still lives and can be drawn upon?

There are all kinds of politics to this. Should we follow our Democratic friends and trust in an economic recovery, leading to long-term growth? Will those political friends consider us foolish or Tea Partiers if we express doubts about that model?

"Planning for retirement" is an exercise in deep, wild futurism for us. Daily life is microcosmically about planetary crisis. Why not?

More from chairman Bruce:

The "solutions" we might offer today are like people in 1910 "solving" nuclear warfare. We don't endure the worst of the crisis now, and we don't understand the solutions. I have always known that the Greenhouse Effect was a major threat. I was writing about that in my first books and stories, thirty years ago. The Greenhouse will get worse and worse, every year, until my lifetime ends. Then it will get worse yet. No denial will make any difference. Most affirmations have been worthless, too.

I can tell people that the climate will get worse, because that's the truth. But I'm not a politician, scientist, engineer or financier. I'm just a visionary novelist. I can advocate some things and maybe increase some public awareness of things. Practically speaking, I am not a major actor in this old, colossal, dreadful story. I am just a talkative artist, someone who can smell that future coming. I do smell it. I smell it every day. It smells like your home, on fire.

People who don't want: a Japanese response to consumerism

2010-10-18T16:58:00.000-04:00

A new Japanese movement creates a lifestyle against consumerism, it seems.

Hoshigaranai Wakamonotachi (”Young People Who Don’t Want”) by researcher Taku Yamaoka is based on 10 years of research and interviews with young people which led him to conclude that, unlike their parents, young people don’t want brand-label goods, don’t drive, don’t play sport, don’t drink, don’t travel, don’t want serious relationships but do like to save and stay at home.

Much of this reminds me of our anti-consumerism. The lack of identifying with labels, non-sporting.

Homesteading without history or politics

2010-10-14T10:10:00.000-04:00

What does it mean to homestead in public in the year of 2010? What are the politics of homesteading during the Great Recession, as fall shades into winter and elections?

In my limited experience so far, people see homesteading as too small, too weird for the usual America politics.

I was moved to opine on this by a passage in this review of a new book about poor whites in Appalachia (the book sounds great):
I get the same sense of loss, a grievous loss of Joe's cultural, let alone economic, inheritance just as Morris lamented the loss of rural life and all its many skills and traditions, wiped out by his hated Victorian capitalism.

That darkness is certainly part of our homesteading experience. Time and again we hear laments about lost practices, perished memories, techniques which must have been present but which nobody can grasp now. Setting foot on our land is sometimes an archaeological experience in all kinds of ways, including this one of recovering social memory.

This summer I spoke with a local senior about food and brine. We were both interested in the combination. He wasn't thinking of brining food for taste and style, though, but about canning practices in the 1930s. He remembers that practice from his childhood, and hearing about it from older family members. I'm not sure how much practical detail he recalls.

The brilliant local contractor who has done so much great work for us often tells me about how much we don't know about construction. Everything from planking to building sleds: how much do we not know, lost in the passage of only a few decades?

The review I quoted earlier ties this melancholy sense of loss to a politics. It springs from that William Morris reference:

Yet over the past two hundred-plus years of capitalism rampant, Joe's experience is the third such auto-destruction to take place in the so-called developed world, where entire cultures and communities have been erased from the face of the earth. All in the name of 'progress' of course as capital yet again must revolutionize the means of production or die.

I wonder how many progressive/liberal homesteaders see their work along these political lines. I know there's a kind of semi-anti-capitalism in the pre-2009 voluntary simplicity movement - not to mention a sense of entitlement (it's voluntary, not involuntary simplicity, right?).

Yet when I'm in public and mention homesteading, I don't detect any political reactions. Neither political critique nor political support. Instead people see homesteading in micro-practical terms: how many chickens do you raise? Just how cold does it get without electrical heat? Community ties are similarly practical and nonideological in view: how do you find knowledgeable people? are there clubs or associations?

Perhaps rural life is too removed from most American political discourse to have an openly political charge, especially in my world of academia and technology. Or maybe people assume a red state politics to the country, and, finding no evidence of that in my professional persona, just leave politics off?

I wonder, too, if any progressives are thinking about reaching out to poor, rural whites along these lines. From the flip side, how many homesteaders are in the Tea Party. Perhaps none of this is happening, and homesteading is a quiet alternative to Democratic unhappiness with Obama and the economy.

For now, I really have to set up that third compost pile.

Corn in alpha

2010-10-12T15:59:00.000-04:00

We harvested our first corn this year. Call it alpha stage corn.

I'm pleased that we succeeded at all, given our climate and utter lack of corn-growing experience.

The stuff's pretty short, though. Two inches each.

Some things to do differently, next year:

Plant in a matrix, rather than a single row. Corn needs intensive cross-fertilization.
Speaking of fertilizing, putting some goodies in the dirt for the corn to draw on. (Remember the old fish Indian corn trick)
Use seeds with the shortest growing season.