Straw Bale Planters get covered for Winter

Today we worked the straw bale planting beds some more… Experimental straw bale bed # 1 – which was dragged together, cut  & planted several  weeks ago continues to be much warmer than the surrounding soil.  The rest of the garden soil has dropped to about 40 degrees at about 6 inches deep, but the bales continue to hold a temp of 65degrees, even in the upper 4″ soil portion of the planter cuts, as well as deep internally in the bales.  The bale at the west end, getting full sun along its high side, has a higher temp that fluctuates throughout the day up to 80 degrees!  Today we built a simple cloche or hoop cover for it.  Rebar, PVC, and quality greenhouse fabric will keep the temp inside above the rest of the air during the night, giving my winter greens a better opportunity for growth & water retention.   The arugula has sprouted prolifically & densely & so I moved the babies around by small bunches – to open areas for hopeful growth.  I am such a lazy gardener, saving time with these casual approaches to planting.

Bed #2 was planted with tomatoes last summer & did not retain water or do very well at all, for whatever reason.  I am hoping that the straw bales address the issue of water as well as amending with organic substance to the soil as it breaks down.  This experimental bed is in early stages – has had a few inches of rain, and got a late start overall.   The straw is still fairly dry inside the compressed bales, and does not register any temp variability from ambient surrounding soil.  I hope it is not too later in the year to get some temp increases as the straw fully wets & decomposes internally.  Does this bale planter need the sun’s heat to bring the temp up inside?  We will see.  We are cutting out the straw planters now, a time consuming job.  RJ is bringing his chain saw tomorrow to rip it up faster- he calls it “hogging it out”.  Once that is done, we will plant spinach starts & my ’saved seed’ broccoli rab.  Then we must wait for more good soaking rains. One it is wet & filled with rainwater, we will cover it with the fabric.  If there is a great temp increase inside, we could have the makings of a warm greenhouse effect! Very excited to see how this works out over the winter.

The handsome coco lined hanging basket that was used as an “upside down” tomato garden last summer never did well either.  Seemed too dry always…only a few cherry tomatoes dared the hot dry conditions to actually redden up.  The salad greens appear to be much happier in their small but moist winter home.  Ambient air temps will be a factor in this little garden’s success, but…So far – so good!

Hawaii Island & Sustainable Localization

On Wed, October 28th, I gave a presentation on Sustainability & Localization at Angel Farms in Pahoa, Hawaii. It was a handpicked group of local sustainability & permaculture groups of the Big Island. I made a similar presentation 3 years ago at La’Akea Permaculture Community nearby in the Puna area, and am excited to see how interest & area projects relating to food & energy Localization & emergency preparedness have seemed to increase since then!

There was lots of thoughtful & experienced input & the lively discussion continued out into the parking lot & hopefully will accelerate now as the local alternative news – Big Island Weekly – covered the event, and several present were very pleased to have made contact for the first time.

More networking is required as there is so much wild food available, & there are so many people living simply & sustainably already, and any number of organic farmers, skill sets & best practices available to share.

Some Local PUNA projects represented –

Aloha Mahalo Apono
Papaya Field Restoration & Canoe Projects

*AMA’s mission is to foster stability in our community by creating programs that help to connect people with nature, and enhance their ability to live in harmony with others.

La’akea Community

La’akea is a local example of integrating modern permaculture with the natural

rain forest on this island

Greenwill Conservancy

Working with at-risk youth & mentoring to pass on skill sets that will offer jobs in the areas of Green Construction & sustainability

Keana Okuda

www.iftheboatsstop.wordpress.com

*Keana is making a difference in her lifestyle in 2010 & will be blogging her year of living locally on what is already on the Island. She is asking us to consider -What if the boats really stopped?  What if we weren’t able to ship the countless amounts of stuff we use here every week?  Would we survive?  Could we thrive?  The boats have stopped before.  What is our sustain-ability?

The Hilo County Government is currently funding a project – The Kohala Center is doing an inventory of food sources & also is asking for citizen input on the future of island agriculture, and so it is a good time to put localization of residential food supply on the table.

On the subject of energy, every new housing development is now required to have a solar hot water installation. Residential water collection is becoming more common, thus saving lots of energy to move district water supplies around. Transport is rural & so is a challenge, but a FREE bus system was recently instated by the county, which connects many rural roads into the towns.

A further note, there are about 200k residents now, and before the advent of imported food, the island supported a population of 300k! A potentially do-able local food transition…so – dig that Taro!!

Aloha,

Annie “NOjeans” SurfWaters

Edible Landscapes

Edible Landscape…

With the prices of food, the uncertainties of the economics – it is certainly time

to plant some food no matter what way we live.

Edible Landscape…

I love this term!  Exactly what we need in this year of focus on

“Local Food and Gardens”…

fresh, juicy and delicious surroundings – the most local  of  all

foods – on our own lawns!

As spring arrives – I am looking at my yard with its different problems and opportunities.

I believe there is an edible or herbal plant for every situation – climbing, low, shade or sun,

dry or moist – in my garden patch… with some research, you can find plants for every situation in your location too! So – why plant just any old plant in your landscaping when you can plant something edible and make food and fun for your family & the future?

Read more: “Edible Landscaping for Beginners | beingfrugal.net”

I was also recently very inspired by the film “The Power of Community” – about how Cuba survived their

“power down” and loss of  imported food in  the ‘90’s…they planted food everywhere – on the balconies of

tall buildings, in old tubs on benches outside of Office buildings; it seemed that everyone helped to get more

calories and nutrition by planting small or large Organic “Victory Gardens” all over the place.

On that note – Let’s help promote a National Victory Garden Movement to support the transition of backyard,

front yard, window boxes, rooftops, and unused land into organic food production areas.

Starting with a White House Food Patch, we can all get started by taking action in our own communities.

Edible Landscape…

Back to your own food production – What do you like to eat?  Plant some! If you already have an established

flower garden or border, it is easy to interplant some delicious looking veggies like peppers or basil and maybe

strawberries as edible ground cover in areas you are already planting and watering.  Instead of putting in that neat

edging row of annual pansies, make it a row of low growing herbs such as Thyme. They will offer you cooking

condiments, tea, small flowers and as an added bonus – you won’t have to replant them every year!

While you are at it – offer your soil some compost or mulch, some soil enhancers like manure or bone meal to give

your veggies more oomph!

There are all kinds of great resources on planting properly with soil additives, and must at least add in nutrients that

the plants use up.  The benefits of permaculture and no-dig methods take you even a bit further into the realm of super great gardens and less work!

I’m all for that – so my winter reading included a number of books –

The #1 A+  book to get is this one -

Gaia’s Garden, A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture by Toby Hemenway

– as well as recommending the following:

* The Complete Book of Edible Landscaping by Rosalind Creasy;
* Designing and Maintaining Your Edible Landscape Naturally by Robert Kourik;
* Perennial Vegetables: From Artichoke to Zuiki Taro – A Gardener’s Guide to Over 100 Delicious Easy-to-Grow Edibles by Eric Toensmeier;
* Self-Sufficiency Gardening; Financial, Physical, and Emotional Security from Your Own Backyard by Martin P. Waterman;
* The Self-Sufficient Life and How to Live It by John Seymour
* How to Grow More Vegetables… – by John Jeavons
* The Ruth Stout No-Work Garden Book, Gardening Without Work for the Aging, the Busy and the Indolent, & How to Have a Green Thumb Without an Aching Back – all by Ruth Stout ( and out of print, I think)

Edible Landscape…

This spring I am replanting the borders of my yard with goji berries,olive trees, rugosa roses, elderberries, a fig,

medicinal herbs and even rhubarb – so pretty with its red and green colors…

I love rhubarb pie.

I am also excited about Polyculture planting…intermixing selected plants together by

broadcast seeding – such that

you end  up with a very diverse mix in your garden, a blend of varieties that defies pests

and ripens over time to

offer months of food – perhaps even self-mulches the area over the season.

If all you have is a balcony and an old plastic 1 gal pot filled with dried soil and a dead houseplant you are in luck!

Coffee grounds, tea bags, crushed egg shells can be added to that soil using an old spoon, and then planted with a

few things. Just shred up that dead plant and place in the bottom to help drainage and  over time it will nourish the

soil as well. Occasionally use the rinse water from your spaghetti or even leftover beer to water your garden and

you will be saving water and nourishing the plants too! Frugal measures are

fun and adventurous…

Here are some Container combinations – pretty and practical ideas:

* Curly parsley and yellow pansies (Violas)
* Red leaf lettuce with yellow and orange calendulas
* Red chard and New Zealand spinach
* Dwarf curly kale with dusty miller, pink nemesia, and dianthus
* Curly parsley with trailing blue lobelia
* Oregano with red chard and trailing white lobelia
* Curly parsley and strawberries

Edible Landscape…

Whatever you have time and room for – it  will be a bonus in  your life –

super nutrition & better quality food at a

lower price, a feeling of genuine happiness each day that your hands are in the soil,

and a sense of security that you

can provide for yourself, no matter what comes to pass in this uncertain time.

Try organizing  some community gardens -

I think there are grants out there just for this!

Edible Landscape…sounds a bit like the Garden of Eden, now doesn’t it?

Excuse me while I go munch some groundcover mint…

Honey – divine nectar , edible bee love and sacred food

I fell in love with the taste of honey as a young girl, and especially loved creamed honey on toast – or comb honey eaten right off of the spoon. Chewing the beeswax for an hour longer was a bonus from this special treat. Taking a moment to savor the vision of golden syrup as it dripped from the hexagonal cells was another aspect of my wonderful memories of comb honey.

And…

I still go off of my “let’s eat carefully of this precious nectar diet” when there is a chance to eat biscuits dripping with golden nectar!

The wonderful & best-selling novel by Sue Monk Kidd, “The Secret Life of Bees” unfolds in a sentimental, honey-glazed land that vaguely resembles South Carolina in 1964. The movie is almost as good as the book – for describing the inner life of its complex characters…I cried all the way through!

There is a scene in the movie – “The Secret Life of Bees” – when Lily smashes several jars of honey in her anger at her lack of mother-love. This abundance of wasted honey really brings home how powerful that loss must have been – for her to destroy the life work of her beloved bees. (One worker bee actually makes

only 1/12 of a teaspoon of honey in her lifetime.)

But – that is not the point of this brief post…I merely wanted to remind my readers that honey is precious – so precious that it takes a honey bee (Apis mellifera) 154 trips, carrying tiny amounts of nectar from the flower to the hive, just to make one teaspoon of honey. The days of cooking with an entire cup of honey are long gone in my life…as a natural food devotee in the 1970’s I ate more than my share of this divine nectar. So I hope that we all begin to offer greater respect for the trials of the honey bee in these times of CCD – let’s eat honey wisely, offer our blessings to the bee, and begin to keep hives locally! That will develop better genetic strains of bee that may weather this time of collapse, which I believe mirrors the overall environmental stress of our current Planet -wide crisis.

Honey has been used as a medicine and a sacred food since before the ancient Egyptians began to keep hives.

So – hey – Let’s get back to a sense of the sacred with all of our foods, and especially those which are truly precious and rare, hard to get and involve the sacrifices of our fellow species.

Blessed Bee.

Oh, oh, its gonna be a wild ride!

What is going on!???? I am probably the “average” person when it comes to understanding the economy…but, when does Wall Street get to be bailed out using MY money????

Upset – yes I am… some rich corporate guys make a big big mistake, and WE, the People have to pay for it? Not fair – I remember a Movie where Chevy Chase’s wife spends the entire family savings in a casino – Chevy tries to convince the owners to give back her money – “It was a mistake”…well, Vegas doesn’t give back lost wages and neither should the stock market be bailed out by the American Taxpayers…those fat guys were gambling, and they lost…

700Billion – that would buy a whole bunch of great houses for the folks who are out sitting on sidewalks after their foreclosures…

Do the math!!

Meanwhile, I feel we are on a roller coaster toward the great crash…I am planting my garden & buying cans of salmon with my savings – how about you?

SMALL FARMS ARE MORE PRODUCTIVE AND PROFITABLE

Let’s take another look at small farms. The localization of our food supply will offer many positive opportunities to our youth, to our sense of place & community, and also to the quality of health and well being we each take from our daily meals.

American agriculture is mired in a mind-set that relies on capital, chemistry and machines. Food production is dependent on oil, in the form of fertilizers and pesticides, in the distances produce travels from farm to plate and in the energy it takes to process it.

For decades, environmentalists and small farmers have claimed that this is several kinds of madness. But industrial agriculture has simply responded that if we’re feeding more people more cheaply using less land, how terrible can our food system be?

Now that argument no longer holds true. With the price of oil at more than $120 a barrel (up from less than $30 for most of the last 50 years), small and midsize nonpolluting farms, the ones growing the healthiest and best-tasting food, are gaining a competitive advantage. They aren’t as reliant on oil, because they use fewer large machines and less pesticide and fertilizer.

• A 1,000 acre U.S. corporate farm growing genetically engineered crops nets an average of $39 an acre.
• In contrast, a four-acre family farm nets, on average, $1,400 per acre.
• Small organic farms are proving to be even more profitable. With oil prices on the rise, growing food without petroleum-based pesticides/fertilizers, and delivering that food to local markets will quickly prove to be the most affordable food available.

I love eating the fresh greens that come in my weekly CSA basket, everything was just picked, and is organic and as fresh as possible. Why not look online for your local Farmer’s Market or CSA ( Community Supported Agriculture) and start getting the best food for your family and for your money right now!

Source: Solving the Food, Health, & Energy Crisis: Local & Organic Production on Smaller Farms

* Change We Can Stomach
By DAN BARBER
The New York Times, May 11, 2008
http://www.organicconsumers.org/articles/article_12216.cfm

Local Food Rant

Eating avos in winter? Lettuce in the heat of summer? Here’s the hard truth! We have gotten so off track on local food in just the last 30 years we don’t even realize what that means to our footprint.

~ I love world market foods, give me a Thai Green curry any day… But, let’s take a look at this addiction to variety, to exotic tastes…

In my childhood, (1960’s) hardly one had ever eaten an avocado or artichoke in the Midwest, and international food was a dream that was only real when you ate pizza (either in a restaurant on special occasions – or from a box mix)

This regionalfood style  was also unrelieved by hot new restaurants. Mostly people ate at home, in fact – they hardly ever ate out, except for church socials or community potlucks…this all a world from the past, from our rural heritage, and certainly a world that did not know what they missed…

Fast forward to today – where Trader Joe’s brings us Israeli cheese, Italian olive oil, and such things are very available in any corner market in the USA. We have gotten everyday habits that are going to be hard to break. Do we need to break the imported food habit? Is the 1500 mile salad, the supermarket dinner sustainable? To complicate things – we have gotten used to spending only 11% of our income on food, unlike most of the world – and getting the huge choices, big super sizes of everything as well!!

Yikes – time to reassess. Can we find happiness chewing on locally grown potatoes, broccoli in season, waiting for the peaches to come ripe? I say – YES! This is what local food means – grown nearby and in season. Your CSA shows the way – they give you a basket of whatever is ripe and ready to harvest in the garden. Try the Farmers Market for a great selection of timely foods, picked recently and by people you get to talk to while you handle their life’s work! Either is a simple and fun way to begin eating local.

Even more directly connected is your own garden, imagine how much more local can you get – than a 20 foot away dinner rather than a 1500 mile dinner! Check out your own slow food connection as you eat tomatoes that you grew – right off the plant, now that is a 1” dinner….the most local of all…now if only I didn’t need my hands at all – how much closer can I get? Mmmmm, a no-hands lunch! Ok, I am over the top – but you get the point… if I eat that tomato, ripe from the sun , my mouth filled with its just picked sweetness, I have just lowered my carbon footprint by a a factor of a thousand. Yay team! Let’s eat the imports, with grace and appreciation for their amazing availability, occasionally – as befits such luxury. Here’s to your health…please pass the spinach!

Check out this site for a localization conversation-locallectual

Also the movie – The Real Dirt on Farmer John!

The Amazing & Vanishing Honeybee

Why do we sing their life song now? The ancients worshiped the bee, sang songs to them, made beautiful and complex gold jewelery in their image. Who are we to allow them to disappear without making songs to their magnificence?

Yes, friends – as many have now pointed out – not only honey lovers – but almond lovers, cheese lovers – your foods are at stake here, in fact – perhaps your own very life is too! The bees brings us agriculture as we know it. They also may bee a significator of the collapse of our ecosystem in these times – an early victim of the complex immune destroying lifestyle we have come to accept and yet (almost) be oblivious of.

What can we do to save the bees?

And why do we care? Just a few facts-

*Honeybees are the only insects that produce food for humans. What a gift! What have we done for them?

*Just a single hive contains approximately 40-45,000 bees! They live as if they are cells of one organism, very socially sophisticated…we humans could learn something from their high degree of cooperation, sharing and dancing communications!

*During honey production periods, a bee’s life span is about 6 weeks. In the winter, they live longer because they don’t get worn out by flying.

*Honeybees visit about 2 million flowers to make one pound of honey. They also bring in their weight in pollen if they find it!

*A bee travels an average of 1600 round trips in order to produce one ounce of honey; up to 6 miles per trip. To produce 2 pounds of honey, bees travel a distance equal to 4 times around the earth. Next time you wrap that spoonful of golden honey around to save everry drop, be reminded of how much loving work and air time created that honey!

*Bees fly an average of 13-15 mph. Maybe we can learn from them how to move at a rate of speed that brings rewards and health.

*Bees from the same hive visit about 225,000 flowers per day. One single bee usually visits between 50-1000 flowers a day, but can visit up to several thousand.

*Queens will lay almost 2000 eggs a day at a rate of 5 or 6 a minute. Between 175,000-200,000 eggs are laid per year.

*About 8 pounds of honey is eaten by bees to produce 1 pound of beeswax.

Beegin to keep a hive of bees. For one thing, it will slow you down to bee in their presence. They hum a mysterious and ancient song, and draw you into watching their daily activities at the hive entrance. Their flight arrivals and departures are way more interesting than anything at the airport! Besides, you may bee helping to save these precious and social creatures. My hives are deep in the rural mountains of Mendocino County. As far as I know, there is no commercial agricultural spraying done anywhere nearby ( They fly up to 5 miles to find nectar) and no weird cell phone towers, or other concentrated electromagnetic pollution to cause their immediate distress. I am hoping that a colony collapse and mite-resistant strain of bees can develop in our area. Check out your local beekeeping group!! I started one as it appeared that we needed to get together. Turns out that almost 40 people in our sparsely populated area keep bees or want to have bees!

There have been a few good movies lately – coming around to educate us and interest us in bees…including the newest – The Vanishing Bees. See a fabulous trailer at their website – http://www.vanishingbees.com/

You can even play games about bees… learn about how to keep bees, or enjoy using local honey in special ways. Bee kind to our pollinators, they are our benefactors in so many ways.

World Fair Trade Day – May 10, 2008

What is World Fair Trade Day? On May 10th, people in 70 countries worldwide will hold events to mark World Fair Trade Day in order to highlight the importance and benefits of Fair Trade. Fair Trade guarantees a fair price and safe working conditions for producers and also supports sustainable practices that minimize our environmental footprint. Fair Trade enthusiasts worldwide will host Fair Trade food tastings, house parties, speakers, festivals, concerts, and fashion shows. Many communities are celebrating World Fair Trade Day over a period of two weeks, from May 3-18th, . read more at the World Of Good website!

Water footprint – forget carbon, we are in dire need of understanding this one!

Every item we consume or use has a

Water footprint

Because our modern urban lives are the result of a century of infrastructure – bringing us our electricity and heat with a touch of a switch, water on tap for the taking, we have lost touch with the actual footprint of our resource use. Conservation is a great concept – but what is the quantification of every move we make, every change we take? How can we make ethical choices in this regard? Turns out there are some siimple rules – always recycle is one of them!

The hidden water consumption in our daily commodities far outweighs the water we actually take from the tap.

People use lots of water for drinking, cooking and washing, but even more for producing things such as food, paper, cotton clothes, etc. The water footprint of an individual, business or nation is defined as the total volume of freshwater that is used to produce the goods and services consumed by the individual, business or nation.

The water footprint of a nation shows the total volume of water that is used to produce the goods and services consumed by the inhabitants of the nation. Since not all goods consumed in one particular country are produced in that country, the water footprint consists of two parts: use of domestic water resources and use of water outside the borders of the country. The water footprint includes both the water withdrawn from surface and groundwater and the use of soil water (in agricultural production).

Some facts and figures

• The production of one kilogram of beef requires 16 thousand litres of water.
• To produce one cup of coffee we need 140 litres of water.
• The water footprint of China is about 700 cubic meter per year per capita. Only about 7% of the Chinese water footprint falls outside China.
• Japan with a footprint of 1150 cubic meter per year per capita, has about 65% of its total water footprint outside the borders of the country.
• The USA water footprint is 2500 cubic meter per year per capita

Forget carbon: you should be checking your water footprint
By Amol Rajan
Monday, 21 April 2008

Ethical shopping just got harder – but the latest attempt to help
conscientious consumers calculate their impact on the environment
could do more to preserve scarce resources than all its predecessors.

The concept of water footprints – or “virtual water” – will tell
consumers the amount of precious H2O that has been used in the
manufacture of products they buy. As with carbon footprints, a
“virtual water” figure will indicate the extent to which a particular
product has cost the earth. And, as with carbon footprints, the
message is clear: less is better.

A new website run by the University of Twente in the Netherlands,
waterfootprint.org, gives ethically minded consumers a chance to work
out the hidden implications of their shopping habits. Common
including groceries, clothes, stationery and electrical
goods are evaluated according to a water footprint calculator. In
each case, the water footprint covers both the manufacture and
transport of the goods.

The results are striking. An apple weighing 100g has a water
footprint of 70 litres, while a 125ml cup of coffee has a water
footprint twice that size, 140 litres. But the water used in
producing wheat or meat is much greater. A single kilogram of barley
has a water footprint of 1,300 litres, while the industrial
production of a kilogram of beef amasses a water footprint of 15,500
litres.

Poultry, meanwhile, has a smaller water footprint than red meat:
producing a kilogram of chicken meat leaves a comparably much smaller
water footprint of 3,900 litres.

Academics behind the “virtual water” calculations have also created a
worldwide league table for the water footprint of different
countries. The US is the biggest offender, with a water footprint of
close to 2,500 cubic metres per year per capita, while Italy is a
close second. Britain’s water footprint is relatively modest at 1,245
cubic metres per year per capita.

The calculations are fiendishly complicated. But if they prove
popular, calculations of water footprints could do much more to help
minimise the environmental impact of consumption than other, similar
schemes.

Over the past year in particular, controversy has surrounded the idea
of “food miles”, as mounting evidence throws doubt on the idea that
locally produced food is better for the environment. Research
suggests that many products freighted in from halfway across the
globe can leave smaller carbon footprints than carbon intensive
production methods closer to home.

Yet for consumers keen to minimise their water wastage, there remains
a single, simple mantra to live by: always recycle.

A cotton shirt, for example, has a water footprint of 2,700 litres,
tallying up the water evaporated in irrigating and growing the
cotton, as well as the water needed to wash away fertilisers.
Recycling such products, and thereby minimising fresh production,
could make the earth’s water resources go much, much further.

“Our research shows that most people aren’t aware of how much water
they use,” a spokesperson from the Consumer Council for Water said
yesterday.

Though it covers more than two-thirds of the earth’s surface, water
has never been more precious. An influential UN report published in
2003 predicted severe water shortages would affect 4 billion people
by 2050, adding that 40 per cent of the world’s population did not
have access to adequate sanitation facilities.

Counting the cost

*Slice of white bread: 40 litres

*Burger: 2,400 litres

*Kilogram of cheddar: 5,000 litres

*Cotton shirt: 2,700 litres

*Pint of beer: 160 litres

*125ml glass of wine: 120 litres

*Pint of milk: 1,760 litres

–

NOTICE: In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C., section 107, some
material is provided without permission from the copyright owner,
only for purposes of criticism, comment, scholarship and research
under the “fair use” provisions of federal copyright laws. These
materials may not be distributed further, except for “fair use,”
without permission of the copyright owner. For more information go
to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml

~~
(PS- I borrowed much of this article from the independant and the water footprint website – I feel that this information is so important that we should all pass it on! – annieb)

NOTICE: In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C., section 107, some
material is provided without permission from the copyright owner,
only for purposes of criticism, comment, scholarship and research
under the “fair use” provisions of federal copyright laws. These
materials may not be distributed further, except for “fair use,”
without permission of the copyright owner. For more information go
to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml

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