I don’t know about you, but here at my homestead we’ve been watching the goings-on in New York City, Boston, Chicago, St. Louis, Dallas and elsewhere across the country (including our own small city 20 miles up the road) that comprise the burgeoning and growing Occupy Wall Street protest movement. As the authoritarian servants of the richest 1% of the nation’s population have moved to isolate and abuse the professional activists, the unemployed, the homeless who have gravitated to the encampments, the juxtaposition with astroturfed, billionaire-funded “Tea Party” demonstrations where denizens were allowed to openly carry guns and assault members of Congress is dramatic. I admit I feel a little guilty to be so enjoying the gorgeous fall colors while people are putting their lives on the line to demand equality and an end to taxpayer bailouts of the criminal 1%.

It is glaringly obvious that the well-funded astroturf ‘movement’ enjoys a far greater share of our supposed First Amendment freedoms than the downtrodden 99% of people who just want to make the rich share in the suffering they order our political class to impose on the rest of us as ‘austerity’. So far the demonstrations have remained entirely peaceful even when police officers start pepper-spraying demonstrators (and their fellow police officers), or when the riot squad barrels into the crowd to choke and fling demonstrators to the ground. Reminds me of 1968. I know ‘they’ say that if you can remember the 1960s you probably weren’t really there, but that was one action-packed year full of billy-clubs and fire hoses and cracked skulls… and that was just the Democratic National Convention. It was still a bit less than 3 years before the Powers that Be started killing college kids wholesale for rudely NOT volunteering for that generation’s dirty big war, but let’s not fool ourselves. The very same thing is possible in 2011, and I’m pretty sure those doing the demonstrating across the country are aware of that possibility.

Homesteaders like us long ago gave up the idiot-box hypnosis drug, get our news from other sources – internet around here, along with the region’s college newspapers and the several alternative rags produced in the nearest city. We have moved physically to take as much charge of our own sustenance as possible, and forever plan and work for more. We’re ahead of the “income inequality” game because we care much less about being filthy rich than we care about or families, friends, environment and self-sufficiency regardless of what happens on Wall Street or Pennsylvania Avenue in D.C. We don’t watch FoxNews propaganda or MSNBC’s endless prison-porn when we could be out there prepping the beds for winter, or digging the new spring to power the ram pump, or simply sitting on a log on the ridge and quietly watching the leaves change color.

We’re a different kind of ‘elites’ in the current sociopolitical struggles. We’re not the money-hoarders or the Snidely Whiplash home-stealers or even The Donald making a big show of firing hard working people just because we get a kick out of cruelty. I think that makes us members of the 99% who are not The Donald (or Tim Geithner, or JP Morgan or MERS or the day-traders on Wall Street). So while we certainly aren’t planning to close up the ‘stead and head for the city to camp out on somebody’s public lawn, I have gotten together with a few friends to discuss things we might be willing and able to do in support of those who have put their bodies on the line to say things that desperately need saying.

I remember the tales of apple-sellers from my grandparents who struggled through Great Depression-I back in the 1930s. Mom’s parents had to leave Miami when no one could afford haircuts anymore (grandpa was a barber), moved to my great-grandparent’s farm in Georgia to wait it out in a meager sharecropper’s shack. Aside from the vegetables and two pigs a year my great-grandparents raised for their own sustenance, there were peaches. Acres and acres of peaches in a well-kept orchard my mother remembered most fondly as a young tomboy with no financial woes to trouble her childhood. Grandpa would take bushels of peaches – his ‘share’ for helping with the harvest – to Atlanta in a mule-drawn wagon, where he sold them like apples on the street for a nickel apiece. Mom and her siblings looked forward to spending their dollar gift from grandpa’s annual efforts on big stashes of penny candy and an occasional pair of shoes. Well, not Mom on the shoe thing, she preferred going barefoot and remained that way her whole life.

Dad’s family lived in Cincinnati, grandpa was a railroad man charged with [not quite] policing the many teenaged ‘hobos’ who rode the rails in those days from city to city looking for work. Sometimes he’d bring a particularly lean teen home with him, granny would feed him well, put him to work in the back-lot garden, feed him again and gift him with bagged leftovers after a night in the barn before grandpa took him back to the rail yard the next day. Dad was 7 when the Depression began. Got a job with the newspaper hawking the late editions on the sidewalks. The paper wanted a nickel, so he charged seven cents so as to make two cents a pop. Told me people would often give him a dime then refuse change. Helps to be really cute, I suppose.

At any rate, it was clear to me all my life listening to the family tales of hardship that we are not and never were among this society’s elites. As Great Depression-II sweeps the country it seems clear to me that what the visibly courageous demonstrators need most is some of that good old fashioned food that us country folk can help to supply (since we’ve no money to send).

Which brings me around again to apples. The apple harvest here in the southern Appalachians is mostly finished for this season, but there are still orchards open to gleaning, will be until they’re bare or hard freeze, whichever comes first. A few very good apples still in the trees if you’ve got a kid or two to do the climbing, lots and lots of slightly bruised fruit under the trees for picking up. These make fine cider, and at least half an apple to slice and dry now that the wood stove is working nights. A group of neighbors and friends from the city – most kids from the community college where grandsons are enrolled – gleaned an orchard outside of Hendersonville week before last. Netted three bushels of good apples, and ended up with a full dozen gallons of pressed cider.

For a change, we didn’t donate the fruit and juice to the regional food bank where gleaned and ‘extra’ produce has been going all summer. This time we loaded it into the trunk and back seat of a little car scheduled to transport a couple of the college kids to New York so they could join the demonstration during their week of fall break. They got home Monday but still haven’t uploaded their pictures. They said they gave the apples away to demonstrators, didn’t last long but it got them a preferred place in line for when the pizzas ordered by supporters all over the world showed up. The cider made them several fast friends, heated over a little sterno stove to help take the chill off during long nights.

They said they talked up the gleaning projects and promoted the great homesteading and grower’s market ‘scene’ in our beautiful region. Don’t know if they managed to convince any of the big city dwellers to consider choosing this kind of life, but they did plant some seeds. Apple seeds, to be exact. If it all falls apart people are going to have to rearrange their lives accordingly. There’s still a lot of resistance to the idea that the 1% (millionaires and billionaires) would really let that happen, but at the point when job-insecure police forces are ordered to start bashing the heads of those who champion union contracts and middle class job security it’s darned foolish to believe they won’t. There is no social conscience where there is obscene wealth and greed for more. Never will be.

And so the pendulum swings. I don’t know any billionaire homesteaders. Would bet you don’t know any either, though there’s no doubt a few billionaires that own country estates and working farms. The economic situation is obviously not scheduled to get any better any time soon for the impoverished masses and winter’s coming on fast. Even after the demonstrators break camp there will still be great need in this country. I hope that all my homesteading readers, and all wannabe homesteaders out there growing a few tomatoes and maybe some beans in their yards, will bear this in mind when planning for next spring’s production. There is opportunity here to help, we should be at the forefront of that. No one should go hungry in this country, though millions do. Every day, even as politicians are busy slashing budgets for things like food stamps, school lunch programs, and WIC.

Politicians work for the 1%, not for the 99%. They and their paramilitary forces will continue to abuse the 99% on orders from the overlords. And no, they don’t care how many of us starve or freeze or die from simple lack of health care. The real change that must happen will come bottom-up, not top-down. Solidarity.

Occupy Wall Street

Autumn has come to the mountain just as spring did – one ay it was perfectly clear, close to 80º and comfortably into the mid-60s at night, the next it was barely up to 60º at mid-day and into the high 30s at night. Not only are we seriously behind in the necessary wood supply for heat, I’ve been having to scramble to bring in the remaining peppers and last of the tomatoes. Poplar leaves are already yellow and dogwoods are getting a ret tint on their leave to complement their quickly ripening bright red berries, and the crisp air fills with leaves whenever the breeze blows.

Luckily autumn is my favorite of all seasons. In three weeks from now the lush greens of summer will have turned into impossible corals and day-glo oranges and deep reds and yellows bright enough to light up the night. The smell of leaf-fall is heavenly even though it means endless raking in November, a necessary task to ensure resistance to spring fires. And of course the usual foot-deep winter covering once I’ve cleaned out the garden terraces and tossed the remains of their summer bounty on the compost pile. But it’s raining right now, so I’m shivering inside not daring to use any of the scant locust we have left from last year’s wood supply before nightfall, when it’ll really be needed.

In my last post I talked about a new centralized organizational outfit for connecting CSAs [Community Supported Agriculture farms] and ass orated organic suppliers with customer bases in their area via the internet, for promoting healthy, local food and food products and changing the way we eat. In my wanderings about the web, I discovered another kind of CSA that sounds like something right up my alley.

It’s called Goldthread, and it’s a CSA they say should properly be called a “CSM” because it offers community-supported medicinal herb shares. The Goldthread farm is located in western Massachusetts, and its herbal preparations are made in small batches at the farm in Conway and an apothecary in Florence. A share basket may include a combination of carefully dried bulk herbs, small bottles of tinctures, essential oils, herbal honeys and compounds, often accompanied by fresh culinary herbs and garlic.

“Grassroots medicine” sounds like a good idea at this current point in history, as my ‘customer’ base has only been increasing over the past few years as western medicine’s allopathic treatments have become far too expensive for most people to use, joblessness has stripped what little insurance coverage people once did have, and the state slashes Medicaid to the bone so that no one new gets on the roll until someone dies. Last year my elderberry tincture (for colds and flu) saved nearly a dozen people – one of them an ER nurse – from work and time loss due to viral respiratory infections. My ginseng tincture hasn’t been made yet, but three new ‘customers’ have requested some, asap. If I had money to invest in some cute little dropper bottles and labels, I could probably make a little income on the side just with those. Then there’s the black cohosh, the Japanese honeysuckle, the goldenseal, the dogwood and spiceberry tonic, and MUST get started on the autumn end of my skin lesion salve that takes a year to produce…

Problem is, I use those little quotes around the word ‘customer’ because I’ve just never charged anybody real money for my simples and remedies. People have long said I could, but all of my herbalist ancestors believed – and taught – that doing it for money was antithetical to the effort at healing. That was so ingrained in me that it’s been difficult to even begin thinking about charging money. But now that my grandson has put so much energy and effort into learning from me, and helping me greatly in managing the medicinal crops, I see that earning a little money on those efforts isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

Now that grandson is in ‘business’ with me as apprentice-in-training, making a bit of money for his college tuition is where I’m aiming my thoughts for the next year. Both in producing the concoctions and in planning for more medicinals next growing season. We’ve already transplanted what will be an entire grove of elderberry that was threatened by a road-widening project, and nettle so we’d have our own on-property supply. We’ve transferred the ginseng to new, deeper beds much better protected from deer and tromping disc golfers than where they were before.

We probably won’t be a CSA like this farm in Massachusetts is, as there are plenty of needful folks just here in our area who tend to trouts the old herb-lady more than they trust whatever allopathic doctor’s on duty today at the urgent care center for $400 a pop just to walk in the door.

So wish us luck, and I’ll be sure to report back on whether or not this change of heart on the healing plane works out. Stay tuned!

Link

Goldthread Herbal Apothecary
The Kitchn: Goldthread Article

Straight from the TechCrunch Disrupt Battlefield, a new internet-based project to greatly expand the CSA [Community Supported Agriculture] movement into places where it hasn’t been before. It’s a project designed to connect community organizers – volunteers with a group of friends and neighbors who want to get in on farm fresh produce and other fresh foods – to buy in to local suppliers in the usual CSA manner and set up a drop-off point in their area for deliveries and for members to pick up their weekly food items. The company, farmigo, acts as the middleman to negotiate directly with growers, coordinate deliveries and scheduling, and handle the nitty gritty of the business end. It also maintains the web-based platform for people to manage their accounts, order food, and pay the fees. To support this effort, farmigo receives a 2% fee on food sold and collects this from the producers rather than from the customers.

The idea isn’t entirely new, as CSAs in some regions have already set up their local businesses through websites, and even pooled with other suppliers to make for convenient ordering of variety items and coordinate deliveries. Farmigo is pretty much the same type of thing, but on a much larger scale and including big city dwellers. The farmers, fishermen, butchers and bakers who offer products through the service still get to set their own terms and commitment periods. When you check into the website you can click on a map to receive a list of suppliers in your area with links and information on already established drop-off sites.

Farmigo also facilitates one-time ala carte purchases of things like eggs, flowers, meats, seafood, baked goods and other things that will be delivered to the drop-off point on your usual days, so the customer isn’t limited to whatever crops are being harvested at any given time on their CSA’s farm, but isn’t corralled into long-term purchase contracts with those other suppliers. This also saves the member/customer the trouble of driving around to several different drop-off points to get their food allotments. Some suppliers will even deliver to your home, depending on where you live and the nature of your orders.

Those of us who do our own organic gardening, participate in local tailgate farmer’s markets, trade with our neighbors for crops we aren’t growing ourselves, and who have turned the art of wholesome organic foods, fresh air and hard work into a regular way of [homesteading!] life, of course recognize the value of any system designed to facilitate wider participation, cheaper prices to the customer and better premiums for the growers. As CSAs and the local food movements grow, more and more people will participate, everyone will be a bit healthier, and groups of neighbors working quarter-acre or less sized organic gardens can get together and plan who grows what, pool the results together, and create their own supplier CSA group!

Because I am lucky enough to have spent the past 20 years on my little mountain homestead growing food and “fitting in” with a local culture that was here long before I was, there would be great interest in a community organizer to make the contacts with various farmers producing a single crop or two of staples like corn and wheat and oats, things many CSAs don’t produce in bulk, but which most people consume regularly as part of their normal diets. Whole and milled grains, dried beans, cornmeal (grits, hominy, whatever) in bulk would be a sure seller. Value-addeds for those non-subscription purchases, such as compotes and jam, ciders and juice made from locally grown fruit. Pickles, hot sauces, vinegars, sun-dried tomatoes and other dried foods… the possibilities are practically endless. Not to mention those free-range eggs and honey for those who keep bees – which will hopefully be me by this time next year.

The primary requirement for suppliers is that their products be grown naturally/organically. USDA organic certification is not required, but this means no GMOs, no petrochemical fertilizers or pesticides, etc. Most small farmers and backyard gardeners don’t use such things anyway, as the whole chemically-based food production system was invented for big Agribiz where the economies of scale (like 5 square miles’ worth of corn) and government subsidies disguises the true cost of the foods produced. There are farmers in my area who have rotated 40 acres in beans, corn and wheat all their lives and never managed to destroy the productivity of their land with chemical adulterants they’ve never actually needed.

I don’t know if something like farmigo would make much of a dent in my region, where local farmers and producers have been participating in CSAs since somebody first thought them up, and where local farmer’s markets are easy to find any day of the week in cities, towns and villages throughout the countryside. But this type of modern organizing and management would be a good thing even here, so there is much to learn. The more people who abandon our American Industrial Food System the better, and again with enough organized coordination those economies of scale can ultimately lower the price of good, wholesome food so that more and more people can avail themselves of it. Win-win situation, so do check around and ‘borrow’ some ideas from those who are pioneering the food wilderness.

Link:

farmigo – Locally Grown & Fresh.

Andrew Burger at CleanTechnica blog reported Monday [September 26, 2011] that Westinghouse Solar has introduced new plug-and-play solar panel kits for do-it-yourselfers, which can be purchased off the shelf at Lowe’s. These kits come with built-in AC inverters, brackets, roof flashings and panel splices, connecting easily to each other. Each panel is rated at 235 watts, making the basic 4-panel kit (~$1500) come in at just under a kilowatt.

Homesteaders are nothing if not do-it-yourselfers, and most of us would dearly love to be supplying our own power. Maybe even selling clean green energy back to the electric company by generating more than we normally need! And since we tend to live out in the boonies… er, countryside, we are often last in line to get our outages taken care of after storms or other problems cut electricity. It would be great to have alternative on-site sources for at least some electrical demands when the commercial power’s out, preferably not a gasoline generator that uses petroleum, contributes to global climate change, and is loud enough to be a public nuisance.

The price of solar panels has been coming down steadily over the past few years, as more companies get into producing the materials for them, and with China investing heavily to develop their domestic industry. There are still state and federal rebates and incentives available in the U.S. to help cover the cost of going solar, so now would be a good time to buy. Those rebates and incentives won’t last long once the price comes down to honestly competitive.

About the most expensive part of these DIY kits is the licensed electrician recommended to do the actual wiring into the home electrical box, or the grid feed-in. Our electricity company is Duke Energy, and while they will facilitate a tie-in, it has to be done by one of their own electricians, and those make $30-$50 an hour. Pay-back depends entirely on how much your utility supplier charges per kilowatt hour. That cost isn’t coming down with fossil fuels or nuclear, so a homesteader could see pay-back in 6-10 years. If you’ve enough money (or credit) to install DIY panels on your barn and outbuildings as well as your house, you could be a net energy producer through the feed-in and almost break even right from the start.

Your own needs will of course come first. Check out your most recent electric bill. It will tell you how much you’re paying per kWh for juice and give you a feel for how much electricity you use per month (round high). Our conservation efforts here will make a big difference in how much roof you’ll have to donate to the generation project. It can take up to 64 panels to cover the “average” homeowner’s electrical needs, and given the size of these panels, you’d have to have several roofs or donate some land to the effort. But of course, homesteaders aren’t “average,” always aware of our consumption habits and trying to lessen our carbon footprint.

Thus to go completely off-grid you’d still have to be independently wealthy. And solar panels only generate when the sun shines, so while you could make a good dent in your own draw on the grid during the day, you wouldn’t be selling back to the grid while you sleep at night. Better bets for a grid tie-in would be wind and/or micro-hydro, both of which would generate ‘trines 24-7. The 4-panel solar kit from Lowe’s could be used to power a dedicated circuit in the house for a specific appliance – like, say, an energy efficient refrigerator or chest freezer – and a 12V battery charger. That way when the electricity goes out you could still maintain refrigeration and household lights, maybe your computer.

At any rate, this is great news. Solar is finally coming into range for the average property owner, even just as an assist to offset continual price hikes in fuels the utilities use for generating electricity. The more people who take advantage of on-site generation, the fewer new big plants – coal or nuclear – the utilities have to build. Check out some of the links below and start dreaming!

Links:

Westinghouse Solar
Westinghouse Solar Introduces Low-Cost DIY Home Solar Kits
Everything Solar: How Much Energy Do You Need For Your Home?
Energy Matters: Wesinghouse’s DIY Home Solar Kits

The current collapse of the world financial system has revealed some structural problems in our national economy that have flourished over a period of decades as corporate interests bought politicians and lobbyists to craft legislation to remove legal roadblocks to mass theft and market manipulation. And despite some changes in the D.C. political landscape, our government remains apparently helpless to do anything about corporate malfeasance on any level. With all the bad economic news dominating the public consciousness, some issues in the food supply sector are having a difficult time being properly correlated and attended to despite the serious level of danger they present to public health.

The food supply issues didn’t begin with the market manipulations on Wall Street and from there to exchanges all over the world. Though for many people the first alarms went off as the CDS fraud crashed the economy in 2008 and the financial players went looking for other markets to wreak havoc on. They seized on commodities – staple foods from the agricultural sector increasingly dominated by multinational corporations like Monsanto, ADM and Cargill. As a traceable beginning in 2008 to what this year became the “Arab Spring” movement across North Africa and spreading to the Middle East and southern Asia, food riots broke out in Egypt and Syria and portions of India as well as elsewhere when people could no longer afford to feed themselves and their families. Things have only gotten worse in the years since, and Americans are slowly waking up.

In 2011 a full quarter of the U.S. population are dependent on food stamps. As unemployment keeps on rising, the government strangely keeps slashing the food stamp budget to appease nutty Republican radicals who insist those hardest hit by the Great Recession are just “lazy” and undeserving of aid that might require corporations and billionaires to pay taxes. Why one of the political parties in our nation believes that Americans will quietly and without complaint starve to death in the streets in order to protect billionaires from paying as much of their income in taxes as their chauffeur does has never been explained by the financial sector’s pundits at the New York Times or Wall Street Journal. Major cognitive disconnect.

But serious food supply issues encompass much more than just market manipulation and governmental paralysis. Consider some of these issues while attempting to get a picture of how dire the overall situation is…

Honey Laundering: China’s at it again – Adulterating pet and human foods with melamine wasn’t bad enough – though one corporate scapegoat was executed by the Chinese government hoping to save its place as cheap ingredients supplier to the world – the latest food scam involves honey. Not just fake honey in those little bee-shaped plastic bottles, Chinese honey brokers are creating honey by mixing sugar water, malt sweeteners, corn/rice syrup, barley malt and a variety of unrefined sugars. Failure to police storage requirements has resulted in heavy metal contamination as well, primarily lead.

If you’ve been thinking about beekeeping for honey (and handy pollinators), this is the year to get busy on it. Extension services in many rural counties offer literature, evening classes, and instructions on building hives. Agents often know who in the area builds hives for sale, and aren’t shy of giving out that information. Many people who are trying hard to eat better and healthier are being taken in by the Chinese honey scam, and big food processors using that fake honey in their supposedly ‘natural’ food lines are risking their markets. Grow your own honey or buy locally from someone honest.

Time to re-engineer the meatpacking sector – Late July brought the second largest tainted meat recall so far, when Cargill’s meat packing division recalled ~36 million pounds of ground turkey products tainted with a multi-drug resistant strain of Salmonella. The biggest recall was in 2008, when a slaughterhouse in California recalled 143 million pounds of beef due to allowing downer cows into the mix. The dangers to public health from e.coli, salmonella, listeria and other bacteria, and from adulterants and contaminates are high, yet our government doesn’t give the Food and Drug Administration [FDA] the power to force food recalls. Companies have to do this voluntarily, and they don’t often volunteer until people start dying and CDC tracks the source down.

If your family eats meat, now is the time to seriously consider raising your own or contracting with a neighbor who raises meat animals. A side of beef from a calf pastured for a year, dressed whole chickens raised happily free range, maybe rabbit stew meat, a slab of locally smoked bacon and/or ham… buying from known sources or doing it yourself could easily save your family’s lives. The more that control of our commercial food supply gets concentrated into the greedy hands of a few, the more danger is present overall. Avoid it like the plague it truly is.

The Nation has a good article looking at How change is going to come in the food system despite united resistance of the big corporate players to cater to public demands for better, less adulterated and far less fattening foods. There is a lot of good information in this article’s analysis to arm yourself with when next you try arguing with a friend, relative or acquaintance about the importance of healthy food and the severe shortage of it in our commercial food supply.

And finally, the good news. The New York Times informs us that vegetable gardens are booming in a fallow economy. We homesteaders have of course known this all along – and have done more than our share to get more people digging and grow the local markets – but we should always welcome mainstream coverage that helps to spread awareness. Recent movement in many states to allow the use of food stamps at farmer’s markets and bulk purchases straight from farmers are helping more people to get more and better food than they could purchase in the grocery store.

Many localities are also sponsoring seed exchanges through the Lions or Ruritan, sometimes through local Chambers of Commerce, 4-H and FFA clubs at high schools. These have committees in charge of getting open-pollinated seeds from local gardeners and farmers, packaging them, and then distributing them free in the late winter and early spring to local residents planning their season’s garden crops. Local schools and civic clubs are offering gardening classes and contacts to suppliers of tool exchanges, equipment like chicken coops and bee hives, and farmers who sell chicks, calves, kids and kits to those wishing to raise their own meat animals. Local butchers are making a comeback, and in many states the Extension Service offers classes all the way up to Master Gardening certification. So get busy, and get your neighbors busy making best use of all these developing local alternatives to Big Ag and Big Food, Inc. We will be a much happier and healthier nation for it, and probably much smarter as a people for our awareness and direct involvement in this most important aspect of everybody’s lives.

Links:

NYT: Vegetable Gardens Are Booming
How Change Is Going to Come in the Food System
Time to re-engineer the meatpacking sector
Honey Laundering: tainted and counterfeit Chinese honey
Risks of tainted food rise as inspections drop

I read an interesting article on the “earthlodges” of Native Americans in the Dakotas the other day. I’d learned early in my life when the family moved from New York to “Indian Territory” – Oklahoma – that not all Native Americans lived in those portable teepee tents so prevalent on the plains. I knew the ‘civilized’ tribes of the southeastern United States were able constructors of log cabins for their permanent villages, and of course knew about those spectacular adobe pueblos in the southwest. And while I learned in junior high Oklahoma history about the sod-roofed shanties built by white settlers (and for which Oklahoma was famous), I’d never heard of earthlodges.

Earthlodges are large round structures from 20 to 50 feet in diameter which are built to be much more permanent than the yurts that basically amount to a Mongolian version of teepee for migratory people. Lots of people these days have deck-mounted yurts that are popular as camp cabins or gazebos, but they’re not really something stable or well-insulated enough to live in full time.

In contrast, the earthlodge is dug into the ground and framed with logs, covered with woven willow mats and then covered completely (except for a smoke hole in the middle of the roof) with mud and sod. Your basic hobbit house, but as its own hill rather than dug into a pre-existing hill. Of course, there are some modern earthlodge designs that combine aspects of natural landscaping and lodge building, which are actually quite nice if you don’t care much about windows. It would be quite easy to engineer one of these with skylights, so interior darkness can be alleviated.

Dakota State Historical Society

The original earthlodges were built communally, often housing between 15 and 25 people. They provided solid, very well-insulated shelter for harsh Dakota winters, and stayed naturally cool in hot Dakota summers. They lasted only as long as the palisade poles and main support logs lasted in the ground, about 7 to 10 years before they’d rotted enough to need replacing. Since it took only about a week for a group to construct an earthlodge from scratch, the old one would simply be torn down and a new one erected in its place. The old logs recycled into firewood made this village system quite efficient given that the Dakotas do not enjoy the thick, lush forests of the American southeast.

For a new homesteader looking for cheap, eco-friendly housing on a tract of raw land, it’s not difficult to see how the problem of ground-rot could be simply eliminated by seating the anchor and palisade logs in concrete. The thermal mass of palisade logs plus dirt/sod can be nearly warm in winter and cool in summer as 3-foot thick adobe walls. More modern – and fully waterproof – coverings take the place of those woven willow mats, and fewer palisade poles would allow for regular insulated walls or an opportunity to place windows and/or exits to porticos, or to build storage rooms or closets off the main structure. For a truly permanent structure, some research on new under-sod waterproof roofing material would probably be a good idea.

The niftiest thing about this kind of permanent shelter is that if your land is raw enough to need some clearing, the logs and poles can be taken as part of your clearing plans. These will have to be de-barked and dried above the ground, there are many good Do It Yourself books and plans out there for site-built log homes that have clear instructions on how to do this. If you’re planning to grow crops, the sod shouldn’t be hard to come by. Rather than a big central fire pit and large hole in the roof, a central wood stove with just a pipe running up through the roof will protect from the elements much better than the wicker baskets the Mandan people used to cover their smoke holes when it rained.

It also strikes me that the side walls could be constructed of straw bales and covered with mesh and stucco or adobe instead of mud and sod and still be as easy to heat and cool. Some may consider rock as well, if the land has an overabundance of those that need removing before crops can be grown. Any of these alternatives for some or all of the side walls would make for a very handsome home. The sod roof does have great appeal, I’ve always envisioned a hobbit house with wildflowers instead of just more grass to have to mow.

The interior, once you’ve got the central roof supports and planned your walls, can of course be framed and subdivided as you please for cooking sleeping and living areas, bathrooms and utility as you wish. The Dream Green link above also offers a plan for a ‘multi-lodge’ made up of several octagonal earthlodges connected to a front portico area. This idea offers the possibility for future expansion as the family grows.

So chalk this up as yet another eco-friendly green construction to think about if you’re new to homesteading or are planning to build more structures on your homestead than you’ve already got. A far less modern (more true to origin) version of earthlodge would make a very serviceable combo barn, root/wine cellar and tool/vehicle storage shed. For as long as you can keep the livestock from eating the walls and roof, that is.

Links:

Indians 101: The Earthlodge
Dream Green Homes Earth Lodge
Blue Ridge Yurts

Those of us homesteaders who have been hoping the cost of solar panels would continue to fall until we can finally afford them on our houses and outbuildings have been watching with some trepidation the news that solar start-up Solyndra has filed for bankruptcy. What does it mean in terms of the push to secure truly ‘green’ jobs here in the U.S., as well as our struggle to get our nation off filthy fossil fuels like coal and gas, and to phase out ill-conceived nuclear power generation before Megalopolis ends up a ‘dead zone’ for 300+ years.

The New York Times reports that Solyndra’s bankruptcy bodes ill for the entire solar industry. But does it really? While we can be sure King Coal and Big Nukes would dearly love that to be true, that doesn’t necessarily mean it is true.

Solyndra’s collapse marked the third time in as many weeks that a solar company declared bankruptcy. Evergreen Solar Inc. of Massachusetts and SpectraWatt of New York also filed for protection.

Three investment-heavy solar companies in three weeks? What’s going on? Some analysts loudly tout the idea that the solar industry itself is in trouble – and there obviously is some trouble – but how bad is it? According to the Solar Energy Industries Association, part of the problem is that the cost of materials to make solar panels has been falling drastically as more and more investment in the technology has materialized, and more companies jump into the fray. In such a situation some of the most heavily leveraged companies who got in when material costs were high are going to fail simply due to their debt load. Solyndra also produced commercial rooftop systems with a unique cylindrical collection system, and that system proved to be entirely impractical in residential applications. This, analysts say, indicates that the company badly misunderstood the marketplace they’d entered.

Solyndra also produced the thin film solar panels I was hoping to use on my metal roof, so maybe their leftover stock of that will go at super-discount price now that the company is defaulting on its more than half a billion dollars in federal loans. Worst part, of course, are than 1,100 ‘green’ energy workers are now unemployed. Hopefully they’ll be able to find new work in the field soon. German energy giant just announced that it is getting out of the nuclear business altogether, and will refocus on its alternative and renewable divisions. ABC News reports that the Solyndra bankruptcy is unlikely to hamper government investment in green jobs or renewable energy sources, so that’s some good news.

Besides, despite the loss of those 1,100 jobs at Solyndra, the solar energy sector is still employing more than 100,000 people and has added more than 6,700 jobs just in the past year. Green job growth appears to be healthy despite some start-up upheavals in non-competitive sectors. These are good jobs, we need more of them.

The bottom line is that Chinese governmental investment in solar production is the biggest factor effecting cost of solar panels, as U.S. companies just don’t have access to the kind of sweatshop, prison and slave labor that the Chinese government can deploy. Much as American corporations would love to pay workers $2 a day for 16 hours of daily work, that’s simply not going to happen no matter how long they drag out this 2nd Great Depression.

The government’s exposure on these bankruptcies should definitely not prevent the necessary investment in alternatives, especially given the recent dramatic breakdown of half a century’s empty promises that nuclear energy would be “clean, safe, too cheap to meter.” The price of those is going nowhere but up, and they already cost more in initial investment than any other energy source. I figure the solar market will balance itself out over time, and those companies that install and maintain solar panels on your roof that turns THEM into your utility company (at a guaranteed rate, something you’ll never get from a public utility) seem to be doing great.

At any rate, I’m still hoping that by the time we’ve got the money to invest in full energy production for this homestead there will be available technologies made right here in the U.S. of A. that are both affordable and will do the job with enough extra to sell back to Duke. Why, maybe Duke will get enough from that distributed generation to cancel any and all plans for new nukes nobody needs or can afford. You never know…

Links:

U.S. Solar Industry Job Growth
Solyndra Bankruptcy Unlikely to Hamper Green Jobs
House Judiciary chair: Solyndra bankruptcy
Solyndra Bankruptcy Reveals Dark Clouds

Now that my terminally wrinkled fingers have finally recovered from the tomato harvest – two bushels dried and half-dried, a third bushel variously canned and frozen – I can get back to enjoying the break (finally!) in this summer’s all-time record heat wave that had us here in the mountains suffering 95º+ temperatures daily for two and a half long, long months. Back to more normal now with low to mid 80′s during the day, mid 60s at night. I love all the seasons for what they have to offer, but readily admit spring and fall are my favorites. Because by February I’m darned sick of ice and snow no matter how pretty it is, and by August I’m more than ready for fall’s crisp clarity and cool nights.

Homesteaders tend to make real sacrifices for as much self-sufficiency as possible even while our most major projects proceed over a period of years in a perpetual “work in progress.” We like to tread lightly on the earth, though as the temperatures steadily rise a lack of air conditioning certainly can make summer a miserable season. So thoughts of course turn toward more necessary projects for energy self-sufficiency that are bigger than just completely redoing the water system for a ram jet and gravity feed. Solar panels are still too expensive for my family at this time, but I have discovered some nifty wind projects we could build on-site without the multi-thousands of dollars it takes to even think about solar.

That of course being a big project for sometime down the road (still working on the water), but please do check out the Homemade Wind Turbine Plans site to get yourselves dreaming in the right direction. In the meantime, there’s good news for Florida utility customers this week, which may even end up helping out utility customers in Georgia and South Carolina as well.

If you’ve driven cross-country in the past year you may have noticed that the vast American Midwest is sprouting windmills at a fast pace. Given this year’s nuclear horror at Fukushima – and associated nuclear unease across the entire planet – you may be happy to know that it became official over the past year that renewable energy sources now produce more electrical generation capacity in the U.S. than nuclear. The statistics are that wind, small-scale hydro, solar and biomass energy production came to 381 gigawatts of capacity, compared to nuclear’s 375 gigawatts.

The nuclear industry – which is multinational and ever greedy for more multi-billion dollar annual handouts from first world governments – had other plans for a “Nuclear Renaissance” before 3 reactors and 4 spent fuel pools melted down at Fukushima Daiichi in northern Japan this past March. That ongoing nuclear disaster has pretty much halted the planned renaissance in its feeble tracks as the public all over the world gets a rare opportunity to critically examine our collective plans for the future in the midst of global economic depression and punishing ‘austerity’ measures imposed by the mega-rich. Seems that one of the belt-tightening measures regular people have begun to take for themselves as money supplies dry up is to get serious about conserving energy usage. Thereby cutting their utility bills. A great many are also canceling their cable television and finding that the information and entertainment they can get from online sources gives them a satisfying amount of control, freeing them from the 24-7 influence of paid propaganda.

On the utility front, Progress Energy’s clever plan to charge its Florida customers an average of $50 extra dollars a month to pre-pay for a nuclear plant it planned to build in Levy County north of its Crystal River nuke is getting some scrutiny from the courts. Originally justified by an always spurious target date of 2016 for coming on-line, it turns out that Progress has conceded that the plant has no chance of even getting built before 2027. Construction delays, dramatic cost overruns and the changing regulatory and public opinion realities since Fukushima are taking a toll. It is becoming completely clear given diminishing demand for the power during this global depression and public efforts at conservation that the Levy plant, as well as new plants in Georgia and South Carolina are most likely to never be completed.

Thus the Florida state Office of Public Counsel, which represents consumers in utility matters, is arguing in an administrative court challenge that charging consumers extra money for decades before a new plant comes on-line is unfair. Depending on how this suit before the Public Service Commission turns out, similar extra charges in Georgia and South Carolina may also be stricken.

Relief for utility consumers is always welcome, but the extra charges have helped to spur speedier deployment of renewable sources of energy by cash-strapped homeowners. Rooftop solar panels are proliferating all over the place in “The Sunshine State” as well as across the south. Recent entrepreneurial start-ups that allow homeowners to ‘lease’ solar panels atop their roofs and still pay less on energy bills are taking off even in this lousy economy. Costs to the homeowner are minimal, and the panels produce electricity at a cheaper rate than big utilities charge per kilowatt hour.

One such company is SolarCity, which offers a range of capacities for businesses as well as homes and has been getting quite a lot of press coverage. Business is booming. An arrangement like this could greatly benefit homesteaders who live in sunny climes but do not have the money up front to buy and install their own solar systems. Energy from the grid isn’t getting any cheaper with or without new nukes, though the costs of alternatives is falling. If you’ve a good credit score, this leasing situation may be your best bet for the immediate future. Some plans allow for the homeowner to purchase the panels over time, assume ownership at the end of the lease for a minimal pay-out, etc. But the value of having installation, repair and replacement services as part of the lease is high enough to seriously consider.

At any rate, here’s to more and more renewable generation capacity large or small, everywhere across the country and the world. It’s a change we’ve needed to make since the 1970s, when Jimmy Carter had solar panels installed on the White House roof as an inspiration to the nation. The solar panels Ronald Reagan had removed as soon as he took office and dedicated the national treasury (and all our military might) to the project of stealing all the petroleum in the world first. After a full decade of dedicated resource wars in the Middle East ad Central Asia, it’s time we the people got back to where we should have been all along. As those Hippies used to say back in the day…

Power To The People!

For those of us fond of The Clash and their music, these past few days of London Burning for real have been… surreal. Pushing austerity to its most absurd limits, the government has slashed educational funding, jobs training programs and basic welfare – including for food – across the board just as is happening in this country with radical right-wingers holding the nation hostage in order to secure massive cuts to all forms of social aid – including medical access – in order to keep our several resource wars going indefinitely without having to tax the people making the most money off those wars. Rioting in Greece over austerity measures, in Israel over hard right-wing policies, and the “Arab Spring” that has so far brought down several governments in the Middle East and North Africa while getting NATO involved in Libya, the now 3-year old meltdown of the world economy has things on hair trigger in some rather surprising places.

Americans have not yet hit the streets violently, though things economically show no signs of easing up as markets plunge and hunger raises its ugly head all over the place. ABC News offered a rather amazing article August 8th touting Dumpster Diving as a way to get no-cost food – featuring New York City – that raises far more questions than it could ever possibly answer. Is dumpster diving okay? Is it a threat to public health? Is it acceptable for people to be getting their food this way? My God… what have we come to in this country?

ABC makes it sound like a voluntary “movement” among people who just don’t WANT to spend money on food. But for those of us who have some real idea of the actual time and energy expended in a “hunter-gatherer” lifestyle, this new version doesn’t suggest that these people have any actual money to be saving by raiding dumpsters all day long. In fact, despite ABC’s portrayal of this “Freegan” lifestyle as some sort of “movement” to be weighed for existential value, it would appear by their own admission that these people have no means of transportation aside from their feet and maybe an old bike, are “squatting” in old buildings without indoor plumbing or electricity, and are long-term unemployed in one of the most expensive cities on the continent.

I cannot imagine having to raid dumpsters just to eat, though I have in my life picked up aging produce from the back of the grocery to feed to my guinea pigs and rabbits. I’ve gleaned fields of neighbors with larger, more mechanized farms for leftover potatoes and other veggies I could preserve or donate to the food bank. There’s a big tomato field near my sister’s place that is literally rotting in the sun right now because the illegal immigrants who used to pick the produce have all been deported. I’m taking a few baskets and boxes down this evening to gather what I can for preserving. Heck, I even accepted a couple of bushels of old onions from a passing truck once when we were camping on the Rio Grande. He was going to a dump, the onions didn’t look that bad to me. Spent the entire afternoon cutting out rot and slicing the rest into a water bath canner pot over a wood fire, and cooked up the largest pot of onion soup anybody’d ever seen. As campers smelled the bounty and wandered over to see what was cooking, I soon had carrots and potatoes and celery and herbs and some stewing meat and a few other things to toss into the pot – which quickly grew to two pots – and by dinnertime we had a grand community feast and told stories well into the night.

…but it’s not what I’d care to do for a living. And I’m sure you wouldn’t either. We who have chosen to live outside the urban danger zones and have committed ourselves to being as self-sufficient as possible cannot sit by and presume things won’t get very, very bad in our cities and towns too when people come to the end of their cut-off ropes and find they have nothing left and nowhere to turn. Things will not be getting better for the foreseeable future unless fundamental changes occur. And fundamental changes are not going to come from D.C. or from our state houses, where the political game of high dudgeon is played primarily for cash contributions from corporate lobbyists and we the people count for nothing.

Here in the Wise Living Journal’s hunger archive there are quite a few articles about hunger in America and how homesteaders can escape it themselves as well as help out their neighbors. A 3-part series titled Feeding The Hungry lists and describes some innovative anti-hunger programs we can not only contribute to, but could expand to include our friends and neighbors to help out regional food banks that are currently running very low on food, and supply feeding programs in our larger towns and cities where people don’t have the means to grow their own food.

We can be part of a new way of seeing things, helping to change a harsh and hopeless reality bottom-up. Politicians will come around eventually if we go ahead and make necessary changes for ourselves. Or be left behind when new politicians from among the ranks of the people rise to prominence by virtue of leadership in making those necessary changes.

A word to my homesteading readers, rural, semi-rural and urban: Don’t you dare neglect to harvest everything you possibly can this year. If you can’t use or preserve it, get it to someone who can, while it’s still fresh. Volunteer to glean neighbor’s fields, and get that bounty to those who will give it away or preserve it for later. Sign up to teach a preservation class to others in your area. How to can various things, how to build solar food dryers, how to use the preserved food. Education is always useful to those who don’t know what you have to teach. And please don’t neglect that fall garden this year just because it’s a lot of trouble. Chances are that the price of fresh food is going to go through the roof this fall and winter as the conditions that have led to entire fields being abandoned such as is happening in my area hit the market with drastic shortages. A lot of people will be going hungry. Even more are losing their means to prepare foods or even stay warm when winter hits as those subsidies are stripped systematically as well.

Don’t wait for the politicians, they are doing just fine and their families aren’t hurting at all. It’s going to be up to us to help our our neighbors and communities, and we need to spread the word. It’s bad enough that people in this country die every year because they have no access to medical care (45,000+, and the figure is growing). Do we want to live in a country where they also starve to death or freeze to death if disease doesn’t get them first? It’s up to we the people because our leadership won’t do anything to help. We need to get down to business right now.

One of the biggest long-range planning issues involved in making a successful transition from a seriously inefficient and wasteful fossil fuels economy toward a more healthy renewables-based way of life is the problem of our petro-based system of agriculture. Those huge tractors and combines that dominate the endless landscapes of Big Agri-biz operations can translate into an entirely unsustainable 10:1 ratio of fossil fuel use to food on the table. Obviously as the cost of petroleum fuels keeps on rising, our society at large must come up with more efficient alternatives. Fortunately, there are a couple of alternatives that bode well for the future.

Huge swaths of the American breadbasket where staple monocrops are produced by the square mile would probably be better off going with Rudolph Diesel’s engine which he invented in 1893 to run on peanut oil. The Big machines could be run on SVO biodiesel that could be produced in a centrally located co-op type operation from oil crops cooperatively grown just for the purpose. These could then power the growing of those massive amounts of staple crops like oilseed, sugar beets, corn and other grains needed for both humans and livestock that are most efficiently produced by agribusiness concerns. Less petroleum consumption for this purpose, combined with programs aimed at lessening big ag’s dependence on petro-based chemical fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides would help a lot.

But is biodiesel the best alternative to the small producer? Smaller, more diverse farms, organic operations and homesteads that participate in Community Supported Agriculture programs and/or agritourism offerings don’t need those huge multi-purpose machines to grow just a few acres’ worth of truck crops, culinary herbs, grains, etc. Luckily for us small-timers, there’s electric tractors.

Electric tractors come in a variety of sizes and conversions from standard small farm size tractors produced by the usual manufacturers to your basic lawn-tractor sized unit that is mostly a glorified riding mower or 4-wheeler/golf cart. Such small units can easily handle the standard machine jobs involved in 1-5 acre fields, often able to plow, till or seed those 5 acres on a single charge. These machines can generally accept any of the standard tractor attachments that any similar sized gasoline or diesel tractor can accept, and while not exactly cheap, are generally not much more expensive than standard models.

Electric tractors actually get more oomph for the buck than traditional tractors or regular transportation EVs that need to be lightweight and go fast. This is because tractors are more efficient at their jobs when they are heavy and going slow. The trick for homesteaders is the power supply for charging the batteries, and of course that must factor into whatever power sources – solar, wind, micro-hydro, etc. – you are using to lessen your dependence on the grid. There are even conversions out there for your basic Small farm size Allis or Deere or Ford tractor that sport nifty overhead canopies (shade!) of solar panels that charge on-the-fly.

On more graded land such as we have here in the Appalachians, any kind of riding tractor or mower type machine is more dangerous than a walk-behind with low profile. And while power for that could be provided by a mule, it’s kind of exciting to find that someone on the electric implement front has already thought of that. Even better, these electrical implements make no noise in operation beyond the noise of the tines working the earth.

Below are listed some great links with lots of good information about electric tractors, tillers, mowers, cart-pullers and such that interested homesteaders will find useful. Several homesteaders I know who have livestock are already using rechargeable battery powered electric 4-wheelers to pull trailers loaded with hay and feed and such to their stock, haul logs cut at distance to where they are split for firewood, and to get that firewood to the furnace/wood stove. More useful actual farm implements attachable to riding mower type vehicles, or conversions of that old Ford might be a great project a homesteader who is already involved in CSA and/or agritourism projects could even find grant money to support.

Useful Links:

EEEVEE: Electric Tractors
The Natural Farmer: Electric Tractors
Permaculture: Electric Tractors
Modern Electric Tractors Incorporated
GE Elec-Trak E15
FreePower: Solar Gardening & Lawn Equipment
SunPony Charging Tiller