Another New CSA and a Change of Herbal Heart

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.

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Disrupting the Way We Buy Produce

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.

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New DIY Solar from Westinghouse

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.

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Corporate Food & Human Backlash

FDA, via AP

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.

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Shakeup on the Solar Energy Front: Solyndra

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.

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Nuclear Energy: Florida Rate-Payers May Get a Break

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.

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Gleaning the Fields

Ruth Gleaning the Fields

In my last post, Hunger in America, I mentioned several ways we homesteaders could participate in helping to get food into the bellies of our neighbors who are going hungry, and whose supplemental aid is being slashed wholesale by the government. The situation is not going to get better any time soon, so an expansion on the notion of gleaning fields in your rural area is timely.

On a visit to my sister who lives south of our homestead near the South Carolina border brought the situation home to us graphically last week. I’m sure most have heard about farm labor shortages in a number of states this season, which have left fields planted in the spring and early summer to rot in place. On our drive to Sis’s we go past a fairly extensive truck farm with acres of tomatoes, cucumbers, squash, melons, pumpkins, sweet corn, etc. that until last year supplied area groceries with fresh local produce and a big produce stand managed by the Mexican-American family who owns the land. We noticed with some shock that the crops were literally rotting in the fields right next to the road and going back for half a mile in both directions – something we’d never seen before.

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Hunger in America: The New Reality

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?

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Food Waste: Compost or More Food?

Following a useful group series called Living Simply: Zero Waste has me thinking about what goodies from the kitchen gets tossed into the compost pile and how much of it might be useful for some other purpose. The series deals with all kinds of waste, of course, the things that go into our trash cans versus what goes into recycling, etc. And readership includes mostly people who live in urban environments. Things like food packaging and general trash items, getting those down as far as possible by recycling things like used batteries, those ‘planned obsolescence’ disposable electronics, plastics, glass, etc.

We homesteaders who have to haul our own trash and recyclables to the “Inconvenient Center” whenever we’ve got time while the darned dumpster station is actually open are pretty good at doing the separating. Especially for things like metals that can not only be recycled, but which we get paid for by the pound. But the question of food waste is quite pertinent this time of year, as crops start coming in and spring beds are cleaned out for fall crop planting. Which I definitely need to do, and would have already done by now if it weren’t so blasted HOT. At any rate, let’s look at the various compostables for what they might be put to best use for, considering how valuable compost actually is for purposes of growing things.

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Houses of Straw

Leonard Leslie Brooke illustration

Sure, we all remember the children’s story about three pigs and a big, bad wolf, who could huff and puff and blow the house down (unless it was made of bricks). The stick house held up a little bit better, but the straw house didn’t provide much in the way of protection at all. But these days, houses made of straw and stucco are getting quite sophisticated. Even looking sturdy enough to stand up to a good, stiff breeze, whether it comes from a wolf or a hurricane.

Bales of straw (usually wheat straw) as building material isn’t exactly new, though perhaps not as old as the Three Little Pigs tale. late 19th century homesteaders out on the Nebraska plains are credited with building the first straw bale and mud-wattle houses, much as Oklahoma homesteaders pioneered stone and earth-sheltered homes with sod roofs. These early examples of hardy home-building with whatever’s handy largely escaped modern notice until the early 1970s, when the hippie “back to the land” movement took off. Most straw bale houses built over the following couple of decades were non-code off-the-grid shelters, but the benefits of bale construction have gained new fans.

Featured in this New York Times article is a rather spectacular example in the Catskills hand-crafted with loving care over a period of years by Clark Sanders. For the new revival in homesteading pioneers for the 21st century, there are a number of outfits and websites offering education in straw bale building techniques, helpful hints, and contacts for associated material like stuccos and plasters, wall lattice, etc. Some of the most interesting and useful are listed below. There are even some very nice straw bale house plans that can be built as offered or altered to your own site’s needs and combined with other green technologies such as earth sheltering, etc.

A relatively small straw bale shelter could be built fairly quickly and cheaply by new homesteaders on their land as a place to live while developing the various water and energy systems that will support something more permanent at a later date. If sited well and built sturdily, such a shelter built into a berm or hillside could later serve as a well-insulated root cellar for food storage, or a cool shelter barn for ruminant livestock. Just be sure your plastering job keeps up with the normal wear and tear of time, or the livestock just might eat their own barn!

Check out some of the listed sites and their offerings, see if straw bale construction might serve you well in some application. All told, the recurring benefit theme of this construction method is low cost. Which is always something modern homesteaders need to consider.

Links:

Straw Bale Construction
StrawBale dot Com
Bale Watch: 50 House Plans
A House of Straw
NYT: Bale by Bale, Stone by Stone