The GW Issue Few Wish to Hear

Most environmentally aware people try to keep up with the science, the debates, and the drafting of policy that will hopefully address Global Climate Change (a.k.a. Global Warming). The hope is that we can diminish human contributions to greenhouse gases before the planet becomes unlivable. Things like developing energy sources that don’t require raping the earth or poisoning the air and water (Mountaintop Removal) or never-ending oil wars, conservation at home and at work, switching urban transportation fleets to biodiesel, purchasing hybrid cars, commitments to rebuilding infrastructure such as the electrical grid so it doesn’t ‘lose’ nearly half of our generation capacity, ending the decimation of tropical rainforests, etc.

And many of the people young and old who are paying attention and doing what they can to mitigate their own carbon footprints are also well aware that with some tweaking of our antiquated agricultural policies that were originally designed to ‘beat’ the Soviets in some kind of mock Cold War game of who can produce the most corn, we could be saving 20% of our fossil fuel consumption simply by switching the nation’s primary shipping systems – trains, ships and semi fleets – to biodiesel made with alternative feedstock crops. Along with our agricultural machinery. A combine can run just fine on biodiesel – or, with a pre-heater refit, straight vegetable oil.

Yet there’s a huge contributor to climate change that people don’t seem to be particularly aware of or take seriously as far as choices they could make to lessen their own impact. It’s not about carbon dioxide, which is the primary focus of most attempts to mitigate Global Warming, but about other greenhouse gases like nitrous oxide and methane. For these the agricultural sector is again the most significant contributor, and it all revolves around our hard-to-kick habit of eating way too much meat.

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Finally! The Last of the Pumpkins

Having battled out of control pumpkin vines all summer, I’m glad to report that the last of the pumpkin harvest is finally complete. It rained so much that several rotted on the ground, they’ve been tossed into the compost bin from which I expect next year’s greedy vines will take off. I’d planted an heirloom variety of pie-size pumpkins, not realizing that everywhere there was a leaf there would root a whole new vine. Thus the minimal planting of only 4 vines ended up literally everywhere! It grew over the mints and into the brick pathway. It grew through the roses and tried to cover the grapes. It grew out into the 3rd goal disc golf fairway and down the hill towards the bottomland drop-off. I was literally lopping off new vines daily just to keep some control (and some of my other crops)! Since the compost bin is on the fairway side of the garden, I’m going to go ahead and let the pumpkins have it next year.

Now, processing pumpkins – even pie-size pumpkins of 5 pounds or less – is an arduous task taking lots of time and energy. I spread it out over a couple of weeks, once haviing brought them inside when the temperature dropped to freezing. Once frost is upon them they go fast. Protected from frost in a dry, cool basement or root cellar, they’ll keep for months. So while it’s possible to avoid all that processing by spreadiing it out over the entire winter one pumpkin at a time, pumpkin simply doesn’t last long enough around this homestead to justify not doing it all at once well before the holiday season. I’ve got grandkids who can each eat an entire pie at a single sitting, and grown relatives who fully expect their pumpkin/hickory nut bread along with the fudge and cookies in December (my standard Christmas gifting). One thing you never want to do is find yourself processing a pumpkin at the same time you’re baking cookies/bread and making fudge. You’ll end up not sleeping for days…

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Home Dried Pumpkin Crackers

My grandson would eat pumpkin bread and pumpkin pie every day of his life if he had his d’ruthers, so here’s the recipe for the pumpkin crackers I’m making now in my newfound food drying frenzy. From a crop of mini-pumpkins that took over three whole terraces of the garden (I only planted 4!) before I started cutting them back so I could get to the compost bin and tomatoes.

3 cups pumpkin puree
1/4 cup maple syrup
1/4 cup packed brown sugar
1/2 cup ground mixed acorns and pumpkin seeds
* [can add flax and/or sesame seeds as desired, whole, toasted]
1 tbsp. ground cinnamon
1 tbsp. cornstarch
1 tsp. ground ginger
1 tsp. ground nutmeg

Now, 3 cups of pumpkin puree is about what you get out of a single mini pumpkin. If you’re growing giants, good luck (you can eat pumpkin bread and pie every day for a year from just one of those). Cut it in half, scoop out the seeds into a colander, quarter and put into an oven roasting pan with about an inch of water. Bake at 350º until soft. While the oven’s on, roast the cleaned and rinsed seeds on a baking sheet, stirring every 5 minutes to roast evenly (don’t burn). The pumpkin will be done in about 30-40 minutes.

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Onions, Onions Everywhere!

At right is the first rush of the bunching onion harvest, prepped for drying in my wonderful (but quite ugly) solar food dryer! These are just the whites – grown from seed – that have been seriously overrun by volunteer grape tomatoes. I decided to let the volunteers grow because the celeriac I’d put where they are all got washed away by torrential rains all spring. Unlike my Abe Lincolns up top, these actually are turning red about a month late. Rain and cool weather all the way through July has kept the Lincolns green-green for way too long, don’t know if they’ll ever ripen.

Seems that’s the story up and down the Eastern Seaboard this year. Cooler than normal, and wet enough to make swamps. I hear New Jersey and other states are having tomato issues, as are all my neighbors, so I’m not alone. Potatoes are taking a big hit as well, rotting in the wet ground or turning black with blight. Both crops may be total commercial losses this year, which means it’s even MORE important that mine come in and get preserved. That’s where my food dryer comes in!

I have so looked forward to not having to buy lids, boil jars, hard-prep and then water-bath this year. We don’t have AC in the cabin, since there’s no point for the perhaps 3 whole weeks of summer when it’s so hot we have to go sit under a tree instead of stay in the house, but it does get sticky and uncomfortable in the extreme when canning, even though I’ve learned to do the water-bath out on the gas grill.

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Livestock on the ‘Stead

AP/Eric Risberg

In view of recent weeks’ events concerning an off-season outbreak of a new flu strain in Mexico that quickly spread around the world – and caused WHO to get all the way to 5 on its pandemic alert system before things eased somewhat – it’s a good idea for those of us in the 21st century’s “back to the land” movement to examine some issues with livestock production in general and how we get around those issues on our own homesteads. Many homesteaders avoid livestock, but many others keep chickens, a cow or more, goats, pigs, rabbits, and some pasture a few calves every year destined for the organic beef market. What does all this mean for us?

Thus far the new flu strain, which according to the CDC is a “unique” mixture of human, avian and swine flu strains, looks to have originated in the CAFO [Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation] system of swine production for human food. These operations, where thousands of animals are confined in close quarters and intensively fed for maximum weight gain in minimum time, can according to researchers and epidemiologists serve as fertile genetic recombination factories for the various strains of influenza due to lack of good waste management practices and regulation, proximity of swine CAFOs to avian CAFOs, water contamination, worker contact with infected animals. Add to that the difficulty of dealing with viral rates of mutation as well as getting effective vaccines into production from one year to the next, and you end up with a situation of concern not only to public health authorities, but also to small producers who happen to live anywhere close to such intensive CAFO operations.

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Some Issues of Concern…

First, to get us all in the spirit of spring, check out Geoff Lawton’s YouTube short on the psychological benefits of gardening. If you like what you see, check out his new DVD, Establishing a Food Forest the Permaculture Way, available from Permaculture.Org.

Most committed modern homesteaders try to keep up with the many issues of concern to us personally, our country, and our chosen way of life. Things like rural development policies, governmental agricultural and energy policies, self-sufficiency (and roadblocks to that), management of forests and water sources, etc. It’s because we care that we are who we are and do what we do. And a good many of us try to keep up daily or weekly with the best sources of information we need to keep abreast of those issues.

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‘09 Season’s Homestead Project: Solar Dryer

Post 1 of an Upcoming Series

Acknowledging that we homesteaders have been ahead of the curve for quite awhile on how to become ever more self-sufficient, the current worldwide economic crisis – which threatens to last for years – no doubt has us expanding our means of producing and preserving food crops this year. On my homestead a good deal of work is going into expanding the amount of acreage we’ve planted in truck crops, begun experimenting with staples like hard red winter wheat and grain amaranth, and doubling the actual plantings of favorites like potatoes and corn that have traditionally been so cheap to buy that we didn’t depend upon our own.

On the preservation front, I’ve embraced a project for this season that should pay for itself many times over during the years it will be in use. It’s a solar food dryer, with which I’m hoping to cut seriously into the energy usage (and expense) of regular canning and freezing as the crops come in. This will not only help keep our not air conditioned cabin cooler during the hot August tomato harvest/canning frenzy, it should also cut way down on waste of perfectly good food from the land that comes in piecemeal, is less-than-perfect, and cannot be immediately consumed. This means I can preserve much more of the apple and pear crops, can preserve the persimmon crop that just started producing last fall, can dry sweet corn, squash and even dark green leafies for long-term storage while preserving much more of their nutritional goodness as well as flavor.

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Disconcerting: Tom Vilsack at USDA

As President-Elect Barack Obama has been very busy selecting key cabinet people and meeting with House and Senate leadership to ensure everyone’s ready on January 20th to begin implementing the Changes he promised, some of us out here on the active lifestyle progressive fringe are not happy with a few of the important choices.

By appointing Iowa Governor Tom Vilsack to head the USDA (Department of Agriculture), committed homesteaders, small landholders and organic farmers like me now have to be concerned that efforts by our own government to make us extinct may NOT change when the leadership in DC changes hands.

In the diary Tom “I Heart Monsanto” Vilsack, This One’s For You, kossack OrangeClouds115 lists everything that’s wrong with GMOs and Monsanto Corporation’s tireless efforts to own and control every aspect of agricultural production in the world. Note I said “world,” because it’s not just Big Corn Country like Iowa and Nebraska and Indiana that Monsanto seeks to own with its grotesque genetically-altered cultivars. It’s everyone’s ability to obtain seed and farm the land, from the US to Canada and South America, Africa, Europe and Asia as well as Australia. They want it all, they don’t need it all, and right here in Homesteading-USA we are the front and foremost line against this obscenity.

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Is It a “Fish Farm” if I Stock the Creek?

Now that the weather’s turned officially cold and the wood stove is going all day and night, there’s time to reflect upon the year and make new plans for the future. I’m still working on how to get “free range” chickens that won’t get eaten by the many foxes and coyotes that haunt our cove, sans the serious fencing we can’t afford. Also working on finding some metal fence poles for the garden fence through our local Freecycle network, nobody’s willing to come off any so far.

I find my mind once again drifting toward renting a backhoe for a week and dredging down in the creek so I’ll have a set of three tiers of pond that I can stock with rainbow trout. So I’ve been looking into the whole aquaculture thing, the issues with pollution and antibiotics and quality of feed, cost of fingerlings from the state, etc. What kind of engineering do I have to do to my creek? What kind of pollution controls? Who gets to police my little trap-falls?

After two days’ worth of homework, I’ve decided that my plan doesn’t fall under the regulatory purview of the state beyond their “stocking rivers and creeks” section. Yes, since it’s private land I’ll have to pay for the fingerlings, but because these pools won’t be anything but slightly-dammed hold-backs the size of my back deck, there should be no issues about waste pollution or anything like that. I will probably need a permit from the state in order to get the fingerlings, but once they’ve determined the operation is so minor as to not really qualify as “commercial,” it shouldn’t cost that much. Sell a few dozen fish a year.

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Letter to the New Farmer in Chief

There is a resurgence of hope across America in the wake of Tuesday’s election of Democrat Barack Obama as President, promising a new direction of change for the future of our nation. Those of us who have been paying attention to the global financial meltdown, increasingly severe food shortages in the wake of global warming, and the outrageous poisoning of our citizens and livestock/pets by corrupt Chinese producers (a glaring example of globalization’s failures), are hoping that a new dawn in America will bring with it the serious changes to our agricultural policies that have grown increasingly necessary through decades of decline.

Now, politicians don’t generally talk much about agricultural policies while they’re stumping for votes in big cities. And they’re often so ignorant of agricultural issues that even rural dwellers – actual farmers – get nothing but pablum and platitudes in response to their questions. Luckily, journalist Michael Pollan wrote a great ‘open letter’ in the New York Times in October entitled, Farmer in Chief. This is a must-read for all of us committed to self-sufficiency, locally grown foods, the viability of family farms and homesteads, and the future health of an environment we all depend upon for life.

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