Be joyful though you have considered all the facts
Having a 1500+ sq.f. driveway, having decided not to use a snow blower and not to hire someone with a truck to plow it for us, we purchased one of these:
It’s a snow float (a Suncast) and it does miracles. A chore that used to take the two of us at least two hours, now gets done in half an hour. Good, because over the last two days we had loads of snow.
To do this week:
The plants under row cover in the hoop house have stopped growing, but they are all alive and well, just waiting it out. I am planning to get some fresh horse manure from my neighbor and creating a small “hotbed” in the hoop house for some early spinach. It would be interesting to compare the growth of those plants to the ones under the row cover, and to what extent the decomposing horse manure heats up the hoop house.
I am out there twice a day to clear the snow off and away from the hoop house so light can penetrate and the structure isn’t too stressed. I am happy to report that the hoop house has withstood heaps of snow and gusts of wind, so our reinforcement of the top connectors seems to be working.
I managed to finish both volumes of Edible Forest Gardens when I was in Belgium and my first project will be to thoroughly re-assess our property. Digging holes and staking out areas will have to wait until the two-foot-thick blanket of snow has gone, but I will have to eyeball some of it and decide on some bushes and small trees.
It’s great to see the juncos play in the fluffy snow and vie for a place at the feeder with the cardinals and the passerines.
We’re back and Rioting again. I’ll again keep last year’s averages (calculated here) visible as a baseline. I use this calculator.
Gasoline. Well, there’s no way around it: Amie and I flew to Belgium – our first visit in 3 years – and I’m counting it as driving there, and back. I’m using our own cars’ consumption as a guide to how many gallons that is.
8.83 gallons per person (pp) in cars + 115.5 gallons pp on airplanes + 20 miles pp on public transport
=Â 302 % of the US National Average
(Last year’s yearly average: 24.8%)
Electricity. We’re still holding steady on this one.
354 KWH (all wind) = 10 % of the US National Average
(Last year’s early average: 18.2%)
Heating Oil and Warm Water. It’s finally winter and it shows in the numbers. The oil burner warms our place to 58F at night, and during the day we use the woodstove to keep it around 60F (I’m still not counting because we still haven’t used up that cord). On some days this month, however, it went down to 10 F and it took the stove and the oil burner to keep the house warm. We keep the Annex, which is not in use, at 45F with the oil burner. Our warm water too is heated with oil.
67.15 gallons = 109 % of the US National Average
(Last year’s yearly average: 77%)
Trash. We’re doing well on this one too.
5 lbs pp = 4 % of the US National Average
(Last year’s yearly average: 7.3%)
Water. This went down but of course two of the inhabitants we missing for half of the month. We’re keen on bringing this down to 10% and it should be possible. Toilet flushing, however “selective”, and showers, however short, are the weak points to address in the Spring (rain water holds the answer).
406 gallons of water pp = 14 % of the US National Average
(Last year’s yearly average: 16.5%)
Consumer Goods. Our main purchases in December were a camera and an aquarium (with accouterments) for Amie – I’m curious to see how much electricity the water heater and the filter consume.
$250 = 30 % of the US National Average
(Last year’s yearly average: 27.2%)
While in Belgium – rainy, gray, cold – we do a lot of drawing and painting. Here is one project:
Oma draws the outline (it tickles!)
Done
Work in progress
Finished
Amie and I will be traveling over the next two weeks, so posting will be sporadic, if I post at all. We have a 9-hour plane ride ahead of us (BANG goes the Riot), and my main concern right now is which book to take. That, and getting a letter notarized in which DH gives his consent for me to take our daughter out of the country.
I’ve whittled it down to three:
Death, Sex by Tyler Volk and Dorion Sagan
In the Loyal Mountains by Rick Bass
Wolf Willow by Wallace Stegner
I’ve read about 1/3 of each of these and still can’t decide. Of course I would take The Book if only it weren’t so voluminous – both volumes will come along in my suitcase, though, along with Holmgren’s Permaculture. Amie will read Charlotte’s Web. But hopefully we’ll both sleep on the plane.
Both!
And, perhaps, my very own pottery wheel?
Last weekend we finally got the plastic on the hoop house, just in time too, before the first big snowstorm.
A couple of days after the storm something did not look right. Several of the “ribs” were no longer bent. A quick inspection revealed that the snow that had accumulated against the bottom had pressed against the ribs, making them bend in more, tightening the arch. This had put too much force on the pvc cross connectors on top, and several of these had broken.
The house still stood by virtue of the connectors still in place, the plastic covering (which did not tear even at those point where the loose ribs were poking into it), and the milder weather. Yesterday DH and I had a chance to go out and fix it.
The cross connectors can’t stand up to that kind of pressure because they are made of rigid pvc, which may get brittle in the freezing temperatures. Not being able to bend, they just break. So we reinforced each connector with a metal rod. The pressure of the arch is now on the metal rod inside the joint and on the much more bendable pvc of the ribs where the rod’s endpoints press on them.
Hopefully this will do the trick, but to prevent the pressure from building in the first place, we are also creating a cross brace on the most vulnerable side of the hoop house. This will at least give us some extra time to clear away the snow. (More on this later.)
I peeked underneath the row covers and everything is doing well, though the Russian kale looked a bit peekish – next year I will be following the Matron of Husbandry’s tips on winter hardy veggies. I also had the chance to harvest some of our first winter harvest:
Swiss chard, harvested mid-December. So good!
A few weeks ago I used up all my compost. I had two full Earth Machines and one pile overflowing its chicken wire container. Not all of this compost was done yet, but after mixing it all up and adding straw, it was just the right mix of finished and unfinished for my purposes: mulching the unused beds for winter.
The Earth Machine closest to the kitchen door is the one that receives all our kitchen scraps. It was thus the one that held the most nutritionally balanced compost. This bin had been turned and fired up several times, so it was also the most done. Also qua composition it was the most varied:
75 degrees is the perfect temperature for vermiculture, and for sure, this top layer was riddled with thousands upon thousands of Red Wigglers (Eisenia fetida). These worms do not live in soil and many people have to buy them by the pound. I did not buy mine and I have no idea how they got to be there, but they are welcome.
This is what the bin looked like when I opened it (picture from Wikipedia – I forgot to take one of my own):
It’s only when you hold in your hand a squirming ball of hundreds of worms that you realize that soil doesn’t “break down,” but that it is broken down. The realization is not simply grammatical. In all layers of compost macro and micro-organisms are busy breaking down the organic material:
All these organisms break the pile down into carbon dioxide, water and humus by using the nitrogen (N, greens, protein) in it to consume the carbon (C, browns, carbohydrates). I always imagine this process as an angry mob of angry villagers setting fire to the wooden house. Only they set the fire inside their guts. A mouthful of carbon, a nibble of nitrogen (with an average C:N ratio of 30:1) and whoosh! The same happens when the larger organisms eat the smaller ones.
It is their body heat – the oxidation of the carbon – that the compost thermometer registers. The heat-lovers, burning the hottest and being the most numerous, consume the fastest. The Wigglers, who don’t like it above 80 F, take their time.
I was sad to have to break up this veritable worm bin. Some of them ended up in the beds and others I transferred to the new (uninsulated) bin, which will collect our kitchen scraps over the Winter and Spring. None of them will survive the cold temperatures, since unlike the earthworms they cannot migrate deep down into the ground when the surface starts freezing up. I hope they will as miraculously show up in my compost next year.
I’m reading Edible Forest Gardens (EFG) again, alongside Holmgrens’ Permaculture. I’m underlining and taking notes in the books and making summaries on a quadrille pad. I’m on volume 2 of EFG, which is the most practical volume of the two, and I foresee a lot of drawing up of plans as I come across passages that apply to my homestead. I’ll let you look in over my shoulder as I “make my mistakes on paper” (the best place to make them).
I’m also looking around for a Permaculture course, preferably online, or a local one spread out over nights and weekends, as I can’t afford, time and money-wise, the three-week intensive in Bolivia, or even in Cape Cod. I found an online course given by Dan and Cynthia Hemenway via Barking Frog Permaculture, which I could even monitor at minimal cost. But I missed the entry date. Next year maybe?
***
I’m excited but apprehensive at the same time. I hope my turning to permaculture again won’t turn me away from Transition. I know the latter came out of the former. Rob Hopkins, the “founder” of Transition, is a permaculture teacher. And he advises that at least one member of a Transition Initiative facilitating or initiator group take a permaculture course for a good reason: the principles of permaculture and Transition are the same, only their domains differ.
Edible forest gardening is one part of permaculture, which applies its basic principles to the agricultural domain, and which in turn then nestles inside the vast ambition of Transition. It is exactly for that reason that I fear I might lose track of Transition. Permaculture, especially when studied with such selfish motivations as my own (I want to make my homestead a permaculture site), could easily blind me to the larger challenge of Transition.
I feel I need to work on my own place – as a base, as a model – before or while I work on the place that surrounds me. And so my vision contracts and expands, expands and contracts. But when focusing on the ground right in front of my feet, I might lose track of the path. Then when I look up to find it again – or because it calls me – my suddenly telescoping vision might make me dizzy, overwhelmed, and I might turn away again.
I know myself. I am aware, and wary. This is one of the reasons why fellow initiators in my town would be so valuable: to keep me balanced!
