ONE TOWN SQUARE: at the intersection of peak oil, climate change, and land use

How did the solarium perform?

February 2nd, 2012 by Jim Just

The worst of the cold weather is probably behind us, as spring approaches. The sun is out, and thoughts once again turn to the garden. It’s timely to review: how did our solarium perform over the short days and freezing nights of winter?

Adding thermal mass proved not to be enough to protect tender plants if outside temperatures dropped below ~25°. For the coldest nights, we needed to come up with a supplementary heat source. We use brooder lamps for ducklings. Why wouldn’t the same concept work for plants?

Electricity was the primary problem: a source wasn’t readily available, and providing a permanent hookup didn’t seem worth the cost or effort since power was needed only a few nights out of the year. So I wired an outlet at the solarium ceiling for two heat lamps to hang above our most sensitive citrus, an Improved Meyer Lemon and an Owari Satsuma Mandarin from One Green World that we planted right in the ground.

Power is provided when needed by plugging as extension cord into a male receptacle in a weatherproof exterior “inlet”.

This system works so well that we’ve moved into the solarium all of the cold-sensitive plants that we previously overwintered in the greenhouse. Space is at a premium in this 7? x 7? structure, so we’ve had to be inventive. Around the Yuzu Ichandrin, we installed shelving for pots . . .

. . . and above, a piece of ¾” pipe serves to hang containers.

Staggering the height of the plants allows more to be squeezed in along the pipe.

In the ground within the solarium, we’ve been growing herbs all winter long, herbs that otherwise wouldn’t grow in winter: cilantro, parsley, and an herb form of celery.

Fresh “cutting” or “soup” celery is great to have in the garden as celery, along with carrots and onions, are the three essential aromatic vegetables used in making stocks and sauces. Buying a whole head of celery in the store is wasteful. Although a good market will let you buy one stalk at a time, we’re a long way from a market. So keeping fresh celery on hand would otherwise be a challenge. Now all we have to do when celery is called for is wander outside -  with the solarium, any time of the year – pluck a few stalks, and tie them together with other herbs in a bouquet garni. Nichols has the seeds: VCE185, Afina. Plant seeds once, and from then on the celery will self-seed prolifically.

An added benefit: as long as I was wiring the solarium, I installed an outlet in the adjacent greenhouse to provide power for a heat mat. A heat mat will enable us to begin sprouting seeds in early February, a month earlier than would otherwise be possible. So it’s now time to begin perusing the seed catalogs and planning for spring plantings. Nichols and Territorial, here we come!

This wilderness is paradise enow

January 29th, 2012 by Jim Just

Friday night. What could be better for a simple dinner on a frosty night, while sitting on the sofa watching a DVD, than Flammkuchen – German pizza?

Flammkuchen – literally, “flame cake” – is a dish from the Alsace-Lorraine region (much of which bounced back and forth between France and Germany over the last couple of centuries).

Flammkuchen is made like a thin-crust pizza, topped with crème fraîche, onions, and Speck - a salt-cured and lightly smoked ham. My first taste of Flammkuchen came about two decades ago while Irina and I were staying in Cousin Alexander’s Bauernhof, right in the heart of the small German village of Oberotterbach.

Elements of Cousin Alexander’s “farm” house – like the rear wall, which the house shares with the town Catholic church and cemetery – date from the 13th century. All the while we stayed there those church bells pealed every fifteen minutes, day and night, ringing out the quarter-hour and the hour. It’s enough to make one an atheist.

It really was (and is still) a farmhouse, dead square in the middle of town. Behind those big doors are a central courtyard; barns, stalls, and sheds; tractors and wagons; a well; a kitchen garden; and a wine and root cellar beneath the living quarters. Farmers live in the village, and sortie out to their fields each day.

Oberotterbach lies just across the border from the French town of Wissembourg, which marks the start of the Deutsche Weinstrasse. Here’s the Deutsches Weintor through which we drove back and forth between Germany and France in our ancient, borrowed Fiat Cinquecento.

The border control station was just on the other side of the “wine gate”. The border controls were a joke, as they were easily circumvented. Rather than staying on the main road, instead take one of the numerous back roads that crisscross the border through the vineyards. During our stay there, EU borders were opened and the inspection stations between Germany and France shuttered.

We often walked the ~4 km to Wissembourg from Oberotterbach through the vineyards and over a shoulder of the Sonnenberg, avoiding roads completely, ending up in a bar where the Gitanes and Gauloises smoke hung so thick and heavy you had to crawl on you hands and knees to see and to breath. But I digress.

The oldest building in Oberotterbach contains a Zehntkeller (literally, “10th cellar”), which was used for storing the local baron’s “10th” share of the harvest from the surrounding area. Kind of like a 13th century version of a local IRS. Centuries later, a cramped corner of that vaulted cellar housed a jazz club called the Musikantebuckl.

Along with the music they served local beer, local wine, and Flammkuchen baked in a wood-fired pizza oven. Love at first bite: I was closer to heaven than a kid from Sacramento could ever reasonably expect to find himself.

Though the Musikantebuckl is still jumping, getting there on a Friday night is now out of reach for us. But it’s easy to recreate a bit of that heaven right here. The biggest challenge is to find a substitute for Speck, which isn’t readily available here. Some recipes call for bacon, but we find bacon too fatty and too smoky. We’ve found that the uncured side of pork we get when we buy a half a hog (which would be bacon if it were smoked) works just fine once it’s trimmed of all fat.

Flammkuchen à La Ferme Noire

For two 12? Flammkuchen:

1 lb Irina’s bread dough
½ lb well-trimmed pork belly, cut into small cubes
1 medium red onion
6 oz crème fraîche (we use the delicious crema Mexicana that is available locally)
Sea salt
Crushed black pepper
A small piece of a whole nutmeg, crushed.

Place the dough on a well-floured surface. Divide into two pieces and roll into balls, coating liberally with flour. Flatten a bit with the palm of your hand, and roll out with a pizza roller, dusting with additional flour as necessary.

This dough is really wet, so it demands a bit of special care for the process to go smoothly. When you’ve finished rolling the skins out, make sure they are well dusted with flour. Fold into halves, then quarters; place on a board covered with wax paper (we use a couple of pieces of Masonite cut into 12″ x 12″ squares), unfold, and set aside to rise for an hour or so and to dry on top a bit.

While the dough is resting, rising, and drying, trim any fat off the pork and cut the meat into small cubes. Put the cubes of meat in a bowl, add salt, crushed pepper, and crushed nutmeg, and toss until the meat is evenly coated. Peel the onion and cut into thin strips, separating the layers.

About half an hour before cooking, put your pizza stone into the oven to pre-heat. You’ll want to use a very hot oven (like 500°). We most often cook pizza outdoors on a gas barbeque, especially in the summer when you don’t want to be heating up the kitchen.

While the oven and pizza stone are getting hot, prepare the Flammkuchen. The pizza skins must be transferred to a make-up board. We use larger and thicker pieces of Masonite for this purpose, 16? x 24? x ¼”; Masonite has a slick and slippery surface, and the ample size of the make-up board allows plenty of room to get the pizza sliding around freely before sliding it onto the hot pizza stone to bake. First sprinkle the make-up board liberally with corn meal (the corn meal acts like little ball bearings). Then flip the pizza skin on top of the corn meal so it’s waxed-paper side up, and peel off the wax paper.

Spread the crème fraîche over the pizza skins. Sprinkle evenly with the onions, then with the seasoned meat. Tap the side of the make-up board to make sure the pizza is sliding free, then slide the pizza off the make-up board and onto the hot pizza stone.

Close the cover (or the oven door) and bake until the crust is browned and crispy. As my dear departed father would say, video camera in hand, here we are.

We had planned to save one of the two Flammkuchen in the freezer for another day, but it tasted so darn irresistible we ate them both!

We have made vegetarian versions of Flammkuchen too, substituting local wild mushrooms (from The Mushroomery) for the pork. While not traditional, it’s really delicious, too.

Spy vs. sly (duck)

January 19th, 2012 by Jim Just

After a barren spell in November, our Muscovy ducks are laying again. Keeping a light on in the duck shed until 10:00 every night seems to have made a difference, as they began laying again shortly after we began that regimen.

Some of the ducks are content to lay in the duck shed. When we open the doors to let the ducks out in the morning (having been shut in over night to protect them from predators) there the eggs are, in the nests the ducks nestle into the straw in the corners of the shed. All we have to do is bend down and pick them up.

For other ducks, laying their eggs in the duck shed simply won’t do. So they seek out less convenient places. Some locations become semi-permanent, and they revisit them regularly: underneath the outdoor workbench behind the potting soil containers, behind the garbage and recycling cans, underneath the tarp covering the compost pile.

A few hens, however, are really secretive. They don’t want you to know where they are laying their eggs, and if you discover one location they tend to abandon it and find yet another. When the duck shed door is opened in the morning these secretive hens set off: alone, determined, and with a purpose. If you want to find their eggs, you have to follow them, and do so carefully and innocuously.  If they see they’re being followed, they will abort their clandestine mission. And if you divert your attention for just a moment they can vanish, disappearing into the brush.

Meet one of our surreptitious hens.

After watching this hen for several mornings I finally succeeded in tracing her to her nest right in the middle of a pile of brush and prunings waiting to be burned. And I do mean right in the middle. I had to carve my way in, using hand shears to tunnel a passageway through the bramble. Stretched out flat on my belly with only my ankles hanging out, I retrieved eight eggs.

Crawling on my belly like a reptile to find eggs simply wouldn’t do. I set a torch to that pile. She’ll never use that nest again.

The next day, that hen once more set out for her burn pile. What few coals remained of that pile were still smoldering. She circled it again and again, repeatedly coming back to and stopping at what had been her entrance. You could almost see her scratching her head: what the hell happened here?

Still, every morning she’s setting off towards where her burn pile used to be. There’s got to be a new nest. One morning I’m trying to follow two hens. Our burn pile hen disappears behind a copse of trees and brush. I rush to see where she’s gone. Damn, lost them both!

This morning, she’s off again. I’m keeping a loose tail. When I see her round that copse, I high-tail it over there. She sees me, pretends she’s just out on a stroll. But I’ve seen where she’s been looking, where she was headed.

That’s an abandoned wood rat mound, next to an old, rotting Douglas-fir stump. A little searching, and there it is, nestled under and inside the wood rat mound: her latest nest, containing a half a dozen eggs.

Another victory, albeit temporary. Tomorrow the game begins anew.

A perfect rack

January 19th, 2012 by Jim Just

When you buy a whole or a half lamb from a local farmer, it’s not like going to the supermarket where you can pick out the exact cut you want, whether it be shoulder chops, loin chops, or a leg. Around here, you’re lucky to find a store that carries any lamb at all. In the mid-valley, the nearest place to buy a choice cut like a leg or a rack is probably Corvallis, at an upscale market such as Market of Choice.

When you buy local locker lamb, (half or whole) you get everything – from the neck to the shanks. You have to know how to cook the various cuts, as they each demand to be treated differently. And when it comes to an valuable cut like a rack, you don’t want to ruin it. Unlike a rack you buy at a market that’s been trimmed by a butcher, you cannot simply throw it in the oven and roast it. The rack has to be prepped for cooking first. If your rack comes wrapped in white paper from your local slaughterhouse, you have to prep it yourself.

A rack of lamb comes with a thick layer of fat across the back.

You have to take that layer of fat off. Leave it on and the rack will be impossible to cook properly. What’s more, the result will be a rack that is difficult to cut and serve; and the meat will be drenched in excess, unpleasant-tasting fat.

Fortunately, removing the layer of fat is easy. Simply grab it by one corner and rip it off – it comes off in one piece.  Begin by separating the fat from the meat with a knife at a corner, then pull on the fat, continuing to cut between the fat and the meat with a knife as necessary as you pull the fat off.

Now doesn’t that look better?

There’s some meat embedded within that layer of fat that shouldn’t be wasted. Trim it out rather than throwing it away.

There’s more . . .

You’ll end up with a nicely trimmed rack, a little pile of lamb meat – enough for maybe a soup or a burrito or a stir fry – and a big chunk of fat to be thrown out.

If you want, you can cut out a little of the meat between the rib bones, leaving little bone handles to grab onto when eating. Add that meat to your pile of saved meat trimmings.

We’ve trained our butcher to cut off the chine bone, and he mostly gets it right. With the chine bone off, it’s a simple thing to cut between the ribs, carving off individual chops for serving when the rack is done. If the chine bone is left on the rack, this is impossible – so you have to make sure the chine bone is removed completely at this stage. If some of it is still there you’d best cut it off. A hacksaw works. The picture above shows the chine bone properly removed.

Now the rack is almost ready for roasting. Rub it with sea salt and freshly crushed pepper. Chop up a clove of garlic or two, and the leaves from a nice sprig of rosemary. Put in a bowl with a teaspoon of prepared stone-ground mustard and a splash of red wine.  Whisk in an ounce or so of olive oil. Coat the rack on all sides with the marinade and let sit at room temperature for a while, until you’re ready to pop it in the oven.

Roast the rack in a pre-heated 450° oven for 20 minutes or so, or until the internal temperature reaches 116° (check with an instant-reading thermometer).  Do not overcook! Rack of lamb should be served rare. Remove the rack to a serving dish and let it rest for a few minutes while you get the rest of the meal on the table and prepare the sauce. The sauce can be really simple -deglaze the roasting pan with a healthy splash of red wine, scraping up all the tasty brown bits.  Carve the rack, cutting between and separating the individual riblets. Pour the sauce around the rack and serve.

Bon Appétit!

Flank Steak! Moose!

January 9th, 2012 by Jim Just

Old friends from Seattle days, who now live near Hillsboro, were coming to visit this last weekend, along with their son home from college during break. As a special treat, we pulled a package of moose roast, labeled “strap steak”, from the freezer. Saturday morning, I unwrapped it to begin preparing it for cooking. Lo and behold, a flank steak! Of moose!

Flank steak holds special status in our home. The first meal I fixed for Irina back when we were courting was a beef flank steak, cooked over coals on little hibachi at my bachelor pad in Winslow, cooked rare and sliced thin, served with Brussels sprouts, steamed just crisp. Guys: quite the thing to impress the ladies. It worked!

Three exclamation points already, a bit much. But the sentences are true and righteous exclamations – and it gets better. We had already procured special mushrooms for the meal: white elm, and wild hedgehog and chanterelles from The Mushroomery. Grilled flank steak of moose, served with a rich mushroom sauce and mashed potatoes.

First, the sauce.

Wild Mushroom Sauce

4 T goose fat (or duck fat, or butter)
¾ lb. wild or good quality mushrooms, brushed and coarsely chopped
1 large shallot, finely chopped
1 clove garlic, peeled and finely chopped
2 T flour
1 C red wine
1 C beef stock
½ C tomato purée
bouquet garni (parsley, celery greens, thyme, bay leaf)
1 whole clove
2-3 carrots, whole
Salt & pepper to taste

Heat the fat in a saucepan over medium-high heat. Add shallot and sauté until softened and translucent. Add garlic, cook for a minute or two, then add mushrooms. Cook, stirring, for a few minutes, then add flour. Mix well and cook for a few minutes, scraping the bottom of the pan so the flour doesn’t scorch. Add wine a splash at a time, stirring to form a smooth, thick paste. Continue adding wine, stirring, then add the beef stock and tomato purée. Add bouquet garni, clove, and whole carrots. Bring to boil and simmer for 1 – 1½ hours until reduced to desired consistency. Remove and discard bouquet garni and carrots and season with salt and pepper to taste. May be done ahead of time and re-heated just before serving.

Fresh vegetables are scarce this time of year, but lightly cooked sauerkraut tastes crisp and fresh.

Light winter sauerkraut

1 lb sauerkraut, rinsed three times in fresh water to remove salt
1 small yellow onion, coarsely chopped
1 large apple, peeled, cored and cut into chunks
2 T butter
1 clove
1 small chunk of a nutmeg
6 juniper berries
1 bay leaf
½ C white wine (riesling or gewürztraminer are perfect)
Salt and white pepper to taste

In a saucepan, heat the butter and sauté the onion until softened and translucent. Add apple and cook a bit. Add the rinsed and drained sauerkraut and toss until well mixed and cooked a bit. Smash the clove, nutmeg, and juniper berries and add to sauerkraut along with bay leaf, salt, and crushed white peppercorns.  Add white wine and cook, covered, for ½hour. Remove bay leaf and serve.

The moose flank steak was simplicity itself: rub with a little sea salt and freshly cracked black pepper, and goose fat which we happened to have on hand; let sit out at room temperature for a couple of hours before cooking; and cook over a hot barbeque until just rare (116° internal temperature at thickest part). Slice thinly and serve.

We began with a little salad made with fresh lettuces from the garden, dressed with a choice of local olive oil or local hazelnut oil. Our guests brought a bottle of Cliff Creek Cellars 2005 Syrah, made from grapes from Sams Valley Vineyard in the Rogue Valley. The wine was big, robust and full-fruited, a perfect accompaniment to the rich and deeply flavored moose.

Next morning before our guests departed, we fixed a brunch of scrambled duck eggs, yellow potatoes fried in goose fat, and Irina’s bread toasted and served with raspberry/pinot noir jam. A dozen duck eggs, and duck eggs are big. 20- year-old young men eat a lot – no leftover moose from dinner for a lunch burrito.

Life is hard on the farm. I’m going to miss that goose fat when it’s gone.

Goat chops: a festive solstice dinner

December 22nd, 2011 by Jim Just

One advantage of having a great goat dairy in the neighborhood (Fraga Farm) is the ready availability of a by-product: young male goats. While you can’t get milk and make cheese without a doe, almost all bucklings are as redundant as American labor – but unlike unwanted workers, good at least for the table.

Goat cuts closely resemble lamb, only a little smaller. We’ve found that for cooking, you can treat goat just like lamb. And what better than goat loin chops for solstice dinner?

Grilled Goat Chops with Fresh Rosemary and Garlic

For two:

4 goat loin chops, preferably 1¼ – 1½ inches thick
1 clove garlic
1 sprig fresh rosemary
1 T olive oil
1 T tamari
Sea salt and freshly cracked pepper, to taste

Strip the leaves from the sprig of rosemary and chop. Peel and chop the garlic. Mix the rosemary, garlic, olive oil, and tamari in a flat-bottomed container large enough for the goat chops to lie flat. Coat the goat chops on all sides, and add salt and pepper to taste. Let rest at room temperature for an hour or so, or at least while the barbeque is getting hot. Cook until rare or medium rare, turning to get nice crossed grill marks on both sides.

We served the goat chops with small, whole grilled potatoes that we had first par-boiled, and with a salad made with fresh lettuces from the garden with dried tomato chips, toasted squash seeds, crushed hazelnuts, and a hazelnut oil dressing. Simple, local, and festive.

We used to trim the chops of fat before cooking so we won’t have to mess with it at the table. But now, we can’t leave Zooey out – she’s part of the party and deserves not to be ignored. She loves the fatty bits, and potatoes and vegetables too.

And even though the chops had were really small – not more than 4 oz each, with only a couple of ounces of meat – two were plenty for the three of us. We just don’t each much meat any more. So two chops were left over for burritos  the next day, for lunch. Carve off the meat, trim off any fat and gristle, and cut into small cubes; sauté in a bit of olive oil just until warm; and serve in a heated flour tortilla with beans, grated cheese. Yum!

Of wool, rovings and needle feltings

November 4th, 2010 by Jim Just

By Irina

Ever since we began keeping a small flock of sheep, mostly for meat and barter, we’ve been lamenting the fact there is no market for wool, gratis or otherwise. Our sheep get shorn once a year, and their wool always landed in the burn pile. A shame, and a waste.

At long last we have found a wonderful solution to this problem. The Creekside Fiber Mill recently opened in Lebanon, providing the much-needed service of accepting raw fiber (from sheep, llamas, alpacas and goats) from anywhere in the U.S. and processing it into yarn, batts, rovings, or needle-felted fiber products. Living nearby, we save shipping costs, which in the past have been substantial enough to make wool a losing proposition.

I took last year’s wool from four ewes in various non-white colors and had it processed into rovings for spinning.

After I saw the needle-felted blankets they produce at the mill, I gathered all my scraps, old pieces, odds and ends and had 2 blankets made. The results were so beautiful that a friend offered to buy both of them at first sight.

Needle felting is particularly appropriate for less than prime fiber or left over wool as any size pieces can be used to create these felted pieces. The sheets of felt can be used as is, or the felt can be cut to create garments, pillow covers, hats, purses – your imagination is the only limit.

Having a local fiber mill means I may be able to develop a great niche market for my wool. In 2011, we’ll have nine ewes to be shorn. I can hardly wait to create some interesting designs and projects.

Ducks!

September 16th, 2010 by Jim Just

At long last, our poultry project is beginning to yield results.

Facilities are through the shake-down period and running smoothly, and we’ve been collecting an increasing number of eggs over the last few weeks.

Muscovies are at the water trough (there are automatic waterers inside the shed).

The trough is big enough so that the ducks can get in and swim around a bit, which they seem to enjoy immensely. This trough used to be right on the other side of the fence, belonging to the sheep. But the ducks much preferred the large trough to their small tub, and were constantly going under, over, around and through the fence to get at the sheep’s water. So we gave up and switched. Note the “duck deck” under the trough. Turns out ducks love to eat mud. The trough quickly came to be perched on a mesa. Putting a 4? x 8? deck under the trough solved the problem.

Two Khaki Campbell drakes and Khaki Campbell and Rouen hens are at the outside feeder.

The ducks are finally getting old enough to begin laying eggs. And this week, off some went to the slaughterhouse – all seven Pekins, and all but one of the Rouen and Khaki Campbell drakes. Or at least that was the intent. One of the Khaki Campbell males slipped out the door while I was gathering them all up (I had neglected to install a latch that could be operated from the inside, an oversight that has since been corrected) and, in the dim light of pre-dawn, I inadvertently replaced it with an unlucky Rouen drake. Which is why you see two Khaki Cambell drakes and no Rouen drake in the photo.

fortunately for us Scio Poultry Processing is just up the road a piece. It’s a soon-to-be USDA-inspected facility owned and operated by our friends Joe and Karen Schueller at Rain Shadow El Rancho.

The ducks arrive in crates.

Go in the front door, and come out in cryovac packages.

That’s a dozen ducks, which should be plenty for holiday dinners and more.

We chose to raise ducks rather than chickens because free-range chickens are readily available and affordable, whereas ducks are a delicacy, a luxury item we couldn’t otherwise afford. Getting the infrastructure in place was neither quick or nor particularly cheap, but now we have in place durable, efficient, predator-proof facilities adaptable for a wide variety of poultry.

USDA promoting mobile slaughter units

July 21st, 2010 by Jim Just

The mobile slaughterhouse could play a critical role in the burgeoning local food movement. This photo of a “slaughtermobile” is from an article in the Washington Post. The article reports the USDA is paying more attention to small and mid-size farms, encouraging organic and sustainable agriculture, and investing in projects to bring locally grown meat and produce to consumers.

A mobile slaughterhouse, with a team composed of a butcher and a federal meat inspector, travels from farm to farm.

USDA’s efforts to help small farmers are focused within its “Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food” program, which seeks to help make the link between local production and local consumption.

USDA has published a Mobile Slaughter Unit Compliance Guide to help those who want to establish a mobile slaughter unit under Federal inspection and operate in accordance with Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) regulations.

February – springtime in the greenhouse

February 22nd, 2010 by Jim Just

A few days of blue skies and warm sunshine is all it takes to turn one’s thoughts to spring.

Over the last week of clear weather, temperatures have been cool at night – like in the low twenties – but have been getting up to the low or even mid-sixties during the day. In the greenhouse, minimums are in the low forties, with maximums reaching the low seventies. Time to plant seeds!

Two weeks ago I planted seeds left over from last year: the first batch of lettuces, and herbs – parsley, chervil, cilantro. Those seeds have already sprouted. As soon as the plants are big enough, they’ll be set out in cold frames, where we’re still harvesting lettuces planted last fall.

This weekend, after a seed-buying expedition to Nichols in Albany, it was an orgy of planting. Six types of lettuces: Australian Yellow, Black-Seeded Simpson, Flashy Butter Oak, New Red Fire, Red Velvet, and our old favorite Merlot. Artichokes, to replace any that may not have survived the brutal cold of early December (at least some old plants show signs of new growth, too soon to know how many). Two new varieties of cabbages – Megaton and Stonehead – to expand on last year’s very successful experiment with sauerkraut. Cauliflower: Snow Crown and Cheddar. Lemon cucumbers. Tomatoes: Oregon Spring, Siletz (would have planted Legend, but I proved to have saved an empty seed packet). Peas, snap and sugar pod. Winter squash – Cornell’s Bush Delicata, our favorite (I know, it seems awfully early, but you catch the planting bug . . . ). And flowers! Sunflowers, pansies, violas, nasturtiums, all in several varieties and mixes. All to be set out at the appropriate time.

Even with all this planting, the greenhouse isn’t even near full. No more seed trays in the windowsills in the house!

Seedling trays

We got a whole selection of commercial-grade seed trays in various plug sizes from Yarnell’s Red Barn nursery in Stayton – for a mere dollar each. The planting mix we made ourselves, from compost run through our Steinmax chipper-shredder.

Garlic, onions, and shallots have been in the ground since last fall. Oops, forgot the leeks! Put that on the list for the next visit to Nichols, along with Legend tomato seeds and doubtless a few others we’ve overlooked.

Over the weekend we raised the borders of the herb garden and added several inches of compost. Got the raspberries pruned, and dug up a couple of dozen plants to give away to friends.

Now comes the true test of the greenhouse, to see if we can sprout all these seeds with no heat other than from passive solar gain, and no protection from cold other than thermal mass and insulation.

Healthy rural economies are resilient rural economies

January 27th, 2010 by Jim Just

We are in the midst of a time of great uncertainty about the future. Peak oil threatens to disrupt not only global financial systems, but also “the economy” as we have come to think of it as an engine of inevitable growth. Even more serious but perhaps longer term, global warming and climate change threaten to disrupt the 10,000 year period of climate stability that allowed human civilization to emerge and the ecosystems within which all species on Earth – including humans – are enmeshed.

For all species, including humans, nothing is more critical than food. Jason Bradford in a post at The Oil Drum argues that reliability of food production in the face of change requires resilience rather than efficiency. A food production system capable of surviving disruptions and failures and of responding quickly to changing circumstances is essential.

Our existing food system is not resilient. As a result of government policies, financial pressures, cheap fossil fuels, and market trends over the past several decades, our food system has become dominated by a relatively few large players. As a result, our food system has become rigid and brittle.

The key to resilience in social-ecological systems is diversity. Biodiversity plays a crucial role by providing functional redundancy. Social and economic systems are no different.

Bradford sketches out what a resilient farm might look like:

A resilient farm has diversified operations to buffer against volatility. The benefits of diversity accrue in many ways.

Organic and especially agroecological farms are less dependent upon outside inputs that can change in price rapidly and unpredictably. Crop rotation plans include many species of plants and animals that are complementary in functions, such as legumes fixing nitrogen, grasses building soil carbon, and animal manures making nutrients more readily available to plants. Instead of buying mechanized services or fertility inputs, the farm integrates the functional diversity of life to create synergies.

Inherent diversity means no single crop failure will ruin the farm, and soil imbalances are prevented. The focus is on soil health, with all fields going through periods of planting in perennial and deeply rooted species to build soil organic matter and mobilize minerals such as phosphorus from deep layers. Fungi associating with roots locate source rock and solubilize minerals that are trans-located to leaves. Topsoil fertility is therefore built from below.

Landscape structure is created to provide habitat for native and naturalized species that participate positively in the farm food web, such as pollinators and predators. No need to buy pesticides when raptors have homes in the trees, predatory wasps have nectar sources, frogs can breed in clean water, and ground beetles have zones of refuge from tillage, for example.

While the emphasis is on letting the biology do the work, renewable energy infrastructure also creates resilience. Farms are often ideal places for wind and solar technologies, and on-farm biofuels are likely to have positive energy returns.

A resilient food system requires in the farm economy as well. Creating healthy and resilient rural economies requires transforming the entirety of our food system.

What might healthy and resilient rural economies look like? Again, Bradford sketches an outline:

It will be organized akin to an ecosystem, or food web. Farms and renewable energy infrastructure occupy the level of primary producers, with businesses acting as conduits for feeding omnivorous humans. In contrast to our current food system, which is linear in structure, the future food system will cycle nutrients back to the farm. This structural constraint will mean that much more food is grown for local populations.

Farms might be more self-sufficient, producing a wide variety of products, for trade, barter, and gifting as well as cash sales. This is a strategy many of our friends are already pursuing, seeking to diversify their income sources and means of support as a way to increase their personal financial resilience.

There structure impediments to our markets which inhibit building resilience. For example, the best and often the only use for much of Oregon’s farm land – even in the Willamette Valley, especially where irrigation is not available – is  as pasture. Grass-fed livestock avoids the health and environmental problems associated with grain-fed livestock and feedlots, while recycling nutrients back into the soil. But the lack of inspected slaughterhouses and butchering facilities means that marketing is a challenge, especially for small-scale producers, as access to retail customers is restricted to the big players.

Similarly, the dominance of giant chain supermarkets makes it difficult for local producers to find outlets for their goods. Buyers for the chains can’t be bothered with small producers. You have to go to independent locally-owned markets like the First Alternative Co-op in Corvallis or to an online marketplace like Eugene Local Foods to find locally grown produce, local cheeses, or locally raised meats and poultry.

Developers push “destination resorts” as a boost to rural economies. But destination resorts don’t do anything for the people already living there – rather, they are pretty much self-contained units, alien invaders that remain distinct and disconnected from the local rural economy. For an idea of a model of tourism that is immersed in the local rural economy looks like, look to France and gîtes ruraux – accommodations at a private farm that can be rented for a week, a weekend, or a short stay.  Gîtes foster a real relationship between the owner of the property, the visitor, and the surrounding countryside. The additional income goes straight to farmers and other residents of the rural area, adding resilience to the local rural economy. In France, gîtes are vigoroulsy promoted by the government.

So here’s an impromptu agenda for beginning to build healthy and resilient rural economies: allow and encourage local processing of poultry and livestock; encourage independent, local markets; and authorize and promote direct rural tourism.

More ideas, anyone?

Indiana city’s vision for a post-peak world

January 14th, 2010 by Jim Just

In overwhelmingly approving the report of its Peak Oil Task Force, the Bloomington (Indiana) City Council,  has endorsed a truly revolutionary idea:

Recognize the need for, and the inevitability of, a steady state economy – one that is not predicated on ever-greater amounts of energy and materials throughput, but recognizes the limits of the biosphere.

The Task Force report – Redefining Prosperity: Energy Descent and Community Resilience - calls for a reduction in community oil consumption by 5% per year in an effort to realize a 50 percent decrease in consumption in just 14 years. The targeted rate of decrease in oil consumption is along the lines laid out by the oil depletion protocol.

Suggested strategies for achieving the reduced fuel consumption goals include:

  • Explore new energy sources, greater efficiencies and conservation opportunities for the following energy-intensive municipal services: water and wastewater treatment; law enforcement and fire protection; heating and cooling municipal buildings; and trash removal and recycling. Immediate attention should be given to off-grid water production to meet minimum community needs.
  • Promote economic relocalization. Our community’s reliance on a steady supply of inexpensive goods from as far as halfway around the world makes us vulnerable to a decline in inexpensive oil and/or shortages. Producing and processing more goods within the community fosters greater security in a post-peak world while strengthening the local economy.
  • Intensify the City’s emerging focus on form-based development, so that residents can easily live within walking distance of daily needs, such as grocery stores, schools and pharmacies.
  • Increase home energy conservation and aim to retrofit 5 percent of housing per year.
  • Establish community cooperative rideshare programs.
  • Advocate for greater local, state and federal funding for public transit.
  • Accelerate local food production by training more urban farmers and removing legal, institutional and cultural barriers to farming within the city.
  • Plant edible landscapes throughout the city.

The Task Force’s vision is for a city where “most residents live within walking distance of daily needs; most of the food required to feed residents is grown within Monroe County; residents can easily and conveniently get where they need to go on bike, foot or public transit; most of the community’s housing stock is retrofit for energy efficiency; and local government provides high-quality services to its residents while using less fossil fuel energy.”

That actually sounds pretty good, doesn’t it? A post-peak world need not be dismal.

Cabbage never tasted so good

October 8th, 2009 by Jim Just

We experimented with Brassica for the first time in our garden this year – cauliflower, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cabbages – with mixed success.

The cauliflower – yellow, purple, and white – ripened first, and all at once. What do you do with all that cauliflower?  But the orange-yellow and beta carotene rich  Cheddar was particularly flavorful and delicious.

We discovered deer love broccoli and brussels sprouts. We were lucky to eke out enough for a couple of meals. For next year, we have an idea for a portable deer fence, made with steel T-posts and 6? welded wire mesh (normally used to reinforce concrete). The fence would be cheap, light, and easy to move around as needed and to get out of the way when not needed. Portable fencing could keep the deer away from the peas and beans, as well.

The cabbage was a total triumph, yielding a dozen or so huge heads. We made a little slaw. But I’m not crazy about coleslaw, and how much can you eat anyway while the cabbage is still fresh? So with the last half dozen heads, we determined to try preserving the cabbage as sauerkraut.

Sauerkraut is finely shredded cabbage that has been fermented by various lactic acid bacteria, including Leuconostoc, Lactobacillus, and Pediococcus. No special culture of lactic acid bacteria is needed because these bacteria already are present on raw cabbage.  Traditionally fermented sauerkraut has lots nutritional value, as it contains beneficial digestive enzymes and lactic acid bacteria and is high in vitamin C. (There may be an added bonus, as well. A study by nutritionist Lejla Kazinic Kreho at King’s College found that sauerkraut is as effective as Viagra at increasing sexual function.)

Sauerkraut has a long shelf life and a distinctive sour flavor, both of which result from the lactic acid that forms when the bacteria ferment the sugars in the cabbage. The name comes directly from the German, which literally translates to sour cabbage. Sauerkraut is traditional throughout northern and central Europe, where it provided a vital source of important nutrients during the winter before the days of refrigeration and global food transport.

We borrowed an 8-gallon ceramic crock from friends Jan and Pete, scanned the net for a look at kraut recipes (like here, here, and here), and got to work. Sterilize the crock. Shred the cabbage. Toss with kosher salt. Throw the shredded cabbage in the crock. Tamp firmly – the punch down we use for wine worked perfectly – and as the cabbage was really fresh out of the garden, it was almost instantly submerged in its own juices, safe from oxygen. Cover with a food-grade plastic lid that luckily fit snugly in the crock. Weigh down with a plastic bag filled with water that also served to seal out air. And put in the root cellar, to wait for six weeks or so.

Six weeks later it’s October, and the kraut should be about ready. Serendipitously, Irina’s cousin Doris and her Mann Bernd arrived from Germany. Who better to consult about actually cooking the stuff?

Berndt said his favorite recipe was with Polish sausage. Slice and brown the sausages. Add julienned onions. Cook with the kraut for about a half hour.

Doris told a story of Irina’s mother’s favorite, a dish that Doris would often cook for her when visiting her in Darmstadt. Cut some big – like 2? – cubes of nice fatty speck (bacon that’s cured but not smoked). Brown a bit, then add onions and cook until soft. Add the kraut, then simmer gently for a couple of hours. Mother was in heaven.

So we tried a fusion – sauerkraut with sausages and speck. We had some speck from Michael at the Pepper Tree Sausage House, and we used his bratwurst, as we didn’t have any of his Polish sausages lying around. Bernd first did the pork belly bit, then add the browned sausages for the last half hour of simmering.

The result was a revelation. The sauerkraut was tangy, tasty, and crisp, and the meats were tender and rich. Accompanying the main dish were mashed Yukon Gold potatoes with sweet butter from the Noris dairy in Crabtree and a fresh green salad from our garden with fresh herb dressing. The potatoes, lettuces and herbs were all from our garden.  A bottle of own Pinot Noir, of course, from the fresh and fruity 2008 vintage. A simple meal with delicious, nutritious food and good friends – life doesn’t get any better than this.

Voilà – a smashingly successful demonstration. Winter doesn’t have to mean deprivation, even in the absence of refrigeration.

Time out for farm work: a passive solar greenhouse

September 2nd, 2009 by Jim Just

It’s been an unusually long time since my last post. But I’ve been busy at work on a passive solar greenhouse. The basic structure is now up.

That’s double-pane glass on the south side (and one panel on the west), gleaned from the Lebanon Re-Store run by Habitat for Humanity. Total price for four 4 x 5 double-glazed windows and a 36? glass door: $175.

Roof and walls will be well insulated (roof R-29, walls R-19). Building materials – lumber and metal roofing – are recycled, saved from earlier remodeling projects around the house. Except for the purchased pressure-treated, the lumber is full-dimension Douglas fir harvested from the property and milled at the old Gaines Mill on Fish Hatchery Road, just a few miles away. Water-filled barrels will provide thermal mass. The biggest expenses were for insulation, a few pieces of metal trim for the roof, and screws and nails, which came to a bit over $300. The gravel for the pad was extra from the road-building project (to the left in the photo, going out to the barn).

We intend to use the greenhouse beginning in late winter as a place to start seeds and grow seedlings for transplanting into the garden, and then throughout the growing season for starting crops such as lettuces which need to be constantly replanted to maintain production. We’ve found that lettuces do great even in the midsummer heat, if they’re grown under a shade cloth.

That’s our apple orchard and sheep barn in the background.

The greenhouse is another piece of our personal program to become less reliant on an increasingly unstable economic system. I’ve been thinking about how to do it for years. Solving the thermal mass problem was the key to actually getting started. We’ve got four plastic barrels used to transport apple cider concentrate from South America that we got for free from Oregon Freeze Dry years ago, just sitting in the barn (they served as emergency fermentation tanks last year when we had a bumper grape crop). Why did it take so long to see the obvious?

SF Peak Oil Task Force releases report

March 17th, 2009 by Jim Just

In October 2008 San Francisco formed a Peak Oil Preparedness Task Force charged with assessing the impact of declining supplies and rising prices of fossil fuels and coming up with a plan to mitigate the ill effects. Now the Task Force has posted a working draft of its final report.

To avoid what the Task Force sees as “a much darker future,” the report makes more than 70 recommendations, including:

  • Energy: conduct waste audit, develop diverse renewable wind, solar, & tidal energy plan, build smart grid, consider feed-in tariffs.
  • Economy: source locally; revise tax policies (”progressive” business taxes, carbon tax, demand-sensitive parking fees, city vehicle tax, gasoline tax based on price floor), invest in infrastructure based on future viability (no “orphan” projects, invest in short-haul water freight, rail).
  • Food security: buy local, create city Board of Agriculture, provide incentives to use vacant land available for food production, make city parks and golf courses available for garden plots, tax fast food to fund local food production, plant fruit & nut trees along streets, tear up concrete & plant street-side gardens, allow small-scale animal husbandry, create neighborhood compost centers.
  • Transportation: impose congestion & parking charges; make intercity & regional public transit cheap, convenient, direct, reliable; build mixed-use neighborhoods, encourage telecommuting, make biking safe & convenient and establish bike-share program, promote car-free lifestyle & make it possible, switch freight from trucks to rail & water.
  • Built environment: require all new buildings to be zero energy, retrofit existing buildings, include blower test in building inspections, require energy audit on sale or remodel, use solar assessment district to finance solar installations.
  • Protecting vulnerable populations: Implement grow-your-own food program for low income families, eliminate all parking requirements for new residential construction & convert garage space to living space, provide discounted passes for public transit, implement bicycle & neighborhood electric vehicle plan, provide programs to reduce energy use for low-income families esp. renters, prepare rationing plan to allocate resources during shortages on per capita basis.

The task force is expected to finalize the report by today (Tuesday March 17) and then submit it to the Board of Supervisors.

A three-fer: eliminate hunger, improve health, support local farmers

March 16th, 2009 by Jim Just

The city of Belo, Brazil eliminated hunger while at the same time reinvigorating the local farm economy.

Frances Moore Lappé, author of Diet for a Small Planet, writes at Yes! Magazine that Belo, a city of 2.5 million people, once had 11% of its population living in absolute poverty, and almost 20% of its children going hungry. Then in 1993, a newly elected administration declared food a right of citizenship and created a city agency, which included assembling a 20-member council of citizen, labor, business, and church representatives, to advise in the design and implementation of a new food system.

The city offered local family farmers dozens of choice spots of public space on which to sell their produce. Local farmers’ profits grew, while at the same time farm income in the country as a whole was dropping by almost half – and poor people got access to fresh, healthy food.

In addition to the farmer-run stands, the city offers people the opportunity to bid on the right to use well-trafficked plots of city land for “ABC” markets (from the Portuguese acronym for “food at low prices”). 34 ABC markets now offer customers the opportunity to buy about twenty core, healthy items at a price set by the city, about two-thirds of the market price. Everything else the market owners can sell at the market price.

Another innovation involves three large, airy “People’s Restaurants” (Restaurante Popular), plus a few smaller venues, that daily serve 12,000 or more people using mostly locally grown food for the equivalent of less than 50 cents a meal.

Belo’s food security initiatives also include extensive community and school gardens as well as nutrition classes. Plus, money the federal government contributes toward school lunches, once spent on processed, corporate food, now buys whole food mostly from local growers.

Hello, local progressive city mayors and city council people? How about something similar here?

Relocalizing Willamette Valley agriculture

July 1st, 2008 by Jim Just

A recent post talked about how high gas prices could lead to the draining of population from small towns in rural areas as people moved closer to jobs and amenities in urban areas. But there is another possibility: the rebuilding of local, rural, agriculture-based economies that rely on human labor rather than fossil fuels.

That’s the objective of the Southern Willamette Valley Bean and Grain Project, which aims at the transformation of agriculture in Lane, Linn, Benton, and Lincoln counties at the south end of Oregon’s Willamette Valley.

This bioregion contains roughly 700,000 acres of farmland, approximately 400,000 acres of which is used for cropland. It once produced a wide array of grains, fruits, and vegetables. At times wheat represented almost a third of what was harvested. The region had the agricultural capacity and food system infrastructure to feed itself.

Now, the region is dominated by farms growing fescue and rye grass for the global grass seed market. Less than 20% of its cropland acreage is utilized for food.

The Bean and Grain Project seeks to convert grass seed acreage into plots for organic beans, grains, and edible seeds as a critical first step to reinvigorating the regional food system. Harry MacCormack, co-founder of Oregon Tilth and owner of Sunbow Farm in Corvallis, Oregon, provides the vision and inspiration.

The project aims to rebuild a complete regional food system, growing food first for local markets and then for global markets only if surpluses are available.

The project sees peak oil as a force driving the relocalization of agriculture:

“It is often overlooked, but nearly every aspect of our current food system is based on petroleum and other carbon-based inputs. Soil nitrogen levels are maintained by fertilizers made from hydrocarbon gases. Pests are fought with petroleum-based pesticides. Weeds are eliminated by petroleum-based herbicides. Fields are cultivated and harvested by machinery powered by petroleum-based fuels. Food products are transported by trucks or trains or airplanes powered by petroleum-based fuels. Foods are processed with machines run by electricity generated by fossil fuels. Foods are packages in plastics made from petrochemical products. We cook with fossil fuel derivatives. From field to distributor to store to kitchen cabinet to stove, our entire food system flows upon a stream of petroleum. This system has evolved and grown through a period when petroleum and natural gas were irrationally cheap. That era appears to be over. The cost of a barrel of petroleum has increased ten fold in the last ten years. Oil production has or will soon peak. Hydrocarbon-based agriculture and its global food system is a literal and figurative dinosaur. Freight costs alone ensure that our food systems must change.

“Add the detrimental environmental impacts of industrial farming techniques–aquifer depletion, topsoil loss, petrochemical contamination of the watershed and other biota, toxic residues on or in crops themselves, and it is becoming increasingly clear that changing the way we farm is both sensible and necessary. Creating sustainable regional food systems based as much as possible on organic inputs and as independent as possible of petroleum fuels, should be one of humanity’s highest priorities. That is the exact purpose of the Southern Willamette Valley Bean and Grain Project, rebuilding a regional food system in the Willamette Valley.

The root of the problem of growth

March 22nd, 2008 by Jim Just

Jeffvail at The Oil Drum attacks our enshrinement of “growth” from a novel direction.

“My approach to the problem of growth is to stop trying to address its symptoms—overpopulation, pollution, global warming, peak oil—and attempt instead to identify and address the underlying source of the problem.”

And what is that “underlying source”?

“[T]he hierarchal structure of human civilization. Hierarchy demands growth. Growth is a result of dependency. The solution to the problem of growth, then, is the elimination of dependency.”

He points out that the notion of perpetual growth is predicated on perpetual increase in resource consumption. This growth in resource consumption causes problems: it brings civilization into direct conflict with our environmental support system. Growth isn’t a problem that can be solved through a new technology – all that does is postpone the inevitable reckoning with the limits of a finite world.

The fact that surplus production equates to power, across all scales, is the single greatest driver of growth in hierarchy. And the structure of human society selects for growth – any group that did not create surplus – and therefore grow – would be out-competed by groups that did. As political entities became more sophisticated, they began to consciously build institutions to enhance their ability to grow. Hierarchies must grow, and human dependency is what sustains these hierarchies. Dependency, then, is the root cause of the problem of growth.

His solution? The “rhizome”: Read the rest of this entry »

Our ecological footprint and agriculture

March 14th, 2008 by Jim Just

There’s a post by Jason Bradford at The Oil Drum that provides a pretty good introduction to ecological economics.

This chart shows the basic concept: that our economy is a subset of the Earth system, and is dependent on that ecosystem for sources and sinks. There are feedback loops between the economy and the Earth ecosystem, and scale becomes increasingly important as limits to source and sink capacity are approached.

click to enlarge

One measure of whether the human economy is too large is the ecological footprint, which relates the consumption of resources and the build-up of wastes relative to resource regeneration rates and the waste-absorbing capacity of the environment. The human economy (population plus consumption and waste generation) is currently in a state of overshoot, meaning it is too large relative to the long-term capacity of the planet to cope.

A significant portion of our overdraft is the result of fossil fuel consumption and the resulting greenhouse gas wastes.

Fossil fuel extraction is reaching limits (peak oil) sooner than expected. Similarly, we’re seeing climate change (think “sinks”) arrive much more quickly than anticipated.

Bradford then looks at agricultural practices, and reports that the greatest energy savings could be achieved by:

  • reduced use of petroleum-based fertilizers and fuel on farms,
  • a decline in the consumption of highly processed foods, meat, and sugar,
  • a reduction in excessive and energy intensive packaging,
  • more efficient practices by consumers in shopping and cooking at home,
  • and a shift toward the production of some foods (such as fruits and vegetables) closer to their point of consumption.

He looks at Brookside Farm, a 1-acre minifarm in Willets on what used to be school lawn, as an example of how small-scale, local farms could work to reduce our ecological footprint.

I posted a piece the other day about how grass seed production in the Willamette Valley has largely displaced food production. Bradford reports some fascinating data about grass:

There are three times more acres of lawns in the U.S. than irrigated corn. This means lawns – including residential and commercial lawns, golf courses, etc – could be considered the single largest irrigated crop in America in terms of surface area, covering about 128,000 square kilometers in all.

That means about 200 gallons of fresh, usually drinking-quality water per person per day would be required to keep up our nation’s lawn surface area. [Not to mention fertilizers and pesticides - ed.]

The 128,000 square kilometers of lawns is the same as 32 million acres. A generous portion of fruits and vegetables for a person per year is 700 lbs, or about half the total weight of food consumed in a year. Modest yields in small farms and gardens would be in the range of about 20,000 lbs per acre. Even with half the area set aside to grow compost crops each year, simple math reveals that the entire U.S. population could be fed plenty of vegetables and fruits using two thirds of the area currently in lawns.

You think we could find better things to do with Willamette Valley farm land?

Relocalization in Eugene

February 22nd, 2008 by Jim Just

There’s a great interview with Dan Armstrong, writer, activist, and owner of Mud City Press, at Carolyn Baker’s website Speaking Truth to Power.

Looking for a way to effectively come to grips with the realities of peak oil, climate change, environmental degradation – and with the loss of faith in the ability or will of a corrupt national government to address these realities – Armstrong turned to the relocalization movement.

“If you apply energy to local politics, whether in the city council or at neighborhood meetings, you have some modest chance of effecting change. Add that Peak Oil is a market issue and is changing the economic gradient of everything in the direction of relocalization.”

Relocalization may not bring salvation or change the world overnight, but it’s a place to begin.

“Nowhere else in all my involvement have I felt or seen the kind of community building that I’ve seen in the food relocalization movement. While emotional Peak Oil or climate change presentations, sadly, have done little to change business as usual, food discussions do. If you want to get involved, I suggest food security as a good place to start, not because it will change the world today, not because it will bring salvation, but because you can see incremental positive response. And if you’re fighting your state of mind, this helps.”