6′ Tall Weeds…

Funny thing happens when you build amazing soil, add a week or so of rain, and have taken a month off of farming. The good news is that I could readily see the reason why inter-row weeding with the wheel hoe is worth it at about 30 days from sowing the seed potatoes – the [...]

Journey’s

This weekend we traveled up to Minneapolis to visit friends and see Cirque du Soleil’s Kooza -which was amazing.  While there, we took an extra day to add in 3 more meals so we could sample more fine dining – it has been several years since I have eaten at Hell’s Kitchen and we also wanted to [...]

900,000 GW Hours

Editor’s note: This post is not an upbeat snippet about potatoes or optimistic take on community activism.  Rather, it about some of the numerical realities of Peak Oil… and its DARK.
There are lots of good reasons that I should not be reading The Oil Drum immediately before bed.  One of them happens to be that [...]

Potato Tower Month 3 + Straw Mulch Spuds

This summer has seen much of our backyard go to weed as first my overcommitment, and then my separated shoulder have reduced my time to the point where the Weeds are Winning.   I have chosen to see this as a further lens through which to view my gardening techniques.  If a garden bed or method fails [...]

Transitions Post Script

A few posts ago I wrote through an anecdote of my family and I picking our way through our raspberry patch.  It was a bucolic scene in the midst of the Suburban Desert and I thoroughly enjoyed it.  But there is a deeper story there too that I would like to draw out a bit [...]

Yuba Mundo Cargo Utility Bicycle HQ
I have my eye on a 5 acre parcel about 1 mile out of town. (In 2 years) Something like this would then become my “farm truck”. Other than the kayak sequence, my favorites are the “minivan” sequence at 1:08 and the “drift” [...]

Transitions: Small Scale Ag

Several items have dominated my thinking throughout the course of the past several months:

I am doing too much:  Real Job, small scale energy production, entrepreneurship, family, home-scale permaculture, community building, and farming… I get to pick 3.
The Next 20 years will be nothing like the Last 20.  Preparing for a successful ”transition” will take thought, planning, investment, and [...]

Energy Descent Musings

One of the results of my forced furlough from hands on participation in Saving the World is that for the first time in, (gulp!) 6 months I am reading non-fiction again.   At my normal state of non-winter activity I am asleep within 5 minutes of hitting bed, and I find it difficult to sit [...]

Cooperative Harvesting

So with the shoulder blown for a month or more and literally thousands of pounds of spuds in the soil I need to both rest my wound and harvest my potatoes.  Employees are not really an option as the paperwork headache of insurance, tax withholdings, etc is not worth it at this scale.  Perhaps I [...]