Another Chicken Fatality

We lost another chicken last night meaning that we've got something infectious. I didn't have the stomach to do a post-mortem exam, nor would I know what to look for anyways (chicken CSI would make a nice class if only there were someone to teach it). I thumbed through Gail Damerow's Chicken Health Handbook, but I don't have much evidence to go on.

I didn't see any obvious symptoms other than a very small amount of listlessness just before both chickens died and a bit of what might be bloody diarrhea on the roost. Mrs. Homegrown disinfected the coop as best she could and I swept out the bedding. A heat wave last week may have weakened the flock and helped bring this on.

We are now down to two chickens, one of whom does not lay any eggs. Looks like we'll be either not be eating eggs or we'll have to buy them at the farmers market for the next few months.

Mrs. Homegrown here: 

I wanted to add that the remaining hens seem perfectly healthy.  If they drop over dead tomorrow, it's going to be quite a headscratcher. They're out happily roaming in our yard right now, all bright-eyed and perky. I've eyeballed them for signs of respiratory infection or diarrhea, and see nothing. All the poop under their roost looked fine.  It's a mild day, as was yesterday--so I don't know if heat was the culprit in either death. The possible bloody diarrhea that Erik mentions above consisted of a couple of  small dark stains on the roost. Hard to say what that was--if it was anything. All in all it's quite a mystery.

It could be coincidence. Both of the deceased hens are of the same breed, from the same hatching, same store--maybe they were even sisters. They were very close. Maybe when one went the other followed, like devoted old couples sometimes do.

I say this just to keep hope that this isn't some bacterial thing. It's impossible to truly disinfect a wooden coop with a dirt floor. We'll do our best, open it up to light and give it a good airing and hope for the best.

It looks like we might get a chance to start our flock fresh, and this time we're going to do things differently. It looks like there are two paths we could follow--those paths, and the choice we make, will have to follow in the next post.

Noodler's Ink Reusable Fountain Pen

Julia just wrote a post on Ramshackle Solid about our newest solution to the frustration of disposable pens: Noodler's Ink and fountain pens.

From the Noodler's website:

Why Noodler’s?

“Noodler’s Ink” has the lowest cost per volume in stores that carry it and it’s 100% made in the USA from cap to glass to ink. The ink with the catfish on the label symbolizes a southern sport that attempts to equalize the struggle between man and animal in the quest for a sense of fair play — and thus a fair price.

Besides being made in the USA "from cap to glass to ink" Noodler's appears to be especially focused on delivering value (all ink bottles are filled right to the brim) and something I had never previously thought about: ink security.

EVERY bottle has slightly different ink component proportions. This is done by hand (one of the major reasons for Noodler’s constantly being in short supply). This production method security feature enables most of our inks to be unique in a forensics lab on a per bottle basis.

Our experience is that the roller ball pen performs as well as much more expensive fountain pens, holds a lot of ink and doesn't leak (at least ours haven't even over multiple flights on our recent vacation). Best of all they aren't disposable.

If you need more convincing, Lyanda Haupt has a nice post about fountain pens and Noodler's on her blog "The Tangled Nest": Fountain Pens for Everyday

How Long Do Chickens Live?

This morning we found one of our hens dead in the coop. She'd died near the feed bin, which shows she was a true chicken right to the end. This is our first chicken death. I've been gone most of the weekend, but Erik says she didn't seem ill, though in retrospect he thinks maybe she was little slower than usual for the past few days. The other hens seem healthy enough. There was no sign of predation or injury.

I suppose we'll find out soon if there is some kind of infection that will take the remaining three. But for now we're chalking it up to age and general frailty. This hen, Jane, was always the smallest and the weakest of the four, and lived a hard life at the  bottom of the pecking order. Poor Jane. She's the hen I'm holding in that picture of Erik and I over at the right hand bar. None of our ladies like to be held, but Jane was always the most patient with photographers.

Our neighbor, Sue, has twenty years experience with backyard hens, and once she told us that she figured their average lifespan ended up being about 5 years. I've read that chickens have a theoretical lifespan of 13 years, but of course, so many die young of mishap or disease. Sue's estimate always sounded sensible to me. Jane died at 4 years and a few months old.

How long have you had your chickens? Do you cull them when they slow down their laying, or do you have some Methuselian hens pecking around your yard? What's the oldest hen you've even had? What do you think the average lifespan of a backyard hens is?

Of course, this leads to lots of interesting questions about backyard flocks, how and when to rotate in new stock, to cull or not to cull, the danger of naming, etc. I think all that will have to wait for another post, because it's a big subject and needs its own space. Maybe we'll do that tomorrow. Right now, let's hear about lifespans.

Free Preparedness E-Books

Camp loom, for making mats and mattresses from the 1911 edition of the Boy Scout Handbook

Through a circuitous bit of aimless interweb searching I came across a huge list of downloadable urban homesteading/gardening/survivalist manuals on a site called hardcorepreppers.com. Unfortunately, this site is so popular that it seems to be down every time I've checked. But thanks to Google's caching feature I was able to access a list of those documents. Here's a curated set of just a few of those links (through the letter "f") that I found interesting. I can't vouch for the reliability of any of this information but at least it's entertaining. And if you have any other favorite free e-book sources please leave a link in the comments. At some point I'll direct the Root Simple staff to add these and more to our resource page.

Food and Gardening
Bulk Sprouter
Bread Without an Oven
Building Soils for Better Crops
Colorado State University--Drying Vegetables
Collecting, Cutting and Handling Potato Seed
Everything Under The Sun: Food Storage for the Solar Oven

Medicine
Making Chinese Herbal Formulas Into Alcohol Extracts 
The Ayurveda Encyclopedia Natural Secrets to Healing Prevention and Longevity
How to Make Cannabis Foods and Medicines
The Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees

Energy
Biogas
Biomass Stoves
Build your own Rocket Stove
Camp Stoves and Fireplaces

Transportation
Bicycle Know How

Zombie Apocalypse Skills (or "ZAS" since everything associated with the zombie apocalypse needs an acronym)
50 Emergency Uses for Your Camera Phone
Map Reading and Land Navigation
Boy Scouts Handbook 1911 Edition
Bug out Bag
5 Ways to Win a Fight 
Guerilla Warfare by Che Guevara 
Cold Weather Survival
Field Expedient Direction Finding

Summer Urban Homestead Failures: Exploding Beer Bottles

Somehow in last week's roundup of the summer's failures I blocked out of my memory the most exasperating: exploding beer bottles.

I think I may have had a contaminated siphon hose which passed on some nasty, yeasty bacterial bug to every single bottle of two batches of beer I had made this summer. Three of those bottles over-carbonated to the point that they became beer grenades and exploded. One blew up on the kitchen counter and the other two in the garage. Having had a bottle explode in my hand a few years ago (wild fermented ginger beer--a bad idea) I can tell you that bottle grenades aren't funny.

So having had three bottles explode and all the other bottles I opened showing signs of over-carbonation, I had the dilemma of what to do next. String my bow and shoot arrows at them from a distance? Call in the homebrew bomb squad?

I decided to don a heavy jacket (in 90ºF + temperatures) and safety goggles and uncap each one in the sink. The second to last bottle gave me a cooling beer shower.

Time to clean our messy kitchen and go on a sanitation campaign.

Gadget Love: The Johnson Temperature Controller

A friend of mine gave me a chest freezer recently and I augmented it with a handy gizmo, a Johnson temperature controller. The temperature controller allows me to run the freezer at any temperature between 30 and 80ºF. It works by cycling on and off the power to the freezer as needed. You just stick the copper probe in the freezer and adjust the dial to the desired temperature. So far I've thought of the following uses:

• Proof bread overnight at 54ºF. I used to proof my dough in my refrigerator, but the chest freezer, running at this higher temperature thanks to the temperature controller, results in a more active proofing.
• Make lagers (which ferment at low temperatures).
• Make ales in hot weather. The house gets too hot to make beer in the summertime. Now I can make a batch or two without having to worry about the weather. 
• Use the chest freezer as a backup when I need to repair the gasket on our Scandinavian refrigerator YET AGAIN!

Not wanting to be a profligate energy user I only use the chest freezer periodically.

Now if only I could lower the temperature of the whole house which, thanks to the first heatwave of the summer, is now warm enough to make yogurt!  

Figs 4 Fun

Our Mission fig tree is out of control!

What can I say about a website that profiles thousands of fig tree varieties? This, and cute pictures of cats, is why DARPA invented the interwebs. The fig action is at http://figs4fun.com/. And for those of you outside of Los Angeles' biblical climate, the Figs 4 Fun website also has a fact sheet on growing figs in pots.

Tomato Report II: Franchi Red Pear

Franchi's Red Pear tomato is a beefsteak variety we've grown for several years. It tastes phenomenal either fresh or cooked. From the Seeds from Italy website:

This is an old North Italian variety specially selected by Franchi Sementi. It is an indeterminate red, pear-shaped beefsteak. An outstanding producer of huge (as in 8-18 ounce) very tasty fruit. Great fresh eating. Early for such a large plant (70-75 days).  This is not the small pear shaped tomato called red pear by US Seed companies. Pear shaped with vertical ribs . . . Really meaty containing few seeds. Indeterminate.

One problem I've had with it is that it's not super productive, at least in my vegetable beds.  I also think I may have over-watered it this summer and, consequently, it's not quite as flavorful as last year's more "meaty" crop.

So what beefsteak varieties do you like? I'm looking for suggestions for next year--hybrids or heirlooms.

ETA:  Just thought of something that would be helpful--if you rec. a tomato, tell us where you live. It will really help others searching for a good tomato that works well in their climate.

Tomato Report: Franchi Red Cherry

I don't have much to say about this variety from Franchi named, somewhat generically, "Red Cherry". It grew well and is very productive considering the compact size of the vine. The taste, however, was acceptable but not exciting. This could be because of over-watering on my part.

I could find very little information about this tomato on the interwebs other than that it is an indeterminate, early variety that grows well in pots (though I grew mine in the ground).

In the interest of a sweeter cherry tomato I think next year I'm going to plant the reliable Sungold.

What's your favorite cherry tomato? Leave a comment . . .

ETA:  Just thought of something that would be helpful--if you rec. a tomato, tell us where you live. It will really help others searching for a good tomato that works well in their climate. You know how it is: location, location, location...  And if any of you who have already rec'd one see this, feel free to pipe up again regarding your location.

Philosophical EDC: Seneca

The most important part of my "everyday carry" is not my pocket knife. It's my slim and easy to tote copy of Seneca's Moral Essays, Volume II. Why? Passages like this:

But it does no good to have got rid of the causes of individual sorrow; for one is sometimes seized by hatred of the whole human race. When you reflect how rare is simplicity, how unknown is innocence, and how good faith scarcely exists, except when it is profitable, and when you think of all the throng of successful crimes and of the gains and losses of lust, both equally hateful, and of ambition that, so far from restraining itself within its own bounds, now gets glory from baseness — when we remember these things, the mind is plunged into night, and as though the virtues, which it is now neither possible to expect nor profitable to possess, had been overthrown, there comes overwhelming gloom.

We ought, therefore, to bring ourselves to believe that all the vices of the crowd are, not hateful, but ridiculous, and to imitate Democritus rather than Heraclitus. For the latter, whenever he went forth into public, used to weep, the former to laugh; to the one all human doings seemed to be miseries, to the other follies. And so we ought to adopt a lighter view of things, and put up with them in an indulgent spirit; it is more human to laugh at life than to lament over it. Add, too, that he deserves better of the human race also who laughs at it than he who bemoans it; for the one allows it some measure of good hope, while the other foolishly weeps over things that he despairs of seeing corrected.

From De Tranquillitate Animi - On Tranquillity of Mind

Guerrilla Gardening: Over and Out

Seed Bombs at Whole Foods! Photo by Jimmy Chertkow

Proof that all counter-cultural movements eventually get subsumed into the mainstream: a Whole Foods seed bomb display sent to me by Root Simple tipster James Chertkow, who pointed out the anthropomorphized orange with a Mohawk. Maybe it's time to retire the whole guerrilla gardening/punk rock thing and just, well, plant some flowers and not make a big deal out of it.

Another Reason Not to Till

This bit of agricultural history comes to you via the curatorial powers of Doug Harvey, M.F.A.

Will have to bust out the flute and see if this works.

Bolloso Napoletano Basil

Another winner from Franchi, Italy's oldest seed company: Bolloso Napoletano basil. It has been slow to go to flower, pest resistant, prodigious and flavorful. The huge leaves are the size of iPhones but make much better pesto (iPesto?).

As usual, I can't find much information on this variety in English. Someone correct me if I'm wrong but I believe the name translates roughly as "blistered Neapolitan" a reference, most likely, to the wrinkled leaves. Bolloso Napoletano will be the official Root Simple compound basil from now on out.

Roundin' up the Summer Urban Homesteading Disasters

Everyday loaf on the left, "charity" loaf on the right.

As we've noted in our books, part of the deal with this lifestyle is persevering through the inevitable disasters. Which means it's time for a regular blog feature, the disaster roundup.  

Loafing Around
I agreed to bake a few baguettes for a charity function this evening. Problem #1 is that I can't do baguettes in my small oven so I decided to do a shorter batard. Problem #2: for some reason, despite the fact that I measure my ingredients carefully with a digital scale, my dough turned out extra moist. Anticipating that the batards would stick to the peel as I put them in the oven, I decided to make round loaves in proofing baskets instead. Problem #3: the dough stuck to the proofing baskets and I ended up with edible, but aesthetically unappealing, loaves.

Moral: the more important the event the more likely disaster will strike.

Squashed
I've blogged about it before, but my attempt to grow winter squash (Marina di Chioggia) ended in disaster. The squash vines took up the majority of one of my few vegetable beds. I got only two squash, one that was consumed by racoons and the other that never fully matured before the vine crapped out. The immature squash was still edible, but bland.

Moral: winter squash just ain't space efficient. Next year I'll tuck it around other plants and trees rather than have it hog up space in my intensively planted veggie beds.

Luscious compost tomatoes.

Unintentional Gardening
I built a cold frame this spring so that I could get a head start on propagating my tomato seedlings. So guess which tomatoes did better: the ones I carefully propagated from seed and transplanted to richly amended vegetable beds, or the ones that sprouted randomly in compacted soil? You guessed it, the ones that grew on their own.

Moral: nature knows best when to start seeds and where to plant them than us homo sapiens. Maybe there is something to that permaculture thing . . . 

Our Hameau de la Reine
This summer the garden generally looked like hell. It thrives during our mild winter and spring then gets baked by the merciless Southern California sun at just about the time I start slacking off on my planting duties. Then the New York Times shows up and wants to do a photo spread about a month after stuff has quit blooming. This is when I usually come running in the house to complain to Mrs. Homegrown that the garden, "does not look like Versailles."

Moral: take a class from someone who knows what they are doing, which is exactly what I'm up to starting next month. I vow that the garden will look like Marie Antoinette's fake peasant village (the Hameau de la Reine) by next year. Then again, I say that every summer.

Garden Follies
Thinking the garden needed some ornamentation and not wanting to go the garden gnome route, I thought it would be a good idea to cast some Platonic solids in concrete--don't ask me why--these things, "just come to me." Mrs. Homegrown (using her Master of Fine Art superpowers) viewed this project with considerable skepticism. I successfully cast a tetrahedron and dodecahedron and stained them with iron sulfate and proudly placed them in the garden. They kinda worked but I have to agree with Mrs. Homegrown's assessment that the scale is off--they look like the miniature Stonehenge in Spinal Tap.

Moral: trust the MFA in your household even if that MFA was in conceptual art. 

I could go on, but I've failed to document all of the disasters. Next, we'll review what worked.

A Raw Deal

Photo from Aajonus Vonderplanitz's website http://unhealthyfamilyfarm.com/ of eggs at Healthy Family Farms in Hohberg Poultry Ranch boxes.

Many of you by now may have heard about a raid conducted by federal, state and local law enforcement on a raw milk buying club called Rawsome, and a simultaneous raid on Healthy Family Farms, which was one of Rawsome's suppliers. The Los Angeles County District Attorney's office has filed a 13 count complaint against Rawsome with nine of those counts against Healthy Family Farms. The D.A.'s office alleges that Healthy Family Farms has operated "without any type of license or permit for milk production since 2007" and that Rawsome "has never had any type of business permit or license."

While I support the right of everyone to be able to buy raw milk and dairy products, the people behind Rawsome and Healthy Valley Farms may not be the folks to rally around. I've heard now from two sources about some serious allegations involving both Rawsome and Healthy Family Farms. Paleo diet activist Aajonus Vonderplanitz paid a private investigator to look into Healthy Family Farms proprietor Sharon Palmer. You can read that report here. The report alleges that Palmer has a long rap sheet, including a felony conviction for elder fraud, grand theft and loan fraud. The website maintained by Vonderplanitz also includes photographs taken at Palmer's farm showing what seems to be meat and eggs purchased from non-organic wholesale sources in the process of being repackaged as Healthy Valley Farms products. There are also photos of non-organic poultry feed and antibiotics.

This type of fraud, repackaging cheap wholesale food products and passing them off as organic/raw etc. is, I believe, widespread.

That list of reasons to grow your own food, if you can, keeps getting longer . . .

Food Containers . . . With Lead!

I found this "plastic food container" in a local 99¢ store. Let me get this straight. The Chinese lend us money to buy stuff they make. But if the phthalates give us cancer how do we repay the loan? Or does the lead just fry our brains so we don't know any better?

Legalize Baking!

Did you know that in California and many other states it's illegal to hold a bake sale? That a synagogue in Los Angeles got busted by the Health Department for hosting a bake sale? That you can't bake bread in a home kitchen and resell it?

Obviously, we need to change this. In what looks like an economic climate that won't change for the better anytime soon, we need to encourage micro-business enterprises, foster a entrepreneurial spirit and make it easy for non-profits to raise money. We may not be able to fix the federal deficit but we can certainly take on this this easy to mend legislative issue. To that end, I encourage all of you to take a moment to sign a petition in support of a California cottage good law put together by the Sustainable Economies Law Center. Please spread the word about this petition!

From the text of the petition:

As part of a growing movement to localize food systems and stimulate small-scale food production, we are proposing that the California State Legislature allow for the sale of certain home-made food products, namely: baked goods (but with no cream or meat fillings), jams and jellies, candy, granola and other dry cereal, popcorn, waffle cones and pizzelles, nut mixes, chocolate covered non-perishables (such as nuts and dried fruit), roasted coffee, dry baking mixes, herb blends, and dried tea.

Many states already have cottage food laws making it possible for folks to start small businesses out of their homes and to allow religions organizations, charities and schools to put on bake sales. You can see what states have cottage food laws here.

My interest in politics extends only to issues that can be influenced at the grass roots level. This is a great example of a problem that we all be a part of fixing.

The Construction of Secret Hiding Places

I love alternate views of our normal notions of domesticity and home economics. On a recent trip to the book section of a large surplus store I noticed our first book The Urban Homestead right alongside books on burying weapons caches, wiring solar panels, acting as your own dentist and assembling SKS rifles. We certainly have exciting company on this journey.

One book in particular caught my eye, The Construction of Secret Hiding Places by Charles Robinson. You can download a pdf of this book for free here. Of course the fact that this info exists in book and interweb form means that the secrets aren't, well, secrets anymore. Nevertheless, I'll never view a stairwell, baseboard or that useless space under the dishwasher in quite the same way again.

Do you have a favorite secret hiding place? Anonymous comments are welcome . . .

Eat Your Pests

Grubs anyone?

Responding to our anti-squirrel post a few days ago Root Simple reader Chile pointed to a post on the her blog "Pests . . . and how to eat them". She makes the excellent point that most of our dreaded garden pests, including insects are edible.

Now if I could only overcome my squeamishness about eating insects. I had to deal with lots of wax moth larvae this week and remembered that in parts of Asia they are stir fried. Here in L.A., you can get deep fried grasshoppers at a few Mexican restaurants (San Francisco's Health Department just banned this practice, for some reason). Perhaps you have to grow up eating insects to be fully comfortable with the bug eatin'.

If you look at the entry on rabbits in the original edition of Rodale's Organic Gardening Encyclopedia, J.I. Rodale suggests eating them. This advice has been, unfortunately, edited out of the revised version. The way the economy is going this summer we may have to revise that encyclopedia again . . .

Farming with Dynamite

O.M.G.

It's real, and you can read the entire 1910 brochure right here.

Thanks to Fourmillab for scanning, to BoingBoing for linking, and an extra special thanks on behalf of Mother Earth to Du Pont!
 

p.s. They sure knew how to design a brochure back then...

99¢ Store Proofing Basket

For years I've used a special wooden basket called a banneton to proof my round loaves of bread in. I'm teaching a bread baking class this weekend and needed a bunch of proofing baskets for the class. Bannetons are nice but expensive so I decided to try using a canvas lined proofing basket as a more economical alternative.

I got some metal bowls from my local 99¢ store. Wicker baskets or a plastic colander would also have worked, but the 8 inch metal bowls were the perfect size for the kind of bread I make. The canvas came from an art supply store, but a fabric store might also work. I've tried to use dish towels in the past, but I've found that canvas works better. Just make sure to flour the CRAP out of the canvas and never wash it, or your loaf will stick.

I sized the canvas so that I can fold it over the whole bowl to keep the dough from getting oxidized. New kitten "helped" with the fabric cutting.

When you're ready to bake you just invert the bowl and dump the loaf out of the basket. I like the look of bread proofed in a canvas lined basket.

Stay tuned for my levain-based bread recipe in an upcoming issue of Urban Farm Magazine.

Making It e-Book Corrected

To those of you who purchased an e-version of our book Making It and had trouble reading it, I just received a note from our publisher Rodale:

The "disappearing words" are actually words that appear in a faint gray color that was hard or impossible to see over light background color settings on some devices, especially the Kindle from Amazon.

We have corrected the e-book files and re-released them to all retailers. The corrected versions should be live and for sale within the next two weeks.

In most cases customers will receive automatic notification that a (free) update is available. That notification should come by way of an email from the retailer where the book was purchased. If notification is not received by the end of August, we suggest they contact the retailer directly to request the update.

Sorry about this!

Michael Tortorello on Urban Homesteading

Michael Tortorello, who wrote that nice piece about us a few months ago, "Living Large, Off the Land," is one of my favorite writers on gardening and "urban homesteady" topics. He's critical without being curmudgeonly and manages to separate the truth from the hype (and there's an awful lot of hype in this movement!). Plus he managed to get an entire paragraph about my thyrsus into the New York Times. Thyrsus hype?

Since he's far too busy writing kick ass columns to have a website, I've collected a few of his articles here in one place for your reading pleasure:

"Heirloom Seeds or Flinty Hybrids?"
Yes, hybrid seeds are o.k. and I agree.

"The Permaculture Movement Grows From Underground"
The wonders of permaculture plus a jab at aerated compost tea.

"Finding the Potential in Vacant Lots"
Recent boom and bust cycles have left us with a lot of room to grow stuff.

"Food Storage as Grandma Knew It"
Tortorello actually tracked down some folks who have functioning root cellars.

"The Spotless Garden"
On aquaponics. Don't name those fish!

"Making Flowers Into Perfume"
 Build that still!

"Seeds Straight From Your Fridge"
On planting seeds from the pantry.

CooKit Solar Cooker Made Out of Wood

The nice folks at Solar Cookers International gave us permission to reprint plans for their CooKit solar cooker in our book Making It. You can access those plans, as well as many other solar cooker projects, for free, on their website here.

I've made CooKits out of cardboard and aluminum foil a couple of times. One problem is that I eventually bang up the cardboard and I've got to make a new one. This summer I had a lot of  1/4 inch plywood leftover from fixing up Mrs. Homegrown's writin' shed. Rather than send that plywood to the dump I decided to make a more permanent CooKit.

I blew up the CooKit pdf from the SCI website using Adobe Illustrator.  I did a tiled printout and taped the pieces together to create a life sized pattern. I used this pattern to cut out the plywood pieces.

I spray glued the aluminum foil to the plywood. Next, I drilled holes in all the pieces and inserted twist ties to, essentially, create little hinges so that I could fold up the CooKit when not in use.

The plywood CooKit folds much better than my cardboard versions did.

This type of "panel" solar cooker works best for things like polenta and rice. Now I've got a convenient folding panel cooker for backyard use and camping trips.

Sunflowers and Squirrels

It's a losing battle, the one we gardeners face against the squirrel menace. As the mammoth sunflowers we planted this summer approached the harvest stage, I tied some paper bags over the flower heads to prevent squirrels and birds from eating all the seeds. Mostly, it has worked. But, as you can see from the animation above, one pesky squirrel managed to figure out how to open one of the bags. Perhaps he used the adjacent tomato cage for extra leverage.

Maybe this bag worked because the Whole Foods logo scared the squirrels away with the thought of high prices and angry Pruis drivers.

I thought I had solved the problem by putting one of those ubiquitous and annoying cloth eco bags over the sunflower. Not even the City of LA logo on that eco bag scared them off.

So what to do about the squirrels? Tight bird netting on fruit trees works but is a pain in the ass to attach and remove. Commercial orchardists trap and kill. Hmmm. Along those lines it looks like we have yet another excuse to link to that squirrel melt video . . .

Homemade cat scratcher

I feel like I should apologize to non-cat people for all the cat-related content we've been generating of late. This should be the last cat post for a while. (At least until the widdle snugum wuggums does something adorable!)

We picked up this cat scratcher idea from Modern Cat. That version is much more polished than ours, in fact, it's downright cute. Ours is also too small--we need to add to it a bit. But you can see how it's made: strips of cardboard coiled up like a a cinnamon roll, duct tape at the breaks. If you go to the original, you'll see how they finish the edges.

Easy. Kitty likes it.

Emergency water storage

We're finally ready for The Big One. In terms of emergency preparedness, we were pretty well set in terms of food, light, fuel, etc., but we didn't have much water. Just some jugs, a rain barrel that's empty most of the year, and the water in our hot water tank. This lack made me nervous, so we finally did took the bull by the horns--or the bung hole...

All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace

Computer modeling of complex systems has gotten us in a whole world of trouble in recent years. Filmmaker Adam Curtis has directed a superb series, about this issue, for the BBC called "All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace". The second episode "The Use and Abuse of Vegetational Concepts" will be of particular interest to readers of this blog. It details the errors that occur when we try to model natural systems. I can't reccomend this program highy enough. Set aside an hour today to watch this program before the BBC copyright police take it down.

Episode 2  "The Use and Abuse of Vegetational Concepts":


Here's the first episode "Love and Power" about what happens when computer algorithms and, shall we say, overly confident philosophers gain control over our economic life.

Episode 1: "Love and Power":

All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace from science2art on Vimeo.

Erik Thoughtstylin' in Urban Farm Magazine

Photo by Graham Keegan. Yes, those are medlars in the background.

On the back page of Urban Farm magazine's most recent issue--Sept./Oct 2011--Erik is asked to answer the question, "If you can only do one thing to boost your sustainability..."

His answer follows. He was in high guru form that day. I hope Urban Farm will forgive me for lifting the whole quote:

The action at the top of the to-do list on the path to true sustainability is not a tangible thing. It's a change in perspective, a breaking down of the barrier between what is "within" and what is "without." It is a recognition that our internal intentions and actions expand ever outward, transforming our households, communities and, ultimately, the world. We are alchemists. Our compost piles, beehives and chicken coops are merely the outward signs of the transformation going on within our souls. A new era beckons.