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The Reality Report: Low energy methods for home food preservation and storage (audio)
Sharon Astyk, The Reality Report via Global Public Media
The Reality Report interviews Sharon Astyk— writer, teacher and subsistence farmer, and the author of two forthcoming books on Peak Oil and Climate Change — Depletion and Abundance: Life on the New Home Front (Fall ‘08) and A Nation of Farmers (And Cooks) (Spring ‘09), the latter co-authored with Aaron Newton.
On this show, we discuss low energy methods for home food preservation and storage. Sharon’s web site is sharonastyk.com/
(31 March 2008, but just posted)
Sharon has been rewriting the book on household management for a post-peak world at Casaubon’s Book. Latest post: What To Do With Your Appliances When You Get Over Them. -BA
First Spring Things
Gene Logsdon, Organic To Be
Spring comes slowly in northern climes like mine, and never more slowly than this year. Here it is April 3rd, as I write, and not one frog or toad is peeping in the pond yet. I anxiously watch my shrinking supply of hay, measuring it against the greening grass.
And then, this morning, came the sign I was waiting for. The sheep did not clean up their hay that I had dropped from the loft down to their mangers, but headed out to the pasture. And so I know. The first most important spring thing for me has arrived. Although the grass seems barely to grow, the sheep know. They are nibbling those first frail green blades, such a delightfully luscious change from winter fare. I can breathe easily. I have made it through winter without buying any more hay.
… The whole affair seemed so wonderfully natural and appropriate. The tree blown down by a storm was being cut up by a human who will keep warm from the wood, while the bees find on the wood something to eat in a landscape as yet bereft of flowers. The wood I burn will make ashes rich in potash and lime to put on the clover field that the bees will harvest for honey and for my sweet delight, the clover meanwhile putting nitrogen gathered from the air into the soil, and then becoming the food for the sheep when the pastures are brown. Certainly in the intricate circle of nature’s food chain there is a zillion times more efficiency than any man-made machine could accomplish.
(7 April 2008)
Gene Logsdon contributes regularly to Energy Bulletin (courtesy of Dave Smith).
Container gardening: Begin on the balcony
Marianne Kavanagh, UK Telegraph
… But it’s time to try again. There’s a wave of enthusiasm sweeping the country. The Royal Horticultural Society has teamed up with NS&I, the premium bonds people, to launch a Grow Your Own Veg campaign, and the Food Up Front scheme in London aims to help beginners turn even a tiny balcony into a productive plot.
So there’s no excuse. Even hopeless gardeners like me are starting to wonder about growing our own. After all, it wasn’t so long ago that everyone had a vegetable patch. I remember, as a child, eating rhubarb and gooseberries from the back garden, and my mother-in-law in Suffolk has been known to grow enough to feed the whole village.
And so, on one of those windswept, rainy March days, Zoe Lujic from Food Up Front helped me sow my first salad seeds.
(4 April 2008)
