Category: Sustainable living

Tote tanks

I finally found a tote tank to store water for the garden’s irrigation system. The irrigation system is a work in progress, and I’ll have photos of that when the project is done.

Tote tanks are much less expensive than the water tanks sold by agricultural suppliers. When you buy one, you’re also recycling it. Otherwise, I assume, they’re industrial waste.

Tote tanks are a product of globalization. They’re how high-value fluids are shipped around the world. They’re designed to be easily moved by a fork lift, and no doubt there is some special means of stacking them on container ships. Some — probably most — of the tanks are used for toxic fluids such as industrial lubricants. But some of them are used for food. That’s the trick. It took me months to find a tote tank that I could verify was made of food-grade plastic and that had not contained anything toxic. This particular tank contained organic olive imported from Spain. The man I bought it from didn’t want to tell me the name of the company he buys them from, because he wants to protect his access to these hard-to-find items. But he did say that he gets them from a company that makes products such as salad dressings.

If you’re looking for a tote tank, check for a label. There always should be a label saying what was in the tank. Personally I would not buy a tank if the label has been removed. In the photo below, note the glass-and-fork icon put there by the Spanish manufacturer of the tank. I believe that icon indicates that the tank is made of food-grade plastics.

Around here they sell for $65 to $100, depending on the condition and whether it’s food grade. They hold about 275 gallons, or 1,000 liters.

Compost, compost, compost

I wish I had thought to keep a running total of the amount of compost that has been used at the abbey. Tons, certainly. I buy it by the dump truck load.

This is a leaf compost, made from leaves picked up as a city service in nearby cities. It’s not an ideal compost, because it’s a high-carbon compost. But if you give it plenty of time for the soil to digest it, it works fine. My understanding of the biology is that high-carbon compost requires further digestion by soil bacteria. The bacteria that do this digestion suck up available nitrogen for their cellular protein. When the bacteria have done their work, the cells die, and the nitrogen is released back into the soil. So, when used in a garden, it must be applied out of season so that it can be digested before planting time.

I think of it as food for my earthworms. They too are hungry little animals just like the rest of the wildlife. That’s something I inherited from my mother. She could never bear the sight of a hungry animal. No one at Acorn Abbey is permitted to go hungry, if I can help it, though I must admit that my population of very fat voles tests my tolerance.

The real cause of food inflation


Commodities traders at the Chicago Board of Trade

If you asked a few Americans about the causes of food inflation, what answers would you get?

Ask a right-winger, or a so-called libertarian, or anyone else who lives in an ideological fantasy world, and you’ll be told that it’s the government’s fault, that’s it’s all about monetary policy. Totally wrong. Yes, monetary policy is loose, but we are still in a liquidity trap. And besides, real inflation is always accompanied by wage inflation, and wages have barely moved in years and years.

Ask someone who is better informed and you’ll be told that it’s climate change, droughts, floods, crazy weather, increased demand in Asia, the high price of oil, the drain of growing biofuels, and the waste involved in feeding crops to animals to produce meat. Partly right.

The biggest cause, it seems, is — Wall Street. Here are links to two articles that follow the money, publications that Americans don’t read. One is from the German newspaper Der Spiegel. The other is from Foreign Policy.

Speculating with lives: How global investors make money out of hunger

How Goldman Sachs created the food crisis

Fall garden, R.I.P.

Last week, we had a night when the low temperature was 18F. That froze the remaining greens in the garden. So it was time to turn the garden at last. Ken and his girlfriend Sarah, who is visiting this week, did the work.

It’s a shame that I wasn’t able to plant a cover crop of winter rye, but I couldn’t bring myself to turn under a garden that was still producing mustard and kale. The plan is to make up for it by adding lots of compost to feed the worms.

Speaking of worms, I hope the chickens didn’t eat too many of them. More than anything, they love to scratch in freshly turned soil.

Let the winter projects begin

Ken is back. And he seems to have brought the arctic air with him. He’ll be here for a month or so. The main winter project that he’s going to help me with is the irrigation project. That involves enlarging a spot in the stream to serve as a reservoir, running some pipe up the hill to the garden, and putting in a water storage tank. There’s also a lot of mulching and composting to be done.

Ken’s van was parked here while he was in Alaska and traveling for the past six months. He got the van back on the road today and plans to do some peregrinating and van-dwelling.

As for the weather, the long stretch of unseasonably warm weather has ended for now, with a low of 16F forecast for tonight.


Ruth steals cabbage


This Carolina jasmine bloom popped out during the warm weather. The cold snap will put an end to that.

The magic of oranges

One of the compensations for the bleakness of winter is that the oranges start pouring out of Florida and California. As far as I can tell, in this part of the country, the winter trucking of oranges north from Florida works pretty much the same as it did when I was a child in the 1950s. U.S. 601, which runs through the Yadkin Valley, was a major truck route that came up from South Carolina and continued northward, connecting with routes that went from Ohio toward Chicago. To this day, there is a tradition of roadside produce stands along U.S. 601 that sell trucked-in produce from Florida, South Carolina and Georgia. Here in Stokes County, which is crossed by no major highways (U.S. 52 touches the southern corner of the county), there is no tradition of these roadside produce stands. I’m guessing that oranges have been shipped around the world for centuries. If historical novels can be trusted, then from Winston Graham’s novels we could learn, for example, that oranges from Spain have been shipped to the British Isles during the winter for hundreds of years.

While visiting family yesterday in the Yadkin Valley, I bought a box of oranges from a produce stand on U.S. 601. These oranges are better, fresher, and cheaper than the oranges that can be had in the grocery store. Not only that, most of the time, the grocery stores carry California oranges. I love California oranges — if I’m in California. But here in the Southeast, Florida oranges are the way to go. I’m guessing that Florida had a good crop this year. The box of oranges cost $18.50.

Since my hippy days in the 1970s, I’ve known about the magic of oranges. This mainly came from reading Jethro Kloss, who believed that oranges are a powerful medicine.

I can testify to the power of oranges. When I was in my 20s, I had to have wisdom teeth surgically removed. My dentist referred me to an oral surgeon who did the work. Two of the teeth were impacted and had never emerged from the gum. They had to be removed by making an incision in the gum, breaking the teeth apart, and bringing them out piece by piece. About two weeks after a brutal round of oral surgery, I had a regular appointment with my dentist. While poking around in my mouth, he asked me what the oral surgeon had decided to do about the wisdom teeth. I told him that we’d taken the first two out two weeks ago and that Dr. Westrick had removed the stitches last week. My dentist didn’t believe me at first. He said he couldn’t see any sign of oral surgery. In fact, he checked with my oral surgeon to see if I was telling the truth. The dentist later told me that he had never seen anyone heal so fast and that he didn’t think it was possible. “What did you do?” he asked. I said, “I juiced a dozen oranges every day.”

So I don’t just eat an orange or two. I juice them in generous quantities. I don’t know what it is that gives fresh oranges their virtue. As far as I’m concerned, orange juice in bottles and cartons is just another dead, sweet drink. All of its virtue is gone. I don’t drink it. Fresh orange juice is alive. If you can handle the calorie load and the fructose, try sometime drinking the juice of 10 or 12 fresh oranges every day for a week. Your skin will glow.

The hens aren't retired after all

My hens abruptly stopped laying back in the summer after two years of laying strong. I had no eggs at all during August, September, October, November, and much of December. I still have a great deal to learn about chickens. The only theory that I could come up with was that they had already reached henopause, so now I would have to support them and pasture them, as promised, for their remaining Golden Years.

But then all of a sudden, in the last week, they started laying huge, beautiful eggs. I am mystified. The only theory I can come up with is that they cannot tolerate hot weather. I have definitely found that my chickens, types that are said to be cold-weather hardy, are much more uncomfortable in the summer than they are in the cold of winter.

By the way, I am down to two chickens — Patience and Ruth. Chastity died during the summer. I have no idea why. She was fine in the morning when I let them out, but I found her lying dead in the grass during the afternoon. It was not a hot day. There were no signs that any kind of predator was involved. Chickens, I understand, sometimes choke to death. So that’s the only theory I was able to come up with.

During my eggless months I bought a dozen eggs only once — good eggs, supposedly, from Whole Foods. I almost threw them out because they were so pale and pathetic. Clearly, if you want good eggs with deeply colored yolks and great flavor, they’ve got to come from pastured hens.

It's good I like turnips

I’m sure I’ll never get over the thrill of knowing that supper came home in a wheelbarrow rather than a grocery bag. I harvested the remaining turnips today, because they’d stopped growing, and the risk of a hard freeze is increasing. It seems strange that the garden is still producing turnips, mustard, and kale during the second week of December. I really don’t have a reference for whether this is abnormally late for these crops in this area. Fall gardens are frost-hardy. And if it is unusually late for the garden, then that’s the upside of climate change — a longer growing season.

The soil was nice and wet when I pulled the turnips. Most of the turnips came up with a clump of soil, and in almost every clump of soil was a nice, fat earthworm or two. The organic soil amendments I’ve dumped on the garden are really paying off. I spread the dirty turnips in the grass and hosed them down to wash them, then spread them out to dry in the wind and sun. Now they’re in the basement. There was about three-quarters of a bushel of turnips left from a turnip patch of about 175 square feet. I’ve been eating, and giving away, turnips since October. I’ve prepared them every way I can think of — steamed and sliced, with butter; curried; roasted; creamed in yogurt. One turnip dish that is good enough for company is turnips au gratin.

I don’t know why turnips are almost universally scorned. For the garden, they’re an easy fall staple, and they’ll keep well into the winter. No doubt many a peasant has been kept alive by turnips in hard times. I’ve actually been served turnips once in a fancy restaurant — Alice Waters’ Chez Panisse in Berkeley. As I said to the waiter, it takes confidence to serve turnips.


Spread out to dry


In a bushel basket


The turnip tops made a wheelbarrow load for the compost.


Mustard


This cabbage is still going, but I doubt that it will have time to make a head before a freeze gets it.