Read Online Made by Hand by Mark Frauenfelder - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Mark Frauenfelder
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to be growing crops that will feed our communities.”
To show me an example of what she means by feeding her community, Celine led me to the front porch, where there was a table with a weighing scale and a notebook and pen. There was also a chalkboard with produce prices written on it. This is Celine’s “you pick” program for selling the produce grown in the energy garden. Four or five families in the neighborhood come over and pick fruits, vegetables, and eggs from the garden. They weigh the fruit on a scale on the front porch and write down the type of produce they picked and how much it weighed in a notebook. Later, Celine collects the money. She charges the same prices that the farmers’ market in town charges: Basil is $2 a bunch, squash cost 50 cents each, tomatoes are $2 a handful, and eggs are $4 a dozen.
I asked Julian and Celine which activity yields the highest energy return on energy invested. Celine pointed to the fifteen hens scratching around in the straw mulch, looking for bugs to eat.
“We looked at the energy output of the garden, and we figured out that most of it is coming from eggs,” she said.
“About ten chickens equals one human in terms of calorie needs,” added Julian. “They need about two hundred calories per day, and they output about one hundred calories in eggs in the summer. That’s pretty generous.”
“If you compost a lot,” said Celine, “that builds up the insects, and you get even better eggs. They make the eggs really high in the right kind of omega-3 fatty acids as opposed to eggs from hens fed a corn diet.”
Julian added that the neighbors have been bringing food scraps over to feed the hens. For now, the neighbors give them the scraps out of the kindness of their hearts, but Julian plans on eventually paying them in solars (rhymes with dollars ), a local currency backed up by units of solar energy. “We haven’t done it yet,” he said, “because we want to make sure the mechanism’s right.”
Near the back of the property, I saw different kinds of equipment. The worm composter had been knocked over in a recent storm, but it still contained a large mass of wriggling worms. The worms, said Celine, eat garbage and excrete a “tea,” which is a powerful fertilizer that she sprinkles on plants.
Near the composter sat the remains of a large alcohol still made from a fifty-five-gallon drum. It wasn’t meant for making moonshine but, rather, for converting waste fruit into alcohol for fuel. “It’s not so easy to do, as it turns out,” said Julian. “Let’s just say we haven’t mastered it.”
“Why not?” I asked.
“You have to know what you’re doing much better than we did,” said Julian. “There’s a lot of skill involved in a lot of this stuff.”
Feeling overwhelmed, I reminded myself that Julian and Celine were approaching gardening from a different perspective than most gardeners. They wanted to learn how people could survive in a post-carbon world, a world where machinery to make juice from apples, bottles to hold the juice, and refrigeration to keep the juice fresh—anything that required remotely manufactured equipment or fossil fuels—were out of the question.
I could appreciate where they were coming from, but my reasons for gardening and preserving food were different. To me, making apple juice was an excuse to get a nifty apple press and learn how it worked, and to design labels to put on bottles of juice for friends. Yes, Julian and Celine were being more practical about the future of the human race, but I didn’t want to go there. I was interested in gardening because of the challenges.
RAMSHACKLE SOLID
I learned a lot from Julian and Celine, but I felt I needed to learn from folks who were operating on a wavelength closer to mine. I recalled a visit I’d made in late June with Mister Jalopy’s old friends Eric Thomason and Julia Posey, who run a blog about their urban-homesteading adventure called Ramshackle Solid.
To show me an example of what she means by feeding her community, Celine led me to the front porch, where there was a table with a weighing scale and a notebook and pen. There was also a chalkboard with produce prices written on it. This is Celine’s “you pick” program for selling the produce grown in the energy garden. Four or five families in the neighborhood come over and pick fruits, vegetables, and eggs from the garden. They weigh the fruit on a scale on the front porch and write down the type of produce they picked and how much it weighed in a notebook. Later, Celine collects the money. She charges the same prices that the farmers’ market in town charges: Basil is $2 a bunch, squash cost 50 cents each, tomatoes are $2 a handful, and eggs are $4 a dozen.
I asked Julian and Celine which activity yields the highest energy return on energy invested. Celine pointed to the fifteen hens scratching around in the straw mulch, looking for bugs to eat.
“We looked at the energy output of the garden, and we figured out that most of it is coming from eggs,” she said.
“About ten chickens equals one human in terms of calorie needs,” added Julian. “They need about two hundred calories per day, and they output about one hundred calories in eggs in the summer. That’s pretty generous.”
“If you compost a lot,” said Celine, “that builds up the insects, and you get even better eggs. They make the eggs really high in the right kind of omega-3 fatty acids as opposed to eggs from hens fed a corn diet.”
Julian added that the neighbors have been bringing food scraps over to feed the hens. For now, the neighbors give them the scraps out of the kindness of their hearts, but Julian plans on eventually paying them in solars (rhymes with dollars ), a local currency backed up by units of solar energy. “We haven’t done it yet,” he said, “because we want to make sure the mechanism’s right.”
Near the back of the property, I saw different kinds of equipment. The worm composter had been knocked over in a recent storm, but it still contained a large mass of wriggling worms. The worms, said Celine, eat garbage and excrete a “tea,” which is a powerful fertilizer that she sprinkles on plants.
Near the composter sat the remains of a large alcohol still made from a fifty-five-gallon drum. It wasn’t meant for making moonshine but, rather, for converting waste fruit into alcohol for fuel. “It’s not so easy to do, as it turns out,” said Julian. “Let’s just say we haven’t mastered it.”
“Why not?” I asked.
“You have to know what you’re doing much better than we did,” said Julian. “There’s a lot of skill involved in a lot of this stuff.”
Feeling overwhelmed, I reminded myself that Julian and Celine were approaching gardening from a different perspective than most gardeners. They wanted to learn how people could survive in a post-carbon world, a world where machinery to make juice from apples, bottles to hold the juice, and refrigeration to keep the juice fresh—anything that required remotely manufactured equipment or fossil fuels—were out of the question.
I could appreciate where they were coming from, but my reasons for gardening and preserving food were different. To me, making apple juice was an excuse to get a nifty apple press and learn how it worked, and to design labels to put on bottles of juice for friends. Yes, Julian and Celine were being more practical about the future of the human race, but I didn’t want to go there. I was interested in gardening because of the challenges.
RAMSHACKLE SOLID
I learned a lot from Julian and Celine, but I felt I needed to learn from folks who were operating on a wavelength closer to mine. I recalled a visit I’d made in late June with Mister Jalopy’s old friends Eric Thomason and Julia Posey, who run a blog about their urban-homesteading adventure called Ramshackle Solid.
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