The warm weather in November has got me in a gardening mood, so I decided to build a straw bale cold frame with the windows I found earlier this year. I got 10 straw bales at the local feed store, a couple of 10 foot 2 x 6 and I was ready to go. First I arranged five strawbales in a U shape facing south.

This was across some existing beds, so the soil’s already in good shape. My goal is to grow hardy salad greens in here over the winter: cress, sorrel, spinach, lettuce, chard, chickory. I raked out the mulch a little to create a good seed bed.

I bought a thermometer at the local hardware store to hang inside.

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Sunday was a little bit of a bust- I only had til about 10:15, and the whole show was over at noon. I was starting to come down with the flu, but I dragged myself out of bed early to be there at 8:00 for Phil Botwinick’s talk on The Two Faces of Money. Unfortunately, Phil was in a car accident a week before and wasn’t able to make it.

When I walked in the hall first thing I saw Kelly Keck and his partner David. They were excited about Kristin Gillibrand’s appointment to the U.S. Senate, as she was the Congresswoman from their district. Kelly had previously run for State Assembly or Senate and they said Kristin was like their friend and it was weird that she was now a Senator.

Since Phil’s talk was cancelled I instead went to Carol McNeil’s talk on Soil Testing and Soil Survey maps. Brian Boucheron and I sat together, and he updated me on the work he is doing now as an intern in Scottsville. I’m hoping he’ll do some guest posts here this year. Carol’s talk covered simple soil pH tests you can get from Cornell Cooperative Extension, and an awesome online soil survey mapping tool.

Carol also pointed us to Cornell’s online IPM Field Crop guide.
Finally, I attended Mike Kimball (Essex Farm) and the Thorpes (East Aurora) presenting on their experience with their CSA operations. Mike charges $2800 for the first family member, $2400 for the next, $2000 for the third and all kids under 13 fly free. This seems exhorbitant, but keeps the margins up and the no-money liberals away. Although most of the membership are wealthy liberals, they subsidize many other members, about 115 total, who can’t afford the CSA. It’s all you can eat, with some limits on things like baby zucchini and pork chops.

My impression is that these folks work exceptionally hard for no money. Someone said that they felt they were performing community service by being a farmer, and that was the take-away for me.

I attended a very inspiring planning session for a local urban sustainability center. Good mix of young, energetic architects and builders and old-guard veterans, run by Rochester Green Living. I found out (officially) that I’m now a board member of the Center for Sustainable Living, but I managed to keep my volunteer hand down for this one. There seemed to be plenty of enthusiasm and passion for this project without me “adding” my agenda. There were a few friends there, but it was great to meet a whole bunch of new folks including Peter, and John from Ant Hill.

Green building is not necessarily my passion, although I’m certainly interested in learning whatever I can. The meeting was inspirational in that a few people had generated some momentum and attracted energy. I started thinking about how to apply this more locally to my village. I mentioned what little I know about Transition Towns, and what I like about the idea so far is that there’s already a template or framework for proceeding that I could quickly jump on. What’s frustrating about these planning meetings is that it’s difficult to actually move them to implementation. Having a small core group (a “board”) with a brain trust or forum or Zone 2, seems like a workable model to me. Anyway I downloaded the Transition Primer and hope to have a go at it tonight and take with me to Hancock this weekend for Module 4.

A lot has been going on in my life and wanted to share it briefly with you. Two weeks ago I was informed I’d be downsized in November, so much of my focus has shifted to finding a new base salary somewhere before people really start listening to Nouriel Roubini and realize how truly, deeply mulched-and-manured we are. In the face of it all, I’ve been wondering if I shouldn’t really get out of the mental-technical realm and learn something more practical like plumbing or carpentry, which I’m dangerously unskilled at today.

Second, I’ve been teaching the last couple of Permaculture Design Course modules down in Hancock with Andrew Leslie Phillips and Andrew Jones. This is a blast, but also humbling. AJ, for instance, has done projects in Thailand, Jordan and Macedonia and worked for years with the UN. He’s currently consulting with some business people in Florida who are doing some really interesting enzymatic recycling of food wastes into high quality fertilizers.

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We’ve had a couple really light frosts, but this morning we got the first real one. This was a good excuse for me to go out into the garden and see where the frost boundaries are. In general I only had one area away from the house on the southeast edge of the property that looked like it was much affected.

Later, I went for a walk on the Lehigh Valley trail between Clover St. and Quaker Meeting House Rd. I’ve been taking this walk all summer and it’s been very instructive. The trail cuts through a large marsh behind a beaver dam, and there are tons of interesting birds and plants. Today what I noticed more than anything was the leaves raining down off the softwoods- poplar, aspen, plane, sycamore and willow. Since these fall first, it would be interesting to see if there’s some reason for it, in terms of the layering of the detritus in the A0 soil horizon. I also noticed that the aspen leaves have the ability to twirl off a little bit away from the tree stem in no breeze. Again, I have no idea what this means.

I got to teach some parts of the Water chapter down in Hancock this past weekend, particularly around swales, dams and various drain and ditch types. Andrew did some of the other Water and AJ did Soils. We also interviewed Mark and Lisa of Mountain Dell and two teams started design of their property, which has amazing potential. We also watched the Sep Holzer video which was inspiring. Especially, to me, the polycultures he uses. Also learned from one of the “students” that wrens love cabbage worms.They teach me more than I teach them, that’s for sure.

In preparation for teaching I started using a troubleshooting guide in the Designers Manual used to determine mineral deficiencies in soil from plant problems. It’s becoming clear that I need to add lime and green sand to my site, which appears to leach pretty readily.

I’m working on the design of my home landscape and wanted to start doing zone and energy input planning. In looking for a solar chart of my latitude I came across this nifty University of Oregon Sunchart Online tool. Just enter your zip code, time zone and a couple of other parameters and presto! a PDF or PNG of the chart for your area.

I just discovered a link to a press release about Rochester’s “Greenprint” which contains a link to the full report (PDF). I would have liked to have attended this event, but I also want to find out about opportunities to plug in after the fact. A friend who is a strawbale building expert said he met with Mayor Duffy a few weeks ago. So there appears to be some reality behind this. The fact that Hillary was behind the whole thing was encouraging.
The report seems to conflate “green” with alternate energy and energy conservation, which I view as a small subsection of green. Nevertheless there are some 12 specific action items, several of which have to do with training, awareness and education. The ethanol activity in the area is apparent. One of my goals is to push at the crop productivity issue of growing sugar beets instead of corn, so this might be a place to start to make some connections.

I’m often annoyed by projections that start out “given current rates of …” I’ve noticed there are a lot of stupid things we do as a society, which when changed on a large enough scale will start to bring us into alignment with reality once more. I rarely see anyone analyze what the effect of eliminating stupidity would have.

Here’s a quick list I came up with in five minutes.

1. Flushing toilets with drinking water

This clearly makes no sense in a world starving for fresh water. A simple fix is to use gray water for flushing. Run a drainpipe from a hand sink to the toilet reservoir. Here we run up against government bureaucracy and zoning regulations. Even a place as advanced as Berkeley, CA is attacking “gray water guerrillas” for re-plumbing their houses for gray water reuse.

2. Feeding food-grade grain to livestock

Energy calories are lost at every link along the chain from crude oil production to grain production, especially corn, and on to feed for cattle. Every calorie of beef requires many multiples of grain calories, which in turn use many multiples more of high-quality petroleum-based energy. The ROI on this energy is so far negative that no one in their right mind would even consider it. In fact, it is criminal insanity.

3. Feeding food-grade grain to machinery (ethanol)

At best, ethanol produces about 64% of the BTUs produced by gasoline. So does it make sense to grow corn, which is highly petroleum-intensive (as grown today) to lose at least 36%? Again the ROI is ridiculous here. In real estate, this is called an alligator. This doesn’t even start to get into the ethics of growing corn for energy or cattle feed when people are starving everywhere.

BTW, Sugar Beets yields double per acre what corn yields as an ethanol stock.

4. Deforestation, especially for ethanol crops or beef

Forests provide so many services, and are so productive, that there is not one good reason to cut them down. They create oxygen and soil, sequester carbon, filter and store water, maintain genetic diversity, prevent flooding, grow food, timber and medicine. Forests are a resource without a measurable opportunity cost, because the next best use is so far below and less than their use just as they are as to be wholly inaccurate. Therefore, all of our economic activity ought to be geared toward growing and harvesting forests. A friend of mine has just started an investment fund based on purchased forestland throughout the country. He suggested that the Southern Tier, rather than targeting switch grass for ethanol production, should be replanted to black cherry, which is in high demand for woodworking and grows in only a very small area in the world.

5. Depleting energy capital rather than energy income first

This is where I get annoyed with the current analyses, even at the Oil Drum, that show that solar, wind and biofuels will never replace the demand for petroleum-based energy. The point is we are outrageously and extravagantly liquidating the assets in our trust fund, when we could be living very comfortably off the interest.

6. Lawns

The American lawn represents one of the single largest agricultures in the world, the gross product of which is very nearly nothing. It uses more artificial fertilizer than the agriculture of India and requires endless hours of mowing, gasoline-powered equipment and chemical sprays. We could easily grow the bulk of our food by simply replacing our lawns and planting to vegetables, herbs and fruit trees. When we do this we see grass as it is: a weed.

7. Suburbs

Suburbs are clearly a result of car culture. I am not one to believe they need to go away, but need to be re-designed. There is a subdivision in Davis, CA called Village Homes that is built along sustainable lines. It includes a community garden, fruit trees everywhere, extensive swaling for water retention, and sidewalks in the back yards. All new subdivisions and housing developments can be designed and planned to avoid the suburban scourges, too much driving, water runoff from streets and parking lots, over-extended infrastructure and so on. Existing suburbs can be retrofitted to reduce need for driving and replanted to useful small-scale gardens and agriculture. Some reforestation can be started.

8. Seed Patents

I have nothing against intellectual property, but the idea of cornering parts of the food market is just plain wrong. The seed companies ought to be able to patent maybe the specific changes they’ve made to existing stock, but the original DNA belongs to no one.

9. Air Travel

George Monbiot has a lot to say about how destructive air travel is, so I won’t repeat that. High Speed Rail would be a much more efficient and cleaner way to travel long distances. This is practical today but would probably require infrastructure and subsidy on a national level. I’ve always found travel by train to be much more comfortable and enjoyable than air travel anyway. If you’ve flown recently, you might agree.

10. Market Fundamentalism

The Thatcher revolution, under whose cloud we’ve been forced to live for the last 30 years represented an extremist swing away from moderate liberal capitalism, where the excesses of capitalist redistribution of wealth from laborers to owners is moderated by democratic government. We have two hundred and fifty years of history to look at here. The laissez faire extremism of the last generation needs to move back toward the middle.

As I was looking for vacant lots I got a call back from the South Wedge NET officer, Peter Saxe, who was very generous with information and ideas. He recommended I get hooked up with Rochester Roots, and one way to do so was to visit the South Wedge Farmers market, which meets Thursday from 4-8 pm, behind Boulder Coffee at S. Clinton and Alexander.

So I went and met Jan McDonald, the director of Rochester Roots School Garden program and told her I was looking for opportunities to do some Permaculture projects and also to connect with established communities and organizations. She told me about the garden project at Clara Barton School near Corn Hill, and I set up an appointment to go meet her there this morning.

More to follow.

After about two years of hemming and hawing, I finally contacted the City about getting access to a vacant lot to do some experimental gardening and urban farming. I hope to find a lot not too far from my studio and start practicing sustainable design there.

I’ve been considering, also for years, whether to take a true Permaculture Certification course. There’s a two week intensive in Ithaca starting in August, or I could do weekends there all winter (ugh!). Or Yankee Permaculture does their e-mail distance learning course over the winter. None of these courses is cheap ($1000 is the lowest I’ve seen) but the certification would give me the right to teach using the Permaculture moniker.