ecotechnic life

Help Wanted: Mystery Eggplant

2012-01-24T17:22:00.000+02:00

Call them Aubergine. Call them Brinjal. Call them Eggfruit. Call them anything you like, but I love Eggplant. Especially when they're from my own garden! Organically grown, they just taste hugely better than shop-bought.

This year I have 3 varieties growing. Or maybe more... (and that's where I need your help!)

I planted Black Beauty (common locally), Japanese White (which I've grown before and loved) and (new to me) Korean Long Black. The Korean Black has been a start performer. By far the earliest, and really trouble-free. We had the first pickings for supper the other night, and the flavour is beyond my abilities to describe. I don't believe I've ever tasted another Eggplant that can compare!

Trouble is, there's a Fly In The Soup. A couple of the "Korean Black" plants are clearly not. Korean Black, that is. Even quite early in their growth it was apparent that they were not true to type, lacking the darkness of stem and leaf that the rest of their bed-fellows show.

So here presented, for your delectation and my edification, some rogue Eggplants. The seed all came from the same packet as the Korean Black, so I guess there was a mixup by whoever packed the seed for Baker Creek Seeds (the supplier I bought them off). Not a problem for me - I'm equally happy to have some new varieties, even if I don't know just what they are. They may or may not be the same variety, these two rogues. Your guess as good as mine.

There is, of course, a chance that they may have cross-pollinated with the surrounding Korean Blacks, but hey... life's full of random! So I'll be saving their seed separately towards the end of the season (all gods willing!)

Can't wait to taste them!

But if any of you, Dear Readers, are able to put a name to them, please, please drop me a line and let them know.

It's a funny thing... many gardeners are pretty casual about the names of varieties and will casually call a variety something new. Me, I like to honour the gardener who first bred the variety by trying - as best I can - to keep the name given it by that gardener, though they may be a thousand years passed-on!

Summertime

2012-01-22T14:19:00.005+02:00

Summertime, and harvest-time approaches. We are just taking the first Tomatoes and Chiles. A feeling of satisfaction and reward, a sense of achievement and relief.

Patent pending
Bird-Scarer.
All rights reversed.

What the birds are leaving for us!

Little bastards are very active... The main pests are the Mousebirds and a large and unruly flock of Finches. The Finches demolished the sunflowers I was growing for Chicken food, and have taken to eating the seed out of Tomatoes that the Mousebirds have opened up for them.

In an attempt to create some "ScareAllBirds"1 I made a few CD-mobiles and have strung them up around the veg patch. We'll see how well they work. Personally I am skeptical.

Frankly, none of the gardening books I have talk about the real problems I see in the garden. They bang on about Blights and Aphids, Beetles and Caterpillars, but not one of them mentions Bushbuck (which have played havoc with the Tomatoes and Chiles this season) or Mousebirds! Time for a new gardening book, maybe?

Software Mobile?

[1] We don't really have much trouble with Crows. They occasionally try to catch young Chicks; seldom succeed. I can't really see how a Scarecrow would be much use against the Crows or the Mousebirds...

The Great GMO Scam

2012-01-12T17:34:00.000+02:00

I am assuming that we all understand roughly the same thing when I speak in abbreviated fashion about Genetically Modified Organisms -- particularly GMO food plants. Some people are tempted to sidetrack the conversation into irrelevancies with arguments like, "All our food crops are genetically modified, anyway, because we've been selectively breeding them for thousands of years." While true, it is either foolish misdirection, or deliberate obfuscation of the crucial differences between conventional genetic evolution (whether consciously directed by ourselves, or whether the result of natural evolutionary pressures) and the deliberate introduction, removal or rearrangement of isolated snippets of genetic material into otherwise-unrelated gene sequences using advanced cellular "surgery". Those who deliberately obfuscate this point clearly have an agenda.

I am no techno-luddite. I am not opposed to improving the yields, flavours, nutrition or agronomic properties of the 5 Fs1 that constitute our reasons for farming. Quite the opposite.

Hell, we've been doing this stuff for thousands of years, as witness the amazing variety of delicious and nutritious heirloom varieties we still have access to3. I am actively engaged in various small projects to try and cultivate new veg varieties using traditional methods. So its not progress per se that worries me, but I am deeply bothered by the whole pro-GMO lobby and its bought politicians.

In short, I think that the whole GMO programme is (at best) stupid. (At worst it is an out and out con job conceived and executed by greedy, lying bandits.)

Parts of the GMO Proposition might even be dangerous, as some GMO opponents argue. Certainly the effects of introducing essentially alien genetic material into our life-support systems largely untested seems a bit foolish and short-sighted, at best. But frankly I am spectacularly uninterested in whether we humans do actually endanger ourselves by introducing weird genetic combinations into our food-supply. We will reap as we sow.

I am equally pretty unworried by the possibility that a Tomato might harbour Cow genes to the detriment of my (vegetarian) karma. I do understand those arguments. They may have substantial merit. But they interest me not. They are Other Peoples' Problems.

I am concerned by the PR schmaltz spread by the pro-GM lobby. At best it is yet another manifestation of nothing more nor less than the usual corporate self-serving, soul-sucking greed, greed and more greed. At worst it fuels a smokescreen that blinds people to the true dangers of this technology, that suffocates the honest debate, thoughtful challenges and many very serious questions we should be asking about GMO crops under a blanket of misdirection, deceit, ad hominem denunciation, pseudo-answers and frequently, outright lies.

The Central Problem Of GMO is this: Evolution.

Life on this planet evolves4. As the energy flows impacting any ecosystem change – be they changes in rainfall, solar-energy infall, atmospheric CO2 concentrations, trace elements or key nutrients,... just anything, in fact – so the ecosystem changes, adapts to the new reality. And that means that the organisms within ecosystems are in a constant and ongoing state of flux, genes ever dancing and gyring to adapt to changes. Life has been doing this for something like 3.5 billion years – basically ever since the Earth got cool enough for any life forms to exist.

We're really very, very good at evolving. All of us Earthicans! We're all evolution Badasses of the highest capability.

To put it another way, the Central Problem Of GMO is this: It Cannot Possibly Work.

Let's take a quick look at some of the things we're told that "genetically-modified" crops are going to really great for:

Pest- and disease-resistance. This has really been the main song sung by the pro-GM lobby so far. We're told that by growing these "genetically enhanced" crops we won't have to use as much toxic pesticide, fungicide, herbicide as we5 currently do, "So really, choosing GMO crops are a very Green thing to do!"
Resistance to agrichemicals design to kill off pests, competitors or diseases that prey on our crops.
We can add Antibiotics/Vitamins/Trace elements to our food supply, thereby enhancing peoples' health and wellbeing at a very tiny cost. Good! I have no objection to that, as long as people have a clear and informed choice in the matter. That means Food Labelling. However, I think there's likely to be some unexpected fallout...
And the latest in a desperate gambit to keep those GMO profits rolling in... GMO crops can be engineered6 to be drought resistant, so that we don't have to worry so much about rapid global climate change.

The first two are pretty closely related. In both cases the germplasm of a crop-plant is modified to impart a resistance to environmental pressures. In both cases the outcome is very highly predictable... evolution happens.

In the first case the pests and diseases that the genetically-modified variety is supposed to resist evolve their way past the newly-injected defences, bringing the whole affair back to its starting point: a crop plant that no longer has resistances to those pests and diseases.

In the second case it is extremely likely that the pests/diseases that we're spraying against will out-evolve the agrichemicals involved. Just as before, we're soon back to square one.

The last two arguments might have some merit, except that we are perfectly able to introduce the necessary nutrients and breed drought-resistance into our crops by a combination of conventional breeding practice and sound soil-management. (Read: Organic cultivation.) At no cost at all. I am working on drought -resistant Tomatoes and Potatoes right now.

I don't wish to delve too deeply into the issues around the transfer of modified genetic material into the wild. It happens. That is well documented. And unscrupulous, greedy corporate blood-suckers want (and, so far, too frequently succeed) at gouging money from unsuspecting farmers who have been the unwilling recipients of this alien germplasm. Suffice to point out that Roundup-Ready weeds are well documented as wild plants. So the Genetically Modified genes have escaped into the wild, with no telling what the consequences might be. Stupid, stupid, stupid!

Now I don't believe that microbiologists are stupid people. Quite the contrary. It is my experience that they are highly intelligent, thoughtful people. So I greatly doubt that they are unaware of this Fact Of Evolution. I'm pretty sure they know that the rest of the ecosystem is going to evolve around the manipulated organisms introduced into it. There is no other possibility. In part I believe that scientists don't really have a very good idea, yet, of just how quickly evolution happens. We are just beginning to find out. It seems that resistances show up in as short a time as 3 or 4 growing seasons! Much faster than anyone expected.

Interestingly, the pro-GMO lobby somehow altogether fails to mention that their products are certain to be out-evolved in short order. In other words, the useful lifespan of such a product – the timespan for which it is likely to be effective for the purpose claimed by its makers – is really quite short. After which we'll need to do something else to "combat" the "hostile" predators, pests and diseases that seek to enjoy their portion of our crops. I'm pretty sure I know what the agri-industrialists are likely to propose... More and newer GMO crops, allowing us to use new and stronger chemical cocktails in the "War on Bugs".

And so another Arms Race chases its own tail...

In short, I don't believe that the GMO industry is telling the full story. And why would they, since the full story doesn't paint a picture that leads inexorably to Perpetual Profit. I would guess that the Techies (the scientists involved) are simply not allowed a voice by their corporate overlords, since the truth is so much more complex and nuanced than the Marketing Department would like. So much more ambiguous and uncertain.

In even shorter, the GMO producers are misleading everybody. They're lying.

They're prepared to risk unpredictable (possibly lethal) consequences on the ecosystems we depend upon for life, all in the name of This Quarter's Profits.

[1] Food, fodder, fibre2, fuel, pharma(ceuticals).

[2] And by "fibre" I also mean "framework" material that we use for building... OK, so maybe I should make it "The 6 Fs". You tell me.

[3] ...despite the best recent efforts of the monopolistic seed kakistopoly.

[4] Sorry, creationists/intelligent-design proponents, you'll have to seek elsewhere than this blog for a sympathetic hearing or equal consideration.

[5] For some value of "we". Reality is that the bulk of humanity is fed by modern factory farming methods. We pro-organic growers are still a splinter minority.

[6] And that really is "engineered" as opposed to "bred"...

Compost

2012-01-05T11:54:00.000+02:00

I've been busy writing and writing... a long writeup on Compost Making for the website, and a blog-post on why I believe the whole GMO program is no more than a scam by a bunch greedy bastards. Coming soon...

While you wait for me to finish up, you might enjoy this video I ran across whilst checking on some composting... err... material?

Brilliant!

Tear Gas Will Solve the World's Problems?

2011-12-02T17:20:00.001+02:00

Unbelievable! Offered without further comment.

US export industry alive and well: Egypt imports 21 tons of tear gas from the US http://bit.ly/vAOs5s

Spring Update

2011-11-04T17:06:00.000+02:00

Just as suddenly as it started, Busy Season is over. At least until harvest time. All the veggie beds that needed preparing are prepared, most of them already occupied by healthy young plants, and just a few gaps waiting for seed-tray occupants to demand their permanent home.
Read more »

Dear DuPont, You're Not Welcome, Here.

2011-10-16T12:49:00.005+02:00

In some slightly good news... South Africa's Competition Commission has blocked the purchase of local seed company Pannar by Pioneer Hi-Bred, a division of the US-based chemical giant, DuPont. Thank goodness for small mercies. The Competition Commission has said that they're release their full report soon, but that the deal was turned down because it would effectively reduce the number of large-scale Maize seed suppliers from 3 to 2.

Not that Pannar is any kind of beneficent angel. They're a large seed company in their own right – the largest in Africa, and as equally enchanted with the idea of controlling seed supplies as any of their US and European compatriots in crime.

Remember that Maize is SA's staple crop, so the Competition Commission's reasoning looks like sound to me. Looks like they're one of the few parts of the kakistocracy actually doing the job they're supposed to be doing, and doing it comptently!

It would be good would be to have an even wider range of suppliers in this country, but the laws around seed-sales are complicated, convoluted, restrictive and blatantly favour the entrenched big players.

Everything's Springing

2011-10-02T14:34:00.000+02:00

A Spring Update

Some weeks ago, I suddenly woke up to the fact that it's Spring planting time, and I'd already missed my first-planting window by a week. Time to get busy!

Seed benches in their new home in the old Banana circle.
Closer to hand means better managed.

Much sowing of seed in seed-trays ensued. Honesty compels me to confess that I think this is the best Spring germination I've seen – at least in many years! Perhaps being a week late wasn't such a bad thing, after all. Tomatoes and Chiles are mostly up, and some of them – notably Brandywine, Purple Russian and Black Cherry – are almost ready for transplanting into their permanent homes already. Purple Russian and Black Cherry were substantially drought-hardy and very prolific for me on their first trial-run last year, so I'm looking forward to them. Lime Green Salad were doing well until a snail got into the seed-tray, so I've replanted them. I ran some germination tests on my Lettuce seed collection, and, sadly, most varieties are toast. I'm down to about 6 or 8 varieties which I've made sowings of and will grow up for seed.

This tray's for Dan, to wish him strength in his time of trial.
All varieties in the tray were sent to me by Dan and Val.

The major challenge has been getting beds prepared in time. With 3 seasons of drought behind us, the veggie garden has been sorely neglected. Last year, particularly, I found it just too depressing to even venture out into the wasteland that was supposed to be a good part of our food supply. That means that the weeds and Kikuyu had just about taken over completely, and clearing beds has been quite a Herculean task. Then, too, the lack of water until May means that I have almost no compost prepared. Luckily, our good neighbour D'vorah came to the rescue with half a dozen bags of horse-shit (in varying stages of decomposition and quality.) I've reserved the manure for those beds that needed it most – mainly the Tomato, Chile and Cabbage beds. The legumes can get by with just the bit of very old compost I did have - clearly not much in the way of nutrients, but still useful for the organic content.

Despite a few months of good rains, September has been even drier than usual, though it is, by my records, our lowest-rainfall month through the year. The few miserable dribbles of rain were little showers of 1 and 2 millimetres that really do more harm than good. At least we go into the season with full dams, so, even if the usual October/November deluges fail to materialise, we should still be OK for water until about Jan/Feb.

We have several new Tomato varieties to trial this year - varieties that have not survived the trials of years past. Along with them are several new Bean varieties:

Greek "Big Beans" (brought back from Greece by my parents from their trip there last year) I don't know anything about them - not even their growth habit, though I've guessed they're a bush variety. They're a lovely tasting, large, white bean. Excellent eating! (And I eat a hell of a lot of beans!)

Purple Podded Pole Bean (from Baker Creek seeds.) In general I am finding that pole beans are so much more productive per unit-area than bush types, that, if I can spare the poles and the energy to attend to them, I prefer them.

Papa de Rola (also from Baker Creek.) Their picture just looks so awesome I had to try them!

Cannelini Beans acquired from the local Fruit & Veg store, so I'm just trusting and hoping that they haven't been irradiated or anything stupid like that. Still to be planted, since I must get off by duff and clear another couple of beds.

But that doesn't mean I neglect some of my old, bulk-quantity standbys...

A prettier sight you've seldom seen...
Hopi Black beans emerging just 5 days after sowing.

Hopi Black Beans are my main staple bean crop. They are tasty, fast cooking, prolific and trouble-free, producing a good crop even in total drought. I basically stick the seed into the ground – usually the poorest bed I have, perhaps with a dusting of lime and bonemeal, trusting them to just get on with things – and then neglect them completely until they've dried out and are ready to be threshed. And they always do just Get On With It! Even last year, when they received not a single drop of irrigation water – not even after sowing – they produced a reasonable crop. This year I watered them exactly once, a couple of days after sowing, and they were showing their heads after less than a week. The only bare patches in the bed are two spots where the Chickens decided to make dust baths.

Rattlesnake are a fine, dual-purpose, pole bean, given to me by my good friend Franz. They're a brilliantly prolific and flavoursome green-bean, quite stringless when young, and make a fine dried bean if they get too big.

If there's time I'll also have to make space for Dragon's Lingerie - another of my staples, but, to be honest, I'm not sure where I'll find space, since I do like to grow at least a whole bed-full.

I didn't have time to prepare a bed specially for Squashes, but Inspiration struck! I had a good pile of garden-slash that needed burning - dead Banana leaves, rotten support sticks, old bits of wooden ladder long since fallen into ruin, tree prunings from the fruit trees... so I piled it all up amidst the worst of the Kikuyu and set it all alight. A roaring great bonfire, and I was left with a well-ashed, clear patch of Kikuyu-free ground. Dug it up, turned the ash in along with several shovels-full of composted manure, and made a nice Squashie mound. In the middle I've put some Lemon Cucumber together with Sunflowers (labelled "Parrot Food" at the local agri) in the hopes that the Sunflowers will provide good-enough stakes for the Cucumbers to climb. Around the edges of the mound I've put Table Queen (a favourite of mine) squash, a couple of Japanese pumpkin varieties that I found at the local Fruit & Veg store some years back (I'm hoping, possibly in vain, that the seed is still viable, since it's pretty old by now), and Waltham – a Butternut variety. I know it sounds like a lot, but it's quite a big mound, and I'll thin the plants to one or two of each in the unlikely event that too many of them germinate. Though the way this Spring is going so far, they will all come up!

I'm also planning another Squashie/Pumpkin mound. Maybe this afternoon, since there's rain forecast for tonight and tomorrow.

And I haven't even mentioned the Beets, saladings, Snow Peas, Endives, Swiss Chard, Giant Garlic, Golden Beet seed setup, Dill, Fennels,...

It's been a really busy Spring, and I'm really happy to be back in the garden.

Life and Death Update

2011-09-28T16:29:00.000+02:00

A happy surprise, this morning: As I went to let our Two Chicken Flock out of their house this morning, I was greeted by another little blonde hen! Evidently she's been sleeping rough somewhere, and escaped the Ratel's attention.

When there were four roosters she was getting a really hard time from them. Roosters at the teenager stage are - just like their human counterparts - randy little wosnames, and with too many in the flock, they keep trying to prove their manliness... errr... male-chickenness... to one another, and the hens suffer from what might best be termed Overattention. So this little hen probably went off to sleep in a convenient bush to escape all the bonking, and has been sleeping there ever since. Perhaps she'll rejoin the other two, now that the pressure's off.

Nice... A 50% increase in the flock for no effort!

Life and Death

2011-09-23T15:55:00.000+02:00

Warning: Graphic images ahead. Squeamish people should leave now.

Picture courtesy of Wikipedia.

A visit by a neighbourhood Ratel (a.k.a. Honey Badger, though they're not related to Badgers at all) has dealt a severe blow to our status as Chicken growers and breeders. It's been quite a long while since the last time a Ratel managed to get in to the Chickens, but the recent visit from our other wild visitor - a Caracal - should have given me ample warning that our chook-house security needed attention. I am a bad and neglectful human person.

The night before last I was woken at about 10:30 by a tremendous bumping and banging, squawking and flapping from the chicken-house. Leapt out of bed, grabbed a light and rushed out to find a full-grown Ratel sitting in the midst of the flock. I opened the door and Ratel leapt out and vanished into the night, chased by an overenthusiastic Keira dog.

It was mayhem in there. Dead chickens all over the floor. Still, not much I could do in the dark, so I shut all up and went back to bed, only to be roused again half an hour later! Sure enough, the Ratel was back in the chook house, and, obviously spooked by the strong light destroying its night-vision, spitting and hissing at me. These animals are not to be trifled with, so I kept a wide berth as I opened the door to let it out. Utter chaos inside.

Next morning revealed the full extent of the damage.

Over the past several months we have lost quite a few chickens to neighbourhood dogs. It seems that non-permanent residents are incompetent to take responsibility for controlling their dogs in a farming area where livestock of all sorts abound. Stock loss to dogs - including feral dogs - is a significant problem for all the farmers in the area, and many of them have a zero-tolerance, shoot-on-sight policy for unknown dogs on their land. As a result, our flock numbers were way down to only 4 hens and 4 roosters.

Our prized young rooster, horribly mutilated
by the Ratel's attack. I dispatched him quickly
and cleanly. He is tonight's supper.

Now we're down to 2 chickens. Just one rooster and a hen. Very sadly, the one young rooster, who we had earmarked as breeding stock, was severely damaged by the Ratel, and I had no option but to put him out of his pain. The Ratel had ripped the entire front of his face off, including his beak.

The other young rooster seemed, at first, to have some chance of recovery, but on closer examination I found that he was unable to breathe properly, could not drink water, and his mouth was filled with dried blood. I suspect that his tongue was gone.

Another hen I found alive, but with both eyes scratched out. Later inspection showed that her body had been badly torn in places, too.

This poor dear had had both eyes scratched
out, so there's no chance of her surviving.

I had the unpleasant responsibility, yesterday morning, of killing them all. Another rooster and a hen are simply... gone. I presume and hope that at least the Ratel ate them. What I cannot comprehend is the wanton destructiveness of Ratels. I can easily understand - and sympathise with - animals taking our livestock for food, but the sheer killing of everything that moves is beyond me. Perhaps an animal behaviourist could explain it to me.

The remaining rooster is reasonably hale and well, with only slight damage to his comb. He's looking a bit lost, though, wondering where the hell all his hens have got to.

I spent the rest of yesterday fixing the floor of the chicken house so that nothing can get in (that way) again. Until the next time...

Weeds in Pathways

2011-09-15T17:36:00.000+02:00

Patrick has written an interesting post about keeping gravel pathways clear of weeds by using a weed-burner. I think this is an excellent idea! I use a small blowtorch for periodic debugging of the Chook House, preferring to scorch the inside surfaces and roosts rather than use noxious poisons. I confess it has never occurred to me to use it to get rid of weeds. I'm slow, I know...

And weeds, in the veggie-garden paths, have been a perennial bugbear forever.

A year or so ago I had an inspiration for "dealing" with the pathway weeds. A method that differs quite radically from Patrick's strategy, approaching the problem from an entirely different angle. But, in fairness, our circumstances and constraints are completely different. I am not working in a community garden, so I don't have to deal with common pathways, nor with rules about how I may run my garden! Nobody comes to give me dirty looks if I neglect the weeding of pathways!

Nor are my pathways gravelled. I shudder at the thought, since I am wont to wander about the place in my bare feet (and, frequently, barefoot in my head, too) and gravel is - along with stone chips - one of the nastiest, most barefoot-unfriendly things you can do to the world. Don't.

I freely admit that I had not thought much of my solution to the weed-in-path problem, until Patrick's post made me re-look at it and realise that, perhaps, it is quite a novel idea for some people.

For years I fought the weeds. Sans gravel, this was mostly achieved with a conventional push-hoe, and took me about 15 minutes per pathway. But sometimes it got neglected, and then it ended up taking a bit longer. Especially in Winter, when the Winter grasses take hold with their strong, tough, bushy roots. Then it takes quite a lot more energy. Until my epiphany...

Pennyroyal clumps planted into newly-weeded
pathway. Clumps derive from the bits weeded
out of veggie beds. The whole process is a little
slow to start with, but that's the nature of all
exponential growth systems!

I realised that, outside of metalling the pathways - a concept I dislike - weeds were always going to infest the paths! Given that something always wants to grow in the bare-soil paths, perhaps I'd be better off planting something more manageable and less rampant than the usual motley collection of weeds.

So, for the past year or so, I've been planting and expanding Pennyroyal as my preferred Pathway Plant Of Choice. It mostly keeps the weeds out once established. It grows fairly slowly and is shallow-rooted, so the bits that do grow into the veggie beds themselves are easily sliced out with the spade. It smells great as you walk around the garden, and it's kind to bare feet!

The only downside of Pennyroyal Pathways that I've come across is that, when the Pennyroyal wants to flower, it grows loads of long tendrilly flower-stalks, and the leaf-mat tends to become a bit sparse and thin. This is not a big deal for me, since the rest of the year it presents a dense, and above all weed-resistant, pathway covering.

All win!

Lynx Bait

2011-07-11T13:23:00.001+02:00

An uninvited visitor in the night helps out.

Wild Mushrooms for Ecosystem Development

2011-07-06T15:02:00.000+02:00

Found in a tucked-away corner of the garden, just near the cottage...

Mushroom Culture Step 2

2011-07-02T12:41:00.003+02:00

Shiitake mycelium in a culture
jar, cloned from a mushroom.

Our Mushroom-growing experiment progresses well, if a little slower than expected. In the first step we cloned some Shiitake cells into several Malt-nutrified agar vessels. Not unexpectedly, given the crude nature of our lab setup, some of those became infected with other, unwanted organisms and had to be tossed out. There remained two jars of clean, healthy mycelium - the "root" structure of fungi. The next stage in growing Mushrooms is to bulk these up into much larger volumes.

This is their story.

Read more »

What is Self-Sufficiency

2011-06-26T17:09:00.002+02:00

Self-sufficiency turns out to be a profoundly political choice.

What is self-sufficiency?

Nailing down a coherent answer to this question is proving much more difficult than I anticipated. In some ways it is easier to describe some things that self-sufficiency is not. It is not, really, truly, the arduous work of keeping yourself fed, watered and shod all by yourself. The term is loaded and deceptive.
Read more »

Shrooms

2011-06-20T17:22:00.001+02:00

Yes, its that time of year, and there's been good rain.

My Dams Runneth Over

2011-06-09T09:39:00.000+02:00

After a record May rainfall – 230% above average for May in the time I've been keeping records – we were really happy to see water in our dams after years of seeing nothing but sun-baked mud. The song of Frogs returned to lull us to sleep.

Even though its hopelessly too late in the season, I optimistically sowed some of the veggie beds with Carrots, Swiss Chard, Garlic, some Barley,... Funny how a little water affects one's emotions.

House dam. Overflow foreground right.

Whenever the district council get around to sending a grader to maintain our little road, we know that rain is on its way. It's the surest rain dance we know, and infinitely more reliable a predictor than the weather forecast experts. On Monday the road got graded. On Tuesday evening it started to rain at about 6p.m. And didn't stop a steady, solid downpour, until 6 the next morning. 74mm overnight! Both our dams are overflowing gently – a thing we've not seen in perhaps 5 years, and the rainfall already exceeds the average for June (though not the mean) despite being less than one third of the way through the month.

Bottom dam (and Keira, a bit mystified by all this water.)

The first question everybody asks is, "So does this mean the drought is broken, then?" And the answer is a predictable, "Maybe."

The rain we've experience over the past month is still way off normal. The point is not "drought or not drought". The point is not "too little water vs. plenty of water vs. too much water".

The point is "abnormal weather patterns" – unpredictability. The most reliable prediction climate scientists can make is that, as we humans stress the climate further, we can expect to experience a greater number of extreme weather events, more extreme weather of greater severity. I think that our own experiences seems to bear this out. Even though the recent rain does not really count as a "severe" weather event it is certainly poking its head well up above the "norms"¹.

Even as I write the rain is falling so hard that we can barely hear ourselves shout, as it beats down on our metal roof... and we're very happy to have the water visiting again.

[1] Whatever "norm" means in relation to weather. The very notion of climate is, itself, no more than a mathematical fiction.

What's In A Name

2011-06-08T11:25:00.002+02:00

You've probably already noticed that, not only has the blog look and platform changed, but now its name has changed, too!

This is a change I've made with some trepidation and fear. After all, quite a lot of people find it by searching for Plan Be. On the other hand a hell of a lot of those people are looking for abortion drugs. The name "Plan Be" was intended to inspire an aura of Zen – our plan to "just be". It never worked particularly well, I feel.

So, heart in mouth, it's changed. Hopefully the new name reflects better the agenda I'm trying to advance through the farm website and this blog.

Blog Update

2011-06-06T16:14:00.002+02:00

Well, I have finally finished transferring (almost) all of the articles from my old blogging platform to this new, Blogger-hosted, incarnation. I had to copy the articles by hand – a tedious exercise. The old blog platform lacked any way to automatically export and translate the content – just one of the many deficiencies that drove me away from the Blojsom platform, no matter the pain and tedium involved in getting rid of it. This means that I also had to translate internal links – links from one Plan Be article to others – so I may easily have missed some. I'd appreciate help from you all on this: Please let me know if you come across any broken links, links to the old (http://mikro2nd.net/blog/planb/) blog setup, missing pictures, misformatting, or just plain anything that looks wrong to you.

Unfortunately, due to this "lack of export" functionality, I was not able to transfer blog comments over intact. This is a sadness to me, since so many of you have contributed insightful and helpful comments over the years that have helped shape my writing and move it forward. I do have all that content backed up, so it's not lost forever, and, if I ever do find a way to get those into Blogger – properly attributed – I can and will do so.

Finally I'm looking forward to writing, once again. And there is certainly plenty we have to get caught-up on. I have to let you know how the Mushroom-cloning experiment is going -- we're about to take the next big step tomorrow. There's brews to write up, and even some drought news (we've had a bunch of great rain, and the dams even have water again!) so there's gardening happening, even though it's probably too late in the season to hope for much success.

And finally lots of plans to get deeper into the whole Self-Sufficiency thing... the why's and wherefore's, and hopefully some more of the How-To's, too.

Mushroom Cloning Update

2011-05-27T17:11:00.002+02:00

The mushroom culturing experiment is going well, though not as well as I had hoped. Still, lessons learned...

I had to chuck out three of the culture jars, as they were infected. Two of them were a sadness, because the mushroom fragments implanted in them had taken hold really well, and the mycelium was growing nicely. Alongside a green and a black mold, respectively. So out they went!

Of the remaining five jars, one has failed to do anything. No infections, but no signs of growth, either. I suspect I may have poked the bit of mushroom too deep into the agar medium. The other four have mycelium growing, with varying degrees of vigour. Obviously I will favour the most vigorous grower when it comes time (in a week or so) to expand them up into grain growing media. The mycelia are beautiful, and exactly as described in my reference. More updates as they develop...

Brewery Mods - Part 1

2011-05-24T15:33:00.002+02:00

First steps in altering to the design of the brewery...

I want to move to a system of mostly hard-pipes between the brewing vessels. I find the plastic pipes, even though of food grade, are a pain to keep sanitary. A hard-pipe system will, I feel, also make it easier to streamline my brewing days, allowing me to brew a little more hands-off than the current setup. Right now I have to hand-sparge, and, as I gain more experience, I find I am wanting longer sparges, longer recirculations, longer mashes,... well, you get the idea. It seems to me that good beer wants an unhurried approach, gentle and considerate handling. And standing holding a hose over a hurricane-strength flame is not conducive to a meditational brewing mind.

Another long-standing source of irritation to me has been the amount of wort that the system "holds on to" and is lost to fermentation as a result. The old setup has a lot of dead space. Pipework below the vessels where liquid simply sits, and that my puny little pump cannot remove (because it cannot self-prime nor pump air.)

The deal-maker is those horrible galvanised bits of pipework I used in the original design. After more than a year of use, they're getting pretty manky inside, and, even though this is the hot-side of the brewery (meaning that sanitation is not an overwhelming concern, because the wort gets boiled for at least an hour after all the nastiness, ensuring that any nasty bugs that might be in the wort at that stage get killed) I would still like everything a bit more sanitary. And I worry about Zinc and Iron disolving into my wort.

So all that nastiness is solved by replacing the inlet side of the pump, this time using Copper fittings. (Click through the pictures for larger images and more photos.)

As an aside, I have much more significant changes in store for the brewery, including the addition of a proper sparge-arm, and plumbing so that I can recirculate the mash through the kettle, thus enabling more sophisticated multi-step mashes. It has proven to be quite a challenge to design the changes in small steps that build upon one another, hopefully without throwing away too many bits and pieces. Copper pipe and brass couplings are hellishly expensive!

I believe I have managed successfully for Step 1, at least. The first step was putting together the new inlet system so that the existing mashtun and hot-liquor tank can continue to be used unchanged.

As you can see from the photo, much less dead space below the pump. I have also shifted the pump so that it is placed much closer to the bottom of the mashtun. The limitation, here, is that the outlet of the pump has to be below the lowest water level, as the pump is prone to airlocks and is unable to expell the air by itself. Liquid must fully prime the pump otherwise it just doesn't work.

Needless to say, given my superlative plumbing skills, I had a leak on one side of the elbow... So the whole caboodle had to come off the pump again, and the cause of the trouble diagnosed. The lip of one of the pipes was ever-so-slightly buckled, so no snug fit inside the elbow. PTFE tape to the rescue. One of my Life Mottos: There are no problems that cannot be solved using sufficient Plumbing Tape.

The final picture shows the newly-plumbed pump in place between the mashtun supports. (Picture is looking straight down from above – a "brewer's eye view".) Inlet from the HLT coming in from the right, outlet to the left, and inlet from the Mashtun from "above". A safety shroud has been fitted over the electrical terminals – that little red dot on the upper-left corner of the pump. I've tested, and everything seems to be working again, just in time for a brew-day tomorrow. I'll be having a go at a Belgian Dubbel, I believe...

Happy International Biodiversity Day

2011-05-22T15:20:00.006+02:00

In which we embark on a new venture in Mycology

Shiitake mycelium, Day 2.

Funny thing is, the mainstream western press seems to have missed IBD completely. I guess the UN's announcement that today¹(22 May) is International Biological Diversity Day was lost in the noise of all those species extinctions directly resulting from man-made global climate change. (Deny it all you like, the evidence is pretty compelling: we are the cause of global climate change.)

Serendipitously we started a new project last Thursday that can only help – in its own tiny way – to bolster our local ecosystems' robustness. We have started a Mushroom growing project.

Buoyed on by my success in culturing brewing yeasts (despite the significant limitiations of my "lab" setup) I decided to have a go at tissue culturing Mushrooms. The result you can see for yourself... the little grey smudge in the middle of the jar is (hopefully) the mycelium of Shiitake mushrooms-to-be. The other smaller greyish smudges towards the right of the jar are really dings in the agar medium where I cooled the knife prior to excising a tiny bit of flesh from a reasonably fresh mushroom prior to placing it on the agar substrate.

See, it's all part of a bigger permaculture-ish picture... three threads coming together...

Thread One: I've read, watched and heard quite a lot about "Hugelkultur" lately, mostly as evangelised by Paul Wheaton over at permies.com. I like the way that Sepp Holtzer, the guy who has been practising and working on this technique, refuses to get pigeonholed as "doing permaculture", thereby dodging all the Permaculture Dogma that tends to go along with Permaculture True Acolytes. I like his style so well that I think I'm going to steal it... The hugelkulture idea seems reasonable to me, especially since I daily observe decaying tree trunks and logs in the forests and plantations that surround our home, and it is blatantly obvious that the decaying wood serves as an effective water and nutrient reservoir. Then, too, I have long noticed that veggie beds that host a vigorous and healthy fungal life also host the healthiest and quickest-growing veggies.

Thread Two: Reading Paul Stamets' ideas for myco-permaculture, I've been researching mushroom varieties that would (hopefully!) work well in guilds and successions. Based on my reading in Stamet's excellent "Growing Gourmet and Medicinal Mushrooms", I chose Shiitake for my first mushroom-cloning attempt. Shiitake should grow easily on the growth media most available to us – Pine logs, chips and shavings. The Shiitakes will play their part in decomposing the wood substrate, which should (if my understanding of the theory is not too broken) then be quite well suited, with the addition of compost and soil, to growing other mushroom varieties – probably Portobello (button) mushrooms, but maybe some other variety between them and the Shiitake. After that I should be able to grow veggies in the remaining bed.

Thread Three: I've been doing some work on modifying the brewery² (described here, here, here and here), not to mention brewing up a storm. So I am ending up with lots of spent grain remains from brew sessions. A 40litre batch of beer produces around 25 or 30kg (wet weight) of bran containing some weak sugars in solution, cooked grain kernels, and a bit of starch left unmodified by the brewing process. Ideal stuff for growing mycelium! Then, too, yeast is just another fungus, and has, indeed, been used in experimental trials for sterilising/pasteurising mushroom growing media. A win all ways!

Convergence

So I thought to myself, "Why wait for several years for a hugelkultur bed to gain a natural mycosystem? Why not hurry things along?" And thus was born my mycosphere garden-bed idea... (or is that a "Mike-o-sphere"?)

I plan to build some beds using pine logs, wood chips, shavings,... whatever I can lay my hands on cheap (read: free) and in abundance. These beds will be innoculated with (initially) Shiitake mycelium, and hopefully we will, in the fullness of time, harvest mushrooms. The Shiitake will be followed by further mushrooms in some sort of yet-to-be-determined sequence, thereby rendering the woody core of the bed quite well decomposed. After that I will convert the bed to conventional veggie production. The mushroom growing plays along extremely well with the brewery, and both endeavours demand a small amount of lab culturing, which has been fun to learn about. And, if the Mike-o-sphere beds work out anything like conventional Hugelkultur beds, I should be able to reduce the brittleness of our water-dependence in the garden, because, although the Offialdom Of The Kakistocracy no longer consider us to be a drought area, and. although we have experienced over 50% above average rainfall for May, we are none too convinced that the drought is truly over.

The Garden Route truly is a canary in the coalmine for global climate change...

We simply have to Adapt Or Dye.

[1] I guess the UN must have missed noticing that they were scheduling IBD day for the day after The Rapture. Oops.
[2] I'll write about the brewery redesign soon.

Russian Circles

2011-05-19T09:36:00.001+02:00

Loving a new discovery, a Chicago-based band (according to Wikipedia) called Russian Circles. Very prog-rock instrumental (no vocals) at times has me thinking of Penguin Cafe Orchestra, other times of early Pink Floyd, occasional flashes of Vangelis in grandeur, a certain amount of Prog Metal feel, but mainly a sound very much their own.

Would love to see Russian Circles live!

Welcome to the reincarnated "plan be"

2011-05-16T12:42:00.000+02:00

The plan is to be a little less absent from blogging...

I've been really unhappy with the old blogging platform for several years, now, but, in the absence of any good, automated way to convert all my old posts (and your many comments, dear readers) to the format of Blogger I've not been able to work up the psychic energy for the task of moving the data by hand. However my antipathy for Blojsom (the old blog software) grew and grew and eventually became a significant factor in me avoiding blogging altogether. And that's Not Good!

The old "plan be" blog is now officially retired. I'll keep it running until I finish migrating the old content over (which may never happen – be warned!)
So I decided to simply stop blogging on the old blog, and just get on with it, blogging on the new platform. Welcome! You've probably noticed that the blog is now under a new URL, and so are the RSS/Atom feeds. Update your bookmarks and feed-readers!

I may,... eventually,... someday... get around to handraulically moving the historical content over to here and shutting down the old blog platform, but don't put money on it happening soon.

Yay, Rain!

2011-03-17T14:31:00.011+02:00

At last... just when we thought the drought was coming back.

Now I'd best get on with Winter plantings of Garlic, Onions and Cabbage...