This is an extremely powerful video and Andrew Faust absolutely speaks for me

OCCUPY THE ECONOMY : Andrew Faust – Permaculture – OWS from TerraVisus on Vimeo.

Andrew Faust Permaculture Designer: HomeBiome.com
Costa Boutsikaris Filmmaker: TerraVisus.com

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This October surprise snow storm dump 2 feet of wet clingy snow on the northeast and particularly on us. The
Night of the storm our goat shed collapsed and crushed/trapped one of our goats.

We found her weakly crying and slipping away. We pulled her out from under tons of shed and snow – was pushed down into muck. We rolled her onto a bed sheet and slid/pulled/lifted through 2 feet deep snow many yards and then into our dining room onto blankets. We covered her in blankets as well and fed her molasses water until she rehydrated enough to drink on her own. She began to eat grain and hay. She menaces passing cats who she doesnt like. She can not stand on her own – her back leg is not working, might be dislocated.

We now have to take her to the vet and i hope its a simple matter of joint reduction. Will share photos of that when it happens.

Am also sharing some photos below of a tiny bit of the vast amount of storm damage here. We have no power, no internet so i am having to post by iPhone.

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This is the first post I am writing from my iPhone and I hope that it’s going to be helpful to give more recent snapshots of what’s going on at our homestead.

The kids carved pumpkins today and our chickens helped with the mess.

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I cant tell you how much we enjoyed growing these black spanish radishes! We bought them from the new-old Comstock Ferre, you can see their page here LINK

They were hardy, really tolerant of our fantastically variable weather this year (cold, wet, endless), only a few went to seed.

Here is a youngish one in the soil.

And then we has some really silly fun picking these godzilla radishes. We figure none of these photos of kids-with-gigantic-veggies will ever make the cut to be in a garden seed catalog!

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Can you ID what this is? mostly impacting our oaks (severely) – adjacent non-oak trees much less affected.

I have many theories but none of the oak diseases fit well into our symptoms.

Here are some more photos.

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As you may remember – we milk dairy goats. At the moment we have 9 lamancha dairy goats, 8 in milk. Goat milk is naturally homogenized so it requires an expensive cream separator to get cream. With no cream you can not make butter!

Additionally, the amount of grain and hay and labor that goes into milking these 8 goats (which includes all the work to get them pregnant, help them deliver, etc etc) fails in comparison to the amount of milk we would get from one cow with much much less labor and cost.

Its for this reason that we have been mulling getting a cow for more than 2 years now. Today we finally decided to just do it and buy a cow, who you see below.

She is 15 months old, a full blooded jersey and not very large – which is very good for a family cow. She will be bred next week (by AI) and will do a few beauty pageants with her current owners.

In September we will have her come live with us!

She should deliver her baby sometime in April or May 2012 and then we will be in milk!

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(one of our neighbors down the street)

We had a VERY close call here at Humble Garden.

(NASA satellite image of the track of this tornado through our area)

We were missed being hit by the Massachusetts EF-4 1/2 mile wide tornado by only a 1/2 a mile – living near a climate induced disaster zone REALLLLY brings home climate change in a way thats almost down to the cells of the body.

Before, in some ways, climate change was academic – charts, presentations, news about far away Pakistan or Moscow, Joplin, MO.

But now the battle has been engaged. We chose this area to build a homestead because its NOT the south or tornado ally or midwest etc and that its supposed to be “cooler” and wetter than the intense droughts in the works for much of the US – well – with this tornado – what i knew – that nothing is safe or sure – is something i know for certain. one can dig an earth home – create a sustainable self sufficient eden in their backyard but mother earth can easily simply wipe it clean.

The real work is inside our heads – and the goal is resilience and hope in the face of chaos.

Here are photos from the apocalyptic devastation just down our street.

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Today’s podcast covers permaculture principle 2 “Catch and Store Energy”.

We have all heard the saying “make hay while the sun shines” and this applies most directly to keeping and raising animals. Animals are a kinetic form of energy capture, transforming the hay and grain and scraps we feed them into other forms of energy more desirable to us (like eggs, meat, milk).

Listen to the podcast for a more in depth discussion of this topic.

As promised, I am including photos of some of the kids that have arrived at our homestead this year!

Enjoy!

Some of the babies had weak fetlocks so I brought them into the house to put splints on them. The splints stay on only a few days and have already been removed and all babies walk just fine.

While they were inside I had to control their mess so we put diapers on them. The babies didnt seem to mind the diapers much at all.

We named this sweetheart “Peace”.

Music used in this podcast:

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I am blogging in support of an effort to reclaim the right of the public to use the term “Urban Homestead” as well as other related terms, a right ostensibly taken by a family in California by filing for and obtaining a trademark on these terms. Not only this, they have chosen, ill advisedly, to send out letters that amount to “cease and desist” to bloggers, radio stations, public libraries, and authors who have used the term “Urban Homestead” even well before this family received trademark protection.

(You can learn more about and join this effort at this facebook page Take Back Urban Home-steading(s))

Some Background

If you have ever googled urban and homestead you likely got many many results relating to the very long tradition of homesteading here in the United States, both rural and urban. You likely also got hits for a broad range of books covering topics germane to urban homestead practices.

Along the way, you likely would have run across links to a suburban homestead project in Pasadena, California by the Dervaes family, a group of 3 young adults and their father.

On a small pad of cement, something like 1/8th of an acre when you subtract the footprint of the house, this family built a business out of growing salad greens and other vegetables for local restaurants.

As with other gardeners of a certain stripe, the Dervaes have recorded exactly what they get out of their raised beds and other horticultural methods. They have blogged about these efforts, including the biomass accounting. They have shared their use of chickens, ducks and dwarf goats in their suburban setting.

Over the years, the Dervaes have received a lot of media and have been identified with homesteading; they have become de facto spokespeople for homesteading even though they represent one family out of a huge number of homesteading families/couples/people.

Backlash

There has been a spontaneous backlash across the web to these actions amounting to widespread bad will against the Dervaes in light of their regressive efforts to enforce their dubious trademark claims.

Urban Homesteading, by its very nature, is anti-authoritarian because it requires breaking the long established or implied rules/mores of the modern urban landscape. People have long been disenfranchised from their urban environment by city practices that have excluded human-scale interaction. Some cities have allowed allotments or community gardens for decades and that works for those people who are fortunate enough to participate.

To break that structure, so as to have a few chickens, a compost heap, a garden, radicalizes or requires a radicalized mindset. That mindset can be part of a larger set of ideals that often fits within a progressive frame that values relocalization of food and economic activity, powering down, building personal and community resilience in the face of collapsing societal structures, good old fashioned frugality and simplicity.

The very act of obtaining a trademark and then the further ideological violence of enforcing the trademark on others in this nascent community of urban homesteaders is anathema to those progressive values.

I think it is this regressive practice that has shocked, awoken, and spurred to action a range of homesteaders on the web to stand up and say “no” to what the Dervaes have done, even as many of us have a whole lot of respect for what they have done before this bru-hah-ha.

The actions over the past couple of weeks have done tremendous damage to the respect people held for the Dervaes. We are in the midst of this scandal so it is hard to say how it will end. The Dervaes seem to be in seclusion, something I think it a good idea because their recent statements have only damaged their case further.

The Hard Way Forward?

If they were to ask me what to do, my advice would be: publicly commit the marks to the public domain, get a real lawyer and not a puppy-mill trademark lawyer in far off Florida, get a PR firm and DO WHAT THEY SAY, do some homework and understand your audience and customers, finally – apologize, lots. If you simply want to decamp to the 600 acre religious community built around rural homesteading, now might not be a bad time to do that – that is if you want to leave this wound undressed and festering.

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