PeakOilDesign - Designing for sustainability in a challenging environment.

Poison Ivy Monster

PeakEngineer — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 19:41:18 -0600

In addition to all the veggies in our garden, we are growing a fabulous crop of poison ivy at our rental house. I knew we had a significant infestation after I had to abandon my first compost pile that was overtaken by a field of aggressive poison ivy sprouts. I had also noticed quite a few isolated patches spread throughout the yard. But I didn’t realize just how bad it was until I noticed that what I had thought were two tall, healthy, green trees were actually very dead trees with woody poison ivy monsters climbing their skeletons as high as 30 feet (above).

My plan is to smother the ground patches with mulch and slice into the base of the woody vines. I need to do the smothering without the landlord noticing, as he was concerned about it being “unsightly” (right...where nobody but us would see it?) and preferred we apply poison. While eradicating this plant may be one of the rare exceptions where I could justify pesticides, I prefer to try less destructive -- and probably more effective -- organic options.

Fabulous Tales of the No-Work Garden

PeakEngineer — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 20:45:04 -0600

As yesterday’s harvest (above) can attest, it’s amazing what you can get out of a garden even if you completely abandon it for more than a month. As I noted in the previous post, we were out-of-state for all of July, with the only garden support being a neighbor watering our hanging baskets. Even after we returned, however, it took us the better part of two weeks before we recuperated enough to spend much time on the garden. I finally found a weekend to get out there and tackle the weeds, spending a total of about four hours yanking them up, which in truth definitely didn’t qualify as “no work”. Actually, I prefer to let the weeds grow as thick as my thumb -- it's so much more sporting that way…

As it is, work has kept me so busy and exhausted at the end of the day and I’m still spending very little time in the garden. With the exception of my thick layer of mulch from my bi-monthly mowing (I love getting away with that in a rental!) and the aforementioned weed-pulling, I’ve given the garden very little additional attention in recent weeks.

Here’s a shot of some well-performing cucumbers, plus some viny squash and potatoes:

As mentioned we experimented with some baskets this year, including peppers and tomatoes (with mild success). Here is our good-sized sprig of rosemary:

And some tasty Romas:

These four plants have more than 50 tomatoes hanging at the moment:

This is the volunteer squash that overtook my compost pile and produced the two butternut squashes you saw in the first picture:

And an overview of the bulk of the garden. As a side note, having very like-minded neighbors is a rare and valuable gift.

Doing Our Part to Advance PO…

PeakEngineer — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 07:36:47 -0600

A multitude of events, both for work and home, have kept us unreasonably busy the past couple months. Of course, it was all fun -- among other things, we met face-to-face with Jade herself (keeper of Jaded Vegetarian) and her husband, in Seattle and at their house. The raging waters atop Mount Rainier (above) also captured our attention.

In July, we (our family of three) traveled first to Seattle so I could attend a 10-day training course for work, with a few extra vacation days thrown in. We visited Mt Rainier and stayed at the Paradise Inn halfway up the mountain, which was a fantastic (if short) adventure. We weren’t able to take the trails we wanted as they were still buried under 10 feet of snow, the lingering remains of an above-average snowfall year.

We spent most of our time in downtown Seattle, and managed to use the bus system for our entire stay (except for the Rainier trip). We visited the space needle, the Pike Place Market, the aquarium, the University of Washington, various other places of interest -- oh, and I might have attended class once or twice. The most valuable visit by far, however, was meeting up with Jade and her husband.

It’s always going to be a little strange to meet a person you’ve known only through electrons, but any awkwardness disappeared pretty quickly when we all realized with relief that none of us were cyber-psychos. We met for lunch downtown and spent the better part of two hours discussing how we came upon Peak Oil and exchanging thoughts on sustainability, then spent more time walking through downtown.

They invited us to see their homestead the following weekend, which was very impressive. Jade and her husband have only lived there a year, but have already made an astounding amount of progress in establishing a sustainable farmscape. They have a wood-frame greenhouse, duck pond, various gardens, and plenty of land to play with.

So, we enjoyed a fantastic lunch, tour, and conversation at their house. It was very encouraging to meet folks who have a similar understanding of the world and are working to make it better. I recommend everyone here make an effort to meet with others from this online community in your travels.

Downtown Seattle and Mt Rainier as seen from the Space Needle

July brought me more travels, including to Iowa, Minnesota, and Washington, D.C. By the time we returned home, it was astonishing to see that our garden had actually survived and, in fact, was thriving. I’ll post more on that later.

For now, we’re just glad to be home and I’m enjoying my break between business trips (3 weeks until the next one...). I’m also happy to (finally) resume a normal work schedule after 3 weeks of performing inspections and battling it out in all-day meetings. Look for more to show up here soon.

Trip

PeakEngineer — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 20:52:35 -0600

We're going on a trip to Seattle, Iowa, Minnesota, and D.C. over the next 4 weeks, so there won't be much posting. Have a good July...

One Big Bike

PeakEngineer — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 21:02:59 -0600

Last night we attended a mini-workshop presented by students from Oberlin College participating in the One Big Bike Movement. These students are biking from Oberlin, OH to San Francisco this summer, stopping along the way to present strategies for living more sustainably.

Their first stop happened to be here in Yellow Springs, hosted by Living Green (a store about which I’ll be talking quite a bit here in the future) which provided wine, cheese, and fruit for refreshments. They spoke about techniques for using passive solar and cooling, including placement of vegetation, windows, and heatsinks. The students also gave an overview of vermicomposting, including a display of a working bin full of red wrigglers. They even left the bin with C.J. of Living Green to use in the store!

I encourage you to check out their site (onebigbike.blogspot.com) and see if they are heading your way.

The World Updated

PeakEngineer — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 19:37:26 -0600

Having a non-boring job that doesn’t allow my mind to wander during the day has significantly cut into the time I have to think of items about which to post. I’m still searching for balance (aren’t we all!), but rest assured I fully intend to restore this blog to its former glory...or at least, to the quality it was before the move.

The events in the world of energy over the last few months deserve some comment, as the situation has gone wildly out of control since I last wrote about it. You all know the numbers -- oil at record highs, gas at record highs -- and the boundless rhetoric as to the causes. Is it speculators, OPEC, the oil companies, supply constraints (i.e. Peak Oil), or something else? Honestly, we don’t know, but that’s the whole damn point -- we just don’t know if we hit production limits yet.

The best data available certainly seems to point to the idea that we have reached Peak Oil for all practical purposes. At the very least, demand is far outpacing supply and there is little that Westerners can cut out their lifestyles before a sharp collapse. Even the normally cornucopian IEA has recently turned doomer with regard to oil supply futures.

The story is similar with food. Grain stockpiles have collapsed, crops are failing, and food is in competition with fuel. What are the root causes? How can we fix it? The answers, despite assertions to the contrary, are complex and point only toward more complexity.
So what does this all mean? What do we do? We do exactly as we were planning beforehand: move toward a more sustainable, self-sufficient lifestyle. Without panic. To those who are new to Peak Oil and other concerns, my advice is the same.

From its inception, this blog has been about prudent planning, including multiple layers of planning. Personally, my family is far from where I would prefer with regards to living self-sufficiently, but we have devised numerous “fallback” positions depending on how events pan out. For example, we don’t yet have an independent water supply, but we have water filters for use with our stream if the city system fails. We don’t grow all the foods we want, but we’re learning about wild edibles. But the fundamental key to all of this preparation is psychological: you must be mentally prepared to accept a different standard of living in order to survive any contingency.

As the apparent slow crash continues, I offer the following humble advice:
1) Toss all red herrings in the Bass-O-Matic. The oil companies can’t change the oil prices; vast supplies of tar sands will never be produced at a meaningful rate; corn ethanol is not a cheap and responsible alternative to oil; and environmentalists aren’t preventing America from some miracle supply of oil that will save us from the Arab evildoers. The core issue is this: there is no more cheap energy. Adjust accordingly.

2) Modern farming techniques will eventually reach a breaking point. The cause of this occurrence is a dead heat between soil degradation, global warming-induced drought and flooding, oil shortages, fertilizer shortages, labor shortages, urban sprawl , and farm bankruptcies. In this race, every horse is a loser. Food shortages will happen in the near future. Eat accordingly.

3) Disasters will happen, be they tornadoes, floods, blizzards, hurricanes, earthquakes, plagues, famine, or energy shortages. Plan accordingly.

4) The economy will eventually suffer from significant inflation, deflation, or both. Spread your risk and for God’s sake, whatever you do, don’t skimp on the supplies you deem necessary for your planning. Live life for today, but plan for life tomorrow.

Reshaping the Yard

PeakEngineer — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 19:29:18 -0600

I spent some of the last few weeks breaking ground on a garden here in Yellow Spring. Since we’re in a rental, I can’t make the garden quite as big as we would like, but I’m grateful that the owner is flexible enough to let us dig one at all. It should be a great learning experience for gardening in Ohio and prepare us for larger-scale operations when we find a permanent farmstead.

It will also be an experience in growing in soggy soil, the exact opposite issue from what I faced in Florida. It turns out that our yard is not a swamp merely due to the recent heavy rains, but our neighbors informed us that there is a natural spring under our area. It is one of the many springs that gives our village its name, and is already proving to be a bit of a gardening headache.

The picture above illustrates some of the challenges I’ve run into with the garden area. After several inches of rain in a week, the ground was super-saturated and I embarked on a plan to drain the yard using the trench I dug to the stream (temporarily a raging river rapids) at the back of the property.

After a few days the water level finally started dropping, but there is definitely a source spring feeding the yard because the trench continues to flow down to the stream.

So, I tried digging up the garden last weekend, but the soil was still too heavy to be workable (without throwing out my back, that is). Instead I worked on deepening the trench to get it to drain a bit faster and I’ll try again this weekend.

In the picture below you can see how I covered the ground with layers of leaves and cardboard, as well as dirt from the trench. This will hopefully break down and provide some good organic matter for the soil. I’m optimistic that the soil (once dry) will prove very rich, judging by the huge number of earthworms I uncovered in my digging.

The Move!

PeakEngineer — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 07:35:17 -0700

Wow, moving is hard enough as it is, but for the sustainably-minded it can be torture! The past three months were very fortunate for us -- I got a new job, we moved back to the Midwest, and we sold our house -- yet extremely stressful.

I know I’ve lost quite a few regular readers and I hope to earn them back now that we’re getting settled. So, I’ll get right back into sustainability topics starting with the one at hand, which is the eco-crappy process of moving states! In October, I learned that I was selected for a job with the Air Force at Wright Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio -- a dream job for me both in terms of the working environment and the location. But first the big news -- the house we found to rent is in the village of Yellow Springs, Ohio, which many of you may know from the Community Solutions Conference held every year on Peak Oil! The village is by far the closest thing I’ve seen to a sustainable community, and is far better able to weather some of the challenges ahead than anywhere we’ve ever seen. I’ll have much, much more on Yellow Springs as time goes on, but for now I’ll get back to our moving story.

The first step in moving involved getting the house ready to sell, which is a much less sustainable process than I had thought. First, there’s the cleaning. Now, we’ve already switched to using baking soda and vinegar for most household chores, but for the real rugged cleaning (making things pretty vs. functionally clean) they don’t always do the job. And to sell a house in the current market (especially Florida!) houses that appear “dirty” to buyers are getting put at the bottom of the list. We had some chemical cleaners left from before, and while it was painful to use them we knew it would be far more painful and environmentally damaging to be flying back and forth to keep tabs on the house if we didn’t sell it. (FYI, the items that required the deep cleaning were the shower door, the stains on the counters, the floors, and the toilets. Baking soda and vinegar did a good job with the rest of it.)

Then there was the painting. Fortunately we had leftovers for most of the rooms in the house that needed touch-up, including some low-VOC, but we did have to buy a gallon of porch paint. Again, this was not a very environmentally-friendly process.

Of course, once we had the house all pristine we couldn’t risk messing it up, because we never knew when a showing would be scheduled. This meant that cooking needed to be kept to a minimum, which meant a lot fewer healthy organics. We managed to work in the healthy stuff (and avoid restaurants) a lot better than I expected, though our diets still suffered a little.

Packing up and moving was by far the biggest hit to our sustainability. Since I work for the government, they hired a moving company to come in and pack us up. Let’s just say that moving companies don’t always pack in the most efficient (or logical) way -- we found boxes that had half their volume stuffed with paper, boxes that we had packed stacked into other boxes, and empty cardboard boxes inside bigger cardboard boxes. It was a little frustrating. On the plus side, we can reuse most of it for our next move into our permanent house (we’re renting now).

I don’t even want to think about how much fuel it cost to move our stuff across the country, but I know we wouldn’t be proud of it. (One thing that’s clear to us now is we have waaay too much stuff and need to consolidate a bit.) Then there was the fuel to move both our cars across the country (along with ourselves) -- although, that may be balanced out in due time since my commute was cut in half and we now live in a walkable community.

We didn’t have a place to live picked out before we arrived in the area, so we arranged to stay at a bed & breakfast for a good rate. This was one brighter spot in our moving process -- not only was it much nicer than a hotel (it was a little cottage next to the main house, with many surrounding acres for the dog to run), but a hotel would have changed our towels and sheets every day whether we wanted them to or not. We let the owner know that we were just fine, and we avoided the unnecessary extra laundry and cleaning. There was also a full kitchen in the cottage so we were able to eat a bit more normally.

In the end, moving was a major blow to our sustainability, but it was necessary to ensure both our future health, happiness, and continued path to living the rest of our lives sustainably. Hopefully our move from Florida suburbia to Midwest farm country will be the best thing for our family and the environment -- but we’re already pretty sure that will be true on both accounts.

Getting Set in Ohio...

PeakEngineer — Sun, 27 Jan 2008 14:14:00 -0700

We have arrived in Ohio and are in the midst of finding a place to live. I'll get back to regular posting and updates on our adventures once we don't have to steal wireless from Panera Bread anymore.

Update and Winter Gardening

PeakEngineer — Sat, 29 Dec 2007 06:52:23 -0700

There is a lull in the moving craziness on the Florida end at the moment, so I was able to discipline myself enough to post. We still need to figure out where we're going to live in Ohio, and we'll likely be renting for a year or so up there, which could present some challenges in trying to continue our development of a sustainable homestead. For instance, we need to figure out a way to keep gardening if our landlord doesn't want us to alter the landscaping. We also need to sort out what sustainable solutions we could carry with us to a permanent homestead.

In Florida, we're enjoying the winter gardening season. I pickled 8 jars of hot peppers out of the garden for Christmas presents (and for our own use) and I'm waiting for tomatoes to fruit.