January 1, 2010 at 9:17 pm (Organic gardening, green living)
Kate over at Living the Frugal Life asked the $64,000 question in her blog this week: just how many pounds of produce can one grow in a suburban lot? Some folks asked about how to track harvests, so I thought I’d post my system here. It’s overkill for most people, but here it is, and feel free to use what you like.
This is an expansion of my “insane crop planning spreadsheet.” Here’s how to use it:
- Sheet 1: Garden bed planning
- Put in the length and width of each of your garden beds.
- Put in your goals for what percentage of your garden you want to dedicate to legumes, grains, calorie crops, greens, and other. (These are defined on the spreadsheet).
- Now start playing with percentages. What percentage of which bed will have which kind of crop? The spreadsheet will keep a running total against your goals, so you can easily see if you need more legumes, fewer tomatoes, etc.
- Sheet 2: Harvests <—This is the sheet that will be most useful to most people.
- Each week has a space for the number of pounds of each crop harvested that week.
- These are tallied automatically, and this data is carried forward to the next tabs.
- I keep a copy of this printed out in my kitchen. When I harvest from the garden, I weigh it and note it on the chart. Then, a couple times a season, I tally everything up to date and input it into the spreadsheet. I find this much more convenient than booting up the computer each time I bring in a carrot.
- Sheet 3: Yields
- This takes the total harvests recorded on the previous sheet and tallies up the total cash value of the crop.
- Input your own values for each crop – either what you’d pay for them at market or what you could actually sell the crop for.
- You can also put in the actual number of plants (or square feet) you planted and get a value-per-plant or value-per-square-foot figure.
- Sheet 4: Calories per square foot
- First, put in the number of people you’re growing for (M2). This will give you a target number of calories, based on just under 1 million calories per person per year.
- Then put in the number of square feet you planted with each crop (column F). Or, use this more theoretically to see what you’d need to plant to provide enough calories for your target group.
- As a default, the number of pounds of harvest per square foot is based off John Jeavon’s “How to Grow More Vegetables…” intensive raised bed system. Once you know how many pounds YOU harvest per 100 square feet, you’ll want to change the calculations to be working from your concrete numbers.
Download in Excel format
Share from Google Docs (save a copy to your own Google account)
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December 23, 2009 at 8:53 am (Changing habits, Cooking, local food)
Yesterday, in my post on local food, MK and Patty pointed out that if local eating is really going to take off, people need to know how to cook, and realize cooking isn’t necessarily more time-consuming than cooking from a box.
This got me thinking…what are foods that people could easily make at home, but think they can’t? The idea would be to have a series of cooking classes with the theme “Yes, you can cook it at home.”These things would ideally take no special equipment or hours of prep, and would replicate things that people think they “have to” buy because it’s way too hard to make them at home.
Here are some of my initial ideas:
- Chinese restaurant-style sauces (white, brown, sweet-and-sour, and spicy orange glaze)
- Crackers
- Pizza
- Fajitas
- Fish sticks & chicken nuggets
- French fries (oven fries)
- Lasagne
What else can you think of?
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December 18, 2009 at 10:20 pm (green living)
Found a great new blog this week at http://growthechange.blogspot.com/ by Canadian authors “Freija and Beringian Fritillary.” Guessing those aren’t real names, but wouldn’t it be awesome if they were? A few highlights:
Also, Kate at Living the Frugal Life has inspired me to build a rocket stove – an outdoor stove built with very simple technology (bricks and a metal pipe) that will run on twigs. Paella, anyone?
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November 12, 2009 at 5:51 pm (Energy, Musings)
It’s been a tough day, oh people of the Internet. I was working from home today due to health issues that, try though I might, I cannot wish, medic, or magic away. I got a request to present information on a project I’ve been working on for over 2 years to a very high-up person at the university, and I couldn’t fill it because I couldn’t be certain I’d not puke on him if I went in. So my boss had to take herself away from another very important meeting to cover for me. This is incredibly hard for me to deal with. I feel like I have total job fail.
Then there’s the crummy energy news: the IEA has been covering up how dire the world oil situation is, largely due to pressure from Americans who don’t want people to panic. Remember how badly that blip of $4/gallon gas threw off the economy? That’s going to become the norm, folks. The only silver lining there is that maybe it’ll slow down global warming, which makes me think Michigan will look like the Dust Bowl in my lifetime. We sure won’t be flying in strawberries from California and chicken from China, and I don’t know if Michigan can feed itself. We’re in a better position than many states: far from an ocean coast, plenty of fresh water (though some places have lots of groundwater pollutants), a diverse and fairly healthy agricultural base, and lots of arable land…which is tilled solely by diesel-powered tractors, outside a few Amish farms and “wacko” organic veggie plots.
And speaking of Michigan, a report from the Pew Center on the States tells us that Michigan is likely going to have California-like money problems in the near future. And a dozen other states, too. How bad is it going to get here? We already have 15+% unemployment (over 20% in Detroit). I’m incredibly grateful to have a job (don’t think about today’s job fail, don’t think about today’s job fail) and there are only slight, very distant rumblings that either my or my husband’s jobs might be in jeopardy, but I’m worried about my family and people around me.
I feel really impotent today. I can’t even go out and garden, which is my usual answer for despair of any sort, what with the dark and the health today.
What do you do when it all just seems like too much bad news you can’t do anything about?
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November 5, 2009 at 11:29 am (Energy, Food security, carbon budget, green living)
I realized the other day that the next realistic steps my household might take to reduce carbon emissions are to carpool more (we commute to work together but could add up to 2 more people in our car) and to move to geothermal heat.
Geothermal systems – even with the rebates – would probably cost $15,000. That’s a ton of money. Even supposing we had $15K to spend on a system (and that’s a big “if”), would it be the best way to spend it? What would truly be the most carbon-reduction-bang for fifteen thousand bucks?
Some initial ideas:
- Help 15 households insulate their attics to R-60
- Buy super-efficient furnaces for several households
- Help 3-5 farmers build hoophouses to produce local veggies through the winter
- Invest in a “neighborhood energy startup” with a gasifier (makes heat and electricity and biodiesel), possibly with a permaculture system of greenhouses, coppice groves, etc.
- Just buy land and start a coppice grove for sustainable heating fuel production, and possibly invest in a pelletizer
- Some kind of education program? I’m thinking the actual return is hard to measure, and it’s not education about global warming that folks around here lack.
Anyone have data on any of these? Or other ideas? bonus points for things that are done once and keep on saving energy and reducing emissions without any further attention or work.
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October 17, 2009 at 10:53 am (Cooking, green living)
A couple weeks ago, I finally bought a thermal cooking pot. It’s been on my radar for a long time, and I finally splurged. The basic idea is that it’s a pot-in-a-Thermos. You put your ingredients in the inner pot and bring it to a boil on the stove, then put that pot into the insulated outer pot, close the lid, and the food cooks using the retained heat. It’s sort of like a countertop version of haybox cooking, and the idea is to save energy and keep from heating up your kitchen when cooking.
I’ve learned that this gizmo has definite strong and weak points. I’m honestly not sure I’d recommend buying one; they are pretty pricey and it doesn’t do everything I’d hoped it would. Still, it works really well for some things, and I can’t stop experimenting! I thought I’d post the results of my experiments to date, so if you’re considering getting one, you can make a really informed decision. Details after the cut: Read the rest of this entry »
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June 20, 2009 at 4:36 pm (Changing habits, Musings)
Going into this weekend, I was pretty tired of the eternal To-Do list. Items might change, but I never really catch up. And some items never change: clean the kitchen, weed the garden, clear off the dining room table, do the bills. Gah.
I wanted out of my rut this weekend, so I decided to ditch the to-do list and instead focus on making something beautiful. I decided to start with the front flower bed. Flats at the market are $8 – don’t need to make that offer twice! And black-eyed susans were 4/$10. And supposedly perennial, too. Sold!And as luck would have it, my favorite garden store was demoing a meat smoker by offering surprisingly large samples of smoked pork butt, homemade salsa, potato salad, and curtido. Beautiful!
Got home and started puttering, and before I knew it, I’d planted the flat of flowers – mostly in the front bed (let me just pull this grass and clover and elm seedlings out to make room), and also in the shade planter on the back deck (hmm, none of the herbs overwintered…better yank those…), and because I had a few left, I scanned the garden and planted them smack in the middle of my line of sight. That happened to be the edge of the rutabaga bed (just let me toss those last scraggly turnips that didn’t get harvested last week and hey…are those volunteer potatoes? Looks like dinner to me…). And oh, heck, why don’t I plant up this empty pot of dirt on teh deck with the last couple things from that flat? And move the rest of the junk off to the end of the deck where I don’t have to see it? I’ll put it away…later. But at least now I don’t have to look at it.
Dinner’s in the sun oven (baby potatoes and rutabagas, a couple bulb onions, brussels sprouts, and asparagus with a little schmaltz and seasoned salt), so while I’m waiting, I’ll put away this stack of cookbooks (huh, if I wipe down the coffee table, the living room will look really nice…) and take a shower. And if I wash those last couple pans, hey, the kitchen is also beautiful!
I’m glad I decided to ignore my to-do list today. Making things beautiful was much more interesting.
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June 16, 2009 at 9:54 am (Food security, green living)
And update on the Simple Pump installation: yes, you can use it to fill the pressure tank. It was actually quite easy to fill the tank up to 40psi. This gives decent water pressure in the house for one or two toilet flushes or quite a bit of handwashing, drinking water, and dish-rinsing. The system of putting a 1-1/4″ PVC pipe though the wall of the basement as a “hose conduit” works really well. The hose threads through very easily, and when I pull the hose out, I just pop a PVC cap on each end, and it keeps air and critters out.
Caveats:
- The fittings on both ends are male, so I had to modify the (special drinking-water-certified) hose to have female adapters at both end.
- I wasn’t able to get it to fill over 40psi, no matter how long I pumped. It’s possible they didn’t install the correct check valve, but I think this is just the limitation of the pump.
- 40psi gives good water pressure for about 4 gallons of water, then you have to pump it up again. It may or may not be very useful, ultimately – though I do find that it’s much easier to rinse with the sink sprayer than with a pitcher, and cleaner than using a tub of water (especially for one-off washes of hands or single dishes).
- You can’t unhook the hose from the pump to the tank when the system is pressurized, so it’s not terribly convenient to switch between tank-pressurization and pumping-into-a-bucket. Hmm, maybe if I used one of those Y adapters that let you attach two hoses to one spigot?
- The hose would freeze pretty quickly in the winter if it were just lying on the ground.
Final verdict: Yes, it is possible to charge the pressure tank using the Simple Pump, but it may or may not be worth the effort. A longer test is in order, I think; if we get around to doing a non-electric weekend this summer, that will be a much more realistic test.
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Rob (over at One Straw: Be The Change) had a great post last week about New Year’s Revolutions, and I am totally jumping on that bandwagon. His categories are re-localization, re-skilling, and re-building community. I might also add “reliance” to that – learning to trust your own skills to get you through.
I’m doing my first workshop on stocking a pantry to live out of! This workshop aims to appeal to a variety of folks: those who want to save money, those who want quick meal prep, and those who think the economy is going to collapse but aren’t quite ready to join a peak oil group or move to a commune. Here’s the announcement: [EDIT 8-13 4:30pm - revised location]
