Moans and Groans and maybe some bitching

Sometimes I wonder about me. I mean, here I am seemingly pounding my head against a brick wall trying to get the folks around me to realize they really, really, NEED Permaculture and no damn body's paying me one whit of attention. The most feed back I've gotten from a local source is "Why do you have to be so negative all the time.

NEGATIVE? I haven't been any where near negative yet!! I've just been telling it like I see it. Yep, it dose not look rosy my friends. We will all have to make changes and choices. Some of them will be difficult to hard if we make them NOW. A lot of them will be choices you will have no option about in the future.

That future bit there is part of my problem I think as, in all honesty, I can't say "You need to get this done by Nov. 5th 2012 or July 13th 2014 or anything as definite as that. Why not? Cause I don't freaking know! I just can see the train wreck coming folks. The only thing that could save us from this wreck, as far as I know, is if some hardworking scientist or some new whiz kid working in his garage comes up with a really new power source that is cheap, plentiful, doesn't hurt the environment much and can run every thing the way it's been running. Now really. What are the odds of that happening? I'd say slim to nil and I wouldn't bet on it. But then there isn't much I would be willing to bet on other than the trends we can all see happening right before our eyes.

Gasoline, fertilizer, plastics and all things petroleum are increasing in cost. Yeah, yeah, I know. Some of that increase is because of some nation over in the mid east flexing it's muscles and saying "Do what I say you unbeliever heathens! Or I'll stop the oil!!" I also know that a lot of you out there are of the opinion that instead of raising the price of your gasoline, we should just yell back: "Go to Hell you un-Christian heathen! We'll just come in there and get it!!" Sigh. To which I can only ask, "Are you really willing to trade the lives of your children or your children's children if you are grandparents, just so you can drive two blocks to get a six pack of high fructose corn syrup laden soft drinks?"

There is a deeper reason for the rise in the cost of petroleum. A very simple reason I'll try to illustrate. Let's say that a while back, about the time that guy first drilled for oil on purpose and somebody figured out what to do with the smelly black stuff, your family won, earned or somehow acquired an unbelievable amount of money. Now, lets say everyone in the family immediately retired and started spending. Maybe a few invested the money but not with any study or help from experts. Basically everyone just threw that money around and never even  bothered putting it in the bank so it would draw interest. They kept it as capital and they spent it as capital and they have been living high on it every since. Only recently one of the odder kids in the family has looked in the vault and said, "Hey, y'all! Most of the money's gone! We need to start investing what's left and not spending so much!" Then everyone else laugh's at the young fool. There's money there. There's always money there in the family vault! So he takes pictures showing that while the money was piled 12 feet high at first it's only 5 and a half feet high now and suggests that maybe they all should learn how to work and live a little less extravagantly. But the Heads of the family just smile and say, "Junior! Haven't you kept up with the times! There's this wonderful new invention called a CREDIT CARD! It's not like we still have to spend OUR MONEY!" And Jr wanders away muttering, "That doesn't sound quite right somehow."

The moral of that little tale above is that oil is the capital we have all been depending on for a long time now. On top of that, it also is NOT sitting nice and easily available in a vault somewhere. It's down in the ground. WAY down in the ground hiding inside rock formations. It has never been in "pools" down there. Yeah, old wells are being reopened now. Wells that the oil companies gave up on several years ago. You know why they gave up on them? Because it cost to much to pull any more oil out. The oil had stopped flowing out of it'd own accord and now they had to suck really hard to get it out. Imagine a malt or shake you have to let set and melt before you can get it to come up the straw. Those tar sands up in Canada? I remember them being mentioned while I was taking Earth Science in College. A fellow student asked why we weren't using them. The Prof. answered "Way to hard to get the oil out. To wasteful too." Dose that tell you anything?

Now you may begin to see why the cost of petroleum is going up. "So we move to coal!" you shrug and say.
"Hah!" I reply. To get Gasoline out of Coal you'd have to processes it all kinds of ways which would not be nice for the environment. "So What?" you ask. My reply, "If  you think we have a lot of kids sick with asthma now wait til we start burning more and more coal. Especially the high sulfur content stuff. So we are back to the kids again. Do you want to trade the health and your kids or grand kids ability to breath freely just so you can drive that two blocks for the high fructose corn syrup stuffed fruit juice they want for breakfast? Or even for the electricity to watch that TV or play that computer game?

Then there is this odd little fact. What do you think all those big machines that are used to mine coal run on? Yep. Petroleum products! Is that a big "Gotcha!" or what?

I am not saying this stuff to panic anyone or even frighten them. I do think you should start to worry. Worry enough to at least start moving your house toward passive solar heating and cooling. Go ahead and get the solar panels and small wind turbines for active solar energy if you can afford them, just remember the process that creates them and gets them to you relies heavily on fossil fuels! So get the best  and longest lasting you can afford.

Setting up your house to gather it's own water from what falls on it's roof and your yard to survive from what falls on it should be your next worry along with scrapping that expensive and time consuming expanse of fake grass land. Put in gardens. Stuff  your front and back yards full of food plants, flowers, berries, nuts and even the odd small animal like chickens, rabbits, ducks, and such. Set up your own little ecosystem that will support you and your family with food, shelter, and dare I suggest it, entertainment. (Go to Google or some other search engine and check out the ideas in Urban Permaculture.)

Of course you can't do this alone. It takes a neighbors to really survive and be happy. The world dose not have to end up like that "Survivor Island" show. I wouldn't want to live in that kind of world where it's all about only one surviving to the end. The ideal is to see how many we can get to not just survive, but flourish!

And that's why I don't believe I'm being the least bit negative. Yeah. the world as we know it right now is rapidly headed for the crapper. I see nothing wrong with that, just as I see nothing wrong with using something called humanure in compost that will eventually be used on fruit and nut trees and other selected crops. What's this humanure? As it happens it's what you get out of a composting toilet, a crapper if you will.

I firmly believe that if we take some simple actions now, learn some possibly hard lessons now, that when the brown smelly stuff finely hits the fan we will be able to gather it up, compost it and turn it into a healthy productive garden we can live on for the rest of our lives. In deed, if we plan properly now we can start living the kind of healthy, earth friendly, emotionally, and mentally active lives I think we humans are meant to live.
Yeah, there will still be friction. But we can learn to use that to learn and grow, to improve and include new ideas.

So no, I'm not being negative! Not at all. Perhaps I'm just not being clear. There are big scary changes coming at some vague point in the future. It could happen ten or more years from now or it could happen next year. Some of it is already happening. But, oh my! What a wonderful adventure it will be!! Especially if we all prepare for what is coming.

Then there is this odd but quite possible alternative. We get prepared for the stuff to hit the fan and - nothing happens! Yet there we still sit. In our healthy, organic, continuously producing gardens, working not nearly as hard as you'd expect leaving us with lots of time for friends, family, reading, thinking or even working at some outside job we actually enjoy doing. Gee, wouldn't that be just a terrible outcome.

For idea's on what to do to prepare you can find a lot of Permaculture sites on line. My favorite is permies.com. Check it out. It's full of all kinds of information.

Goats and stuff

Guess it's about time for an update on the goat project. I started with three goats about two years ago. They were, I am told, half Nubian and Pygmy goat. All three were black with a few white and brown markings. There was the fully grown doe and her two female offspring. When the younger 'girls' were old enough I agreed to host a pretty fellow who was mostly brown with black and white markings who wouldn't stay in his owners pen. He stayed with my girls for a couple of weeks and then started trying to wander again so I assumed he'd done his duty and asked the owner to come get him.

After the usual interval I was presented with six more goats. Only only four were female. Those I kept, selling the males. I also traded off the oldest female goat and one of the young males for another pair of goats. A male and female goat that were all white. I eventually discovered that the male, at least, was one of those infamous 'fainting' goats. My house cat got out and startled him and he just fell over. Very odd.

In any event, I kept him separate until about 3 months ago when I returned him to the pen with all 7 of my does. The over all plan for now is to sell all the kids and re breed after the does have dried off. I have not trained the girls to stand for milking and I have no patience for cleaning, or keeping clean, a milking parlor.

Now, after a very busy and trying week that included loosing one kid despite buying all kinds of things I now don't need, loosing half a nights sleep two nights in a row, and helping one doe during a breach birth I can report that I have twelve goat kids. . . I think. The little buggers keep scampering around so it's hard to tell.

Now if you managed to keep track of the numbers above you should have figured out that I had 7 does, so you are likely asking: Only twelve? Well, it breaks down this way. Oreo had two, Baby had two, Star had two, Rose had one that didn't survive, Brown 2 had one (the breach) Brown 1 had three (that Rose stole from her as she is more dominant than Brown 1) and Cookie had two. At least that's how I think it is, but it's hard to tell as I did have other things to do and all of them except for Brown 2 refused to kid while I was watching.

This is a learning process for me. Last time they kidded I had made the mistake of  not taking the billy (ram, whatever) out before they started having the kids. I lost one kid then because he kept them moving so much the little thing got trampled. (I think. Once more I wasn't there when it happened so could do nothing to prevent it.) This time I took the Grand Wizard out and put him into exile in a separate pen. Next time I will have to have one of the stalls in what is now a horse barn set up to put the girls in with several smaller stalls for each doe. The idea being to keep them together but still somehow separate so there will be no stealing of other's kids and I will know for sure which kids go with which doe.

But that's a lot of work and I need to get some materials together for it besides. Meanwhile I need to
catch up on my sleep.

As for the naughty kid stealing Rose, if I can get a stall fixed up I plan to move every one around so that I can lock her up with at least one of the triplets leaving the other two with Brown 1. Unless of course Brown one has already started drying up. Sigh. You have to make so many decisions when you are a goat lady. Maybe I should just sell them all off and get chickens. I like eggs. I know I like to eat chicken (might even be able to kill one never tried.) But I've never tried goat meat and if I don't like cow milk I doubt I'll like goat milk.

Growing food without irrigation! Even during a drought!

Sound like a blurb from one of those "Buy this and Get RICH in just ONE DAY!!!" ads doesn't it. Only difference this is true and you don't have to buy a thing! Really. I'm going to be trying it, that's for sure. I've already got some tiny little mini versions snaking across my front yard. They may grow as more material presents itself.

Out back in the pasture however, I'll need some help. Big muscle type help or weaker muscles that owns some power equipment and won't mind doing something that will likely seem odd to them.

What is this Miracle that could let me grow food, even during a drought, without irrigation?  It's got a weird German name that means hill or mound or some such. It's spelled Hugelkulture and you can find out a lot about it at http://richsoil.com/hugelkultur/
That's where I found out about it.

All you need are some old, preferably half rotten logs, tree limbs or firewood so old it's no longer usable and a place on your land where you want a garden. You can dig down a little or just start right there with out even skinning back the sod. If you do skin back the sod save it and plop it grass side down on top of your newly built raised bed when you are done.

Next  you build that raised bed by pilling all that old wood, rotted and otherwise, within the outline of where you want your garden.Stuff it in there. Add in fallen leaves, sticks and other woody type things then cover it all up with soil and maybe even a little compost or manure if you want to give it a kick start. Then you plant some fast growing plants that grow tight soil holding roots on top of that to hold the soil in place. (It's a mound by now, preferably a fairly tall one.) There are more details of course. Just go to richsoil.com or permies.com and this fellow Paul Wheaton will tell  you just about everything you need to know about Hugelkulture, and iron skillets, and rocket stoves as well as a little bit about Permaculture. Real good stuff.

Man, I can almost taste the tomatoes already! I'd give more details on this but really Paul does it so much better than I and he's even got pictures showing how it's done. So just go to those sites I told you about, now. Go on! Shoo!!