Mr. Kraft does life

We are water.  Sure, there are a few other things that also make up our bodily composition, but the bulk of our physiology is water.  So, if we are consuming water that is polluted, or eating food grown with polluted water, we’re probably not doing the best for ourselves.  Furthermore, all of the rest of life on the planet depends on water to live.  Compromising the quality of this resource would not be a good idea if we have an interest in continuing life in the future.  Removing pollution is not always possible, and is always expensive.  Preventing the problem is easier, healthier, and cheaper than fixing it.

There is no ‘away’ anywhere on earth.  I have mentioned this before, here.  When we put toxic chemicals down our drains, or when a bit of gasoline spills at the gas station, when the car’s oil tank drips a bit on the roadway, these toxic chemicals run off into our water table.  They then become mixed into the rest of the water supply and spread themselves throughout the earth, making their way into our drinking water, and our food.

If a product you are thinking about using is not such that you would want to have it touch or enter your body, think twice about letting it go down the train.  If you wouldn’t want the bleach and the caustic toilet bowl cleaner in your food and your water, then just don’t use it – because putting it down your tub drain or down the sink drain will not be putting it away into some safe and sequestered area.  Those chemicals often make their way back into our water supplies.

The beautiful thing is that we don’t have to pollute the water intentionally.  Using biodegradable products to clean our kitchens, countertops, sinks, tubs, and floors, will be better all around.  This way you will not be inhaling toxic chemicals that remain in the air after you use them to clean your house, and you will be saving the water from toxic pollution, at the same time.

If you want to learn about this, you can easily do an internet search for ‘biodegradable household cleaners’ or you can ask me about it.  Personally I find baking soda, vinegar, and an old towel to be effective at cleaning most things around the house.  You also don’t need to buy a product that is manufactured and marketed by a large corporation.  Baking soda and vingear, for example can be purchased in bulk, and they are much cheaper than buying a name-brand version of the same thing.  Add some essential oils to your baking soda to make the house smell fresh.

Here is just one site with a number of recipes for do-it-yourself, non-toxic cleaning solutions.

One of the first posts on the blog included a video of this SoCal family. This newer clip is really inspiring and captures some more details about the homestead. Get some.

We’ve seen a lot about how much our culture uses one-time use products.  It’s every day.  It’s unconscious.  It’s all-pervading.

We’re creating all of this ‘waste’.  What is ‘waste’, anyhow?  Why would anyone every produce something that is not going to be useful, completely?  As we have seen, nature does not create a single thing that isn’t completely useful, down to the last molecule.  All of the acorns, every leaf, and even each animal is recycled and their respective nutrients are cycled back into new life.

It turns out there is a way that you, too, can help play an active role in this process of recycling, and it’s free.  Nature does all the work for you, and you don’t even have to pay anyone to take away this stuff that you once thought of as ‘waste’.  We can stop calling anything organic, or simply anything from the earth in its natural form, ‘waste’.  That’s because we can compost that food, and also all of your garden scraps, into new life, instead of paying someone to come, pick it up, and use more energy to put it into a sealed landfill, never to be used again.

So what is ‘compost’ anyhow?  Composting is the “process whereby organic matter, including food waste, paper and yard waste, decompose naturally, resulting in a product rich in minerals and ideal for gardening and farming as a soil conditioner, mulch, resurfacing material or landfill cover.” [Source]  Basically, many things we presently throw away in landfills are valuable and nutrient-rich, and by simply putting them in a pile, we could take their nutrients and recycle them into new food growth for the future. A very large percentage of the garbage produced in the US each year is organic matter.

Each time organic matter is thrown into the “garbage”, we are littering.  We are wasting.  The waste is taking place on so many levels.  If you’ve got an apple core, an orange peel, a banana peel, or what have you, please, compost it.  You can of course include leaves from your yard, grass clippings, branches and all other plant matter, in your compost.

There is no excuse to not compost organic matter.  Let’s also dispel the use of the word “waste” in context to organic materials.  By putting organic matter in the garbage to be taken to a landfill, we surely would be creating waste.  It is waste, because we are wasting this valuable resource, by discontinuing the cycle that it is a part of, and not allowing it to return to the soil, to decompose, and reconstitute all of the microorganisms and energy within it, to the earth.  We are wasting because we are creating more “waste” for the municipality to have to pick up, transport, process, and then put into a landfill – these all take precious, finite energy to do.  Composting, on the other hand, is free, requires minimal human input, and can be done nearly anywhere.  Composting creates free, organic fertilizer, a valuable resource, which can be used to grow food, plants, trees, and more.

Municipalities and even nations are catching on to this.  Toronto and San Francisco are just two successful examples of cities that have instituted city-wide composting.  In Toronto, for example, a total of 388,188 metric tonnes of residential waste was diverted from landfill during 2008.

If you can’t find any help online, just get in touch with me and I can try to help you learn how to start composting.

Please, stop littering – don’t waste your organic materials – compost.

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We had a family event recently and my mother and I spent a few minutes thinking and came up with a way to have the event without creating more needless waste.

Typically in the parts where I grew up, people use plastic or paper plates and plastic utensils, all of which get thrown away after the event. Often people will throw away the food scraps that people don’t finish, into the garbage, as well.

So, we put out not one trash can, and provided only items to people that would fit into three categories:
- Organic matter
- Recyclable plastic
- Recyclable paper

I placed signs above each bin, and for the most part, even without explaining to anyone how it worked, people used the appropriate bins.

Afterwards I threw the plasticware into our dishwasher (yes I know it uses energy and water) and cleaned it all for another event. Now we don’t have to buy new ‘disposable’ items for the next event. Furthermore, the food scraps and paper napkins will be composted to grow more food, instead of going to a landfill.

It’s really not hard to do things like this. Not one person complained, for the record!

Some of the best education I’ve had here has been about the medicinal properties of plants. I can only speak for myself, but in my experience growing up, while my pediatrician-mother always preferred to let the body heal itself with its own devices, when medicine was required, we used pharmaceuticals. Even for things like cuts, we would use ointments and topical creams that were produced in factories by some company. That was just how it worked and I never thought much about where those treatments came from, or what their active ingredients were, or how they were designed and formulated.

Well living here has completely opened my eyes and shown me that for actually the bulk of time that humans existed, people relied on remedies and medicines from numerous sources including plants. What a surprise! This is a topic that deserves much more than I can shine light on in this short post, so I will just share an anecdote and open your eyes to just one example of the possibilities.

I was scything the clovers and other grasses on one field a while ago and when I removed my gloves I noticed that I had caused a large blister to burst on the inner side of my thumb. I treated it with typical ointments from a first-aid kit with a band-aid. This happened again later and we didn’t have any more band-aids. So, I asked Jim what I should do and he reminded me of the sap or pitch from the Balsam Fir tree. On a bike ride we took previously we took a swim in the woods and had hung our clothes on a tree which he pointed out to me as the Balsam Fir. It has these small “blisters” that you can pop with your fingernail and out comes a clear pitch or sap. Jim felt like there were a few of these fir trees out in one area of our land so I went there and sure enough there they were. I popped one of the tree blisters and coated my blister with the pitch. It is sticky and needs to be covered with a leaf or dirt or something to stop being so sticky. But meanwhile, it has sealed the cut from the elements, and has natural antiseptic properties to clean your wound, all at the same time!

Since then I have used this numerous times with excellent results. This morning I used it again and covered the cut with a plantain leaf – yet another wild edible with natural medicinal properties.

Info on balsam fir with photos of blisters [link]
Info on plantain [link - see 'Uses']

Today was hot. A real scorcher.

First, we watered our tomato plants with a solution made from fish as a natural fertilizer. Next we hand-threshed our home-grown winter rye grains. Afterwards we harvested some potatoes and sowed some new oat seeds, in the style of a Japanese farmer, Fukuoka Masanobu. (He wrote “The One Straw Revolution” which has been quite inspiring to me.)

Lunch was all spelt-grain pizza with home-grown tomatoes, basil, garlic and herbs. I saved dessert – the brown-rice pudding made with raw milk and our eggs – for later.

Lastly we took a few hours to harvest fresh herbs from our garden to dry, and took some previously dried herbs and put them into storage containers for winter use. Today we worked with chocolate mint, spearmint, echinacea, lemon balm, dill, calendula and sacred basil.

Joey Glover!  Yo yo!

So, much has taken place since the last post.  We are spending the bulk of the work days working with our vegetable beds and getting annuals out to our CSA members.  There is never a lack of things to do around here.  One might thing that living in Brooks would be a bore, but I think those who are bored are just boring people.

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I had asked Don to go hunting, but he didn’t have the time that weekend.  Wild foods, including meat, intrigue me.   Wild plants have much more nutrition than the vegetables and fruits sold in shops.  Market produce has been bred for generations to have high sugar and water content, and to last in trucks and on shelves.  They aren’t bred to be nutritious.  Similar things happen with meat.  So, wild plants have retained their ability to compete in the woods without fertilizers and so they are heavily nutritious.  And how much healthier do you think an animal in the woods who can go and pick the food they think is best would be, compared to those that are fed industrial products we have chosen for it to eat?

Anyhow, Bill and Lauren and Bri took me on a walk through the woods with their dog Dakota a few weeks ago.  Our property is over 300 acres, and it abuts on all sides a series of very large private properties that are rumored to be over 1000 acres in total.  Either way, there are a series of gorgeous hiking trails through some of our woods which I was introduced to.  We reached the stream after 25 minutes of hiking, and Dakota caught hold of something.  Eventually Bill pulled him in, and Dakota had mangled a porcupine.  Dakota had a bunch of quills in him, and was reluctant, still, to let go.  Bri and I didn’t want to let the dead animal rot, so we strapped her to a log we found, with my camera strap (hemp comes in handy sometimes).  The walk back was long, especially so as I had forgotten my belt and was juggling the log in one hand, and a basket with wild mushrooms and my camera in the other.

We made it back to the land and proceeded to gut the animal in the woods.  This was the second time I had done this, and Bri’s first.  Anastasia came by with interest and ended up helping out, too.  It was difficult working around the sharp quills, but we were successful and got the internal organs out, cleaned up the carcass, wrapped it up and refrigerated it.

The next day we pulled out a large sum of quills, as Bri wants to make some art with them.  Then, we skinned the porcupine and nailed the skin to a board to dry.  We cut up veggies and Bri put it in a baking dish.  It came out decently.  Porcupine is supposedly a tasty meat – I would agree, although there was not much meat to be had.

I guess the universe heard my intentions after all.

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Vermicomposting.  Check it out on google.  Worms are highly underrated.

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Since that first hike, we have taken a few more, out towards the stream and further.  A part of the land there is low, dank, and covered with hemlock stumps.  The land was all clear cut some time ago.  However, the energy is quite special and many of the stumps are giving life to reishi mushrooms, a healthful variety.  It is highly revered by Japanese, Chinese, and Korean culture, and has been for thousands of years.

We came back with over 15 pounds a few weeks ago.  We are making tea with some, and dehydrating the rest and jarring it for storage.

Wonderful.

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Stinging nettles are a wild plant that help with arthritis and have other healthful qualities.  They are also free and nutritious.  Try steaming them or making them into a tea.  Use caution when picking them as they can sting ya.

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We sheet mulch here in a way that might seem nutty, but it’s very effective, free, and saves the land from soil erosion while providing a moist, weed-free place to grow plants.  In short, we cover the compost and soil-bed with layers of cardboard and newspapers, which we get from the local grocery store.  We then soak them and cover them in woodchips which are free from the power company.  So we are making stacking functions here – taking the waste streams from businesses and turning them into input streams to grow food, while building the mulch, which was our main goal.

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There is a photo of our bulk order up there.  There are a few items not on the table, but you get the point.  We spend less than $4 per person, per day, here.  And we are all big eaters.  No skimping over here.

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Ya momz, kid.

So it’s been decided.  The indecision and weighing and deliberating has finally ceased.

I don’t feel like writing too much right now, so I’ll let the photos do most of the talking.

The main house at Newforest. From the rear.

The kitchen.

Bulk food pantry.

Bulk food pantry.

Cubby bed, upstairs.

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It is difficult to really show you with photos how the growing areas really look.  I will work on this.

Swales and food production.

Chickens.

Where I sleep.

My humble abode.

Outhouse with composting toilets.

Cob oven. Built by hand. For pizza and bread.

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The food forest below is very young.  There are numerous wrire cylinders upheld with spikes.  Each of these is a tree or a shrub.  This land was stripped for timber and topsoil – essentially it was raped.  In 10 years, this will be a massive edible food forest with a wide variety of fruit and nut and perennial species, and hopefully rich topsoil, with wildlife running around, too.  It will take years, but the bulk of the work has been done over the past few, and it will surely pay off.

Young food forest.

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Lunch break!

Salad. Grown right here.

Abbie in the greenhouse.

Delmont's - Our farm stand.

Farmstand produce. All from Newforest.

More of our produce.

Edible flowers.

Lauren grows, dries, and blends her own herbal tea mixes. Amazing.

Mushroom workshop - open to the community.

To fill some of you in on things, for some time, I have been deeply interested in Permaculture, and hoping to pursue a situation in which I could surround myself with like-minded people who could teach me how to grow food. Specifically I want to learn how to propagate and care for fruit trees, learn about rain-water catchment systems, bee and chicken husbandry, sheet mulching, how to design edible landscapes, incorporate our own hand/home-grown produce into a seasonally appropriate diet, cultivate mushrooms, and learn about natural herbs and remedies. In addition, I was looking for non-commercial farms who were more focused on homesteading, or education, so the days would not be as stressful, and more could be learned.

A few months ago I joined the WWOOF program which had a wonderful directory of over 1000 farms in the USA who are open to people like myself for a work / trade setup. Of those, just over 30 really seemed to be a good fit. After writing to those, I visited 7 of the highlights that were located reasonably close to where I would be traveling. Meeting so many people, all living so close to the land was encouraging, to say the least. There is so much I could say about each of these places, but I will save you the time and share with you a few pictures and highlights about some of the places I saw.

ZocaLo – Winter Harbor, ME

Just two folks were living on the narrow 40-acre plot, with ocean frontage leading back deep into the woods. This place was truly DIY – Do It Yourself. Heavily into reusing materials and using as little energy as possible was the name of the game. Highlights included the numerous structures on-site that were built with materials and energy harvested from the property including the clay / mud / straw house with cedar timbers, milled on-site with electricity from salvaged batteries and solar panels.

Images:

Underground passive-solar greenhouse.

Home-made earthen home with sod roof.

Kitchen in the earthen-home.

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Newforest Institute – Brooks, ME [website]

Young folks, a non-profit, a wonderful couple managing the grounds, fruit trees, permaculture, swales, herbs, gorgeous salad greens, communal cooking and living, a quaint town, and a 12 mile bike ride to Belfast.

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Sky Meadow Retreat – Greensboro Bend, VT [website]

This spiritual retreat center is truly unique. A warm family of five lives on site full time, while ‘residents’ come to live in the superiorly cozy cabins or other rooms on the property to share with managing retreat cooking, maintaining buildings, and growing all of the center’s vegetables for the year during the short growing season. With a focus on communication and stillness, the warmth of this spot seeped deeply into my skin.

Photos:

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Laughing Dog Farm – Gill, MA [website]

Daniel Botkin kicks ass. He works hard and continues to put his knowledge and love into his little property, consistently. His fruit trees are young but productive, and his greenhouse and terraced garden was full of lush soil and young seedlings, reaching up to the sun. The meal we ate comprised his own sun-dried tomatoes, greens from the garden, and chestnuts from his own trees, amongst other delectables. Daniel is also in-the-know about saving the lower back – many thanks for the advice.

Photos:

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Restoration Farm – Ashland, OR [website]

Ashland is a small community in southern Oregon, very unlike the surrounding cities. It is an oasis of Permaculture teachers, hippies and other progressives. On this 10-acre plot sat a u-pick blueberry farm, acres of young food forest, and some gorgeous new buildings along with a pair of greenhouses and some perennial vegetables and herbs. Chuck had massive rainwater catchment systems along with some sun-tracking solar panels. Thank you for the food and showing me around town, sir.

Photos:

Note the massive, green, rainwater catchment tank.

Chicken tractor on the left - young food forest and mountains behind.

Permaculture library - massive! Way to go, Chuck!

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Tryon Community Farm – Portland, OR [website]

One of the most unique setups I have ever imagined. Tryon is set in the south of the city of Portland, bordering Lewis & Clark college, and the suburbs. Just 5 miles south of downtown, abutting national forest, these 7 acres feel so far from the city. 16 people live here in the community, including families with children. Tryon is also the home to the nation’s only outdoor kindergarten. Their outdoor kitchen, sauna, and wide variety of edibles are also quite wonderful. The meal we ate with the community was hearty and delicious, and I appreciate how welcoming they were to me. Many thanks.

Photos:

Outdoor kitchen.

Cob sauna.

Communal kitchen.

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Feral Farm – Rockport, WA

I met Matt through an internet forum – deeply engaged by his writings about Permaculture, I wrote him. His farm is not listed in the WWOOF or any other directory. He does not advertise or request volunteers or interns. He is just doing his thing. It was a surprise to hear that he was only 90 miles from my sister’s place. This was far and away the place I visited that held most closely to the true ideals of Permaculture. The focus was aimed at developing what could be most closely modeled as a forest aiming towards sustainability that could also support human life. The few people on the property live without electricity and running water. The shallow but effective wells were created with pulleys and weights and raw human power. Wild edibles and a tremendous number of perennial edible vegetables were scattered all over the 23 acres. Various areas of the forest were strategically being modified to incorporate fruit and nut trees that would over the next 35 years, develop to have a diverse forest ecosystem. Species were selected for their edible production for humans as well as to attract animals onto the property to provide more food for the humans on the land. Modeling certain patterns after those of the Native Americans, Matt had truly a deep grasp of the land, it’s animal and plant life at the present, and his vision for the future was becoming a reality.

While he was living in what most Americans would see as being quite primitive, Matt impressed me deeply. While he lived in a very cozy yurt, he had constructed by hand, numerous cabins below 200 square feet. They were built to a very high level of construction quality, and their size permitted them to be legally built on the property without any building permits. One of them was almost exclusively a library, in which he kept his most impressive collection of books – all which were highly practical and focused on topics from mushroom and wild edible identification to Native American land and animal management strategies to Permaculture and spirituality. Matt was completely self-educated and has a work ethic that I have never seen anything like, ever.

There is going to be a Permaculture Design Course on the property this summer, which if you are in the Pacific Northwest, I would recommend you check out. PDC link.