Little Miss Susie Homesteader

My Scents of Smell

girl mark — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 22:30:30 GMT

I've been doing a fun experiment with my brain. I decided to see how well I can improve my awareness of sense of smell. My sense of smell is already pretty impressive- I can smell people (if they're smelly) across the street at times, and I first noticed it as a child one day when I was able to "track" where a teacher of mine had gone by following his smell from the locked classroom door down the sterile neutral-smelling hallway and thus knew that he was in the building even though the classroom was locked (on the other hand my hearing sucks!). As an adult, my sense of smell fluctuates with my monthly menstrual cycle and can be extraordinarily hightened for a few days, so I have a glimpse of the improved awareness that I'm aiming for. My suspicion is that we ignore our sense of smell partly because we don't have good words to describe it- unless something smells 'like something else', we don't often have good words for the distinct odors- and because we don't talk about it, we don't pay attention to it- the stimulus might be coming in through your nose just fine but your brain ignores most of it unless the odor is strong . I suspect that most people could develop a better sense of smell just by paying attention. Recently I've been reading all kinds of fun pop-science neuropsychlogy books- Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat, The Brain That Changes Itself, and Mind Wide Open (I really recommend the latter two), and a book on the evolution of the body and brain, Your Inner Fish . After reading about the spectacular mental re-training of folks with various forms of nerve damage, brain damage, or blindness that's described in The Brain That Changes Itself, I decided to experiment with an obvious bit of my awareness to change through retraining, my sense of smell. I'm curious if I can bring my everyday awareness of scents up to the level I sometimes experience due to hormones. A few weeks ago, I set an alarm on my phone that goes off twice a day. It reminds me to stop and pay attention to what odors are around me. I have long found that if my attention is drawn to 'paying attention' to the olfactory sense for some reason, I do in fact notice that I can smell whatever's around me, but ordinarily I simply don't pay attention most of the day. I decided to increase the number of times I'm reminded to do so. A few days ago the experiment finally caused a 'pop' in my consciousness, and I've been noticing odors many more times a day than normal even without the reminder from the pda/phone. It's a lot of fun. Sex, and even just being around my lover is more fun with this heightened awareness of scent, too, as are walks around town, being around plants, walking through the woods, being around food, etc. The more unpleasant odors aren't jarring like I expected, I think I'd notice them normally anyway, and I'm surprised that I'm only increasing the pleasant aspect of this. I'm pretty sure that this time hormones dont have anything to do with it as it's the wrong point in my cycle, but I guess I'll know if keeps up. Life has a whole new dimension now- it seems to be a total waste to have a sense that you don't use very much. It's well-understood that parts of the brain that are connected to memory are also very close to those that process the sense of smell, which explains why odors can set off extremely vivid memories, and I'm really looking forward to seeing if this experiment also changes how I lay down memories for myself.

Fantastic article on migratory beekeeping and monoculture in Terrain Magazine (last summer)

girl mark — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 01:47:49 GMT

Nobody Home Everyone Has a Theory Why the Honeybees Died this Winter. Try Malnutrition. By Gina Covina, Terrain http://www.ecologycenter.org/terrain/article.php?id=13601 On Alan Wilson's table at the Oakland Farmers' Market, row after row of glass honey jars catch the early morning sun that angles down Ninth Street. Some of the honey gleams a reddish brown, some a paler amber, depending on the particular mix of flower species the bees foraged. All of it was produced by Wilson's colonies, which number a third of what he had last fall, before the infamous bee die-off that afflicted growers around the world. "I'd better get the honey while I can," one customer remarks. The flurry of media attention given this winter's bee losses, now labeled "colony collapse disorder," has updated the world of bees for a heretofore-clueless public. Our image of honeybees is a lot like our bucolic images of farm animals -- and just as far from the brutal truth of today's corporate agriculture. We picture fields of clover, blossoming orchards, the wildflowers beneath the trees, filled with happy bees industriously gathering nectar and pollen to take back to the hive. As the bees gather pollen, they transfer it from plant to plant, thus assuring cross-pollination. Fewer people can picture what happens at the hive, where the bees feed the protein-rich pollen to their developing brood. The adults live on honey they make from collected nectar -- sipped from the throats of flowers into the bees' honey stomachs, disgorged at the hive into the hexagonal wax combs made by the bees, fanned by bee wings to evaporate excess moisture until it reaches the perfect syrupy consistency, and then sealed with a wax cap to keep it clean and ready to sustain the colony over the winter. In order to do all this, bees rely on a diverse range of flowers blooming over a wide stretch of the year. The honeybee (Apis mellifera) is a European native, one of very few bee species in the world to store honey in bulk and live fulltime in large colonies (30,000 to 100,000 individuals). It is the only bee with a long history of intensive management by people. For almost all of this time, and continuing today in many parts of the world, the rosy picture of bee life painted above is largely accurate. But when beekeeping meets industrial agriculture, the result is very different. Colony collapse disorder may have many contributing causes, but it comes down to bees hitting the biological limits of our agricultural system. It's not so much a bee crisis as a pollination crisis. And we may end up calling it agricultural collapse disorder. It's a rare beekeeper in the United States who can survive by selling honey. The trade loophole that has flooded this country with low-cost Chinese honey for the past ten years guaranteed that (fortunately for beekeepers, that hole has just been plugged by new federal tariff regulations). The only income remaining has been in pollination services. Alan Wilson's bees are rented out for almond pollination starting in February. After that they go south to the orange groves, then all the way to North Dakota where they make clover honey. Wilson's Central Valley location near Merced has little to offer bees over the dry summer months except roadside star thistle and the brief flowering of cantaloupes in August. Nearby agricultural chemicals are a concern, especially the defoliant used on cotton before harvest. Just the drift from the defoliant has taken the paint off Wilson's hives. Still, this year he plans to keep his bees closer to home where he can manage them more intensively and try to increase their numbers. Every commercial beekeeper has different arrange-ments, but each involves long-distance trucking and the California almond crop. Almonds are entirely dependent on the seasonal importation of honeybees. Growers can't get crop insurance coverage unless they have at least two bee colonies per acre at almond blossom time; some growers use up to five colonies per acre for heavier yields. Over 800,000 Central Valley acres are planted in almond trees. As beekeeper Randy Oliver says, it is "monoculture at its absolute worst -- they don't allow one species of weed to grow": mile after mile of bare soil and almond trees. No native pollinators can survive on this wasted landscape to ease the honeybees' burden, and nothing lives to sustain bees before or after the almond bloom. Truckloads of bees begin to arrive as early as November from all over the nation -- it takes virtually all of this country's commercially operated pollination colonies to cover California's almonds. While the bees roll down the highways, hive entrances boarded up, or wait in Central Valley bee yards for the trees to bloom, they're fed a mixture of high fructose corn syrup meant to replace nectar, along with soy protein meant to replace pollen. (Some beekeepers, Wilson among them, have switched to beet syrup as a safer though more expensive alternative.) Oliver sums up the patent absurdity: "When bugs from the east coast have to be trucked to California to pollinate an exotic tree because California has no bugs, it's a pretty whacked-out agricultural system." Oliver's 500 bee colonies -- he was lucky, with losses under ten percent -- follow a relatively short migratory truck route that takes them from Central Valley almonds to Sierra foothill wildflowers to Nevada alfalfa. He attributes his success to fewer and shorter moves, reliance on pasture forage for much of the year, and avoidance of artificial feeding. "Some of these guys move their bees a dozen times a year," he says. Popular pollination routes include apples and blueberries, which rely on honeybees for 90 percent of their pollination, peaches (50 percent), and oranges (30 percent). Farmers won't bother planting squash or melons if they can't get beehives in place by bloom time. One-third of all US crops depend on honeybee pollination. It hasn't been this way for long. Even 30 years ago growers could rely on a combination of native pollinating insects and local honeybees for most crops. In 1970, there were 35 beekeepers in Alan Wilson's area; now there are two. As farms grew more and more of fewer and fewer crops, using petrochemical pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers, vast tracts of land have gradually approached the reductionist goal of supporting no life at all except the target crop. It's not just the almonds -- every crop is grown this way. That's why it's called industrial agriculture, or factory farming. Bee researchers have been calling bees "the canary in this coal mine," a different version of the birds and the bees. A quote attributed to Albert Einstein has been popping up all over the Internet: "If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe, man would have only four years of life left. No more bees, no more pollination, no more plants, no more animals, no more man." Einstein never said it, but the instant ubiquity of the sentiment says everything. Though the media only picked it up this year, bees have actually been in trouble for the past couple of decades. Mites -- parasitic insects small enough to use bees as their hosts -- jumped from other species to honeybees, another example of collateral damage from global transportation. First tracheal mites in the '80s, then varroa mites in the '90s -- even before last winter, the world's honeybee population had declined by half in 30 years. UC Davis apiculturist Eric Mussen points out that before the mites arrived, winter losses of five to ten percent of a beekeeper's colonies were the norm. The mites increased yearly losses to 25 percent by the late '80s, and now we're at 40 percent or higher, with some years better than average and others catastrophic. Randy Oliver says, "If we made a list of collapses of the last 20 years, this winter's would not make the top five." Last year's losses were bad for Alan Wilson, but the last four years together have decimated his colonies by over 90 percent. The only beekeepers doing substantially better are the very small percentage practicing non-chemical mite control coupled with little or no trucking or artificial feeding -- in other words, labor-intensive vigilance combined with lower pollination income. It's not a financially viable option for many fulltime beekeepers. The difference with this winter's losses is not having an identified cause, and therefore no quick (even if temporary) fix. For tracheal mites, beekeepers developed nontoxic preventive treatments -- Alan Wilson successfully doses his bees on a mixture of Crisco, sugar, and peppermint extract. Varroa mites proved trickier, and beekeepers started down the slippery slope of synthetic insecticide use. "Until the mid-'90s nobody dreamed of using chemicals in beehives," Oliver says. Once they did, the race was on, with insecticide-resistant varroa mites evolving neck-in-neck with the newest chemical treatment. European beekeepers, who have had the varroa mite longer, have pretty much given up on chemicals and use an Integrated Pest Management approach. US beekeepers who go this route find it labor- and attention-intensive, and effective within its parameters (not eradication but healthy bees living with a smaller number of mites). According to Oliver, "We're just prolonging our agony as long as we continue to use chemical treatments." Everyone agrees the honeybee buzzed into the 21st century carrying a heavy load of stress. Colonies were weakened by mites, perhaps by chemicals used to kill the mites, and probably by at least some of the 25 different viruses carried by varroa mites. Add in a fungus, nosema, that's tolerated by healthy bees but a problem for already weakened hives. Then there's the stress of long-distance truck travel, longer distances for more bees every year. The small hive beetle, an African native recently found in Florida hives, posed another challenge; aggressive African honeybees attack the beetle, but European bees, bred to be docile, let it overrun the hive. Cell phone interference has been proposed as a threat to bees, based on reports of a German study showing bees unable to find their way home in the presence of high-frequency electromagnetic radiation. This particular theory must be called inconclusive at best, since the study was not designed with enough apicultural knowledge to produce reliable results. No bee taken from the hive for the first time, as was done in the study, would be able to find its way back, since bees navigate primarily by landmarks, not electromagnetic homing sensors. Their first few excursions are short orientation flights, not blind trips in a box to a release point. Of all these factors, many beekeepers judge varroa mites the most consistently debilitating. But there's another weakening influence more obvious and more integral to the larger agricultural dilemma. It's the stressor Mussen calls the most important of all -- bee malnutrition. High-fructose corn syrup and soy protein are not any more nutritious for bees than they are for humans (see Spring 2007), and bees in transit and between pollination jobs often must subsist on nothing but these non-foods. Compounding the problem, we're talking genetically modified corn and soy, every cell of which contains a bacterial insecticide. Are bees not insects? US studies have indicated that Bt corn pollen does not kill healthy bees or brood reared on it, but a German study showed that Bt pollen led to "significantly stronger decline in the number of bees" in hives already weakened by varroa mites. We do know that corn pollen in general is poor bee food, high in fiber and low in protein. The Midwest, up until now the country's best bee forage habitat, this year is being planted much more aggressively to GM corn as a source for ethanol -- aggressive meaning planting marginal areas and edges usually left to the asters and goldenrods that are high-quality pollen sources in late summer when bees need to raise the generation that will overwinter. Even when bees are out foraging for real nectar and non-GMO pollen, for much of the year they are likely to be ingesting a monocultured diet due to their use as pollinators for industrial-scale agriculture -- nothing but almond, then nothing but apple, then only watermelon. They're exposed to pesticides used on their forage crops as well. Oh -- and one more influence to factor into the equation -- very hot weather can damage the protein content of pollen, decreasing its food value for bees. Global warming is kicking our butts from more directions than we can comprehend. Given these conditions, last winter's losses can hardly be considered a surprise. Neither can the failure of bee researchers to come up with one specific cause, much less a magic bullet cure. Still, the kind of thinking that got us this far continues. According to Mussen, "the only hope is the USDA Tucson lab" which is working on a liquid feed that bees can eat all year. Randy Oliver calls this the "holy grail" of bee research. The USDA's proprietary formula, if they come up with one that works, will be patented and licensed to a commercial producer, and the whole agricultural system may manage to lurch along for a few more years, complete with pollinators hauled from Florida to California in time for the almond bloom. How did all those almonds get pollinated this year, on the heels of beekeepers' discoveries that half (in some cases up to 90 percent) of their colonies had suddenly gone missing? It wouldn't have happened without a change in regulations that allowed bees to be imported from Australia. Bee businesses Down Under went into boom mode, sending 100,000 packages of bees to the States. A package is a starter kit of about 10,000 worker bees and a queen, enclosed in a small screened box with a sugar water feeder. The receiving beekeeper shakes the package into a waiting hive, and given proper nectar and pollen resources, within a month a new generation of bees will be expanding the colony. The Australian influx may be short-lived, as a colony of Indian bees (Apis cerana) was recently discovered living aboard a yacht off Australia. The Indian bee is host to yet another mite that could wreak havoc if it spreads to the European honeybee. Another factor in almond pollination this year was the rental price for a bee colony, which averaged $150, nearly twice what it was last year. This was the first year in which the income beekeepers realized from almond pollination surpassed the income received for the entire US honey crop. There's talk of opening the Canadian border for next year's almond season. To paraphrase Randy Oliver, we're prolonging our agony by continuing with this profoundly unworkable agricultural system. Suddenly terms like "organic" and "biodiversity" shift from boutique buzzwords to elements of survival. This country has 4,500 species of native insects that are potential pollinators. On the East Coast, where farms are much smaller, more diverse, and broken up by uncultivated land, native insects account for up to 90 percent of crop pollination. Studies done on Costa Rican coffee crops have shown that yields are 20 percent greater within one kilometer of forest remnants. Canadian canola farmers show increased yields by leaving 30 percent of their cropland wild. It's all about pollination. Fortunately for us, insects are quick to recolonize formerly dead areas. Hedgerows, windbreaks, wetlands, woodlots -- the particulars of restoration agriculture are easy and already known. It's the big picture that's harder to shift, from the extractive industrial petrochemical model to the biodiverse ecosystem model. Honeybees have upped the ante, giving us all the motivation we need to change -- do we want to continue to eat? The material appearing here is copyright Terrain magazine, which is published by the Ecology Center in Berkeley, California. (510-548-2235). The material is to be circulated for educational purposes only, and is not to be reprinted in any publication, or distributed for commercial purposes, including copying for sale, without the permission of the editor of Terrain. © 2008 Terrain All rights reserved.

looking for Bay Area sublet for fall

girl mark — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 01:20:33 GMT

Right after I started this blog, which is supposed-ta be about my homesteading experiences in rural North Carolina, I got a wild hair up my ass to explore the possibility of spending the fall in the Bay Area so as to take a couple of community college classes that are a lot easier for me to do here (for one thing, I still have residency in Cal rather than NC). So, this is a preliminary shout-out to people I know, that I'm looking for a fall sublet in the East Bay. I'd REALLY prefer to be in North Oakland/Emeryville or somewhere along San Pablo Ave in Oakland/Emeryville/Berkeley, but would take a Laney College/lake Merrit area place also. I'm not that particular about the particulars of the place, am quiet, cook a lot, respect other roomates' privacy, and come with references.

Cold and Flu herbal remedies thread

girl mark — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 21:51:47 GMT

I've been partying a bit too hard in San Francisco (well, not really, I don't drink) and came down with a cold the other day. That's the drawback of being in the city, you're constantly breathing other people's germs. The years I didn't live in NYC, or the years when I didn't work indoors in NYC, I always noticed that didn't get sick nearly as often. Working as a bike messenger a couple of winters was amazing that way- you'd think that getting cold, wet , breathing bus exhaust, and getting stressed all the time in the winter is a recipe for disaster, but I found that I actually had fewer germs attacking me than when I worked indoors doing construction or was in school, and took the subway everywhere. Maybe it was the extra exercise, or maybe it was due to not spending much time indoors, but there was a noticable difference. Every time I moved out to the country the same reduction in colds would happen, too. I dabble in herbalism, and am starting to think about getting some formal training. Here's a really good thread on one of the herbal medicine Tribes, with a lot of information I agree with, about herbal remedies for colds and flu: http://tribes.tribe.net/diymedicine/thread/2d889f7e-281e-49b4-b1b0-aa13cf6db7ee

Sauerkraut and kimchee

girl mark — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 21:32:13 GMT

For years I"ve been making kimchee, and I think it's a bit easier than sauerkraut, though the result is similar. My kimchee isn't very traditional- there's garlic, but not nearly as much as what I've had in Asian restaurants that serve kimchees as condiments (I don't know how much the garlic/spice factor varies in Korea, I'm sure it's different from family to family). Below is something I posted to the Fabulous Fermentation tribe last year, and since then I've made dozens of gallons of this stuff. It's starting to be a huge hit with the roommates. I just ordered an extra case of cabbage from the CSA- pre-planting- to make sure there's a few more gallons in two months when the cute little cabbage seedlings they're planting turn into nice heads. Kimchee is fairly fool-proof because it relies on making a brine of known salt proportions to protect the cabbage (or whatever vegetable) from the wrong microbes, and it's easier to get the amount of salt right even if you don't know how much (by weight) cabbage you're really working with- you just pour brine over it till it's covered. You generally dont get molds or other undesirable things growing in or on kimchee during the processing, unlike kraut (I think), because the kimchee is easier to keep submerged in brine. You can kimchee lots of different vegetables. Cabbage is a nice crunchy texture of course. In traditional kimchee the dominant spices are ginger and garlic and very hot peppers. I've done very untraditional kimchees red cabbage, a little bit of turmeric, and a beet thrown in for good color. Eye candy! Besides Korean kimchee, other cultures made ferments using brine to easily preserve vegetables- for example, Russians and Ukrainians brined many different vegetables (those Jewish refrigerator cuke dill pickles are brined rather than heat-processed like American canned pickles are) and Russians even brine-preserved fruits like watermelon and apples. step 1: -small head of cabbage -half a large daikon slice cabbage into small pieces (I just put it through the food processor) and cut the daikon into half-moons: slice it in half lengthwise and then slice the halves. soak for 24 hours in a brine with the following proportions of salt/water: 5 cups water 2 1/2 Tb salt if you need more than 5 cups water, then retain the same proportion of water/salt. Krauting 101: you need the salt to inhibit the wrong bacteria (think compost bacteria) and to encourage the salt-loving lactobacillus and other sauerkraut/kimchee bacteria. If you don't like salt you can always rinse the kraut before eating, though it wont' resemble Korean kimchee anymore if you do this because the spices will rinse off also. If you use too little salt it'll compost. Yeck. if you use too much salt then it'll be inedible and no amount of rinsing will save it (ask me how I know) soak the cabbage and daikon for 24 hours in the brine, in a bowl with a tight-fitting plate on top to weigh it down. That'll make it shrink a little so you can squeeze it into jars more easily. Step 2: Then: Drain most of the brine off into another bowl mix the following condiments into the cabbage: several Tb of grated ginger several cloves of garlic several scallions cut into little bits 1 Tb cayenne pepper or several hot peppers minced 1 Tb sugar For some reason I believe the hot pepper gets less hot after fermenting, but I could be wrong. Mix all this with the cabbage and pack some big glass jars with it. The cabbage wants to float to the top after a while and that's where the evil compost bacteria will get it. I weigh the cabbage down by stuffing a ziplock bag into the jar, and filling it with brine (rather than water, in case it leaks!). Sometimes I stick a pint beer glass down on top of the ziplock bag to keep it all in the jar. Let ferment for 3-7 days, it'll have a slightly off flavor earlier on and should stabilise to a nice sauerkraut tang a few days later.

I Build My Home Wherever I Go- transitional homesteading

girl mark — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 21:07:08 GMT

I've got about four years on my regular blog, Diary of A Mad Scientist. It mostly covers biodiesel topics, which are my primary occupation. Lately I've been doing more writing about homesteading and community of all sorts- I've done urban homesteading in the squats in New York City (where I lived without electricity at times, without central heat at all times, without electricity and without any source of heat at other times, and without a lot of other social structures at all times), I've done a little bit of it out in rural areas, and I've done a little bit of it in Oakland. Most of these situations were rentals (or other temporary arrangements like the squats) where we knew that we'd eventually lose the place, which brings up a dilemma when it comes to living comfortably. Most people don't like to invest too much effort into a rental. I have the opposite approach. I don't intend to own property any time soon- I'm even a bit uncomfortable with the whole concept of land owning, especially as an immigrant to North America knowing the history of the country I'm in- and don't want the lack of home ownership to impede my having a comfortable environment set up exactly how I want it. I used to joke that my motto was 'I build my home wherever I go'. Ironically, the NYC squats mounted enough years of a legal challenge to the building's owner (the City of New York) that they eventually gained legal status as owners (in transition, with tons of problems). C-squat, which I helped start in 1989, has been there for 19 years now. Serenity, my long-term home, which is everything but serene, still stands (and fights amongst itself just as it did when I was a wide-eyed teenager visiting the sleazy thirtysomethings who were quite happy to show me their homesteads). Some of the originally abandoned buildings that were in the original city homestead program in the 1980's have quietly succeeded in finishing their renovations, gaining title, and providing housing for their occupants ever since then. Other groups in the same program lost control of their life's work over technicalities in the program. But for the most part, the gambles on a temporary space, and the quality of life it provided to some of us, were successes. After a few years in Oakland California, I'm now living in Pittsboro, NC, in a community that's in a caretaker sort of position on some land that'll eventually get developed. We've got something like two years supposedly- but with the housing market tanking, that development may hold off for a few more years. So it's back to the same sort of transitional land status gamble- it may be worth setting up more home improvements, farming the land, and building the garden soil, as it's entirely possible we'll be there for 7-10 years, or it might all be gone in two. I personally prefer to gamble on it's permanence, or at least on the known factor that my quality of life will increase if I treat the place like I live here. Some of the challenges we face at our place include: -there's a half-built cabin there, that's not quite worth fixing up if we lose it soon. I'm taking a gamble on doing the work, though, as it's relatively un-complicated carpentry and it'll provide me a super high-quality little cave to live in for a couple of years at least. I mean, rent for the place is $150 a month (we charge ourselves rent even though we get the land for free, and the money goes to support an educational project at Piedmont Biofuels) -everyone's on electric or propane heat, which we hate. We are all biofuels geeks, have a chainsaw jock who's always ready to cut wood, have a wood management shed nearby where we can dry wood, and it's ridiculous to pay money to the local power plant. We should be on wood (there's no solar exposure at one of the houses, set deeply into trees, so solar hot water is out of the question there) However, the expense of putting in a wood stove at that particular place is really offputting. I'm not volunteering to do the work quite yet, perhaps next summer. Wood heat, and hydronic heating, and other things like that, will be a whole nother blog entry in the future. -it doesn't really seem to make sense to build garden soil. I'm considering doing so anyway, though, but mostly for experimental reasons- we have access to a horse stable's manure, and I'd like to do some large-scale compost experiments to see how fast I can do it (and to experiment with glycerine composting as well from biodiesel production). In the meantime, myself and Bob and Camille are working on container gardening, which is the solution I've done in most urban farming I've done. I met Bob and Camille a few years ago and visited them before they moved to Pittsboro. At the time, Bob was running a biodiesel plant in Colorado. They used some spare 275-gallon IBC containers- 'totes'- the plastic things with a steel cage around them that are the "next size up" container from a tote- as container gardens in the concrete loading dock yard of the plant. They cut totes in half and made these 4' square, 18" high tubs, and grew tomatoes and greens. When they later moved to Texas, they just forklifted the tote gardens into a moving van and took the garden with them . That's exactly the model I want to do here.