Bike economics series on Grist

If you haven’t seen it already you should check out this series on Grist about biking and the economics a bike economy can have on a city versus focusing on cars.

This is why we have an urban farm

 

 

Watch this video.  This is why we operate an urban farm.  We’re not there yet, but we will be soon.

Courtesy of Civil Eats

Easiest way to grow potatoes

Potatoes.  Who doesn’t love potatoes?  I know I do.  And I love how easy they are to grow.  If I was ever to get involved with growing  large amount of some crop, ala, monoculture, I would choose potatoes over our traditional (at least around here) corn and soybean rotation.

Check out this article on Sustainablog about easy ways to grow potatoes.  I think these are two good suggestions, but I like my method better, which I’m going to share with you.  It’s similar to his method #2 but provides a bit more safety from weeds and grass growing through your bed.

Method 1-otherwise known as the one where you plan ahead

When I need to plant potatoes I usually plant them on virgin soil that I want to eventually grow on.  I start the planting area in the fall by collecting lots of leaves.  Then I make a huge pile of them in the area that I want to grow the potatoes on (sometimes with cardboard under them and sometimes not).  Over the fall and winter these leaves will decompose, as will all the weeds and grass that is under the leaves.  When the spring comes I simply pull back the leaves and stick the potato seed in the ground and cover it back up with the leaves.  Now, as the summer progresses I cover the plants with grass clippings.  Voila!  When the tops die you’ll be able to dig up the potatoes and eat them.

In summation

1. Collect leaves and make them into a pile.
2. Let them decompose over the winter.
3. In the spring make a hole and set your seed potato in the hole.
4. Cover up with your remaining leaves.
5. As the summer progresses cover with leaves or grass clippings.

The best part of this setup is that after you harvest the potatoes you have created a new raised bed that will be filled with mostly composted soil that you can plant right into.  Essentially you’ve composted the soil you’ll need in place!  I’m thrifty with my energy like that.

Method 2-wherein you didn’t plan well enough 

Now, if you want to grow potatoes and it’s spring and you didn’t plan ahead (I promise I won’t judge you) this is how I do would do it.

1. Put down a healthy layer of newspaper or cardboard.  (cardboard is better)
2. Toss down a little bit of compost to give them just a bit of nutrients.
3. Put down your seed potato chunks.
4. Cover with leaves, straw or grass clippings.
5. When the tops die back you can simply reach under the mulch and harvest the potatoes.
6. If you let these clippings continue to decompose you’ll have a nice bed of compost shortly.

There you go.  I think he and I are on the same page except that I like to set up the bed in the fall.  I also like to put down cardboard to kill the grass if I don’t pile up enough leaves to kill it for me.

The things I think

I think it’s amazing to me, that the kid at the school concert we were just at needed the full 45 minutes to get that treasure out of his nose.

I think it’s telling about the state of humor from the past when my kids replicated it today saying corny jokes and then one banged on the electronic drum for the bah-dum-dum sound.  Just like what you see today on late night TV or even back in the day with Johnny!

I think I like farming but when it rains things get really boring.  I don’t do boring.

I think if we keep tweaking it, this Urban Farm book of mine may actually be a true book and not one written by a business wonk with little creative juice.

I think the site people I want to punch in the throat is a funny take on general life.

I think the Honey Badger don’t give a f$%#.  (Link NSFW)

I think I really like the book Empire Falls that I just finished.  So many fiction books today are mystery/murder/etc books.  This is just a fiction book that sucks you into the lives of people in this small town.  It reminds me of Main Street by Sinclair Lewis only updated to current time.

I think used book stores might just be the coolest places on earth.

Seeding made easy

I’m typing this while having created some time tonight, well, Mother Nature created it for me by sending through a huge rain storm.  It’s raining so hard the gutters aren’t keeping up.  Therefore I’m not out weeding and doing garden work like I need to be, but inside typing and working on all the other things on my never ending to do list.

Today for the first time I used an Earthway seeder.  And I loved it!  I love this thing!  My gardens at home are all sq ft gardens which are planted fairly laboriously by hand using Mel’s techniques.  I even did this with most of the crops that I planted at our urban farm as they are all sq ft garden beds as well.

It’s no wonder that bigger farmers use tools such as this to grow their crops.  It would make the seeding so much more effective, especially when you are seeding in a row. I did figure out though that you need a fairly well broken up seed bed.  The seeder liked my beds made of all compost but didn’t care for the beds that were trucked in dirt with clods and whatnot.  (When I’m planting by hand I can just work around them so the clods don’t really matter.  🙂 )

I used the seeder today to plant green bean seeds, and I tried it in the sq ft garden beds as an experiment, in addition to the long rows I intended to be bean rows.  Typically a sq ft garden bed would have 9 plants per sq, or 288 plants for one 32 sq ft box (8×4).  Today I was able to run 7 rows across the bed (on the 4 ft spacing side) that size and as long as the seeds are spaced at the stated 3.6 inch spacing that would work out to about 200 plants in that bed.  ((8×3.6)x7 rows)  That isn’t as many as with the sq ft method, but I had the bed planted in less than 5 minutes compared to a solid 30 minutes to do it with the finger method.  Given this time savings it might be worth the slightly reduced yield from each bed. Of course I could try to get in an eighth row which would put the number of plants up around 230.

Planting is mostly completed for this summer (save for tomatoes and peppers) but when it’s time to direct seed the fall crops I’m going to use the seeder and see how it works for the beets and carrots, two plants that always take a ton of time to plant in the beds.

Check out the videos below!  Some cool information about the seeder.

If you’re interested, check out this info from Johnny’s.

Also, the human powered home has a section (I need to review this book at some point)

Also, also, 🙂  I know I saw something on Gene Logsdon’s blog about how he uses Earthway Seeders on his acreage  but I can’t find it now.  He meshed together 3 of them I think and used them to plant his corn rather than buying a device to pull behind the tractor.  (Gene is really big on keeping costs down when you grow instead of getting bigger and bigger)

Smoked fatties

You may have already seen this on my Facebook update a few weeks back, but I wanted to share it here as well.

I made this recipe again and I have to tell you, it just keeps getting better.  I used Jimmy Dean sausage instead of Country Home sausage and it was a lot better.

Smoked fatties

I cut these up and placed them into hot dog buns which didn’t work for the boys.  😦

And they didn’t seem to like it this time around.  Maybe I gave them too many snacks this afternoon.

Check out the link to BBQ Addicts.  I’ve tried this with ground pork without the sausage flavoring and it was not good.  Don’t do that.  🙂

Old Chinese Proverb

“THE PERSON WHO SAYS
SOMETHING IS IMPOSSIBLE
SHOULD NOT INTERRUPT THE
PERSON WHO IS DOING IT.”

This is so true.  The Chinese have the best sayings.  We hear this a lot at work with all the ideas we propose to people who are a little more…um…conservative.

🙂

Urban farming, the new way to handle unemployment?

Depending on which figures you choose to use, unemployment in America is approaching 20%, a figure that is quite remarkable.  Fully 1/5 of the people in America who could be working are not currently working.  I think urban farming could be this generation’s way to handle unemployment, sort of like a 2011 version of the CCC.

Urban Farm in Chicago

When you are willing to trade your labor for less space and less machinery you can create an amazing income from a small land base.  SPIN farming is a method developed by a farming couple in Canada when they realized that they could make more money by growing intensively on less land if they grew the right crops at the right times.

They have a farm income calculator on their site that suggests that a farmer with 1/2 an acre can generate $24,000 in gross sales on the low end up to $72,000 on the high end.  I think this is doable as well, but it does require a bit more marketing and growing of high value crops.  We use a CSA model for our urban farm and I don’t think that will get us to those dollar figures because a CSA model is similar to a bulk food model vs. a model where you would grow exclusively high value crops like exotic green, radishes or beets for restaurants.

While the situation in Detroit is well known, the situation in other cities regarding vacant land is less well known.  The Brookings Institute has placed the vacant land in Detroit at around 1/3 of the city area, of 40 sq miles.  I saw a

Urban Farm in Cuba

different article that put the vacant space in the average city at around 14%.  It’s higher in the south (around 19%) and lower in the Northeast (around 9%), but 14% of the space still works out to a pretty good chunk of area.  According to this article about Pittsburgh the size of the 10 largest cities in America is 340 sq miles, with Pittsburgh coming in at 56 sq miles.

Using those figures we can put the vacant land size at 5.6 sq miles in Pittsburgh or 34 sq miles for the average city in the Top 10 of America.  (Stay with me on the math here people)  So if you take the top 10 of our largest cities they would represent 21,760 acres of vacant space per city (640 acres per sq miles * 34 sq miles).  That would work out to 210,760 acres across those 10 cities.

Now, let’s attack Pittsburgh.  This article about Pittsburgh puts this city as the  56th largest city in America.  (this ranking is based on population size not land area)  I’m going to assume that the next 50 largest cities are all Pittsburgh’s size.  (I know this is crazy but I have to make some assumptions to make this work)  56*10% =5.6 sq miles per city * 50 cities = 280 sq miles.

640 acres per miles * 280 sq miles = 179,200 acres.

So, between these two figures we have 389,960 acres of land.  (Let’s make it 390,000 to make things easy)  If you use the figures that SPIN farming provides that means we could potentially create 780,000 new jobs by encouraging urban farming on this vacant land.

The most recent figure I have seen on unemployment puts the total number at 13.7 million people.  (I think is what the government calls unemployed which is not the number of people who are looking for job and quit, those who are no longer getting benefits and aren’t counted, and other factors).  By turning the vacant land in these top 60 cities into urban  farms we could lower the amount of unemployed in America by just under 6%, and would put the total number under 13 million.

A quick Google search puts the number of cities in America at around 25,000.  I have discussed the top 60 size wise here.  If we can assume for a minute that each one of those cities could support 1.5 sq miles of vacant then each city in America could, in theory, support 3 urban farms.  25,000*3 would be another 75,000 potential positions.

Now, I guess this wouldn’t completely take care of our unemployment problem given that it would “only” create around 860,000 new jobs.  It’s interesting though that an initiative like this would make urban farming the 2nd largest employer in America after only the behemoth Wal-Mart.  It’s interesting to think of all the job creation initiatives that are in place to help corporations create jobs and this one initiative could create the same amount of jobs as two new McDonald’s corporations.

Rooftop farming

That is a lot of jobs.  And this just vacant land.  It doesn’t include potential farmland in sprawling suburban campus’ or on rooftops in the city.  I’m going to toss out that an initiative that included those elements would easily produce just as many jobs.  Now you are looking at 1.8million jobs which would, by itself, lower unemployment by 13%, assuming that each farmer doesn’t ever hire any workers or that ancillary industries aren’t created off of this initiative.

Interesting though isn’t it?

Picture 1 courtesy of Cut and Fill

Picture 2 courtesy of thegoldenspiral.com.  

Picture 3 courtesy of Treehugger 

This post cross posted at Groovy Green.

Whoa boy!

Man, I have to tell you.  Between my normal life and getting this farm up for the spring, and my own garden, I’m beat!

Meetings in the morning, then spent 4 hours in the sun yesterday hand shoveling trailers full of dirt, then some meetings, then quick unloaded a truckload of wood chips and then drove back to the farm to cover up all the plants for the frost that I was warned not to plant before June 1st or we may have a stupid late frost only I didn’t listen because I’m too smart for my own good and everyone else is wrong and there you have it.

So hopefully all those lovely squash and cuke plants that I’ve been lovingly tending in the greenhouse make it through the night.

😦

My rig, and simpleness

I thought it would be interesting to post up a picture of my bicycle here.  Most of the time a bike is posted on a blog it’s to talk about how fancy it is and all the features and what they cost.  Blah blah blog

A picture of the road bike.

I’m much more into simple and functional.  And cheap.  Now that’s not for everyone.  If I was older and not able to handle discomfort perhaps I would care that my bike is just a little bit small for me.  Or that it only has one gear.  If I was riding across the country, instead of across town, I would certainly care about the gear part.

Missing derailleur

But as it is, I usually ride 5-10 miles and this works just fine for me.

What you are seeing here is a $50 investment in an old frame and adding about $175 in components (and bike shop labor) making the bike a fixed gear bike. I’m a fan of simplicity and fixed gear bikes are that.  And cheap. If I were to buy a new fixed gear frame it would cost around $400 just for the frame.

I think a bike like this is a good metaphor for America in a lot of ways. We, as Americans, always feel like technology will be the answer for us. Whatever is next and newer and better is always better. I’m not so sure. James Howard Kunstler talks a lot in the Kunstlercast about the diminishing returns of technology.  I think we are squarely in the middle of this.  No one needs a bike with 30 different speeds, or carbon fiber or special low resistance wheels.  What we need are bikes that are simple, reliable and efficient.

Some technologies do make your life better. As I’m writing this I’m sitting on the back porch using a WIFI connection to “work” while I listen to birds (and not bite my kids’ ears off because they are so loud) and enjoy some peace (not withstanding all the lawn mowers chugging away).  The WIFI connection has enabled me to make any room of the house an office instead of one central spot.  It has done amazing things for the way I work while in the office as well, and for others.  To me, this is a good example of a technology that has an increasing return on my life.

Think about the technology in your life and figure out which ones make your life better, and which ones actual create a drag on your life’s momentum.  Do you still need them?  Can you jettison them?  To me, asking questions like these are the basis of living simply.