Agriculture – In My Back Yard

Enter Title Apology Here

Hi reader(s). (I know there’s at least one of you, because you told me so in person… thanks, Vera!) I’m feeling kind of bad about neglecting you for a whole month; you might accept my excuses but I certainly hope you’ll accept my apology. To make it up to you, I’m going to start trying to add some pictures.

I don’t think it makes sense to go over everything that’s happened in the last month in one post, so I’ll bring you up to date with a few highlights. Three trips out of town – the first two look remarkably like The Travelling Engineer Problem as I made two more trips to Ohio; the third was to Princeton Reunions which was another thing entirely. There was also the Memorial Day holiday, and learning to be a s pumphouse_small_crop tonemason¹. We determined that we needed a “well house” to protect all of the equipment that goes with the new well that’s coming online soon, and so we decided to berm it in to save on heating costs. Let me tell you, this is slow, heavy, hot work.

Evening Entertainment

On a friend’s recommendation, we tried a different place for karaoke, called K-HOUSE. This seems to be a local one-off Ithaca establishment despite the rather generic name. The bulgogi was far from generic – it was truly excellent. The song selection was quite good, although our tastes are obscure enough that between us we failed to find a dozen songs we were hoping to sing. One of the weirdest things about the place is that although there’s a stage in the corner, the big screen for the words is right over the bar, so unless you rent one of the private rooms, you wind up standing in the middle of the room singing to the bartender, rather than facing your “audience.”

Then, while at reunions, I had the great pleasure of attending Princeton University Players’ production of The Fantasticks. This show is one I did as an undergrad, but with Cameron Platt ’16’s creative directorial choices, it came to life in a completely new and very moving way for me. I also got to see the always hilarious improv of Quipfire!, the group that had to wait for me to leave before they started. And, of course, arch sings.

IMBY Progress

Some miscellaneous progress notes: Believe it or not, the pallets of concrete blocks shown above had a wrapper that indicated they were made in NY. Also, I finally ordered wood for the “covered bridge” shed I plan to build – and that was locally grown, rough cut hemlock from Robinson Lumber. When I had to buy gas for the lawnmower, I followed up the Mirabito lead (Apr 12) and found they are selling ethanol-free gas (which you might consider a good thing, or a terrible thing, but since I’ve followed Agway’s advice and used that, I haven’t had any carburetor or muffler exhaust problems). I bought a hammer to replace one I’d lost² and was pleased to find that Stanley Bostitch makes hammers in Mexico (could have come a lot further)… and that they have a 100 year warranty. Wow.

Even closer to home, the literal backyard is starting to yield food, and I’ve had some spinach (for instance, in an omelette with backyard eggs), lettuce, chives. The cherry in the front yard is promising real production this year, perhaps even enough to rival the abundance of the one tiny “pink champagne” currant bush that just keeps on giving. Onions, potatoes, peas, peppers, and a cucumber are all progressing well so far. I may even let some of the winter rye I planted as a cover crop keep growing and see if I can process it.

Not as Local as I’d Like

I had to refill the water softener that serves my home and 3 others on one well. We use potassium chloride (KCl) because it’s better for the gardens, and as a nice side effect, I avoid having to eat bananas to prevent leg cramps. The brand comes from the North American Salt Company, which pretty well describes them – they have mines and plants all over. Packaging, at least, seems to happen along the Great Lakes, so there’s some chance this is getting here by rail or water. If push came to shove, though, we could switch to sodium chloride (NaCl), and for that Ithaca has its own salt mines, close enough to bring it by horse-drawn wagon. If one worries about such things in a post-industrial world…

I also bought some anti-deer fencing and wooden stakes, which though purchased at Agway, are surely from far-flung places. Once the trees grow up (now hopefully unencumbered by the deer) maybe I can make my own stakes…

Frustrations with Mega-Corps

When I tried to find the whereabouts of Woodstock Foods, which has a nice looking “non-GMO” campaign going, I was pretty effectively stymied. Their web site doesn’t have any physical location information on it. A Hoover’s search suggests it is actually a subsidiary of United Natural Foods (UNFI, also of Providence, RI), a $6.7 billion dollar Fortune 500 company. That doesn’t inherently make them bad, but considering that the Gross State product of Rhode Island is only $45 billion and that UNFI isn’t even among the top 20 employers in the state, it seems unlikely that the company is particularly “local” to there, and by extension to anywhere. Also, I found a piece of glass in my sandwich one day, and their peanut butter seemed the most likely culprit.

If you build a stone wall and don’t charge anyone, does that make you a freemason? ↩
Thought I’d lost… oops. ↩

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: May 3

My neighbor Steve and I had a very fine weekend at Northland Sheep Dairy learning about horses and mules as draft animals from Donn Hewes’ Teamster School. Some day, we think it would be amazing to have our own draft animals here on site… but for now, we still have a lot to learn. I was extremely excited about the possibility of learning to rebuild and repair old horse-drawn implements such as old McCormick Deering sickle bar mowers.

I’ll try to keep my notes on this weeks purchases concise. Good: Local cheese; used books; local port and brandy; car alignment check at a local service station. (Although this could get better if my friend John becomes a neighbor and is able and willing to apply his mechanic skills to cars on-site.) Bad: Some garden implements from Agway, needed because old ones broke (plastic sucks). Gas for car. Ugly: Greek mavrodaphne wine – this was something I tried years ago and wanted to sample again. However, I will soon be bottling some homemade wine from my own Concord grapevines – which (you’ll have to trust me on this) is much better than you’d think based on Concord’s reputation. Also, wings and drinks at The Haunt’s karaoke night (again). Ambiguous: Going out to eat to meet with people. These were three local, non-chain establishments: Viva Cantina, Hawi Ethiopian Restaurant, and the Rogues’ Harbor Inn. In all cases, I’m sure many of the ingredients were non-local; Rogues’ Harbor probably did the best as my sandwich included local (free range, hormone free, antibiotic free) chicken, locally baked bread, local cheese, and beer from on-site, and all 5 beers in the sampler were also made on site. Balance that against the fact that it’s the furthest of the three from my home.

It seems that now might be a good time to look in on some of the other purchases that have happened this month “in the background” – things like automatic payments for services or such things that don’t show up as receipts in my wallet.

Good: Trees from Musser Forests – they are relatively close, and once planted one hopes that the trees become a local and self-sustaining resource. CO₂offsets from the Finger Lakes Climate Fund. A donation to one of my Alma Maters – no goods received, the donation will do work locally where it is received. Service contract costs for my domestic hot water system.

Bad: Water filter service contract from Aquasana – this seemed like an economical way to get filtered water, but it seems unfortunate to be shipping filters across the country. However, I only need a new one every 6mo or so, which is better than when I was using a Britta filter. Phone bills – no obvious alternative to a big national corporation for a true (works when the power goes out) land-line phone.

Ugly: Netflix subscription – this is split between me and a friend; neither of us have (or really want) cable, and both of us have relatively esoteric movie tastes (things like old episodes of Doctor Who, obscure political documentaries, and Bollywood comedies). And, because much of what I’m actually interested in isn’t available “on demand,” I actually continue to have them ship me DVDs. There are certainly other, more local forms of entertainment, but considering the relatively light weight of DVDs in the mail, I suspect this isn’t an environmental catastrophe either. Electric bills – would be nice to buy a Solarcity Powerwall, but not in the cards right now, and otherwise relying on our lovely NYSEG for power. However, by buying wind credits I can home that some of my power is coming from Black Oak Wind Farm.

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: Apr 26

Around the neighborhood, this has been the weekend of visitors, chickens, and trees. A new family considering moving in to our village came to visit us from the west coast, and we had a pleasant flurry of get-togethers¹ so they could meet many of us in person. Meanwhile, our coop co-op was gifted with 13 chickens that a neighbor’s relative was giving away, and at the same time a different neighbor got a mini-coop (not a mini-cooper) with 3 chickens. On top of that, a third neighbor got his first nursery shipment of the year (a miniature Valencia Orange) and I began digging planting holes for this year’s coppice trees (swamp white oaks and river birch from Musser Forests).

Good: Milk. Beer: At The Haunt’s Karaoke Night – Ommegang Rare Vos, and possibly Bass, although who can tell where the heck this is made now that it’s owned by a multinational. (I mean, Bass is possibly good. Bass was definitely consumed. I might have embarrassed myself on stage, but not because I had too much beer to remember the evening.) Lunch: At Viva Cantina – they source many things locally, although I cannot say with any certainty where all the ingredients in my lunch came from.

Bad: Car Tires. Actually, I was having some trouble deciding which category to put this in, and “Bad” seemed lonely. There’s no question that my car dependence itself is in the “bad” category. But as tires go, I was extremely pleased with the fact that Yokohama Tires has a “Sustainability” link at the top of their web site, and seems to be doing real measurable things in terms of GHG emissions and reduction of landfill-bound materials. I also made the phone calls needed to determine that the actual tires I was buying were made in Salem, VA. Electronic Parts. I bought a power supply for the new LED path lighting I installed from DigiKey. I couldn’t come up with any good way to get something highly efficient to run these highly efficient lights², other than buying it new by mail order. Technically, I could have built it myself, but I would still be ordering the parts from who knows where… and this is at least UL listed! Still, if TSHTF in the next 5 years (typical LED lifespan: 50000 hours) it’s nice to know I could. But I’d probably have more to worry about than path lighting at that point.

Ugly: Breakfast. I needed something in walking distance of the tire store that was open at 8am, and although there are local options 15-20 minutes away, Panera was 3 minutes away, so convenience got the better of me. I guess they do employ people locally to bake for them, but it’s not like Dolce Delight. Dinner. Wings at The Haunt are probably not sourced from anyplace I would be proud of.

A side note here: I made Maza (barley cakes) again, only this time I was able to use on-site sourced honey and regionally-produced sunflower oil. However, I added non-local raisins to make them a bit fancier. ↩
My LED lighting is consuming 1.75W total including the power supply. A quick bit of research concluded that it was cheaper – not counting LED lifespans – to run them full time than to put them on a mechanical timer, because most of the mechanical timers consume 2-3W by themselves. Isn’t that crazy? ↩

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: Apr 19

My parents were visiting this week, helping out with their home that is being built in our village, and helping me out a lot along the way. (Thanks Mom & Dad for all the garden and building support!) Their presence changed my shopping patterns in some interesting ways. For one thing, my mom decided that she needed to bring all the food for the week, somehow believing I had been existing purely on air and sunlight. (OK, who are we kidding, until this week it would have been air and snow.) She was shocked (“shocked, I tell you”) when she found she couldn’t fit it all in my fridge. Conversely, their presence got me started on some home-improvement projects I had been putting off, with attendant purchases.

Good: I go to a local dentist. We don’t have one on site (yet) but I think that’s good enough. (Also good – just going for the cleaning and not having any cavities or other problems to complain of.) On the grocery side I picked up some milk (inspired by the butter last week, I got this from Byrne Dairy, which has returnable/reusable glass bottles!).
Plantings. I picked up planting potatoes and onions at our local Agway. Admittedly I’m not certain where they get these, but considering these will be truly growing In My Back Yard it’s hard to call this one bad.
Concrete blocks. I picked up a few of these for a construction project, thinking that they were definitely going in the bad or ugly category. It turns out that at least some cement is made regionally and it may be boat-shippable. Not sure where mine came from, but in the realm of how to get things here, this is at least plausible. (Not that extractive industries themselves are sustainable. Also, I feel guilty buying this from a big box store, but I was trying to match what was already installed.)
Bar drinks. My “bars and restaurants” post was a result of Wednesday and Thursday night’s activities. I try to get to karaoke with DJ Dale at The Haunt when I can, but this week we were stymied by a confusing calendar which showed both the karaoke (false) and a band playing (true). We wound up at Felicia’s Atomic Lounge instead, a place that has a distinctly hip NYC feel but with a heavily locally-slanted bar menu. I selected a cocktail featuring one of the two local gins, and got some things for the other folks (including the folks… my parents) that probably erred on the local side though I don’t have all the details. On Thursday, I explored the opposite side of the STBC/GLBC equation from last week, and had a Right*O*Way*IPA at our local “Thirsty Thursday” networking event.

Bad: Bananas. Source of potassium for parental units. Not local, not likely to ever be. At least they were organic, and maybe they can be shipped by boat, which may be more sustainable. Rice. Still a staple grain in my diet. This is Lundberg organic basmati from California; although this is domestic, it’s possible that the shipping across the US is worse for the environment than shipping by boat from India. That’s a hard one to calculate.
Propane Refill. After 18 months (548 days, if you want to get precise) I used up my first 40lb propane tank. That’s 0.07lbs/day or if you convert to CO₂ emissions, about 3oz per day. (Although there’s a big difference between living and fossil carbon, considering I breathe out 2.3lb of CO₂ each day, I think I’m not going to get too bent out of shape about 3oz to cook my food.)
Misc fasteners. That’s what they call all those little nuts and bolts at your local (or national chain) hardware store. Regardless of where you shop, there’s a pretty good chance they get their inventory from the Hillman Group. It could be worse: nearly 60% of what they sell is made in the U.S. But… it’s a bit disturbing how dependent we can become on a single bottleneck like this one distributor.

Ugly: Toothpaste. I can (and do) buy Tom’s of Maine, but it’s not at all clear to me that they’re “of Maine” or even “Tom’s” any more, since they’re owned by Colgate-Palmolive. Interestingly, their web site doesn’t whisper a word of this vicious, nasty rumor… er, fact. Still, I’d like to keep not having cavities when I show up at the dentist, so what to do? Brush and floss as best as I can.
Cat Food. I’m not entirely sure what to do about this. If the furball would feed himself entirely off of the rodents In My Back Yard I’d be rather happy, but he seems quite certain that I own him 3 (or 4, or 5) square meals a day, and will take it out on me (or out of me, in flesh) if I don’t live up to his expectations. And… whaddya know, he’s allergic to grain. So unless I want to deal with cat dietary allergies (don’t make me elaborate) I wind up feeding him the fancy all-fish stuff made on the west coast. Well, at least they sell it in local stores?
PVC plumbing parts. There really should be a better alternative, but when people don’t remember that you have to leave faucets open in the winter so they don’t freeze, I don’t want to pay for replacing the parts with brass. I still have to go to Agway and get a replacement for the 55-gallon drum (recycled, food grade, less than $20 last I checked) that burst open from the freezing water – and figure out if that fits in a Prius!

Also, two more reasons that I love our local Agway. First, when my second propane tank appeared to be malfunctioning, they help test it, bleed air from it, and topped it off again for free. Second, when the sprinkler head for one of my garden watering cans cracked, knowing that these aren’t sold as replacement parts, store manager Dan Lee found a spare one he had kept from a shipment that had a damaged can, and gave it to me for free. In this day and age, who does that? Ithaca Agway does.

How Local is CO₂?

Carbon credits. At this point, if you haven’t heard the name, you might well be living in a culture that doesn’t use fossil fuels. But the basic idea is that if you’re creating CO₂ from burning fossil fuels, you can do “something” to compensate by buying carbon credits. These might go to the planting of trees or some other activity that reduces CO₂ production elsewhere. You can argue over whether this makes a difference to our long-term future, or not, but that’s really outside the scope of what I want to write about here. Thinking in terms of my back yard, what can I do to first reduce, and subsequently offset my CO₂ production?

The first step I took (starting in 2010) was planting my own trees. Estimates are that each tree may capture 2.5-5.5lbs of CO₂ per year depending on age. Considering how quickly I can plant trees, though, this doesn’t amount to much. The key, though, is that the trees I’m planting are part of a coppice grove, which should supply me with firewood. More on coppice at the end, if you’re interested.

The next step I’ve taken is to stop using natural gas. When my home was built, the installed heat and hot water source was a natural gas boiler. I started heating primarily with wood in 2012; although there are some deadfalls on the property and one or two trees that I’ve had to take down for other reasons, most of this wood was purchased from local suppliers. (Unless you want to pay for the energy of kiln-drying, you must buy your firewood locally.) Then, in 2013, I was able to eliminate the boiler by having a solar “domestic hot water” system installed. The only remaining gas appliance is my cookstove, where I decided that the embodied energy (about 1325kWh equivalent) was more than the CO₂ involved in keeping it running off of propane. (So far it’s looking like 10 years worth of use will be about equivalent to the replacement energy – but then I’m still on my first 40lb propane tank so I might be underestimating the years.) Also, out in the future, I may be able to use a biogas digester to run the stove. And yes, I need a backup for the solar DHW and for the wood stove… but those are both electric, running off my grid-tied solar PV array, which is backed up by buying more wind credits than I actually use.

Of course, all of this is only part of my CO₂ use, because I still drive a car, and because my work requires me to travel overseas periodically, which leads to air travel. In the most recent year, my Prius accounted for 31% of my CO₂production, and the flights for 67%, so I’ve reduced the home energy to only 2% of my total, much lower than typical use. So now we’re back to the question of carbon credits, and how I can choose carbon credits that are local. That has an easy answer: the Finger Lakes Climate Fund. If I offset my carbon use here, it turns into grants for local homeowners to improve the energy efficiency of their own homes.

So in summary:

Before/After CO2

	Past	Present	Future
Heating	Natural gas	Locally sourced wood Electric backup	On site coppice wood
Hot water	Natural gas	Solar DHW Electric backup	(same)
Cooking	Natural gas	Propane cookstove	Biogas cookstove?
Home energy¹	50%	1%	TBD
Automobile energy¹	80%	48%	TBD
Airplane energy¹	?	98%	Lower?

¹ As a percentage of single family detached green home/green car, conventional suburban development, per the EPA. Note that the transport numbers are cumulative: I used as many BTU flying as most households do for their entire annual transportation. Not good, but all of the flying represented was job-related.

I said I’d write a little more about coppice for those who are interested. The coppice grove has been in use in Europe (particularly the UK) for so long that they are considered unique ecosystems. The principle is simple – there are many trees that will regrow new shoots from cut stumps; the regrowth is more vigorous because the established root system can supply nutrients much more effectively, and the harvesting and regrowth can be repeated over and over on a relatively short cycle. (Some trees, or some ecosystems, will work better with “pollarding”, where the cutting happens far above the ground.) Estimates for coppice productivity range from 1 cord/acre/year to as high as 5 cords/acre/year!

Since I’m burning about 1 cord/year, we allocated 2 acres for coppice but I started out by planting only 1/2 acre. One of the good (and bad) things about initially establishing a coppice is that you want to plant only a fraction of the trees each year – less work, but you have to wait a long time (10-15 years?) before your first plantings are of harvestable size, and you know what your yields will be. In any case, I’ll be buying from the local wood suppliers for a while longer still. However, because I’m planting a more esoteric (if historically suggested) coppice, I will get some productivity sooner.

Some of the preferred species for firewood coppice are ash, beeches, poplar, some oaks, and black or honey locust. But in the old days, coppice was used for a lot more than firewood: fence posts, fencing withies (willow), tool handles (and going back to pre-iron age, even tool blades including plowshares!), furniture… So I’ve elected to plant a coppice that includes a variety of species, starting with quite a bit of apple.

Apple has the following advantages: coppices very well (even past the first 15-20 years); can be grown from seed readily (so I don’t need to buy expensive orchard trees); excellent firewood; excellent wood for smoking meats; excellent wood for turnery (making things on a lathe) and other woodworking; and, oh yeah, it produces food. Now when you grow an apple from seed of a good eating apple, you know something about the genetics – at least one of the parents tasted good – but you really don’t know if you’re going to get something of quality. On the other hand, if you plant fifty of them, chances are that you’ll get something out there that’s good for eating, and a bunch of things that are decent for making cider. Since we have orchard spaces elsewhere, there’s no reason at all why we can’t graft out branches from any apples that happen to be delicious.

I’m including some other trees in the coppice rotation as well; the variety leads to a more diverse ecosystem and different trees will have different uses. Some “thornless” honey-locust (Gleditsia triacanthos var. inermis, acquired cheaply from the local soil conservation district), some Kentucky coffee tree (Gymnocladus dioicus – doesn’t coppice! – but I got it for free from a friend, and it does produce a coffee substitute and is good firewood), and planned for this year, swamp white oak (Quercus bicolor, which does coppice and which does well in poorly drained soils).