Homestead mailing list

[Bill Jones <billj AT harborside.com>]

Clansgian AT wmconnect.com wrote:

> > But they have 
> > unbelievable discussion boards where individual contributors discuss the 
> > projects they're working on.
> >    
>
> The "negativism" is actually just a form of the $239 tomato, says I.
>
> My gardens are primitive, scarcely neolithic.  More than 3/4ths of the plants 
> are from saved seed and all the "fertilizer" is from decaying organic matter. 
> The shovels and hoes cost little in either money or energy to produce and 
> bid fair to last 100 years.  This spring I restored my grandfather's old Vulcan 
> #13 plow and turned one 1/6th acre plot that had been allowed to fallow the 
> previous year and had begun to grow in sod.  The restoration cost about $16.
>
> This is turning out to be a very good gardening year.  Already here just past 
> the Ides of June my 'produce/cash outlay' is very high.  My 'produce/energy' 
> ratio is even higher, 'energy' here being liquid fuel or electricity.
>
> The cash cost of a tomato (once they ripen) is likely to be so negligible 
> that it is hardly worth tallying.
>
> Yet the gardens of some acquaintances are insanely cash intensive, and energy 
> intensive.  There is the Kubota tractor parked by the 20'x30' garden, the 
> purchased platic trellises, the polycarbonate green house (heated, of course), 
> etc. etc.   When the year's garden expenses are divided by the produce, it isn't 
> unusual for the result to be a $239 tomato.
>
> And why are they gardening?  Why, to save money, of course.  That, and to 
> save the Earth by not contributing to the energy and soil erosion that 
> agribusiness causes.  They never stop to realize that manufaturing that tractor and all 
> the purchased garden dodads cost more in energy than the produce from that 
> garden would save in 500 years.
>
> I look at all the alternative energy posits I can find, including the one 
> Bill posted.  I have yet to find one that in the end is not a $239 tomato.  As I 
> have unpopularly opined before, if you take the actual amount of electricity 
> available at the outlets for an alternative energy system and compare that 
> amount of electicity to the cost (in energy used and pollution caused to make it 
> as well as cash to purchase it) and compare that to the cost (ditto) of 
> purchasing that amount of electicity, in every case so far that I've investigated, 
> the alternate energy system in the end is causing MORE energy use and pollution 
> than buying the power, and the cash payback is in hundreds of years.
>  
I agree 99%, but only because electric equipment is so impossible to 
make on one's own.  There are other issues.  Count on the future to very 
unpredictable, with what power there is being diverted to big cities.  
Fortunately almost nothing that we need comes exclusively from electricity.

> There's another aspect of this I find fascinating.  Now of days one hears 
> endless blather of how we can come up with alternate motor fuels or alterante 
> vehicles so we can continue to dash about madly.  The suggestion that moving 
> about great distances at 70mph every day might itself be the problem which is 
> easily solved by working out a lifestyle that doesn't NEED personal motor 
> transport of that type in in that quantity.
>
>  
I guess it depends on what the the meaning of "us" is.  We already live 
that way. 

> Blank stares follow the suggestion.
>
> > From Bill's site this:
>
> "Hand Pumps--Better than not having water, if you have no resources 
> available.  Or if you can get your kids to do it."
>
> Like the unassailable mindset that will consider no alternatives but the 
> status quo of unlimited amount of personal vehicular transportation, the pervasive 
> theme on all the "what to do about depletion and pollution caused by the 
> electric system" sites is that whatever task is to be done, the ONLY thing to be 
> considered, even remotely considered, is to stand back with one's hands folded 
> and watch some gismo do the work.
>
> Do it by hand?  You have got to be f-ing kidding!!  Why, I know someone 93 
> years old with only one arm and in a wheelchair and on an oxygen collector.  You 
> can't expect HER to do that work by hand so you can't expect ANYONE to do it 
> by hand.  What an evil, sick suggestion.
>  
Maybe you'll think that gardening is still fun after you have to raise 
all the water for your garden 100' with a hand pump.  If you calculate 
the caloric expenditure involved with pumping that much water, it would 
add several hundred calories onto your day's total, after chopping wood 
and before all else.  We opt not to do that, for obvious reasons.  The 
reason why these systems are possibly more valuable to us than to you is 
that we're 3 days away from a dead garden once the power goes out, since 
the electric pump we're stuck with now allows for no other options.

> And yet on the proffered website, the feature for water pumps is the solar 
> powered pump that lifts the water 35 feet at a rate of 75 gallons an hour on 
> sunny days.  I am just finishing up a system on my place using an old cast iron 
> transfer pump that lifts the water from the collection basin in  a stream 24 
> feet to the pump and then delivers it under a bit of pressure 16 more feet to 
> the cistern (which has a low flow in very dry weather).   With a reasonable 
> effort the system delivers 5 gallons a minute.  That's 300 gallons an hour 
> although one is unlikely to crank the thing for a full hour at that rate.  Yet it 
> costs only fifteen minutes of work to duplicate the fellow's solar system and it 
> can be done any time day or night, sun or clouds.
>
> Yet the prospects are dismissed.  You'd only employ a hand method of doing a 
> task if no other method existed and then you'd try to shanghai someone else 
> into doing the work at that.
>
> No, it isn't negativism, it's realism.  
I'm putting in 5 different compressed air water pumps, each for a 
different purpose, and the total cost for all of them will be less than 
$200.  That's less than half of one ridiculous electric pump.  You often 
hear that it's more efficient to use two separate pumps: one to raise 
water and the second to pressurize it.  But no one ever does, because no 
one wants to buy two pumps.  I can, because the cost is so cheap.

My Biodynamic buddy finally convinced me that wood gasification is the 
way, for anyone who already has a functioning engine.  The carburettor 
is replaced by a stopcock valve and a T-connector to allow in air, and 
the engine draft provides the air flow through the gasifying chamber.  
It's not that convenient to turn on and off, but for wood chipping or 
compost shredding (a one-shot deal) or water pumping (where the water is 
stored in a tank) it's just fine.

I guess the expensive pond we're putting in, to make sure the garden has 
enough water even if there's a bad drought, must be the ultimate $239 
tomato.  What's it worth to know that there will be water?  But with the 
pond, only minimal effort will be required on the bicycle pump to lift 
enough water such a sort distance.

> The real low tech solutions are shunned as some sort of hellish 
> curse.





For example, people who live in arctic regions could simply hike 
southward to obtain food.

Compressed air (for conveying energy) and wood gasification (for 
creating it) are the real low-tech solutions.  Both can be implemented 
by reasonably intelligent people with junk from the previous century.

For me it's also a question of accepting a dumbed-down lifestyle, which 
I would not do in either case, neither as a naive consumer who knows 
nought about any of the devices he owns, nor as a helpless case who's 
only capable of slurping up whatever water falls by chance.

S. Oregon coast