On my fourth try, I finally got the bread to come out nice, just in time for Easter. So here’s my Easter Loaf recipe. Sorry there’s no picture; we ate it! You’ll need a dutch oven and 5-10 hours ideally, although the actual work required totals about 5 minutes.

First make the sponge- mix the following in a large bowl and let it sit for half an hour:

• 1 packet of Fleischmann’s Instant Yeast (NOTE: Russ says use 1/4 teaspoon; I’m telling you what worked for me)
• 2 Tbsp brown sugar
• 1 cup unbleached flour
• 1 cup warm water

After half an hour there should be some bubbles on the top. Next, using a wooden spoon, mix in:

• 1 tsp. salt
• 1 Tbsp. olive oil
• 1 1/4 cup unbleached flour
• 3/4 cup flavor flours (rye, whole wheat, buckweat, quinoa, chickpea flour, etc.- I used 1/4 c. whole wheat, 1/4 c. buckwheat low gluten, and 1/4 c. chickpea flour)
• Flavoring or seeds, such as caraway for rye, wheat germ, dill, rosemary, garlic, etc.

Flour a board or counter and knead the dough 10-15 times. Flour the bowl and dump the dough back in and cover with a towel.

Let the dough rise for 2-8 hours.

Smack down the dough and knead it again, well. Try to get the air out of it. Let it rise for another few hours.
Pre-heat the oven to 450°ree; and put the dutch oven with the lid on in to heat up for half an hour. Take the dutch oven out, sprinkle a little corn flour or polenta in and turn the dough into it. Sprinkle a little water on the dough and then some sesame seeds on top, and press into the dough. Bake with the lid on for half an hour. Then remove the lid and bake another 12-15 minutes, til you get a nice brown top. The bread should poof up nice and round. Easy work!

I’m gradually coming to the conclusion that it’s probably more helpful and productive for me to stop arguing the fine points of systems theory, energy dynamics and rhetoric and get down to doing some work, spending some time in the trench.

Finally, and I do mean finally because it’s taken me 13 years, I have a decent seed starting space set up down in the basement. Take a look:

I got my big batch of seeds from Seeds of Change this afternoon and got inspired. I set up the second table and light, on the left, and brought in the seed medium. I’ve also got a heating pad to help the new seeds germinate. Lights and heating pad are plugged into a three-way extension cord, plugged into a three-to-two adapter into a timer on the end of another extension cord. Hopefully the house won’t burn down.

I started the first seeds two weeks ago: cilantro, broccoli, broccoli raab, cauliflower, parsley, brussels sprouts, mesclun and snap peas. I used plugs to start these, which I haven’t used before. The cilantro, on the far right, is just now sprouting, but everything else is looking pretty green. It’s about time to snip off the lesser seedlings.

The next batch started about ten days ago and includes mung and adzuki beans, lacinato kale, lupines and poppies. The mung beans, in the middle, all sprouted really easily, being sprouting beans, but I’ve only got about 10% of the adzukis to come up. The kale is on the right. These were dried beans, several years old, so I guess I’m not surprised. The lupines I saved from pods last fall and the poppies are new seed my sister sent me for Christmas.

I like the fact that these plug trays come with a little clear plastic cover to keep the moisture in, but I’m finally utilizing the egg cartons I’ve been saving for the last year. Today’s batch includes red leaf and romaine lettuces, tai sai chinese cabbage, sorrel, spinach and golden chard.

Now the question is, how am I going to plant all this stuff? I have a couple of beds that could take some things as soon as it warms up a bit, but I’m hoping to sheet mulch about half my lawn this year. I’m guessing I need four yards of manure, two yards of topsoil, about 20 bales of straw, and maybe another two yards of ground bark mulch, just for aesthetics. There’s a feed store in the neighborhood so I thought I’d ask there first for who’s selling manure and straw. Otherwise there’s a small dairy operation not too far, and plenty of horse farms. I figure I can rent a UHaul pickup, now that the Kidney Foundation took the old Nissan pickup.

I also want to put in a few shallow swales before mulching the beds. A swale is basically a ditch on contour, with a small berm on the downslope side. The ditch is then filled with mulch or gravel. As water flows downslope, it sinks into the swale and gets stored in a plume underground.

I figure I’ll rent a rototiller and till these contour lines as soon as it dries out a bit- been pretty wet the last month or so. I’m thinking I ordered red clover to plant on the berm-lets, but it must have been back ordered, because it didn’t come with the other seeds. I have a fairly flat lot but there is still an advantage to swaling here I think. I’ll put paths on the upslope side of the swale and plant these in clover as well, and mow them with a push mower.

The stuff we are talking about- home, urban and communitiy gardening, food, pattern, integrated landscapes, victory gardens, ecology, edge, small farming, relocalization- is suddenly mainstream. Allison Arieff blogs on these and other topics on the front page of the New York Times website.

My friend Russ sent me this very cool link to this DIY underground house in Wales. Check it out.

With this post I want to complexify some of the terms that are commonly used in discussions around Peak Oil, climate change, economic viability and sustainability.

Energy

H. T. Odum shows that not all BTUs, kilocalories and quads are created equal. Since these measure heat, into which all forms of energy can be converted, they are convenience measures. However, dilute energy forms, such as solar radiation, are less able to do work than highly concentrated forms such as gasoline, TNT and high voltage electricity. Collected wood has about 0.5 Fossil Fuel Equivalents (FFE) in terms of quality. Collected sunlight calories need to be concentrated at a rate of 2000:1 FFEs through plant photosynthesis. The ability to do work determines economic as well as ecological growth.

Furthermore, he shows that there is a typical pattern in successful ecological energy systems, where a portion of high quality energy is fed back to improve the quality of a low quality energy source of greater volume. This pattern can be chained to move energy up the chain. When calculating net energy, we should consider the quality of the energy, not just raw heat equivalents.

Resources

Mollison shows that resources are not all created equal. They can be categorized based on the effects of their use on themselves and other resources. Some resources when used degrade or destroy themselves. Some, like a skill or knowledge, improve with use. Others degrade if they are not used. Some resources improve other resources with their use. An example is the one cited above, where a high quality energy source improves a lower quality source. Some resources are neutral with respect to themselves and / or others.

The worst resources degrade themselves and others with use. The extent and reversibility of this degradation, destruction or improvement indicates another dimension in grading resources. So when we talk about resource yields from use we can be more specific by identifying the downstream as well as upstream costs of resource usage. This is a largely ignored aspect of energy accounting, and is almost nowhere captured in micro-economics (though sometimes captured in macro-economic analyses).

Waste

From the foregoing we can see that waste, too, is a matter of perspective. One man’s trash, and so on. Waste is in fact simply a resource that degrades itself or other resources when used or not used.

Concentrated livestock manure is a “waste problem” under the current industrial divisions and geographical separations of livestock operation inputs and outputs.Manure is rich in nitrogen, fosters soil organisms, generates heat, and acts as water conserving mulch when spread on fields at lower concentrations.

For this reason, Permaculture says “the problem is the solution.” Also we can see that any gross accumulation of a resource, not used by the system, is a form of pollution to the next larger scale system. By this definition, even money, when highly concentrated and not reinvested in the system becomes a form of pollution.

Stuart Staniford of the Oil Drum posted yet another rosy scenario about the future of food. What has struck me about this series is the fantastic gaps, assumptions and leaps of faith Staniford takes as givens and most of the commentators go along with. To give just a brief example, he says that there’s no problem with producing nitrogen in the future, despite the fact that natural gas is a critical component in the production of ammonia, which is the critical component of all nitrogen fertilizers. No problem, we’ll just substitute the boundless renewable energy he talked about in a previous post.

David Holmgren points out that if there’s boundless energy, then all of our work in Permaculture and sustainability is probably a waste of time. There’s still that pesky global warming issue, but we can ignore it for a while longer. Nevertheless, Staniford’s posts represent a possible scenario in the future, and we need to consider it, however unlikely it is to come to fruition. Holmgren considers this view as the “green tech” solution- one among a number of possible scenarios, each of which require differing strategies.

My point here is not to take Staniford’s arguments apart. At least not yet. What’s interesting to me today is that the process of uncovering the assumptions leads to more learning. To me this is like digging a trench (to use my friend Bill’s expression). Working at the trench level of detail, close to the ground, gives a strong and coherent foundation to one’s knowledge. So while I intuitively disagree with Staniford’s conclusions, he’s providing tremendous service by defining this swiss-cheese structure, whose negative space is a patch pattern of very fertile intellectual ground.

Permaculture points out that the interesting stuff, the productive areas are at the edges and transitions. This suggests that it is not the anti-assumption that is interesting but the points at which the assumption and anti-assumption approach eachother, where the anti-assumptions spread out to touch eachother, like pioneer patches in a successional field.

I want to weigh in on the relocalization debate that has been going on for the last several weeks on The Oil Drum. The debate continued with the ArchDruid’s mixed-metaphor weigh-in on Friday. I’ve finally got some coherent thoughts about this. My argument follows.

Mollison defines yield in terms of a system, which creates both product and energy yield. Since energy is not created, according to the 1st Law of Thermodynamics, energy yield is not truly a “net” but rather the surplus energy after the system’s needs are met. This is the key measure of sustainability in a general sense.

System yield is the sum total of surplus energy produced by, stored, conserved, reused, or converted by the design. Energy is in surplus once the system itself has available all its needs for growth, reproduction and maintenance.

Cheap oil has allowed us to create really big systems, so that current agricultural grain system yields need to be measured against a system that includes oil inputs from Canada, refining in Texas, potash from Canada, nitrogen from Venezuela, processing and shipping to markets all over the world. For all practical purposes this includes the entire global ecosystem. Whether this system is in surplus is a question for another post. The point is that the scale of the system has been driven by cheap and abundant fossil fuels. Therefore, the end of cheap energy will necessitate a reduction in scale of all operations, including agriculture, if it is to be sustainable.

To Staniford’s point that BigAg can continue under improved economic conditions due to Peak Corn, at some point this cannot be argued to be sustainable. There’s a price point that will be reached if it has not done so already. Mollison’s items about all the needs for growth, reproduction and maintenance seem to indicate, in a world where 1/6 of the population live in extreme poverty, that this point has already been reached.

Relocalization can be defined as an attempt to create sustainable systems at a much smaller, more human scale. This would apply to food, money, transportation, media and other “extensions of man.” It follows then that the scale and progress of relocalization is a function of energy supply. This is not to imply that this is a linear relation; the function is necessarily complex.

This realization leads to a further question about the mechanisms and strategies for achieving relocalization. “Planning” is clearly a term with a lot of baggage, so I prefer Mollison’s term “Design.” This will still make Market Fundamentalists twitch, but the fact is the current system has been historically designed in very specific ways. Again this is subject for a future post. The IMF is a case in point, if you need one.

Donald Norman, the usability expert says there is no such thing as “no design”: there is good design or bad design. So we should start designing for a future with a much smaller scale, and the relocalization movement is attempting to do this. To the extent that we employ conscious systems design, for example using Permaculture strategies, relocalization is not a “reversalist” approach.

An important follow-on question is the pace at which re-scaling and relocalizing must take place. I would argue that this depends on whether we are in a Code Red situation or whether there is yet time to design a controlled energy descent, especially in light of Global Warming.