Open source blueprints for civilization

Posted: April 6, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: 2. Water Security, 3. Food Security, 4. Energy Security | Tags: , | Comments Off

Do you love farm hacks as much as I do? If so, check out this mother-of-all hacks architected by Marcin Jakubowski.

Using wikis and digital fabrication tools, Jakubowski is open-sourcing the 50 most-used farm machines that can be built cheaply from scratch.

TED Talks calls his Global Village Construction Set a “civilization starter kit.” At just $10K that could be shared among several micro-farmers and permaculture enthusiasts, I call it affordable.

Back to the (micro) farm

Posted: January 9, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: 2. Water Security, 3. Food Security | Comments Off

After taking off December from posting to sell one business, launch another, and take a much need vacation to see the sun again, we’re back and ready to dive into our winter projects as we seek ways to opt out en masse fro the typical North American culture.

First up was finishing up a lean-to style greenhouse so we can continue growing our own food throughout our dark winter.We started with digging in to lay a foundation and finished with adding water barrels to store emergency water and absorb heat during the day (to then release at night).

Side note on the water barrels: they also serve as a more long term economical (and environmental) solution for storing emergency drinking water. Several years ago we bought (lots) of 1 gallon plastic containers to keep on hand in case of emergencies. It’s a lot of plastic and cardboard that now, when it is time for me to cycle back in, I have to find other uses for. Oops. Since I don’t want to repeat this every few years for the rest of my life, the food-grade plastic rain barrels and a siphon are a much better long term solution.

Map Your Neighborhood Step 10

Posted: October 12, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: 1. Philosophy, 2. Water Security, 3. Food Security, 4. Energy Security, 5. Alt Transportation, 6. Personal Training, 7. Physical Security | Comments Off

There is a brilliant woman named Dr. LuAn Johnson in Olympia, Washington who created the Map Your Neighborhood (MYN) program. It has the nine steps to complete immediately after a wide scale emergency such as a tornado or earthquake.

For our small town, we are adding a “Step 10″ series to various citizens’ nine step guidebook to bridge the gap between an individual set of neighbors and the larger community surrounding them. Steps 1-9 of Dr. Johnson’s MYN program ensure you, your loved ones, and your direct neighbors are cared for and secured. As we roll out our town-wide plans to connect our neighborhoods for both emergency preparedness and sustainability projects, the Step 10 series will shift the focus of specific individuals to securing entire neighborhoods and then the whole town (which happens to be an easily defined area – it’s an island).

Perhaps this list will be useful for your town as well. Here are a few examples of our Step 10 additions for citizens to pursue after they have finished their Steps 1-9. They will seek to travel (safely, short distances) to their neighborhood’s designated shelter:

  • Ham radio operators to begin communication coordination
  • Doctors, nurses, EMTs and CPR experts to to provide medical attention
  • Mechanics and engineers to ensure all generators are safely up and running
  • Members of the horse and bicycle communities to begin transportation duties (medical supplies, communication devices, etc) where roads are likely blocked by landslides and fallen trees

As we do further work on these Step 10 actions, we’ll document them on our main website, as well as excerpts here on this blog.

What can you do about the global food crisis?

Posted: October 1, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: 2. Water Security, 3. Food Security | Comments Off

Sending both financial and spiritual support to farmers across the globe is a good response to the global food crisis, but you can also directly help by growing your own food close to home.

Whether it is on the balcony of your apartment, the community pea-patch down the street, your own backyard, or via your local CSA, growing your own food not only helps you and your local loved ones, but those farmers around the world.

Learn more via OxFam’s interactive map on food prices around the world.

Keep Calm & Carry On

Posted: September 22, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: 1. Philosophy, 2. Water Security, 3. Food Security, 4. Energy Security, 5. Alt Transportation, 6. Personal Training, 7. Physical Security, 8. Wealth Management | Comments Off

I have British friends who use this old catchphrase often and many times tongue-in-cheek. Which made me smile all the more when I saw the nearby graphic while reading one of my favorite blogs, Little Homestead in the City.

As we are ramping up our local efforts to build resilient neighborhoods on our island, it’s a good reminder to read about the history of victory gardens and related sustainability projects that our grandparents were quite familiar with, and that are becoming new again.

In her post Anais asks her readers their preparedness levels in these areas (at least one of which you’ll see we’ve not listed in our categories to the right – oops): Food, Water, Fuel Energy, Sanitation, Alternative Currency, Transportation, Communications, Medical & First Aid, Survival, Security.

I’ll prepare a future post regarding our sanitation plans in low or no power scenarios.

Here comes the sun

Posted: August 25, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: 2. Water Security, 3. Food Security | Tags: , | Comments Off

Gene Logsdon recently described August as a Glut Month and the reason why farmers put up with the headaches from the rest of the year. Although we are just micro-farmers, I could not agree more.

Once the sun finally decided to arrive in the Pacific Northwest, both the food forest and the raised beds started pumping out produce.

Between a crazy-busy work schedule this month from my day jobs + harvesting, storing, and replanting for Fall crops, this blog almost looks like we went on a European-style vacation for the entire month of August.

And now for one of the annual photos that makes me smile…a year’s worth of garlic hanging up to dry.

We’ll combine this with the tomatoes that are starting to come in heavy to make salsa for the winter months.

I did discover that with our recently expanded beds in the food forest (30 new blueberry bushes and more), our 5000 gallon water cistern system no longer provides the targeted two months of irrigation. In fact, we ran dry in just 10 days. Oops.

Next on the big project list: digging a 50,000 gallon pond and installing a solar pump to bring the water up to the cisterns for redistribution to the food beds.

“In Transition 1.0″ the film

Posted: July 15, 2010 | Author: | Filed under: 1. Philosophy, 2. Water Security, 3. Food Security, 4. Energy Security, 5. Alt Transportation, 6. Personal Training, 8. Wealth Management | Tags: , | Comments Off

Wow.

I think this short collection of vignettes may have just set the direction for my personal and professional time for the next 5+ years.

Highly recommended.

Emergency water supply installed

Posted: October 30, 2009 | Author: | Filed under: 2. Water Security | Tags: , , | Comments Off

Water security. For me that means we could use as much water as we want to irrigate our food crops, even in the middle of a drought. For me, that means a significantly sized source of potable water to use in an emergency. And for me, that means harvesting rainwater.

The nearby sketch shows the setup we built over the past three weeks. We’re harvesting rainwater from the roof gutters, into a “trash can” silt catcher, through to a 3P Technik VF1 Volume Filter, past a 4″ first flush diverter, and then into a pair of 2500 gallon cisterns. Extra rainfall can be diverted into an existing large diffuser once the tanks are full.

Water then passes through a Graf floating inlet filter with 8’’ hose to be pumped back up our hill out of the tanks with a new Grundfos MQ 3-45 1HP 110v pump, feeding the two yard hydrants near the food forest and one yard hydrant near the house.

From sketch to completion…look in this slideshow for more photos.
This water storage book – although quite short – was by far the most useful. I could not find several components locally, so I ordered them from Rain Harvest.
Now to go clean up the construction mud and replant grass for the chicken tractor…

Awareness arrives in stages

Posted: August 6, 2009 | Author: | Filed under: 1. Philosophy, 2. Water Security | Tags: , | Comments Off

“Awareness arrives in stages.” A fellow named James Kunstler said that. Wise words.

In my own life, awareness of sustainability issues came in waves. First it was organic food, then Fair Trade products, then green cleaning/building products for the home.

Then the combination of studying Peak Oil, global warming, and the recent US economic financial services meltdown led me to where I am today. Although attempting to foresee the future is tricky at best, preparing for future scenarios is prudent. While I am optimistic about future possibilities (e.g. near limitless energy from geothermal, wind, and solar), I am realistic in planning for more negative eventualities (e.g. a pandemic flu correcting our over-populated areas).

But where to begin? Every once in awhile I feel overwhelmed by the negativeness of it all, or the absurd, massive, endless lists of things that I *could* be preparing for. Then I look at my relatively short prioritized task list, take a deep breath, and move towards getting the next item checked off.

If any of you are thinking that way, here’s your *one* task to do this week: buy a bunch of bottled water (2 gallons per person per day for 30 days) and stick it in a closet (but not on concrete; a chemical reaction fouls the water over time). It seems like alot of water when you are buying it and getting weird looks, but not so much once it is stashed in the closet.

Then smile, relax, and tell yourself you are a great person because you’ve got one month of water stored for your family in case of massive tornados, fires, floods, earthquakes, excessive house guests, whatever.

Now that you have your immediate water needs taken care of, you can start reading through the blog posts on food security.

Water security

Posted: July 11, 2009 | Author: | Filed under: 2. Water Security | Tags: , , | Comments Off

Major update July 27, 2009

You might have read about California’s “water war” gearing back up. California has had water issues historically since the West Coast first started to get seriously developed, but many voices are now pointing to water as the next precious natural resource over which *real* wars will be fought.


Related, water rights have also been an ongoing concern for those requiring significant amounts for irrigation or ranches.
One solution that skirts the legality issues (sometimes) of water rights is roofwater harvesting. My plan is to stem the rain flow from our gutters to a new pond we’ll dig below our current vegetable garden and “food forest” (more on that later in a permaculture post).

Using a solar pump, we’ll bring the water up from the pond to a simple sand filter, then to an underground cistern. Our existing diffuser we already have buried in the backyard will become moot. Bummer. Wish my awareness of water issues had been higher five years ago when we installed the diffuser.

We’ll add a manual diverter between the pond and the sand filter to help keep the cistern water clean in case of a natural emergency (e.g. volcano erupts and we don’t want the ash clogging the filter).

Why an underground cistern? For the same reason this is a semi-anonymous blog. I don’t want anything exterior to the house that screams “We have extra water!”. Because the pond is so far away from the house, it should not attract that much attention. And even then, most folks will think of it as just a pond, not a large holding tank for usable water.

After collecting roof rainwater and having our county folks test it for total coliform counts, copper counts, etc, I know how extensive of a sand filter I need to build. I’ve now got sub-contractors putting together bids now for a 5000 gallon cistern system; our monthly water usage between the house and the gardens is ~ 4800.

So we’ll have one month’s water supply running at normal speed; much longer if we pay attention and ration this precious resource wisely. My goal is to have this complete within the next month or so. We’ll use the cistern water regularly for our garden irrigation, offsetting our water bill and allowing for fresh water to be reclaimed at each new rain.

Can this water be made potable? You bet. A nifty little product called Aerobic K-07 does the trick through hyper-oxygenation. Google it; lots of backpacking/camping gear retailers and websites sell it.

Here’s the rule of thumb to guesstimate how much water you could harvest annually: CATCHMENT AREA (in square feet) multiplied by the AVERAGE ANNUAL RAINFALL (in feet) multiplied by 7.48 (to convert cubic feet to gallons) equals the TOTAL RAINWATER FALLING ON THAT CATCHMENT IN AN AVERAGE YEAR.

So that is CATCHMENT AREA (ft2) x RAINFALL (ft) x 7.48 gal/ft3 = TOTAL AVAILABLE RAINWATER (gal/year). For me, that translates into 695,640 gallons annually.

Interested in learning more about harvesting your own roof runoff? This PDF is viewed as the Bible of rainwater harvesting. Don’t let the “Texas Manual” title throw you off. It is definitely applicable to all areas of the US.

Related side note: using the rule of thumb keeping one gallon of water per person, per day, on hand for emergencies, we’ve also got one month’s water supply stored in jugs. Be sure you don’t store your water jugs on a concrete floor; a chemical reaction occurs over time which fouls the water.
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