We’ve had nine days of very wet and cold weather.\u00a0 Can’t do much gardening, using the wood stove a lot to drive out the cold and damp.\u00a0 The tea plants are the only one who appear to be very happy with our wet winter so far.\u00a0 It seems they love all the rain, with fast and strong growth.\u00a0 I made another 200 cuttings from the growth (oasis cubes, dip-n-grow); with the success rate i’ve been having, that might become 20 new plants.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, the new house has been moving forward (photos<\/a>).<\/p>\n Last week we had a mainland visitor, my old friend Aix, who now lives in Arcata, CA.\u00a0 Incredibly, we hadn’t seen each other since i visited him in Kyoto in 1997<\/a>.\u00a0 It was great to catch up, and he briefly got to experience working in the tea field, running to shredder to make compost, and digging on the new house pad.<\/p>\n I’ve been spending quite a bit of time recently studying the big changes going on in the wider world – peak oil<\/a>, peak everything, climate change, collapse of the banking system, instability in global agriculture.\u00a0 Will the future look more like Mad Max<\/a> or the Amish<\/a>?\u00a0 While it’s all super complex, one clear conclusion is that in the future, those of us that survive will be growing more of our own food.\u00a0 I give tours of our farm often, and when i tell people that we grow around 1\/3 of our food, they are very impressed and say we are better prepared for the coming troubles.\u00a0 But i’m not so sure.\u00a0 Where will the other 2\/3 of our food come from?\u00a0 What about all our hungry neighbors?<\/p>\n There is more to survival than food.\u00a0 The staple carbohydrates that we can grow here are tubers – potato, sweet potatoes, taro.\u00a0 We buy\/import our other staples, so our food is based on tubers, bread, pasta, and rice.\u00a0 I realized recently that if ‘the boats stop’, then our food will be based on tubers, tubers, tubers, and tubers.<\/p>\n Down at Evening Rain Farm<\/a> in Puna is another family, who are growing perhaps >80% of their food, more than anyone else i know of (starting with their Food Experiment<\/a>).\u00a0 I haven’t met them personally, but their blog is fascinating.\u00a0 It is a jungle where they live, so they have fewer tubers, but a ton of breadfruit.\u00a0 Breadfruit and pig, every meal, every day, “breadfruit alfredo, breadfruit parmesan, breadfruit pesto”…<\/p>\n One major challenge on our land, for food sustainability, is garden space.\u00a0 We have so many giant eucalypts around, on a L-shaped skinny lot, that shade is a big issue.\u00a0 We’ve been cutting them back (endless firewood!) but it’s a lot of work, and they are also serve as beneficial windbreak – a complex trade-off.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" We’ve had nine days of very wet and cold weather.\u00a0 Can’t do much gardening, using the wood stove a lot to drive out the cold and damp.\u00a0 The tea plants are the only one who appear to be very happy … Continue reading