Square Foot Gardening

All New Square Foot Gardening
The All New Square Foot Gardening by Mel Bartholomew

I’ve been reading the last version of the book and I’ve ordered this latest edition. Our situation is a bit different than he talks about – but not too much. Our containers aren’t in a neat 4×4 grid. Instead we’ve got five containers, each with a two 12″ squares (well, a little more than 12″). That gives us only ten squares to work with – not up to even one of Bartholomew’s 16 block squares. Not quite enough for even one person. Obviously there’s a limit to what we can produce on our tiny porch. Particularly with a balcony overhead.

Anyway, I hope to implement some of the ideas from the book even if we can’t do the whole thing now. I’m still experimenting with the best way to handle the Earthboxes. I think they’re staying too wet. I’m going to fill the bottom with gravel this year to decrease the water. Maybe if they got more sun it’d be okay but I think the soil is getting too wet. It seems waterlogged.

Today I took the mulch covers off and turned the soil to try and get it to dry out a bit. I’m not keeping the soil in there. I’m going to clean the boxes out and start over this year. It should be interesting.

$100 oil? $4 per gallon gas?

Clusterfuck Nation by James Howard Kunstler

Overall I expect to see $100-a-barrel oil at some point this year. Last year I made a bet with a friend that oil would end 2005 at $75. I lost the bet. But it is a fact that the price of oil altogether ended the year 40 percent higher than 2004, so it is not as if the markets did not show extraordinary stress.
New laws regulating gasoline mixtures will also contribute substantially to higher gasoline prices (perhaps as much as 40 cents a gallon). So I will predict gasoline breaking through the $4-a-gallon mark sometime this year.

I don’t know if Kunstler will be right or not. But he makes some interesting comments in the post. Even if he’s off on the figures I think we’ll be in for a ride this year.

Bagels!

Yesterday I made bagels! Years ago Ryan had made a soft bagel that was really good but we’d never made regular bagels. I had been craving some bagels so I decided it was time to learn how to make them. They weren’t difficult at all though they are a little time consuming. First you have to make the dough, let it rise, shape them into balls and let them rise. Then you poke a hole in the middle and then spin them around to make the whole larger. Then you drop the bagel into boiling water and boil for 2 minutes, flip over and boil for 1 minute more.

Boiling Bagels

Here are all the bagels all boiled and ready to go into the oven.
Boiled

Then you bake them for 15 minutes, flip over and bake for another 5 to 10 minutes. End result, yummy bagels!
Bagels!

communitysolution.org

The Community Solution to Peak Oil
site has their latest newsletter Peak America – Is Our Time Up?. It continues the discussions from earlier newsletters, looking at current USA policies and statistics about our society. It is very interesting and well worth a look.

Environmental Restoration: Buried Clay Pot Irrigation

Environmental Restoration: Buried Clay Pot Irrigation

After a post on the Path to Freedom site I decided to look up more about this method of irrigation. Looks interesting!

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