sastyk
Posts by this author
Just a quick reminder that tomorrow Aaron Newton and I will begin our next Farm and Garden Design Class. The class covers everything from the very basics of design - how to get started planning for a garden or small farm, soil, sun and water issues, seed starting, choosing perennials, making the…
Robert S. McElvaine's _Down and Out in the Great Depression_ is a fascinating look at America during the Depression. Compiled from letters written to Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt and Herbert Hoover, it presents Americans in their own words, saying what they thought was most important in the…
My happy-happy-joy-joy of the day. Apparently Independence Days needs a second print run, only 3 months after its release! Yay!
So just in case you are wondering why the heck you'd want to store food, and wanted to start from the beginning, well, there will be no shortage of copies.
With any reasonably successful blog, you have a conversation going on, often between an author and commenters who have a long history and background, and people coming into the conversation for the first time. Sometimes the people coming in are hostile, sometimes curious, sometimes troubled by…
I imagine after the last few weeks, the idea of storing food isn't seeming quite so crazy to a lot of folks in the country, but still, I hear all the time "I want to start building up a reserve but my husband/sister/mother in law thinks this is nuts." So I thought I would repost this piece, on…
The jars are emptying out here. Despite the fact that it was an unbelievably awful gardening year, somehow the canning jars filled up all the same, to the point that we actually ran out of pint and smaller jars. Now, boxes and cabinets are filling up with emptied jars, put away until I begin…
Everyone needs to read Don Peck's superb Atlantic Magazine piece on why the jobs aren't coming back anytime soon. It confirms what I began writing back in late 2008 - that most often economic crises of the kind we have been seeing last a decade or more.
Most recessions end when people start…
I shouldn't complain - the Telegraph's energy columnist, Rowena Mason is technically affirming that even non-crazy people can believe in peak oil. Her essay, titled "You Don't Need to be a Mad Max Survivalist to Take Peak Oil Seriously" at least acknowledges the point. Her equation of Mad Max…
You'd be surprised at how warm our barn is on winter nights. A few nights ago, the thermometer read -10 as I headed out the door, and the wind was howling, but inside the barn it was below freezing, but surprisingly tolerable. Close down a comparatively small space, insulate the floors with dry…
Not promising anything - and definitely not promising anything until the book is done, but does anyone have topics they'd like your blogiste to cover? What do you want to hear me go on about?
BTW, if you are interested in more in-depth going on (plus a whole lot of awesome other stuff), Aaron and…
Once upon a time, before I descended into parenthood and dull stability, I was out with a group of friends who had, let's just say, been drinking quite a bit. One of the young men in this group proposed to two others that they do something that was, to put it bluntly, totally moronic and likely to…
In _Depletion and Abundance_ I write about the difficulty of committing to a lifestyle change in a world where you always seem to have more time, where defining events are always on the horizon but never present. I use the phrase "time to pick up your hat" which I take from a short story by…
Increasingly, the cost of staying wired is eating up a huge part of people's budgets accordinging to The Times:
It used to be that a basic $25-a-month phone bill was your main telecommunications expense. But by 2004, the average American spent $770.95 annually on services like cable television,…
A lot of big snowstorms get people who do not grasp the difference between weather and climate all excited. Consider the VA Republican party who claimed in an ad last week that if it snows, we can't have global warming. But it isn't just the skeptics and denialists here - among the believers we…
Note: This is a lightly revised version of a post from ye olde blogge (actually ye older blogge, the original Casaubon's Book). At the time I wrote it, I didn't know about Dan Savage's brilliantly funny book on the seven deadly sins _Skipping Towards Gomorrah_ and if I had, I probably wouldn't…
I've often wondered what I should write after everyone is already living the Zombie attack and is bored with hearing about how to grow food and mend your socks. I figure at some point, the market will be saturated by such things, and people will want to escape - and I should start thinking now…
This morning, during school time, Isaiah asked me just how many Aunts and Uncles he had. Asked to clarify what the parameters of the question were, Isaiah asked me how many people he would call by the title "Aunt" or "Uncle." Which led me to do some quick addition - and to a number that came out…
I have nothing to do with the recent kerfuffle about civility and comment policies that has been meandering through science blogs, but a large quantity of posts on the subject on a largeish number of blogs has, I admit, gotten me thinking about my own comment policies. Since I often get queries,…
Dr. Steven Koonin of the DOE recently spoke about the future of energy and its implications for the goals of the New York State University system. Given that my husband is employed by said system, and in fact teaches Environmental Physics (aka "Here's how to do the math to prove we're doomed…
I somehow missed this Times article in January that documents the rising number of Americans living on nothing but Food Stamps. If you missed it too, you have to read it.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/03/us/03foodstamps.html
This is the American equivalent of living on $2 per day.
Sharon
Ok, maybe not. But just in case you were wondering why Americans watch the news constantly and know nothing, here's a pretty good example. Coming up next - how to write a completely generic blog post, by yours truly ;-).
So for those of you getting ready for Snowpocalypse, as the mid-Atlantic faces, gasp - a whole foot of snow, I have to tell you something. I'm jealous. I mean really, really jealous. I want your snow.
A general pattern of winter storms in my area (upstate NY) is that they come down from Canada…
Every news media I looked at it is trumpeting good news - while unemployment increased in January, we're thrilled that it was only be 20,000 jobs. Because of this, the unemployment rate fell to 9.7% amid, as we learn on CNN "hope the economy will add jobs soon."
What's buried in the middle of the…
Note: This is a rerun from ye olde blogge. As the book deadline approaches, expect to see some of my previous opi making appearances here. Since I've got more than 1000 of them, it shouldn't be too boring, I hope. I hope this one will help some of you in garden planning this year.
There are a…
As you all know, I live with five males, ranging from 39 to 4. As a woman raised in a mostly all-female household (mother, step-mother, two sisters), I try gamely to fit in, but find myself occasionally mystified by the guy-ness, or inadequately equipped for things like appreciating how cool it is…
I've now been at scienceblogs for a couple of months, and it is fascinating to me - I went from a stand-alone blog to one with a whole lot of other people, and getting to know the local culture is a really interesting exercise. Overwhelmingly, it has been really wonderful and fascinating. Still, I…
We spent about 8 months looking for a suitable dog before we acquired Mac the Marshmallow last month. Until a little over a year ago, we had two American Working Farmcollies, half siblings. Rufus, our senior dog was an unusually large dog for his breed - half again the size of either parent or…
An unsurprising but still deeply depressing article from the Guardian observes that not only was Copenhagen, billed as "the last, best hope for change" a dismal failure (duh) but that Mexico City is already a dismal failure.
Dozens of politicians, diplomats, economists, scientists and campaigners…
I've got a couple of speaking engagements and another class coming up, and I thought I'd let you know where I'm going to be and when.
First, on Saturday, March 6, I'll be in Concord, NH at the NOFA-NH Winter Conference. The Northeast Organic Farming Association has been so powerful in creating…
At first glance, swept yards, derived from Africa, at one time traditional in the south and now mostly the province of a few, aging African-American southerners; and Cottage Gardens, invented in Britain under the feudal system and now evolved into a trendy " flower garden style" meaning mostly a…