From your friendly moderator—This is a really important and interesting conversation.
I would like to keep this thread open, but encourage people to focus on the personal stories of HOW weird weather is affecting you and what you’re doing about it.
The rest of the internet is full of great places to debate the reasons WHY. My husband recommends Quora.
I can tell you that EU isn’t ordering us to cut old forests. All talk has been quite the opposite; Finland should cut less (although new coverment isn’t going to comply on that). We don’t even really have old forests besides national parks and some in the tundra that is not useful for forestry. Otherwise over 99% of our forests are under forestry managament. There are just very few fragmented pieces that are untouched outside national parks (some of which have atleast some history with forestry). Most people haven’t even seen what natural finnish forest looks like and so think what they see is normal forests.
Hi Jesse. Good to hear the EU recognises the importance of old growth.
New to me.
I think it would be rather far fetched to imagine such a global conspiracy that all the climate experts in every country of the world are fired if they don’t agree with a ‘false’ narrative that humans are causing catastrophic climate change. And all the measurements made all around the world by people of so many nations are in on the conspiracy. I find it extraordinarily more likely that the global scientific consensus on this issue is due to the huge mountain of evidence from so very many independent sources and variables being accurate.
That’s quite a different matter. But if we are to talk of technofixes, I think the technology of growing genetically diverse crops in a low input species-rich manner which builds the soil (no dig is very significant in that regard, as is permaculture), are very suitable fixes. We do have the means to grow food in a far more intensive and less destructive way. People like Richard Perkins have demonstrated that very well (no dig, species-rich, though not genetically diverse populations but he has most of it!), and shown it to be very profitable too, which is important if it is to become mainstream. And this kind of technology is very much suited to bottom-up grassroots movements, which I think is a very good thing. But we may agree that waiting for commercial technologies put upon us by corrupt governments, isn’t so likely to go well.
I’m not sure where this is coming from but personally I have a bicycle, and not even a driving license. No plans to get a moped. But there are countless people who insist on having cars, and if we are to transition away from oil, then it makes good sense to me that there should be cars that they will anyway buy but that are electric instead of oil. If the world simply continues only buying fossil fuel cars, then that prevents the move away from oil. First there need to be alternatives to the fossil fuel vehicles, then the fuel can be phased out. I find that quite logical, even if I don’t myself have a car. A population that has only fossil fuel cars is highly unlikely to allow their government to suddenly ban fossil fuels. Such things generally need to be phased out gradually.
I would however like to see more projects like Aptera - electric but far less demanding in terms of resources. Far lighter, far more aerodynamic. Designed as an electric vehicle without the need to look relatively the same as the outdated fossil fuel vehicles, which was Tesla’s strategy, resulting in a very big and heavy car - still far superior to fossil fuel cars but in my opinion not as appropriate as Aptera. I’d also like to see more advances in human powered vehicles. Mass production of 3 and 4 wheeled recumbent enclosed velomobiles for example, would be awesome, making them affordable for the masses.
But yeah, I don’t have control over that. So I am spending my time (aside from teaching music) on breeding plants.
I don’t know the details of your situation, but if you have land, you could grow food in a good way. Or plant trees on it. Or plant on other people’s land if you can make the connections. Or work on a good market garden to gain skills. Or start a low cost velomobile company! 
That seems unusual. How long were you vegetarian for? Perhaps your diet was not balanced. One third of India is vegetarian and they have a great many strong people. One of the most handsome men I know has been vegan since he was conceived, and he’s tall and strong. I make nattō, a really wonderful bacterially digested soybean product that is intensely healthy, I would be happy to teach you how to make it if you like.
Anyway at least if you are only eating wild game, and if that wild game is sustainable, then that’s way better than eating mainstream farm animals, which take insanely large amounts of land and resources and poisons to grow, torture and kill.
Sometimes it can be counter-productive to pay too much attention to governments. They are largely criminal organisations. It can be better to focus on the positive, so I am glad to see you considering what it is that you can do personally. I hope you find a good way, and gain comfort in doing your bit in your local situation. I think that is rather key to happiness.
It might be good to therefore stop watching and reading about it then. Leave it out of your mind, and focus on doing good helpful things
Oops - only just got to this since I was responding as I was reading. Hope it’s ok to still post what I have already written above.
Thanks, Julia!
I tend to think it doesn’t really matter who’s doing what wrong, or who’s to blame for whatever. That kind of thinking quickly leads to anger, and away from solutions. So let’s focus on solutions!
Since a very big problem facing the world today is too much deforestation, I think planting useful trees on whatever land we have access to is a great solution. Edible trees, obviously! Also medicinal ones, ones that are useful for wood, ones that are valuable for wildlife habitat, etc. Probably every species has value, including invasives (although we probably shouldn’t plant those on purpose).
We as humans have a remarkable capacity to create, design, and manage ecosystems. Let’s use that marvelous ability to add stability, balance, and abundance in every way we can.
Gather a few seeds from native plants you enjoy and sprinkle them in new spaces. Remove some invasives to make space for well-behaved species. Create habitat for wildlife, or leave it alone. Reduce, reuse, and repair more. Compost more. Give things away more. Recycle only as a second-to-last resort. Put things in a landfill as a last resort. Consider where any product will end up at the end of its life and decide if that’s worth it before buying it.
Even just simply rejoice to see ladybugs.
There are all kinds of little things we can all do.
It’s fine to talk about challenges we’re personally facing, especially since, when we do so, we can help each other figure out solutions. Let’s not waste our time or mental energy focusing on who’s to blame. That really doesn’t matter. What matters is what we have the power to do, and that is often a lot of small things.
Let’s use our power to improve everything we touch.
For some reason, I wasn’t taught how to critically think in public school. But I was taught the food pyramid.
Some point later outside of school, I learned how to critically think. I also learned the food pyramid is a scam.
Some point more recently, I’ve learned my place in the world in relation to history. I am a modern day peasant. The feudal lords of this era control the information that is put inside the textbooks or broadcasted in the media. They care about us and our future. They want us to comply with the message so we can be safe.
We just need to believe what is said and comply.
To that end, I have been practicing gardening without power equipment for 3 years.
Additionally, I am breeding plants for heat resistance. It seems that a lot of gardeners in the deep south take a break this time of year. They do a spring garden and a fall garden — because summer is too hot for most plants to thrive. I make a big summer push to see what seeds I can produce.
From what I gather human knowledge of the possibility of climate change was first theorized way back in the 1840s and basically proven, by experiment, by the early 1900s.
The first time I heard of it was in the early 1970’s in an article I remember reading about when Richard Nixon signed the clean air act into law. Some scientist whom I regarded at the time as a dimwit proposed that cleaning the soot and other particulate from the smokestacks would still leave behind the CO2 and in effect by removing the shading effect of the particulates, increase the speed of anthropogenic global warming.
I thought that fellow was dimwitted at the time because I liked being able to see through the air, which was not the case in the Ohio River Valley in the mid to late 1960s and I just could not grasp how fixing that could possibly have any negative effects. Turns out I was wrong. From what I could see though the 1970s and 1980s things got quite a bit better, I thought. Although they built a bunch of giant coal fired power plants up and down the river nothing visible came from the smokestacks except steam.
Also, in the 70s and into the 80s I learned more about anthropogenic climate change and although it seemed logical to me, I was skeptical. I just couldn’t at the time, grasp that people could possibly do something on that scale, I mean, planets are big. I also remember thinking, and so what if they do? A degree or two warmer just means that a 90-degree day will be 91 and a -5-degree night will be -4, that’s not so bad and besides it isn’t going to happen for a hundred years, so it doesn’t matter to me anyway. Turns out I was wrong and wrong on those points also.
I remember watching Carl Sagan address the US congress on the matter in I think 1986. I have unshakable faith in Carl Sagan and believed everything he said and nothing I’ve learned since has altered that, in fact only reinforced it. Carl Sagan was not a soothsayer or a religious prophet or a political hack. He didn’t even have a YouTube following or a TikTok account. He was just a very smart fellow who did some math and found what comes out to the right of the equal sign. His calculations on a time frame however turned out to be off by a significant amount because they were based on the “current 1986” rate of emissions. The current, current rate is nearly double the 1986 rate, as well as more forest cut or burned, and more land covered in concrete.
So, by the 1990s as I began to notice odd things like longer dry spells or daffodils in full bloom being frozen down to the ground by a hard freeze or dried up in a few hours by something akin to Santa Anna Winds, I got to thinking maybe this stuff really is real. I never doubted Sagan’s words but still I didn’t want to actually accept it and I also had my fall back of, nothing really bad will happen in my lifetime. Wrong again.
When I moved here, I made a little tiny garden with my shovel. I did all the stuff like double digging, raised beds, square foot, French intensive, mulching. I banned insecticides and fertilizers and started saving even more of my own seeds. Then I was gifted a rototiller and somewhat against my better judgment massively increased the size of the gardens. That took a few years and all the time the dry spells got more frequent and longer although thankfully not really much hotter.
I’ve since abandoned the rototiller and downsized but not as small as I had at first. It’s easier to keep up with all aspects of garden work and with the dry spells becoming still more frequent and longer lasting made it easier to water when necessary. So, I thought OK, I’ll try to find or select my plants for drought tolerance and along with careful cultivation practices everything will work out fine.
As years passed, the dry spells while still common turned out not to be reliable. They might now be punctuated with downpours of five or eight inches in a couple of hours and repeatedly over several days or a few weeks. Five inches might fall on my garden and none five miles away, it might also be accompanied by hail approaching the size of tennis balls and moving horizontally. Even weirder is what happened in our used to be hottest month of August a couple years ago, the entire month saw highs of 80 F or less and a few lights sprinkles every day, more the half of my sweet potato seeds rotted or sprouted, in the pods. June was like that this year. A few years before that July saw highs in the 50s F followed by a very hot August.
So, my plan for adaptation to increased drought turned out to be wrong, again. Batting a thousand here I reckon although I’m not a sports fan and don’t really know what that means other than from context.
Now I don’t expect homo sapiens or much of anything else to be around all that much longer, sorry for the inconvenience, but that’s just what comes up to the right of the equal sign. A bit encouraging at least for me is that as described, my track record on being right in these matters is dismal, at best. And even if I am right this time, it’s certainly not today and probably not tomorrow, at least for those not currently on fire or underwater.
As far as what can be done overall, I’ve been there, done that. Few if any individual people have planted as many trees as I, few Americans at least, have owned fewer cars, driven or flown fewer miles or put less in the landfills and it hasn’t helped one teeny, tiny, little bit, and I’m tired. I do however encourage everyone else to keep doing it if you’re in the mood, lots of it.
As far as in the garden, since I was so wrong about adapting to drought, I’ve come up with some other plans.
First, I originated the idea that since weather is going to become more extreme and unpredictable that the best thing to do might to be heavy selection for fast maturity. This allows the highest probability of a successful harvest between, disasters. Additionally, it might allow for two or even three successive harvests in one year, just in case a disaster free one comes along.
Second, I really like the idea I heard of here on this forum I think, of considering general stress resistance rather than specific resistance to disease, or drought, or flooding. It sounds similar to Robertson’s vertical v horizontal resistance to disease only perhaps broader. I think I may even have a bit of a head start in my multiple plantings per season because a cowpea planted in late April experiences a vastly different environment than one planted in July. I don’t see value in attempting to create multiple landraces of the same crop in the same location. Sounds just about impossible, at least for me.
Third, is my idea of reuniting the different types of a species into a landrace selected to adapt itself largely by itself, into whatever works for it, in my location. This is especially useful with bi-annual crops and since I was never very good at getting seed from them anyway, gives me an excuse to forget everything I knew about how it is supposed to be done. This is what I’ve had pretty good success with onions and my broccol-ish. It basically involves planting these crops at the same time or soon after they do it themselves. This year I’m excited to have an abundance of my own carrot and Swiss chard seeds and will in the next few days be planting all of those things. It is turning hot and dry here after the dreary, drippy June and first half of July, so I don’t expect they will sprout until it rains, but that’s fine. If they can wait, so can I.
Anybody got any other ideas on adapting to the new normal. The new not defined a s a new stable or predictable state but rather of continued and accelerating change.
I think it’s possible to have two different landraces for the same species in the same location, but it’s usually impractical. I can think of a few reasons to do it – if one landrace based on desirable dominant traits (spicy peppers) would ruin another landrace based on desirable recessive traits (sweet peppers), or if you were trying to have two landraces for a species that are optimized for wildly different seasons (winter and summer peas).
In the former case, you’d usually have to use a large isolation distance, which would be a pain. In the latter case, isolation in time would happen just by nature of how you’re growing them, so it would be easy to achieve.
What’s usually the most practical, and makes the most sense to me, is to have semi-separate landraces, like Joseph Lofthouse does. I like the way he makes sure recessive traits that are desirable stick around by planting things in blocks. That way there’s plenty of crossing, while also helping to keep the diverse phenotypes.
I’m thinking the semi-separate landrace thing makes particular sense for squashes and beans. With both things, growth habit and harvest purpose (“to eat while immature” versus “to eat when mature”) would be convenient to have things grouped by. No big deal if there’s a little crossing, especially since that would allow room for potential awesome surprises. Just nice to have an idea of what your loose plans are for each individual plant, and that’s easiest to achieve by grouping.
I personally love your idea of adapting things to mature faster, and I think it’s brilliant, for all the reasons you mentioned. For those of us with hotter weather on average (which is most places; not everywhere), climate change may even make that a little bit easier, because we’d have more heat units to deal with. When you’re working with a problem instead of against it, it often makes for an easier and more resilient solution.
Personally, one of my plans to deal with an unstable and unpredictable climate is to try to grow more plant families. And to try everything that interests me, even if it looks like a long shot! Whenever I find a crop from a plant family I don’t currently have plans to represent in my garden, I get very interested in trying it, because I think wider diversity of plant families is a good thing, just as a general principle.
I was talking about different landraces to deal with different stress factors in the same location, which I believe at least for me is totally impractical and attempting it would be counterproductive. Different sub-landraces for different purposes are pretty easily doable for some things. We like green beans and dry beans. All beans work for dry but only some work for green so my green beans are a subset of my dry beans grown in a different patch. All beans are in the dry mix, only some are in the green mix, and I even have some that are single variety because of preferred flavor.
We also like both sweet and hot peppers. Hot ones are used primarily to make dry pepper flakes and really only need to be grown maybe one year in three. Although I separate them as much as possible, I don’t save any sweet pepper seeds those years. A little sweet in the hot doesn’t hurt to much but the other way around is a problem.
I had just about given up on squash largely because of hordes of new stink bug critter that showed up several years ago. I’m discovering though that by trellising the vines and planting them here and there instead of all together, the bugs don’t seem to bother them as much and it is also easier to see and squish the nasty things when they do. I have some squash plants this year that are growing and producing wonderfully. I’m rethinking my abandonment of squash and if it goes well will have different landraces of the different species rather than of one species. I haven’t tried it yet, but I can’t think of a reason that a winter squash couldn’t just be harvested immature and used like a summer squash.
I’ve been there, done that too. It doesn’t work for me because we want to preserve and store as much as we can and lots of little patches of lots of things doesn’t get the job done. Especially if some of them end up making little if anything to harvest, then that space was just wasted that year. I’m actually planning in the future to go the opposite way and focus on things I know produce lots to eat and store.
My garden this year is actually the opposite of what I want in that regard. It’s a whole bunch of little patches of a whole bunch of things, none of which is big enough to produce the quantity of storable food that I want. I’m growing just about everything I have this year in order to make a final decision on what I’ll actually focus on going forward.
I expect to end up with maybe 15 species grown for storage crops in the garden. Add in the extras that are just used fresh like lettuce, melons and several others I’m probably up to about thirty species. Add the outside garden perennials like asparagus, rhubarb, and horseradish and the fruits, berries and nuts the number goes up some more, but I expect the total number of species will still end up less than one hundred, and that’s about as diverse as it’s gonna get here.
Our weather has been weird these last few years. We had one year so wet our area was a federally declared disaster area. The next year, up until now have been drought. Very little snow until a pretty brutal winter this year. It warmed up early in May and then a bunch of mid 40’s nights in June. With our weather becoming erratic I can personally seethe importance of diversity in my gardening, since what’s done well is a little different each year so far.
Lovely comment Mark.
Not to mention increased temperature leading to unexpected consequences like the melting of permafrost releasing huge amounts of methane! I remember in the 90’s reading James Lovelock’s work on his Gaia Theory, great stuff - independent English scientist, way ahead of his time, first one to really understand the nature of the biosphere as a self-regulating self organising system, basically a ‘super-organism’, detailing many of the homeostatic principle of it. He also discovered the hole in the ozone layer.
He warned of the severe danger of the climate flipping to a ‘steady hot state’ that’s basically irreversible. I also expect humanity to at least mostly disappear, maybe within 10~30 years? This doesn’t discourage me from crop breeding though, only encourages me more.
I can get why some people may not want to do it. But I think it comes down to the kitchen. For example, it’s nice (for me anyway) to eat both ‘regular’ rice, and sticky rice. And I also love black sticky rice, I add around 10% black sticky rice to regular short grain rice to make a slightly stick and entirely deep purple rice that is absolutely delicious. And sometimes I just cook white sticky rice for some special meal. Some people like long grain rice, or risotto rice for some dishes too.
Aside from different dishes benefiting from different tastes and textures, we could think of tomato - we might like to use paste tomatoes, cherry tomatoes, and beefsteak tomatoes, for different things. Or different wheat flour for bread vs. croissants. Then there’s the growing season - winter wheat vs. spring wheat; tomatoes that ripen at different times so there’s good production throughout the season. Or different brassicas for different seasons, which will have different flowering times. Or different brassicas in general - Brassica oleracea, someone like to grow cabbage, kale, Brussels sprouts, kohlrabi, broccoli, and cauliflower, and maybe even multiple varieties of each!
Even Brassica juncea - mustard for example, it can be nice for some people to have one specifically suited for seed production to make oil (very popular in Northern India) or condiment, and others for the leaves (very popular in Japan).
Brassica napus is grown as the delicious vegetable ‘norabo-na’ in Japan:
The same species is the third-leading source of vegetable oil in the world (or was as of 2000 anyway) - rape seed oil, one of the oldest known vegetable oils. But it contains erucic acid, which is bad for us, so there are varieties that have been bred to have very low levels of erucic acid, ‘canola oil’ in Canada for example. I have both types (both Japanese varieties) and I intend on keeping them separate. If I did have Canadian oil seed or a local UK one derived from that or developed separately, I might consider mixing it with my Japanese one, but I would want to keep the vegetable version and the oil seed version of this species, separate.
Radishes too, someone might like some big ones for slicing or pickling or grating; some small ones for salads; and others for large and prolific pod production. Someone might like different potatoes for making mashed potato, baked potato, and boiled potato - the waxiness can be quite different for example, for desired cooking differences. Cucumbers also - it can be nice to have really juicy ones for fresh eating, and others that have less water content, for pickling. Sweet peppers - it can be nice to have some thin walled ones specially suited to frying (I’m thinking of the Japanese taste for shishito for example), and others that are thick walled and especially sweet, for eating raw.
Having different populations doesn’t just have to be for the pleasure of eating also - it can be about survival. Diversity in terms of multiple populations might mean that one year instead of your entire species’ crop being totally lost, you only lose one out of several populations, due to climate or pest reasons. In India for example, so many different crops are grown. I used to eat kala chana, a kind of small black chickpea. It was cheap and said to be healthy, although the locals told me it was usually fed to the animals. - they prefer to eat the larger lighter coloured chickpea. Well, I more recently read that in an extreme year, it can become a very important food crop. I heard similar stories about some crops in Africa too. And also, in India I heard of some crops that are actually a bit toxic, but are eaten in drought years again as a kind of emergency. I heard of one in particular that can cause irreversible damage to people, and you can see a clear correlation between instances of that disease and droughts. So that doesn’t sound to good. However, that’s probably a far smaller effect that it would be if it were death by starvation! So, I find it interesting and a valuable lesson that some traditional cultures have ‘spread their bets’ by growing many different crops (including less productive less enjoyable variations of the same species of ‘better’ varieties) that might not have much use most years except perhaps as animal feed, but which become crucial every so often when other crops fail. This builds much more resilience into the system in the long run. (Though hopefully we can make such systems without needing to resort to crops with toxicity).
Perhaps one idea along these lines would be, for example, that if we have some potatoes from TPS projects that are way more tolerant of harsh conditions but are not productive enough for us to really want them, we could perhaps keep them going, for this kind of reason. A backup crop. The same logic could be applied to many other crops. Rather than focusing only on making landraces that do ‘well enough’ and are more productive.
Oh wow that’s a great idea! I only want sweet peppers but that’s a really neat trick that I will try to remember. And it could be applied to many crops.
Maybe a good solution would be to tell ones neighbours how fantastic a certain crop is (that one doesn’t want to grow) and give them seeds for it. Then trade come harvest time I have the sense that growing more variety makes a community more resilient, like the examples I gave about India etc., but so long as there’s a good local network, that could be quite spread out. And I sense that there will come times where our local networks are the only networks still functioning.
That also makes a lot of sense in terms of the landscape (unless you live in an homogenous flat landscape!) - I would guess some people’s land is much better suited to various crops. Village scale growing. Villages here are so strange, not like in India. But maybe there is potential to become normal again.
Absolutely. If you have access to enough land (or several small pieces of land that are far apart), you can grow multiple landraces of the same species at the same time quite easily. If you have a neighbor happy to grow one of those landraces, and they live far enough away to provide isolation, and you enjoy sharing harvests with each other, that’d work, too!
Plus, of course, isolation by time works great! Only saving seeds in different years is a great way to do that.
Another way to do that is to make sure flowering times don’t sync up. Suppose you have a broccoli landrace you want to bolt early (a good thing with broccoli) and a cabbage landrace you want to bolt late (a good thing with cabbage). You could eat all the cabbage flowerbuds that form early and all the broccoli flowerbuds that form late, which would give you food and separate the two landraces easily.
Excellent point about having “useful as a last resort” crops to prevent starvation. That’s what I’m thinking I want to do with my groundcover plants. Most of the time, I’d like to completely ignore them and walk on them. But I want them to be edible, so that if I have a year with very little food, I can harvest them to eat.
Inviting tasty edible weeds into my yard also seems like a great idea.
Another sneaky backup plan I have is to highly favor plants that are entirely edible, even if I don’t like all the parts of the plant. I’m not particularly fond of squash leaves, for instance – but they’re edible! So if I’m hungry, I can eat the leaves as well as the fruits. More food in the same space. I consider sweet potatoes to be a much more desirable crop than potatoes for exactly this reason: the whole plant can be eaten.
The only-borderline-edible plant in India that you’re talking about is grasspea, right? The one that can cause lathyrism when eaten in large quantities? I’ve decided that I never want to grow it, because boy howdy. But of course, that’s easy for me to say because my ecosystem can easily support winter annuals and a lot of fruit and nut trees.
I actually have the same opinion! You just have a ton more experience than me with the intersection of what grows well for you and want you want to eat all the time. 
I mean, I want to have lots of little patches of things, but I want those to take up less than 10% of the garden eventually. I want most of it to be solid, dependable, tasty, nutritious food I can rely on. I like the idea of always having some random stuff tossed around “just in case” – most herbs are that way for me – but food production is super important as a primary goal for me.
So far, I am pretty sure I’m going to grow a lot of Jerusalem artichokes for winter food. I’ll find out by experience is there’s a limit to what I want to eat. (I eat powdered inulin regularly because I love the taste and the gut benefits, so I expect the sunchokes to be a great staple for me.)
I definitely hit my limit with squashes last year. 100 summer squashes (half of which I let mature into winter squashes) and another 20 winter squashes was just too many. I got to the point where the thought of eating any more squash made me feel like, “Ugh, please no,” and I got to that point with about 30 left to eat.
I suspect I can eat two or seven sweet potatoes a week, every week, and be happy. So I should be planning to grow that many, which will be quite a few.
Broccoli, I never seem to get tired of. I like it best “overcooked,” so pressure canned broccoli is delicious to me. I never seem to get tired of peas, either. So my thinking is that my winter garden will be about 45% Brassica oleracea, 45% peas, and 10% other things (such as garlic, lentils, and fava beans).
As for summer crops, I’m always happy to eat green beans, so I think I would be wise to grow a huge quantity of them. Peanuts, too. Squashes should be more of a side note, even though they’re productive and easy, because I tire of them much more quickly.
Thing is, I’d like to keep about 5-10% of my garden space open to “everything else,” because I like the diversity. I think I’d like to intercrop them with my main staple crops, both because I think there will be benefits to the main crops and because, if the main crops die in adverse unusual weather, I can use the interspersed other stuff as a backup plan.
I so hear you on that! That is absolutely my current goal. Growing/selecting/breeding crops that can produce lots of storable food, bonus points if they can easily be stored (like dry corn or beans or winter squash) without extra work or energy (i.e. canning or freezing).
Absolutely. I’m sort of okay with canning, but leery about relying on it as a long-term solution, because I assume I won’t have natural gas in a long-term emergency, and firewood may be too precious to waste on things I don’t need today.
I don’t like fermented foods, so I don’t want to do that, and I’m even more leery about freezing because, again, I assume I won’t have access to a freezer in a long-term emergency.
(Although, in the hopes that I can have access to that, I have gotten a very energy efficient chest freezer, two batteries that can run it for about four hours each, and two solar panels that can charge one of those batteries in about four hours. It’s not nearly enough to keep a freezer going 24/7, but it’s a start, and hopefully I can afford to get more later.)
Because I live in a desert and keeping dried foods dry is super easy here, I’m liking drying as a way to store winter food. But I even more strongly prefer foods that don’t need to be processed in any way: things I can dig up to eat fresh through the winter (carrots, sunchokes), pick to eat fresh in the middle of the winter (cabbage, peas), and have sitting on a shelf for many months without rotting (sweet potatoes, apples).
More and more, I’m becoming convinced that root cellaring is a good idea for food storage for winter.
I’'m worried about droughts too. There are a 141 countries busy with cloudseeding programs. They spray chemicals in the air to make it rain.
I doubt we’re ever going to really control the weather in this way. But if it’s dry where i can’t be sure it’s because they dried my air by making it rain elsewhere.
The scale in which agricultural areas have become increasingly monocrop desserts for miles and miles and miles does a lot. I’m a permaculturist. We create windblocks, hedges.
Industrial agriculture removes all hedges, all windblocks, all forests if they could. In France the government announced they’re going to maintain the hedges in a few years time. You’ll be fined. Hedges have been removed at lightning speed ever since. Luckily citizens alarmed by the changing landscape are springing into action saving hedges and wanting to make them more biodiverse. Another uphill battle.
I remember well the scare in the seventies was we were moving into another ice age. Then all forests would dissapear because of acid rain. Then the ozone layer would dissapear. Now we’ve surpassed a hundred deadlines climate alarmists have given.
I’m not saying CO2 is not playing a role. It’s lead to global greening for starters.
There’s much more at play then you guys think. I understand just blaming consumers for CO2 output is the easy way out. And the easy solution is just lock everybody up in fifteen minute cities. Raise indoor farms in food hubs.
That is the plan… Fourth industrial revolution by Klaus Schwab.
But i’m a freedomloving open person and i refuse to live seperated from nature. And nothing is more complicated then nature. We’ve not started to understand nothing, not a 1% of a 1%. And the more science ‘knows’ the more questions it arises. But it’s fine, we have infinite time, if we manage to come together as a species, to learn to deeply understand ourselves and come together in natural tribes, working together and with nature instead of against it.
Science is driven by money and politics. It doesn’t work for us the people at all. Here we are struggling to landrace. Why isn’t this idea mainstream? Why aren’t scientistes doing this, investing the billions upon billions in warfare industry. Why? Tell me then?
Why do we have to spend time and energy struggling to landrace? Why do i have to bow down to the holy science that didn’t even recognise UFO’s or mycelianetworks a decade ago.
The dogmatic mainstream view is just one of many. If people are afraid they’re easily hearded. I’m not afraid. Nature will survive. It’s the future of our chikdren that’s at stake. And if it means that we’re going to be locked up in concrete fifteen minute cities eating crickets and soy, i’d rather be dead.
That sounds like an awesome idea! This year I have had to dig, which was really counterintuitive to me, destroying the soil structure and having food plants surrounded by bare soil. But circumstances dictated that - time constraints etc. But I really want to be having low ground cover that eliminates tall weeds naturally, and yeah playing roles such as adding fertility, giving flowers for pollinators, keeping out some pests, and for sure edible ones very welcome! I’ve wondered about strawberries and a few other things but just not had time to think about it or try anything out yet. If anyone has recommendations for the UK climate on that, I’d love to hear! Especially regarding things to plant in a tomato plot.
Yeah nice idea. I’m trialing taro at the moment. Not sure it will grow well here. But, aside from the tuber, the leaves are also edible. Have to cook them first though, they’re very irritant otherwise!
I also have a bunch of different edible flowers, just seeds, haven’t had the chance to plant any yet! But it’s nice to have pretty things for us and pollinators too, that you can also eat My plan would be to scatter them all about, as well as some mixed flower beds.
Sounds about right. I don’t remember specifically but yeah, also I do not want to grow things like that or others from other countries that are toxic. There are quite a few things around the world that are eaten but are toxic if you eat too much. I think maybe there are some Native American crops like that too if I remember correctly. Partly with kids in mind or other people who don’t know, just puts me right off such ideas. There are plenty of other things to choose from. But I think we can at least consider the principle of emergency food that grows well in freak weather but would not be ‘good’ enough to consider a ‘normal’ crop. Just make sure they’re not also toxic!
I feel so sad when I’ve seen overcooked broccoli in some restaurants/pubs. Of course it’s just down to personal taste. But in case this is useful for anyone, I’ll say my favourite way of cooking it I cut it into small pieces maybe similar to my thumb. Then put it in a pot with maybe 5mm of water at the bottom, and sprinkle finely chopped fresh ginger all over it. Let the water boil for 4 minutes and it’s done - soft but still bright green, not changed to that dull green. Take the lid off, squeeze half a lemon all over it, a little olive oil, then stir it up and serve with rice and a freshly made tomato-onion-paprika-turmeric sauce. Yum! Could add some protein of some sort as another dish, or whatever. I don’t even add salt, get that from the sauce. The very small amount of water left can be poured over the rice, or can drink it, might give 2 shot glasses worth if cooking for too, quite delicious since the brocolli makes it sweet and the ginger gives it a kick. Yum!
I think that’s off topic so probably not a good idea to go that direction here, from what has been said above. But I will just say that I think that’s black and white thinking that is out of touch with reality. These days I spend a lot of time reading a lot of plant science. And medical science. So I can assure you that view is inaccurate. I would suggest letting go of such ideas, they seem to be only causing you suffering.
I have some truly amazing music in my music collection and almost none of it is mainstream. That’s just reality. Not everyone has to be interested in what we are interested in. Even if we think it’s ‘the best’. And there are some really good reasons why non-landrace crops are popular.
You don’t have to. Do it if you want to! Be at peace with other people doing things they want to do! That’s my suggestion.
(Steeples fingers.) One very intriguing thing I learned recently is that trees do spray chemicals up in the air in order to seed clouds. Forests, by their very nature, essentially create rain. So who needs industrial solutions? Clearly we all need to plant more trees.
Funny how so many solutions keep coming right back to, “You know, we should really plant some more trees!”
I think industrial science, like so many other things, is a tool. Just like digging deep holes. Just like cutting down trees. Just like huge monocultures. Most things have contexts where they can be wonderful. It just has to be the right time, and the right place. Some things are only useful in highly specific situations, so they should be pulled out sparingly. Others can be used frequently, and are great for many broad situations.
The scientific method itself – which is what I consider science to actually be – is a flexible tool that is strong and well-crafted and useful in lots of situations. I recommend keeping it easily accessible and knowing how to use it.
