 Before it happened, most of us thought about fossil fuels only when we filled up our cars. Then the whole extraction industry collapsed and we realized that something more important than transportation was completely dependent on these fuels. That was the food system. We never thought about the fact that from growing and harvesting to processing and transportation, our food was made using fossil fuels. This is the story of a family trying to cope with the loss of those fuels. We have to grow, harvest and forage for ourselves in a new world. It's called Foodmageddon. This week has been a cold and snowy one, but now that we're into week two of the fossil fuel crisis, people are starting to feel the pinch of the pump as gas stations take advantage of the situation. But for the most part, we've had enough fuels in the pipeline to keep things running so far. I thought it would be a good week to give you a tour of our property. I'll go into what we've got and what we plan to do this year as we try and adapt to grow all of our own food. Well, that is at least until the fossil fuel industry recovers, if it does. We're lucky that most of what we've done here has been with an eye to self-provisioning, but now we have to put all this planning into practice. But remember, we've only been here two seasons, so everything we've done could be done in a year if your life depended on it. And it might now. So we got some snow this weekend, and it's going to make things a little difficult to film, just because everything's covered in snow, but this is our house. This is the little technology institute we live here. Our house was built in the 1850s, so let me give you a tour of the ground and show you what we're dealing with. While the front of our house was built in the 1850s, the back of our house was added in the 1970s. So far, what we've done, and you'll see on the inside, we've added solar hot water panels there on the bottom. We're going to add a couple more, hopefully soon, and that helps heat up our domestic hot water. The back gets a lot of nice sun, so you can see, I don't know, in the corner there the chickens are hanging out. They like to hang out under the solar hot water panel because it's a little warmer on a cold day like today. We also have a lot of grow beds. You might be able to see the trellises here, where we're trying to recruit cucumbers and other vining things. So we'll move those trellises. I'm sure you'll see that here later in the spring. In last week's episode, you saw me chopping wood and stacking wood. This is one of our wood hutches that we have. We have a couple. Each one can hold a quarter or two of wood, and that's what we use all winter. Storage space is always at a premium for us, and here you can see another extra outside of a storage area pile of cardboard. This is going to be used in our garden to help suppress weeds. Right now, the appliance store is still operating business as usual. Every week I stop by and pick up refrigerator boxes and other brown paper boxes that I use to suppress weeds. You'll see it in a few months when I put them out on the garden. But as long as gas is still around and I can make it into town, I'm going to be picking up a couple more of these boxes. So this is the gate that goes back into our garden. I specifically built everything, all the entrances to our garden. Too small to get even a bobcat back there because I wanted to force myself to not use fossil fuels back here. Now that's kind of a moot point, but that was at least the thought. We just want a nice entrance to our garden. So from here back, we're going to get into the garden area. So when we moved in, this garden area was largely brushed over because the previous owners had had a beautiful ornamental garden. But then had passed away and although some neighbors had helped out in the interim, the land was largely left just to grow. And so we had black locust and black clapped raspberry and as well as other thorny and really pernicious woody vegetation over this whole garden area. So the last couple of years, we've just been taking the brush out and building beds. It's kind of hard to give you a tour right now because everything's under snow, but you can see the hummocks over the land. Each one of those is a raised bed. In addition to the greenhouse, I've been trying out some cold frames this year and these are essentially, you can see it here, straw bales. To create a bit of a little house over some windows. And these windows let in the light and let things get warmed up. And hopefully we still have some kale living in here and then we can occasionally harvest that. But this adds another 10, 15, 20, 30 degrees even on a winter day like this. It's going to get nice and tempered in there. Everyone likes to make fun of kale now. It's kind of the butt of the joke of like, oh, you're green or whatever and you eat kale. Okay, great. But, you know, it grows. I mean, look at that. We've got green kale in the middle of winter. It's maybe 15 degrees out here and we've got a green vegetable that grows. You can't beat that. This summer we also got really lucky in that we had a windfall and decided to put in solar panels. Obviously, we didn't know that this was coming up, that the fossil fuels were going to crash. Had we known, we probably would have done this anyway, of course. But it just worked out that these solar panels just got operational in December. It's a 6, thanks Rooster. Okay, it's a 6.3 kilowatt system, which, you know, right now with the grid up, over the year should provide 100% of our energy needs. Now in the winter it provides less energy than we're currently using. And in the summer it provides much more. Our solar panels will let us cook, irrigate, and otherwise process our food. The refrigerator is hooked up to the solar power, but since we've got a small refrigerator, we're going to have to come up with ideas to preserve food, largely without refrigeration. Right behind the garage in the solar panels, we have an in-ground greenhouse. It's called a Wallapini, W-A-L-P-I-N-I. It's a South American design where you build a greenhouse right into the ground and that you can hear snow in the background falling off my neighbor's greenhouse. And this design uses the thermal mass of the earth to help keep heat retained a little better. Last week you saw me shovel the snow off, but we've gotten more snow since then, so I'm going to clean this guy off and then we're going to go inside. And I'll give you a quick tour of what we have going on there. It's still a work in progress, but I'm going to need to finish it up this year. So I've been working on this greenhouse for the last two years really, but you could make it in the season or if you really need to hurry, you could make a greenhouse above ground with a lot less work. These are earth bags. Earth bags are essentially grain bags, poly bags with a plastic liner that get filled up with local earth and then stacked with rebar between the layers and also barbed wire and that helps keep them from shifting. Where the ground level right now is about here. So we're, you know, three feet, good three feet underground. The greenhouse will be important in the spring to help us get a jump on the growing season. In the summer it will let us grow plants from zones to the south like okra, peppers and sweet potatoes. In the fall it's going to extend our growing season and next winter we'll try and turn the back wall into shelves full of spinach, kale and other cold hardy plants. We've got a lot more technical information on the website, which is lowtechinstitute.org. And now for my absolutely favorite part of this greenhouse. This is a mass heater stove and essentially what it is, it's a wood stove within a wood stove. You know, thermal mass absorbs heat and lets it out slowly. So what this does is it creates a lot of mass with a pretty small firebox and what we do is we fire it real hot and in here is a small chamber. And that chamber heats up, the gases go out into basically a small chimney inside here. They hit the top and then as the gas is cool, they release their heat into this exterior wall and it goes down, down, down, down, down and then out the back into a chimney and then straight up. So it kind of does a giant S-curve, but in that S-curve it dumps all of its heat in here and the smoke coming out of the smoke stack is so cool that you can touch the smoke stack on top. I should mention that we had a big hand in building this from Jim Shales at Tall Grass Vernacular in Omaha, Nebraska. He builds mass heater stoves just like this and all kinds of other fire masonry, fire-related masonry. So you should definitely check out his website for a lot of really cool pictures and plans and designs for stuff like this. Every one of these bumps here is a raised bed. So we've got one, two, three, four, five, six and then we've got more over here, more over there. We build raised beds for quite a few reasons. They help drain moisture when we get too much. They warm up quickly in the spring. We can control the soil a lot better because we can add amendments. Plus they're just a lot neater to work with because you can walk between them. Overall, they're just a great addition to our garden. We've been building them now for two years, but you could build all of these raised beds pretty quickly in a season if you had to put your mind to it. Now I'm going through a temporary fence that will become permanent into what we call the berry, which is a conflation of berry and area. From here forward back to the house, that's where we grow most of our vegetables. From here back, we're really concentrating on fruits, perennials, apples, strawberries, gooseberries, raspberries and a couple other things. We do have some beds back here, but really we're working on building an orchard and area for berries. Here we've got about two of our dozen apple trees. They're obviously very young and we don't expect them to produce anything this year. I probably should get some wire on these to protect them from deer that kind of maraud through. Luckily, when I put this gate on back here, that stopped a lot of the deer from coming through, but we still have rabbits and other pressure. So we've got these plastic collars on the bottom to keep mice and other little rodents from eating the bark, the outer portion of the bark of these apple trees, which is basically the vasculatory system of any deciduous tree. And if the mice eat the bottom out, the bark out, then it girdles them and they die. Here we've got strawberry cages, and these are small raised beds. They're narrow. Obviously, you can't see it under the snow here, but it's a wooden raised bed, and then I attached this chicken wire to it, and then we close this up when the strawberries start producing. That way the birds and other critters don't get to them. Then we just have to worry about slugs. When we moved in, there were a lot of black-capped raspberries, which are wild black raspberries growing here on the property. They're kind of an invasive colonizer. They're one of the first plants to move in when you stop taking care of a lawn or a garden space because they're thorny, they're just a good colonizer. And so I had been initially just chopping them down and digging up the root balls because they're not what we want in the garden area. And I had initially planned to just buy more raspberry plants, and I thought, well, why am I tearing out raspberry plants to then have to later plant more finicky, cultivated raspberry species? So what I did was I started transplanting all of these canes a few years ago back into this area, and what I've done is created a maze of trellises so you can walk an entire circuit of the maze and end up where you started, and you'll have gone by each side of this raspberry trellis and picked everything clean. We'll get at least a couple dozen quartz this year. Now this is one of my favorite things on the property. This is our chicken coop, and we built it primarily from stuff here on the property. The timbers were from a pine tree that had died, and we cut down. You can actually watch a video on our YouTube channel about how we cut down, rived, and then built this timber frame chicken coop. So you can go back and check that out on our YouTube page. The chickens will provide eggs and meat, obviously, but because we kept a rooster, we're leaving it to make more chickens this year. Right now we're the only ones with chickens in town, but I bet by the end of the season, our chicks will be all over the neighborhood. Even in the winter, we're getting about two eggs a day, but over the summer, we'll be getting four to six a day, meaning we're going to have to figure out how to store them. When fossil fuels were around, we used to sell extra eggs, but now we'll want all that protein to stay on site. And now here we are around the front of the chicken coop. This is the south side where the sun can shine in on these double windows. We're also inside the chicken run. This fence encloses the girls for a small yard during times of the year when we don't want them out tearing up the garden or things like that. Right now, they're allowed to go out into the garden. As soon as first frost hit and we didn't have anything else growing in the garden, we let them out and they scratch through everything and deposit some fertilizer all over. But in the summer, we close it off and then we make them go out into the back where it's a lot more wooded and protected from things like hawks and other predators. Next to our chicken coop is this shed. This is a barn square that my stepmom painted and gave to us, so we like to have that up in here. And speaking of barns, this is actually barn paint, traditional barn paint, with iron oxide or rust. Essentially, it's a flower paint where you boil water, you add flour, you add a whole bunch of rust filings and then a little linseed oil and a couple other things to make a paint that is fairly eco-friendly and really durable. It's got a nice red, rich, deep kind of tone to it. We really like it to preserve this wood and I think it looks great and I'm excited that it was a very eco-friendly paint that I could make in my kitchen with my cookware and then just wash it off. It's great. Inside the shed, we store garden implements of course and other things but we also have our bees. We took the inspiration from Slovenian and Swiss beekeepers who actually build sheds specifically to hold their beehives and we'll have a look inside here and we'll see how they're doing this winter. So we kind of use the shed as a storage area in the winter. We've got all our hoses and some of our other garden stuff in here that we're not using right now but on this side, here on inside the screen are some of our beehives and you can see here we have Langstroth hives for those beekeepers out there watching that sit on, here's our hive stand and then this one's already died out so we can move it out of the way and I'll show you what's going on here. This hive died out in the fall due to predation from wasps. I found a whole bunch of dead wasps in here but unfortunately I was inattentive and I didn't seal it off soon enough and now wax moths have moved in and they've put their larvae in here so what I'm going to have to do is take it out, clean it out, scrape all the wax larvae onto the ground by the chickens and the chickens will get to eat all the larvae but essentially what I've got here is a bottom board that's attached and here in the front the bees can go out of the back wall the south facing wall of the shed and had this survive longer I would have put a wooden cover here on the bottom of this screen bottom board but in the summer I like to leave it open so they can get a lot of moist or they can get a lot of airflow through but so this is one of three hives we have here now we do have two hives that have survived so far this winter and I don't know if the sound on the recording will pick this up but when I slam on this and give them a knock to see if they're there we should hear a vroom of the bees as they buzz their wings together to recognize that something knocked on their hive so let's see if we can hear it yeah so they're alive in there and then they're alive in that one over there too we got a couple more out in the yard so let's go check those out and see how they're doing this year before we get to those other hives we can take a look here at the doors and so what these are again they're modeled after a Swiss bee hut but basically this board this is a landing board it comes down and in the summer this is open and the bees will come in and out and each one of these has a different pattern so they can easily identify which is theirs a lot of beekeepers often do this with colors and then this is a slide that is an entrance reducer so when a bee hive is small or weak you want to have a small or in the winter you want to have a very small opening maybe an inch just so they can come in and out and they can easily defend that but if it's a real strong big hive you can open it up all the way so that they don't get a lot of congestion at the door and pollen in all summer so because it's winter when I close this up I'll take this out so you can see on the other side the bees can come in and out of this small space right over here for their cleansing flights another sign that we have an active hive here we have we had snow yesterday and look at all the bees here dead on the ground bees when they're dying in the winter will try and make it outside when they die their friends their hive mates will drag them out and dump them into the snow because they will mold in the spring when everything unthaws they're just extra waste inside the space and bees are really really clean animals the inside of a bee hive so this is a weaker hive but it still has some honey left in here so I wanted to come get it so here I just take off the inner covers let's take my gloves off I don't even have a hive tool with me there are all kinds of specialized tools that beekeepers have see? still full of nice honey and this will be great to give to the other bees to give them a better chance to overlive the winter I got into beekeeping because I used to audit our grocery list for things I could make at home we were buying sugar and I thought we could either tap maple trees or keep bees since I didn't have 40 years to wait for the maples to grow bees it's been one of my more fulfilling hobbies and you should wander over to the website and check out the research we're doing on bees if you're interested in that well thanks for joining us this week I hope you have an idea of what we have to work with now here around the homestead next week we will look at what we have in our neighborhood available and we'll have an update on the fossil fuel crisis and a little bit of the beginning of what we're going to plan to do this growing season and feed ourselves so thanks for watching don't forget to subscribe share us on social media and all that sort of stuff hope you're doing well and take care