 Gandhi supposedly said be the change you want to see in the world and this is really a summary of a larger speech with the important line being if we could change ourselves the tendencies in the world would also change. So today we're going to look at a day at the Institute as a jumping-off point to discuss the change we want to see in the world. This is the Lotech podcast. Hello and welcome I'm Scott Johnson from the Lotech technology Institute your host for podcast number 57 on October 14th 2022 coming to you at the Lotech Institute's recording room in Cooksville, Wisconsin. Thanks for joining us today we're taking a look at what a typical day is here at the Institute but again every day is pretty different and don't forget to follow us on Twitter our handle is at low underscore techno like us on Facebook find us on Instagram subscribe to us on YouTube and to check out our website LotechInstitute.org there you can find both of our podcasts as well as information about joining and supporting the Institute and its research. Also some podcasters should put ads on podcasts unless you hear me doing the ad someone else is making money on that advertising while all of our podcasts videos and other information are freely given they do take resources to make and if you're in a position to help support our work and be part of this community please consider becoming a monthly supporter for as little as $3 a month through our Patreon page patreon.com slash Lotech Institute if you'd like to sponsor an episode directly please get in touch with us through our website LotechInstitute.org it's now 655 on a Thursday and I'm down here in our living room slash breakfast nook you can probably hear my one-year-old daughter in the background banging her plate as she enjoys a banana I've been up for 45 minutes getting myself together and one of the kids up we'll have to get the other one up here in a minute we live here at the Lotech Institute or better said the Institute lives right now at our house that's something we hope to change in the next two years we hope to make a permanent home for the Institute in a barn with a workshop in an office but that's not where we are yet and so a lot of what we do is in our own home and in our garage where we hold classes in our driveway and on our property if you ever run a business out of your home you know that it can be a challenge both interpersonally with other people who like to have privacy in your family but also just you know insurance liability wise and all that all those sorts of things so it's something we're working to change but we also enjoy the doing a lot of the things we talk about both on the podcast on our YouTube channel and just on our website as you'll see as we go throughout the day much of what we're doing at the Institute connects somehow to how one lives their life and since we're living here we often get to enjoy and suffer from the Institute's projects today on the menu is cinnamon raisin toast that I made chased work at a bakery so that's fun some of the ingredients in the bread our ours but we've already had to plant most of our wheat seeds for next year and we've given away and we still have some to grind up and use that's what we try we try and integrate as much as we can our own food and eat everything from our own property as we can and then on top of that we supplement with exterior our incoming foods on the grocery store and things like that for example or we don't have any dairy animals we have two growing kids so we certainly buy milk and cheese and dairy and things like that because we can't make them on a scale without access to a dairy animal which is kind of a shame because we live in Wisconsin and I do know there are neighbors that have dairies and in theory we could walk over and get some milk but farmers here don't want to give raw milk to people they don't necessarily know and so it's hard to bring that up with people and say hey can you do something illegal for me when we only know each other in passing so that's kind of a thing that might need to change in the future if people need to seriously think about changing their food web from something that is national or international really to something that is hyper local something you know could you walk and get all the food you need probably means less dairy for most of us but there's certainly a lot of food around you and so that's something we often think about if you haven't watched our Food Mageddon series on YouTube you should head over there and check it out that's where we spent a year where we only ate food that we grew gathered or hunted near us so that's a yeah it's interesting place to start if you're kind of just joining us or if you haven't seen that so breakfast is toast sometimes we have eggs from our chickens sometimes we'll have granola that we've made for the most part we try and at least integrate a lot of our own food into it that's water going into our tea kettle we use a reverse osmosis filter because we live in the country and the nitrate levels are really high because all the industrial ag land around us dumps tons and tons of nitrates onto the fields it's amazing how much nitrogen we've fixed using largely natural gas and other power to compress atmospheric nitrogen into usable nitrogen that just gets flushed into the environment because we over apply it but so yeah we have to use a reverse osmosis filter out here although if I lived in the city I'd do the same thing for other reasons Institute runs on tea not coffee someday I'd like to figure out how to grow my own tea leaves but for now importing dried self-stable goods is really not that bad you can bring tea and other dried commodities really long distances by ship which is much easier on the environment than other types of commodities especially ones that are fresh or need to be kept refrigerated cool or moved very fast so yeah if you think about what you're buying at the grocery store things that are shelf stable and do not require quick transportation from a long ways away are generally easier on your carbon footprint okay bye have a good day you too bye penny and the whirlwind is past kids are gone for the day three days a week they're in full time which allows me to do three days a week of work the other days are juggling and now a few minutes of computer work updating blog post answering emails answering YouTube comments and taking care of things that can't wait and double-checking that I don't have any appointments or things I'm gonna miss throughout the day just a bit of calm after the storm of getting the kids together and out the door now I am chopping up peppers these are hatch chilies actually and I am popping them in the dehydrator because at this time of year the dehydrator needs to basically be running constantly to dehydrate peppers and apples and tomatoes and everything else okra yeah whatever we can get in that dehydrator we get in there and get it going because winter's coming as they say before I went outside to get some work done I had to pop down here to the basement and I am shoveling finished worm compost into a sifter because I need to make some potting soil because we need to get our winter herbs going we have an herb spot in our kitchen and they grow in pots so my mom is gonna get those herbs started today and also we need to start some lettuce because our winter cold weather greenhouse will be starting up here soon so we gotta start some cold weather leafy greens like spinach and lettuce and other things so that we can have fresh greens into the winter now to open up the chickens give them some scratch fill up their feed or a voracious little dinosaur descendants here unfortunately we have a sick one who has something called blackhead which is primarily a turkey disease but because the medication you would give to it would make it unsuitable for human consumption the medicine has been banned and so my sick chicken is gonna die because I can't get the medication legally in the United States so there you go kind of rare in chickens and this is my second chicken in four years that's died of it that's unfortunate we've had Hock attacks this summer but overall we have a decent flock here we're going to do our fall butchering in a few weeks and bring our flock number down to about 10 for the winter all right so I've just planted out 50 spinach cells and I'm watering them in which is the spring water you hear in the background completely soaked then they'll go in our oven where the pilot light will warm them up and sprout them and they get moved to our greenhouse where they will grow over the next few months first under sunlight and then under grow lights using crapwood to heat the fireplace in there it's a constant cycle of starting seeds harvesting and starting seeds and harvesting on a rolling basis I now find myself 20 feet above the ground on top of a greenhouse repairing a cut in my neighbor's greenhouse that I also get to grow in so I'm not gonna record much up here because it's dangerous but fun just another random thing I get to do today now I'm inside the greenhouse picking tomatoes these are Roma style tomatoes and Marzano twos I'm picking these these are a paste type tomato these will be turned into things like salsa and marinara sauce and tomato paste and sun dried tomatoes and on and on and on I also need to get some seeds from lettuce that bolted in here beginning of the season so I can plant that out to our other greenhouse which is more cold weather oriented now I'm in the garden taking up potatoes never ending potato harvest continues do a bit when I have free time usually we get around 200 pounds of potatoes a year which is enough to get us through the next season if you want to hear more what I have to say about potatoes you can check out a couple of different podcasts in our feed just scroll back you can find like potatoes will save humanity and how we plant potatoes based on the USDA study we ran so anyway yeah try and spend a lot of time potato field in the fall and now it's time for lunch at almost one o'clock supposed to be noon toasted tomato sandwiches with tomatoes from the garden and bread we made earlier this week and working on the computer trying to get stuff done sort of a quick break and then back to it and now after lunch I am spending a quick half hour in the office moving papers around and answering emails again and just doing general office work which I honestly don't do enough of and if I had more time I would spend a little more time in the office but that's how it goes especially during the summer spring and fall when there's a lot to do out in the gardens and fields now I'm out in the wood shop moving around staves that are going to be made into buckets this weekend at an event that I'm demonstrating coopering at so I'll be making a little buckets and pails my kit there at the New Glaris Heritage Festival or Harvest Festival at the historic Swiss Museum in New Glaris Wisconsin so I'm looking forward to that it's always a fun event every year so I'm now prepping all my wood for that I have to get some pine boards sawn down to approximate shape and then I'm also going to split up a whole bunch of ash to make buckets completely by hand so always something onward and just like that my free time is done it's now 10 to 4 so I have to go get the kids from daycare in school etc get them home get them fed get them doing stuff oh and here comes my neighbor with basket full of produce for me okay all right now I have just a few minutes while the kids have a snack to scrub the back porch in order to then put some linseed oil on it just to get the muck up because this is a muddy place because we come in out of the garden and it just builds up over the year so it's good to wash it off get a good coat of linseed oil on it before the winter comes now we are with the help of the munchkins I'm watering the greenhouse getting the beds ready we are watering in the greenhouse I don't know why we're all coughing we're watering the beds in our winter greenhouse to get them all nice and uh-huh water level is all nice and built up so that they can accept the spinach and other things that we planted out today so just kind of getting this winter greenhouse in shape you can see this winter greenhouse called a wallopini on our YouTube page you can see the first half of the build so check that out if you haven't found our YouTube page yet last thing of the day is covering my tomato plants and other sensitive plants with row cover because we're supposed to get a freeze tonight so I am just covering up with my my daughter my one-year-old here on my back in a backpack and we are out here just pulling the row covers right over so that they stay just above freezing and my son is at the other tomato patch eating any ripe tomatoes so they don't go to waste of course before I go and cover that one last thing of the day and then we'll be making dinner and having family time as you can see each day here is filled with bits of work sometimes we spend all day on a project and others we are moving from task to task like today but every day is different and much of what we do is building up infrastructure or growing food in a future with less abundant energy this is a model that most people could and frankly would have to adopt we wouldn't be able to rely on long distance transportation networks as we do now for fulfilling our every desire by mixing physical and mental work it gives me for example a more balanced feeling than if I were just behind a desk all day or working outside alone thanks for following along today and I hope this gets you thinking about what your life could be like if you began to disengage at least a little bit from the large-scale economy that really can't be kept up indefinitely that's it for this week the low-tech podcast is put out by the Low Technology Institute the show is hosted and co-produced by me Scott Johnson and co-produced and edited by Ines Hizuki this episode was recorded in the Low Technology Institute's recording room subscribe to the podcast on iTunes Spotify Google Play YouTube and elsewhere we hope you enjoyed this free podcast and if you'd like to join the community and help support the work we do please consider going to patreon.com slash lowtech Institute and signing up thanks to our forester and land steward level members Marilyn Scarpon, Sam Braun and the Hamuses for their support the Low Technology Institute is a 501c3 research organization supported by members grants and underwriting you can find out more information about the Low Technology Institute membership and underwriting at lowtech Institute.org you can find us on social media and reach me directly on Scott at lowtech Institute.org our intro music was cobwebs off the album headless horseman by Halizna that song is in the public domain this podcast is under the creative comments attribution and share a license meaning you're free to choose and share it as long as you give us credit thanks so much take care and happy Halloween if I don't get to you before then