 This week the fossil fuel crisis has continued. We are still without fossil fuels or just running out of what we had available. So we can't go to the grocery stores easily and there's nothing fresh in the produce section so we're basically buying stuff that is staples, dried, made already. Other than that people are just starting to hunker down, starting to grow things in their gardens which makes it tougher to get supplies for gardening which is good and bad. I mean it's good that people are planning and making gardens, that's wonderful. But it stinks for me because I've been trying to get different materials and things and they're running out which is honestly fine. We have everything we need at this point but it's always nice to build up a little more. So anyway thanks for joining us this week, we're going to look at a couple different projects. I pressed my cheese, we have a lot of starts in the greenhouse so we'll keep an eye on those. We're building a lot of beds and I planted a whole bunch of flax. So we'll see those and a couple other things on this episode of Foodmageddon. Thanks for tuning in. So the first thing we're going to look at is cheese. As I said last time cheese is a great way to save excess dairy from pre-industrial times and I guess we enjoy it now as well. But I wanted to get practice with whatever milk we have available in the grocery store so that when I am able to find a neighbor with cows I can make large amounts of cheese successfully. So I am continuing my practice with cheese making and this week I pressed my cheese into a round and then I waxed it. Now it's time to pop the cheese out of the mold. So I had a bit of a problem with this cheese and when I was in the curd heating stage I let it get too warm. I let it get over 100 degrees, it was like up to 105. It made the curds really seem like they were melted rather than kind of sticking and forming together and in most of the cheddar cheese videos I've seen online people are able to crumble the cheese before they put it in the mold and I was never able to do that it was still kind of like a half melted cheese. So this might be too soft to press and it might not actually survive the aging process but we'll give it a go and see what happens. And cross our fingers that it will be a survivable cheese for all involved. Actually this was a Jerry rake throw together cheese mold and once I've done it a few times I'll build something a little more permanent but for the first time let's see how our cheese looks. So it's actually firmer than I expected so that's good. It's got some discoloration from the pan. Looks like a cheese. So now what has to happen is it has to sit on a rack in room temperature for one to three days for the skin and rind to develop and every day I'll flip it but otherwise it just sits here like a cheese. So after three days of drying I coated the cheese in paraffin and the outside had gotten pretty dry and formed like a rind and then this paraffin wax should keep any moisture that's left in there in and all the bad microorganisms out at least that's the hope. I labeled it dipped in paraffin wax and yeah it's actually a pretty satisfying process. So peels aren't available trying to make a schedule for myself and one of the big things for me is Friday is kind of clean up the house day but it's also maintenance of the fence and other infrastructure around the garden so that's what I'm up to today. One of the big problems is that vegetation grows up underneath the fence and when the vegetation touches the electric fence it shorts it out and drains the battery. Not only that it reduces the amount of charge available to keep rabbits, raccoons and deer out of the garden. So every week I go on and I hoe up any vegetable matter that's growing up underneath the fence. I start so on so I can get them out of the house because they're kind of crowding the back window and you know Lauren would like to have her dining area back. I've only been waiting for two years to have a functioning greenhouse and I finally do getting all these out of the house and into where they belong. This is pretty exciting. In addition to working on the greenhouse I've also been continuing to make garden beds. It's still the never ending process in the spring because we have to get all the cardboard out, all the mulch out, source all of the compost and everything else that we need to do. So it's been busy and it's been extra hard because we have less gasoline available. So this month I basically have one tank of gas for my truck to get all the mulch, all the compost, all the cardboard, everything I need for the garden this month I only have one tank to get it with. I have no idea how much gas I'm going to have next month if all this continues. Yes, you're such a ham. You're such a ham. Today we are out here to get some beds ready for the peas. Peas are sprouted, they're coming up, they're ready to be transplanted soon so I got to whip these beds into shape. So let's do a quick discussion of what I have here and the point of doing all this of course is to keep my weed load down. It also builds soil. I'm not churning it up. This is called no dig gardening. If I turn it up and I destroy everything that's in it, it also breaks down the microbes and the microbial life, the fungal life, all the things that make soil get disturbed when you deep till it. That's why I'm doing this no dig method where I cover everything up and mulch it. Over years I'm building up more and more soil. I have a foot of deep soil here and that's because I've been doing this for three years now. As I said, this is year three of no dig gardening. So let's just have a look. So these are cilia, these grow all, they're kind of invasive. They grow all over the neighborhood. But if we go down a bit farther, we see we have pretty good soil all the way down. And a lot of this is originally clay but because we just pile on more organic matter every year and smother it, we're really able to keep the organic content high. And even though I'm putting cardboard on it, I'm going to plant through the cardboard. So this is the medium I'm going to be planting into. And as I'm hoeing this all together to prepare the bed for the year, I get any incipient invasives that I see. I saw some wild parsnip over there and some others. So I try and prepare it as much as I can before covering it up. Each year, there's a less and less weed load. I'll see if I can rustle up a picture of what this looked like before. It was completely grown over with invasive trees and brush. All of this that I'm putting on will break down and become soil next year. And so I have my two pathways. I've got my cardboard covered by straw. And if we move over here, you can see how we're making it. So we've got a bed covered by cardboard. These are the sides of the bed pushed off to the side. This will be a pathway. It's going to be filled with mulch. And then this is the next bed that hasn't been worked yet. I'm going to pull last year's pathway onto it that's rotted now. Cover it with cardboard, cover it with straw, put the sides on. And it will be a good bed just like all the rest of them. It's a lot of success, actually. One of the things we try and do at the Los Angeles Institute is figure out how to house clothing feed ourselves without fossil fuels. Food is obviously the one I'm really concentrated on this year. But sometimes I feel like I don't give enough shrift to clothing. And so my goal last year was growing in a flax to make myself a shirt. And I'm still in the process of processing that flax. But this year, I'm going to grow flax for the seed. But I'm going to use that same flax seed that I grew last year. I got a half a pound of avian flax. And this year, I'm going to grow two pounds of avian flax, which is what I got from last year. So I've got that here in the cart. I'm going to clean up this area and then put the flax in. Luckily, flax requires less preparation of the ground than everything else, because flax grows so prolifically it locks out all of the weeds. So it's a great kind of cover crop for me and real easy and fun to grow. So now, after getting most of the overburden off this triangular plot here, now I'm going to just scrape the surface a little bit with this wheel hoe so that I can create the rows in which I will be planting the flax seed. I'm not really digging deep. I don't want to disturb the soil too much. But I do need to break up just this surface area. Number one, to get the seeds in. And number two, to get this light vegetation on top and disrupt it so that when the seeds emerge, they can quickly overtop and out-compete the weeds that are here. So in the pre-industrial world, draft animals were really, really important because they could plow up a lot faster than I could. And I'm not even plowing. I'm just scratching the surface. An acre is originally defined as the amount of space a man and a horse could plow in a day. Obviously, doing an acre like this would take me a very, very long time, a couple of days, three days, four days. I don't know. I don't want to find out. It would blow out my elbows. I have to adjust this so it's a little less stressful on my elbows. But now, without fossil fuels, draft animals would be really important. I don't know if it would be possible maybe next year to talk to some of my neighbors. There's horses within riding distance up here. I can't imagine they've ever been used as draft animals, but it would be interesting to talk to the owners about possibly plowing this all, maybe not plowing, but scratching this all up for me next year just to save me days of work, freeing me up to do other things. And in exchange, I could give them food or something like that. That's the sort of thing we have to start thinking about now that we don't have easy access to fossil fuels to run our rototillers and our other tools that usually make quick work of what is actually pretty slow work when you don't have the embodied energy in fossil fuels available. Oranges aren't actually my favorite fruit. They're actually really like apples. The thing is right now, oranges were available at our supermarket. We're starting to see majors to disruptions in what we can buy. So the produce section is pretty ghostly. There's really not much in terms of lettuce, hot peppers. Anything that needs to be shipped quickly, it's not there. Oranges are actually really ecologically friendly because they can be grown and ripened on the tree and then shipped slowly because they have a long shelf life. Same thing with apples. They are out of season right now, so a lot of our apples in the spring come from south of the equator, so there aren't that many available right now, but come the fall, there should be a lot. They can be shipped on trains and other slow moving. Very efficient transportation methods. So I'm eating oranges now, that's fine. I'm looking forward to apple season though. One way that you can kind of look at what collapses in the loss of fossil fuels is the carbon footprint. And so I'll link to a talk I gave. I'll actually put it out as a podcast at our recent gardening expo where I talked about the carbon cost of growing different plants. And really what I'm showing people is how carbon intensive it is to grow things like asparagus off season or lettuce off season. Really the main takeaway though is buy in season, buy locally. And yeah, you're not gonna get lettuce in the middle of winter, but that's fine. You'll enjoy it more in the spring. We're really looking forward to salad season which should be starting here soon. So yeah, I'll link to that and you can have a listen. You can also find other similar lectures like on the history of gardening and other things. If you go to your favorite podcast app and look for low tech lecture series. That's low tech lecture series. I'll link to it below here on the YouTube page, but it's available on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, all these different places. And there's all kinds of interesting, I hope, lectures there that I've given over time. So check that out and I don't know, enjoy oranges and other things while we have them. So I had to do some work with my black seed. They got a little bit of surface mold. So I washed them with hydrogen peroxide. They turned against them and they never dried out completely. So my seeder didn't work. I had to broadcast them. So what I did is I really walked back and forth and my hand spread out the seeds as evenly as I could. So now I'm just gonna rake them in and trample them down. Pretty low tech. So just behind my flax field over here, I've got my potatoes. This is one of a few potato fields I'm making. And the idea here, right now there's piles of straw, but what I'm gonna do, I already have some rows that I've dug in with the real hope. And what I'm gonna do now is put the straw down between the rows and that is hoping to smother the incipient growth that we have here. Leave the rows open. I'll plant the potatoes, put down compost, turn them all together, and then as the potatoes grow up, I will move this mulch over on top of the potatoes to hill them up. I grow my potatoes on the surface. And the reason I do that is because I conducted a study with 10 market gardeners in Southern Wisconsin. And we tried all kinds of different methods, five to be exact, different methods of growing potatoes, growing them on the surface under straw mulch, under newspaper and straw mulch, digging them in, hilling them up like traditionally, growing them in potato towers, and also growing them in grow bags. And we found that planting them on the surface is probably your best bet if you have space because it takes the least amount of energy for you to dig up each pound of potatoes on a per pound basis, planting them on the surfaces, half as much work as digging them into the ground while it is only a small percentage, less productive in terms of tubers per square foot. So I am a whole video about this, and I will link to that here. You can check that out if you're interested in learning more about the potato study that we did. But suffice it to say, we plant on the surface with some compost and mulch. Well, that's all we have for this week. We were off last week, and the reason was that we had to do some beekeeping. You can find a video of that on the Lotech Institute YouTube page under our other videos, the Lotech video series. So maybe I'll link to that right here. So have a look at that and see some of the other work we're doing around the institutes. Be sure to check back next week because we'll be planting potatoes and doing a whole bunch more in the garden and in the kitchen. Subscribe to make sure that you get each of our episodes as they come out, and please consider liking the video and sharing it with a friend. We really appreciate it. Next week, I hope to also get a podcast out, or at least in the next couple of weeks. You can find that under the Lotech podcast on most of the major podcast carriers. You can also reach out directly at Scott at LotechInstitute.org. And I hope you're all staying safe out there. Thanks for joining us and take care.