 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. Welcome back. Things are starting to get serious. People are having to adjust to the new normal for one quarter of gasoline for their cars and for me, well for us, that isn't much of a big deal because I work from home. But for others, they're having to start telecommuting. In fact, Lauren is working from home until further notice. We're in, what, day four now of you being home? What do you think so far? We need a better chair. That's your only complication while working at home? So far. Okay. Are you still getting a lot of work done? Thankfully, yeah. I mean, as long as the internet's still working, I can keep working. All right. So I will say that I'm enjoying having everyone around. Plus, as the economy starts to feel the lack of fuel in the system, we're starting to get things sorted around here, which is kind of a relief. One of the first things I'm doing is stockpiling enough food to get us to the point that our garden starts producing enough to feed us. Grocery's hardware and feed for the animals. And this has to last us at least three months and more for the chicken feed because of the corn and other things will be ready till the fall. Yeah. So I just came back from town with a whole load of animal food. And while we can't stockpile our way out of this crisis, if it goes on internally, we can at least have a little bit of buffer to give ourselves some breathing room. So the dog food is actually the bigger issue. I can grow chicken food. I just need some time. We are already starting to see reductions, though. This is not what I usually buy for my chickens, but it's what was available, so I had to buy it. And that's only going to become more acute as this goes on. We're going to get less and less of our desired stuff and more and more of bottom of the barrel of things that are available. For example, I might end up having to feed them birdseed if I don't grow enough food early enough. The boy is getting some orange right now. We'll see how much longer oranges are available for him. He's dropping them all over the floor. Kind of a messy eater. Maple syrup season is in full swing. Luckily, we've had some nice weather, so I can be outside boiling down the sap. Every two days, I pop over here my little cart and grab all of the sap. On the other days, well, honestly, now every day I'm boiling. My goal is four gallons, because that's a lot of calories that we can use all winter. Now, to mention, I don't know where we're going to buy sugar otherwise. Today's haul is 16 gallons here and another eight gallons across the street. So that's a total of almost 24 gallons, meaning I've gathered about 100 gallons of sap already this year and the taps are still going strong. My goal for the year is four gallons and I'll hit that mark this week. Luckily, each gallon has over 13,000 calories, meaning that's almost 3% of the 2 million calories we need to produce. Think of that in just four gallons of sap and that's counting the chickens and the dogs and the calories for everyone else. So really, for our own human calories, that's almost five or six percent of our total calories we need for the rest of the year, which is not bad to be producing now in the spring when nothing else is growing. Well, this is my life now. I am boiling down sap every day. Well, every day it's not raining. As you can see, all the snow is pretty much gone because we've got over an inch of rain and 60 degree temperatures. So it's really starting to feel like spring. While I'm taking care of other projects, every half hour I have to step out of here. I generally have to add some wood to the fire and most of this wood is scrap that I couldn't burn in my house anyway. At least we're going to get some extra calories out of it. As long as the sun is shining, I'm using my induction burner to finish off the sap. This is what I boiled down yesterday. This is probably eight to ten gallons of sap boiled down to about three gallons. And this will boil down to just a couple of quarts. And this induction oven uses a very little energy to boil everything. And we're using it when the sun's up, meaning it's just drawing solar power, not the grid power. So this is something we could use even if the grid goes down. Although an even better option would be building a solar oven and maybe that's something I'll be doing by the end of the year. Some of you might be wondering what all the wood needed to boil down the sap. And it's a fair question. The way I look at wood is that it's carbon neutral. Trees sequester carbon from the atmosphere so when it's burned, that carbon is just re-released to the environment. Fossil fuels, on the other hand, are permanently sequestered carbon that's being added to the atmosphere and causing problems. Of course, we do have to think about particulate matter when burning wood. The stove I'm using to boil down the sap is not nearly as efficient as our house wood stove. So ash and soot are being added to the local air and that's less than ideal. But we're burning for a short time so this isn't a long term thing. Here I have my finished syrup. I finished it on the stove just to have a lot more control of it. I know it's done. I know it's done because when I put in this thermometer it reads 220 degrees which is hotter than water will boil meaning the water content is low enough that it has plenty of sugar in it. So that's exactly what we want and now it's ready to be hot packed. So you don't need a water bath can this or anything. All I do is I just put it in jars really hot, seal the lid and then that will essentially keep any bad bugs out of it and that way we're 220. That will keep us nice and safe and we'll store all this energy. Each pound of this is about 1,700 calories so every gallon is 1,600-1,700 calories so that's pretty good. We're also using all this extra time to prep beds. Some of the beds are in our own backyard and others are on a neighboring plot of land that I call the back 40. Our neighbors were market gardeners but retired and offered me a fifth of an acre to grow on. This brings our total area under vegetable and fruit production to about a half an acre. So we're in an area of our garden that isn't fully developed yet so the goal is to make this all into beds so we can grow more food. We've got to get some lumber or some timbers out of here that we cut down a few years ago. We've got to rake up all these leaves because a lot of them are walnut leaves and walnuts have a juggalone which is a growth inhibitor for other plants. So we've got a little bit of work to do. Not to mention, over here all of this mounded up soil was pushed over onto our property from a previous neighbor and so we're going to reuse all that topsoil and make beds. For better or worse our property has a lot of black locust. Black locust is a tree but it's technically a legume and it puts nitrogen into the soil. So on that hand it's great. On the other hand it sends out runners and all of these small trees that pop up are popping up from the root system and they have thorns and they're nasty and they're not super fun to garden through. So I've got to take them all out. So this is an extra grow area. It's about 100 feet on the side so as you can see there's a lot left over from last year so I've got to take down all this vegetation and get it ready for next year. Unfortunately I wasn't as good at weeding as I had hoped to be so there's a lot of weed seed in here so instead of composting it I'm going to have to burn it just to get rid of the seeds. I'm starting to really like spring. It's the time when I'm starting a lot of seeds and still have a lot of optimism about how my gardening is going to go this year. Unfortunately this spring it's a little more serious since we actually have to depend on the garden whereas in years past I tried to grow as much as I could but we always had the store to fall back on to pick up anything that didn't produce. Well, most of my onions have sprung up and now I have to plant all kinds of other stuff. Here we're planting bok choy and cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, eggplants and a whole bunch of lettuces. These are the first major plantings that we have this year. So I've brought up soil from downstairs I have to fill up all these different planting containers plant the seeds and then toss them in the oven where it will be nice and warm while they sprout. Well that's it for this week. Thanks for watching. Next week we'll update you on the egg hatching project. We'll be spending more time prepping the garden too. And if it's raining we'll be working on our basement storage area. And you can follow our work on the blog which you can find at lowtechinstitute.org Remember to sign up to receive our blog by email at the bottom of our homepage. Also you can click on the subscribe button below. And thanks to those of you who have already subscribed. Take a second to help spread the word about what we're doing by using the share link below. And reach out in the comments I'll try and answer all the questions I can. I've been promising a podcast for the last few weeks and I will get around to it soon. We'll be discussing the behind the scenes parts of this project and how it interacts with the real world. You can find previous episodes and subscribe to the lowtech podcast on iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher or anywhere you get your finer podcasts. And for those of you that detected a stuffy nose here first of all, I'm sorry about that. But it's nothing to worry about. It's a mild flu or something like that. It's been going around the house. But it's just a flu. Nothing respiratory going on so don't worry about that. We got our flu shots this year so it seems to have been pretty mild. I wonder how that's going to go next year. Anyway, thanks for watching again and stay safe and good luck.