 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. Well, it's the end of March and spring is definitely here. This week we are busy with three or four main projects, incubating chicken eggs, getting seed starts going inside, gathering supplies and fencing the growing areas. In the world at large, the economy is starting to grind down as fossil fuels become increasingly scarce and expensive since their collapse two months ago. Most people are working from home and we're limiting our trips to the grocery store. As you know, a few weeks ago I tried to get one of our hens to go broody, and that means to sit her on top of eggs and hatch them out. I didn't have any luck, so I've had to become a broody hen myself, and I've got the incubator up and running with 34 eggs in it. So a few weeks ago, I tried to get my hens to go broody by leaving eggs out in the nest and what's supposed to happen is the chickens will sense that there's a big pile of eggs there, a clutch of eggs, and then they'll sit on the eggs, warming them up for 21 days, and the eggs will hatch. Right, but none of our hens went broody and this isn't a huge surprise because most chickens now are bred to not go broody, to not sit on eggs when there's a clutch of them because we want them for egg production, not for producing more chickens usually. So it's kind of a bummer. So what I've done is I've taken our dehydrator and I've converted it into an incubator. An incubator has to hold the eggs at a constant 99.5 degrees, and that's what all the websites say, although I imagine some fluctuation is probably not that big of a deal. So I'm trying to hold it within 3 or 4 degrees of 100 with high humidity. And so what this involves are all my eggs here. I've got another pan underneath with a pan to kind of distribute the heat, and in here I have a pan full of water. That's over a pilot light on our stove. So it's just running on a tiny, tiny bit of pilot light. You could also do this with an electric heater, but we still have the propane, so we're going to do that. And right now it's at 100 degrees right on the nose. So now what I do three times a day when I wake up in the mid-afternoon and then right before bed is I flip the eggs over. Now usually a hen will do this on her own in the nest. She'll be fussing with her eggs all day. But because I couldn't get one of my hens to go broody, I have to fuss with my eggs. If the heat is uneven, then at least they'll have a variety of heats throughout the nesting period. A few episodes ago you saw me start seeds in little pots, and every day I've been watering and monitoring the starts in our oven, which is about 80 to 85 degrees because of the pilot light. And this is the perfect temperature for germinating most seeds. And this week my efforts have started to sprout. Fresh out of the oven, we've got sprouts. We've got sprouts coming out of the oven. Some of the things have not sprouted, but a few have, so I'm going to pop those out. Like here we have the cabbage already coming up. And so I'm going to take those out because otherwise the sprouts get too long and leggy because they rise up very fast looking for fresh light. So this is my indoor grow operation. I've got a couple grow lights here. They're LED. They're only nine watts, so that means savings for you. That means it's not going to take a ton of energy. So I've got my cabbage. It's actually bok choy type of cabbage. So those have sprouted. So those I will take out. And the rest I'll put back in the oven. Oh the cauliflower's out. Eggplant is not out yet. But the arugula's up. So I anticipate that we will see some lettuces pop it up here tomorrow. We're also putting up stores to get us through the gap between what we have now and what we are going to be able to grow. We've been gathering staples and need to put them up in storage. This crisis. And it's true, but it's still not a bad idea to have a bit of a stockpile. Our garden isn't going to produce anything of significant caloric value until later in the season. So we need to at least put away a little bit to get us through the hungry time of the year. So I've got sugar. I've got flour. And downstairs I've already got oats. As well as all the animal feed I bought last week. I'm storing them in buckets to keep rodents away in case we have any of those show up. And also just to keep them a little more airtight than these paper bags. I've been talking with my neighbor who farms wheat. And he has a whole bunch of wheat planted last fall. It's going to come right this summer. But he's not going to have a way to harvest it because no fossil fuels. So I've talked to him about going over and harvesting wheat this summer. So that's something we're going to do. But until then we're going to have to rely on what we can buy. A pound of flour has about 450 calories. So if we have 100 pounds of flour, that's over 40,000 calories. Usually I buy 50 pound bags of flour and sugar. But they were out of them. All they had left were these 10 pound bags. So I got them while I could. And then of course you want to label them. Because you will not remember where and when you got these things. So at least what it is month and year. And then you obviously use the oldest first and the newest last. Most of our time has been devoted to fencing in the grow plots. Most of this work has been done at my neighbor's plot. Which I call the back 40 last year. Deer and other critters ate most of my crops. I check on them one day, decide to harvest a day later. And in the night in between the deer would get in. And trample them all to the ground as they ate them. I lost corn, oats, field peas and other plants that way. Not this year. It's a rain day which is really good for me. Because then I can do some work that I've been putting off inside. And today I'm making fence posts. These are for the electric fence that's going to go around the back 40. Our growing area. Because of the deer and the raccoons and the rabbits. If we don't put this out there we're going to lose everything like we did last year. So a small investment of time and money in the beginning of the year will really pay dividends later in the year. Last year my corn, my oats and my peas were all about ripe. And I was ready to pick them. And I came back the next day and they were completely trampled. The deer also knew they were ripe. So they jumped the fence, went in and ate them all. So this year I'll be putting up this electric fence. But first I have to build and put together these insulative bypasses so that each one of these fence posts can hold three lines of electric fence. I'm putting in two posts. This will hold up the six foot netting. And then there's going to be another post here and that's going to hold up the electric fence. And this is around the back 40 to keep out deer, raccoons and rabbits. Which are the scourge of what I grew here last year. I'm trying to beat the rain to get some of my fencing in. Up here I have a wire that I'm attaching a net to, a deer net. And down here I have the electric fence posts. So I need to hang up the netting and string the electric wire. Hopefully before it starts raining or it gets dark. I've also been prepping a few beds in our own garden and I'll have to step this effort up in the coming week in order to be ready to plant out the peas and other early crops soon. So what I've got here are garden beds. It might not really look like it because the chickens have been let loose and they have torn it all the shreds. But the plan is to rake up last year's pathways of mulch into the beds giving them some fresh nutrients. Put down the cardboard, put down the straw, remulch the paths and we're ready to go for the year. I also have to take out these trees unfortunately because they're just forming more and more bushes. I also use my scythe to clean up some of the runaway vegetation on the back 40. Later I burn this all down to try and kill as many weed seeds as I could. My scythe is an Italian one that I bought from One Scythe Revolution with a short blade that's better for cutting down thicker, weedier stalks than say for mowing wheat. It's a lot nicer to use this tool outside on a sunny day than any gas powered equivalent. Thanks for watching this week's episode. Come check out this week's podcast. It's finally going to be up out this week for behind the scenes look at our foodmageddon project. We talk about how things are going and how we're lucky to be running this project at a time of a global pandemic hitting the US. You can find previous episodes and subscribe to the Lotech podcast on iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher or wherever fine podcasts are sold or not sold. Next week we'll have more on the egg hatching project. Mark your calendars on the 5th or 6th of April. We're going to have a live stream on the YouTube channel as the chicks begin to hatch so you'll be able to just put that up in the corner of your screen and watch that as you're doing whatever you do on your computer all day. We'll also spend more time in the garden after we wrap up the fencing on the back 40 and our own property. I'll have some more blog posts up soon. You can find that at Lotech.org. Sorry, LotechInstitute.org. I should get my own website correct. Right now we're working on a series of posts about how you can spend your newfound free time growing food for yourself and your community all under the hashtag low tech resilience. Remember to sign up to receive our blog by email at the bottom of our homepage and don't forget to like and subscribe on YouTube too. Thanks to our current subscribers and to those of you leaving comments we really appreciate it and please take a second to share this program with your friend or family member who might be interested. Well, thanks again for watching and stay safe.