 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. It's been a busy week here as the fossil fuel crisis drags into its fourth week. Gas prices continue to rise, but for the most part it's business as usual. Although we're starting to see cracks in the transportation network. That's why this week I'm ordering everything that we'll need, or everything I think we'll need. I'm not sure how much longer we can depend on online shopping and shipping, so I'm using it now before it's gone. What's more exciting and dynamic than watching somebody browse the internet? So as it's the end of February, or getting near the end of February, and we don't know how much longer we'll be able to use shipping and gas for transportation, I am trying to collect everything I need for the coming year now. Get it sent here, or go pick it up myself. I'm scouring Craigslist for things like plastic buckets. Someday I'm going to have to come up with some solution beyond plastic buckets to store things, and I'm going to look to prehistory or pre-industrial grain storage. But for right now we have a surfeit of plastic, so I'm going to be using these buckets as much as we can. I have to get some sort of grain mill, and I've been looking at all kinds of different grain mills on eBay, on Amazon, all the usual suspects for what do you want to do when you're doing home shopping, right? And so I found, for example, a corn thresher. And the cool thing about everything I'm trying to buy is I'm buying them with wheels, with fly wheels, that have a groove for a belt. Because my plan is I'm going to make everything hook up to my bike. I'm going to have a stationary bike with a belt drive, and then the gears will shift so you can vary your speed and the amount of work you have to put into it. And there's going to be a V-belt that transmits that energy to, for example, this corn thresher, and then also a grain mill to grind our wheat into flour and stuff like that. Because the hand crank models, you're going to get really huge shoulders, maybe that's what you want, but I'd rather use my legs that are a lot stronger. And then also we could get a KitchenAid attachment and use the electric generated by the solar power, but more moving parts depending on electricity, maybe less so. We can always depend on a bike because I used to be a bike mechanic so we can fix that. Other things we're looking at, getting is seeds. So I'm ordering most of everything through Johnny's seeds, just because they have a wide selection and I'm always partial to Maine and New England for some reason. Yay, Johnny's, because they've been working with us to get our seeds in for this project. So a big thanks to those folks at Johnny's. So, you know, dill, onions, okra, beets, beets, Swiss chard, pumpkins, long island cheese. If you haven't tried long island cheese, it is probably my favorite. It tastes about like butternut squash, but it stores, we still have some in the basement. It stores for months and months and months. Broccoli, Kohlrabi, melon, spaghetti squash, butternut squash, cucumbers, watermelons, tomatoes. I'm just working on compiling this list and trying to get everything in from far away now. The distance from which we can get resources shrinks as fossil fuels are less available, we're going to have to be more and more creative. I could always depend on, you know, going to the nursery or picking some up later in the season. But I don't know that that's going to be available in two months, so we got to get it now. Ooh, barrels, like actual wooden barrels for 130 bucks. Sorry, I get distracted easily. Anyway, so as dynamic as this is me talking to you while I'm looking at my computer, maybe I would do like a really great 80s montage. And he's here because he was fussing on the floor and this is the only way to keep him quiet is to have him in my lap. So last night I went through and sorted out all my seeds. I've been keeping him in this cardboard box, but now I've built this nice new seed, component of the seed arc. And essentially what I have are a whole bunch of jars with all my different seeds in them. I have about 20, space for 21 jars. Here's some brand new one, tomatoes. And so yeah, last night I shelled out a couple dozen ears of corn. So I've got lots of dried corn seed, which is for dried corn. I do have some sweet corn seed left. I got three or four tomato varieties, brand new wine, San Marzano is a paste tomato. But I'm worried that a lot of my stuff is inner bread because I've been on these brand new wine seeds for probably six or seven years that I've been saving them myself. And I think they're starting to lose bigger. So because we can still order things, I think I'm going to order and replace a lot of my own seed lines. They weren't very vigorous last year and that could have been the growing conditions, but it could also be my seed stock. So I'm going to replace some of the seeds I have like my cucumbers. They all wilted and so I wonder if I had some sort of wilt on my seeds. So I'm going to replace my cucumbers, my tomatoes, and then the same thing with my squashes. I just don't have enough space to keep them separated and I haven't really concentrated on that. So sometimes I get a lot of inner breeding. One of my favorite things we have is a kale mustard hybrid. It's got the texture of kale. So it's really hearty, but it has that bite of mustard greens. It's really great. I've also got space here to hold all my little packets. So I've got sunflower. I'll probably have to replace the sunflower. I've got some lettuce left. Ooh, cilantro. There we go. Got some eggplants, some fava beans. See this amount of beans is not really enough to grow a significant amount from. But from this, I can grow out seeds that I'll collect all this year and I'll grow them out more next year. So for example, I started out with a packet of this with my dent corn, which is, I don't know, some people call it Indian corn, whatever. It's got that multicolored and it's dried. It's actually an ornamental corn, but we eat it. And so I started out with just one packet of this and I grew it and it was an old packet. It only grew like 10 plants and then I got, you know, maybe this much of a jar. And then next year I grew out a whole field of it and now I have tons of it. So I'll plant out even more this year and then we'll run it through a mill and crack the corn for the chickens. And then we'll also grind it up and make tortillas and tamales and other things. I got zucchini, summer squash, stuff like that, kohlrabi, plenty of Brussels sprouts actually. Cabbage, we'll make sauerkraut and kimchi. Pretty old broccoli, Veronica Romanesco. It grows in fractal patterns. It's really beautiful. Turnips, thyme, some basil. We're doing okay on seeds, but I still need to get my orders in soon while shipping still exists. And so here I've listed all of my seeds with their Latin names, their varieties, what year I've saved the seeds, if I need to buy them or if I still have them. And I can post this online so you can see exactly what seeds I have. So I used to be an archaeologist and we talked about exchange networks. Kind of like social networks, but for trade and the movement of stuff instead of memes and ideas. Right now we have a global exchange network, but as this catastrophe continues our exchange networks will get smaller and smaller. Think about it as concentric rings around your house and over time these outer rings that are from large distances will drop away. And pretty soon we'll have to start depending on locally available items and foods. So this week we're preparing for getting more local with some last minute purchases. Last year I grew a half a pound of homeless oats into, I don't know, two ground paper bags worth of oat heads. So right now what I have to do is get the oat grotes or the seeds out of these heads. Usually one uses a thresher and then a winnowar, but I don't have a thresher or winnowar yet. I'm going to have to build one this year because this year it's not enough to eat, but it's definitely enough to grow out into a lot more food. So what I actually have to do is bash each one of these heads until the oat grotes start to come out. And then we have to winnow all of this vegetable matter. This is called chaff away from it. I don't know, but threshing might be related to thrashing. I don't know, I'll have to look that up. Basically right now on a small scale I can thresh my oats with food processor. I tried it first with the plastic blade and that was no good. So now I've got the metal serrated blade in there. Let's pop it in there and put it on high for about 35 seconds. And that should knock all the oat grotes right out. But hopefully it won't shred all the oat grotes, so it's kind of a fine line between shredding and releasing the oats. Now come step two and ideally you do this outside in the fall. And all those little dicks you hear, those are oat grotes falling through. I can just double check again that all the oat grotes are knocked out of here. Yeah, there's not a lot of heads left over. So this just gets rid of the big chaff. I'm going to do a few more batches of this and then I will shake it all through and then we'll get to winnowing. So I'm going to try and convert this space in our basement into a big food storage area. It will be insulated, it will be cool. I'll have a refrigerator that pulls in outside cold air over here. And here in the middle I'm going to build a big shelf that's going to hold all of our food, our dry goods, all of that. And it's going to be road and proof so it will keep the mice from getting up. So this is a fairly typical, maybe a little bigger than typical grocery shopping trip for us. Flour, tortilla chips, noodles, bananas for the boy, cheese, tofu, vegan sausage, you know, just random things we need. Lemons, green peppers, bouillon, noodles, nuts, oranges, you know, just fairly typical for us for the week. I've got some tea, tortillas. We'll see how this changes as the fossil fuel system continues to degrade. But right now everything is mostly in the store but we'll see. By next month I'm sure that will have changed and we'll be having slimmer pickings. But that's okay, we'll be starting to grow stuff in two months so hopefully there won't be too much of an overlap. I realized that the temperature is starting to get above freezing during the day and below freezing at night which is the perfect time to collect maple syrup. So I got to clean all my taps. And I made these a few years ago. You can buy metal and plastic taps but you can also just make wooden taps and here I'll show you these a little closer. These are essentially wooden pegs that are made out of oak and I drilled a hole all the way through them and then drilled extra holes here and then I bore out a three quarter inch hole in the maple tree and tap it in. And then I use one of these strings to loop around here, the clove hitch and then I tie the bucket to it and the sap drips right out and into the bucket. And that's all you need really, you don't need anything fancy. But I do have to wash all of them because they sit downstairs and after I wash them, I'll disinfect them with a little bit of hydrogen peroxide and they'll be good to go. So this maple tree is a maple tree and I know that because it has what are called opposite branches. So at the very end, do you see how at the tips of the branches, the branches split out from the same point rather than one going left and then going up a little bit on the branch and one going right and then going up a bit and one going left. Both side branches, lateral branches come out from the same point. Also, this is a sugar maple because it has tight bark, meaning it's not sloughing off. Other types of maple trees have bark that looks like it's shedding. Thanks for watching this week's episode. Next week we'll be going into tapping maple trees and boiling down the sap to produce syrup. We'll also put a few things on the blog, which you can find at lowtechinstitute.org. We'll post the seed list that we talked about this week so you can see exactly what we're growing. And we'll also post our hour log and this is a detail of how much time we're spending on growing our own food. It might seem like a lot of time, but it averages out to less than you'd expect over the season. While you're there, why don't you sign up to receive our blog in your inbox. You can do that at the bottom of the home page. And while you're here, why don't you click on the subscribe button below. If you've already subscribed, thanks. And why not click the share link and send this episode to a few friends. We'll also be working on our first podcast soon, which will be a behind-the-scenes look at this project. You can find and subscribe to the lowtech podcast on iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, or other podcast apps. Just search for lowtechpodcast. We already have 30 episodes covering a wide variety of topics, so you can start listening to those now if you want. And a quick final note. We wanted to thank Johnny's Seeds for help with our seed purchases this week. Just in the interest of full disclosure, we wanted to let you know that we did get a discount on our purchase from Johnny's as a way to help us carry out this project. We'll let you know any time we get promotional consideration on a product or a service. But I want you to know our opinions and our comments will remain independent from that any partnership because we won't partner with anyone we can't speak our mind about. So if we say we like this product or this company, we do. And if we happen to be working with them, I'll let you know. But I like them because I like them, not because of the consideration. Thanks for watching. Stay safe and good luck.