 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. We're now in month two of the fossil fuel crisis. It's March, and as you know, the catastrophic collapse of the fossil fuel industry is starting to really wreak havoc on our everyday lives. The government decided to open up the strategic fuel reserves and are pumping out about a quarter of what we used to use each day for fuel. So rationing has gone into effect and cars can only fill up every other day depending on their license plate numbers, just like happened in the oil crisis of the 1970s. Even numbers one day, odd numbers the next. Alright, well, things are still arriving by post. Mostly getting seeds and a few extra things that I didn't have before. We get stuff like a lot of field peas or split pea soup. Beets, spaghetti squash, new England pie pumpkin, lettuce, onions. So I got to start the onions immediately. We're already behind on starting the onions. Canaloupe, German Johnson tomatoes, sugar baby, watermelon, lettuce, different black and pepper cucumbers. Ooh, radishes, yeah. Beets, anyway, so I can give you a picture. We have lots and lots of seeds. And most of these are to replenish my existing seed stock. I save my seeds each year, but sometimes they get intermixed and sometimes they're just not as prolific or as vigorous as I'd like. So I need to reinvigorate them with an influx of fresh seeds from seed companies. Everything here has layers on layers of work. So we're going to have our chickens hatch out some chicks this spring. And I could just, I guess, leave some eggs in there and one of them will go broody, meaning she'll sit on the eggs, warm them up and incubate them for 21 days. But I can't be sure of success that way. And it's the spring. I need to clean this thing out anyway, which means pulling out all of the wood chips that I put in there last fall. Pull those all out, spread them out in the garden, put in new wood chips. Chill out. And then prep an area for the chicks to raise themselves, or for the hens to raise their new chicks. I'm going to do a little bit of reorganization here, but first I have to do the stinky work. Three months worth of chicken poop. And the cycle begins anew with fresh wood chips. I'm not going to build another chicken coop, but if I did, one that I could drive the wheel bar right into would be a nice thing. And to top off the spring cleaning, I'm going to take out all the old bedding, some straw, put a lot of wood chips and stuff gets mixed in there too. I'm going to clean out these old nesting boxes and fill them with nice, clean hardwood shavings. These are made in various woodworking projects, largely from a friend of mine. This is a lot nicer than wood chips or straw even. They absorb water better than straw, so they keep the bed a lot drier, which is going to be important if we want more of the chickens to sit in here for almost a month raising chicks. We need to keep her nice and dry, and we need to allow her to regulate the moisture. Hi, Prince. Prince is the smartest chicken that we have, which is not saying a lot. I don't know if she's laying eggs anymore. I don't know if I want eggs from a smart chicken. I don't like a chicken that out-thinks me. And the brown ones are going to come back and go under a broody chicken here soon. Come on in, Prince. While our current concern is for fuel for our cars, we have to start looking ahead to feeding ourselves locally. In the 1980s, Reagan started to sell off our National Strategic Grain Reserve. We used to have silos full of food all over the country, but the thought was that all this food in the silos wasn't earning interest, so why not sell it, put the money in the stock market, and then when there's a famine, we take that money out and buy food. This doesn't sound like a good idea now, does it? Well, I'm starting to get sap out of the trees, and so now it's time to boil that sap down into syrup. The best way to do that, well, not the best way. The most efficient way is using reverse osmosis. I don't have that system, so I have to do the traditional way of boiling it down. It takes about 60 gallons of sap to make one gallon of syrup, so it's kind of an energy-intensive process. But this year, I have a more effective boiler. Last time I did this, I just kind of threw something together. To be fair, I threw something together this time, but it's a lot better thing I threw together this time. Right now, I'm pouring sap through a screen just to catch any debris that made its way into the sap. These are out amongst the trees, and wind blows a little bit to bark all over. So now, I got a little bit of water in there. I'm going to open up my really fancy door and kind of show you. It's essentially a box where I put my fuel in here. It burns. The smoke comes up and out over here, and I point this away so that the dust, so that the ash doesn't fall down back into my sap and make for a smoky-flavored sap, which isn't the worst thing in the world, but you don't want that in your syrup. So let's load this thing up and get it cooking. So I try and keep everything as organized as I can. And here are each one of these is four gallons of sap. So I'm going to stack up my sap over here. As it boils down, I keep adding sap. And eventually, at the end, I'll take it off and pour it off into that final bucket, and that bucket will go inside, and I'll finish it on a stove that I can control a lot more, because it's just kind of a lot of heat all at once. It's, you know, high temperature all the time, and I don't want to burn and lose all the sap that I've boiled down in the very end, because as, just with reducing anything, it boils and boils and boils forever, and then all of a sudden at the very end, bam, it's done, and you have to catch it at that right time. So this is about 24, 25 gallons that I got in the first week. It's going to pick up here as things warm up this week. It's a lot nicer out this week already than it was last week. The other nice thing about maple sugaring is it's kind of just a waiting game, so what I can do is continually stock the fire, continue to add my sap, boil it down, and then work on other projects out here, because it kind of needs to be baby sap. Most of my taps are across the street in the commons, but my neighbors here let me put up a tap right on their own tree, and this tree I know from previous years is really, really productive, so it gives me a good idea. Oh, this one has about two gallons in it. I probably have one or two gallons in most of the taps across there. Since I have four-gallon buckets on there, I have a couple days between which I have to empty them, but this is kind of like my indicator. Well, things are moving along. We've got about 12 gallons cooked down to about under four gallons, so I'm going to keep adding more and cooking it all through the evening. All right, one thing we're not going to be able to buy at the grocery store is mushrooms. Well, I don't have the capacity to grow things like button mushrooms. I can certainly grow oyster mushrooms. Oyster mushrooms are probably the easiest mushroom to grow for somebody who doesn't have a clean room. They'll grow in just about any medium, and they're pretty easy to propagate, but they're not my most favorite mushroom, but they're easy, so I'm going to try and get some of these guys going. So what I'm going to do is take a sharp knife and some boiling water, just wash it off as best I can, and then I'm also pouring this over about a quart of one-inch pieces of cardboard, and this is to not only kill any spores that are on there from the environment, but also to soften them up, to let them expand, to give them some moisture, because this is what the mycelium is going to grow in. So mushrooms don't grow from plants, obviously, they grow from a root structure, a fungal root structure called mycelium. You can actually, especially in oyster mushrooms, if you get a package of oyster mushrooms and you let them sit, you'll see the mycelium, it's like white threads starting to grow out from the bases. And I'll do a close-up here so you can see exactly what I'm talking about behind the sylphia pedics. All right, so what I'm going to do, put down a towel, put down a rack, dump these guys out, because the main thing is, it's not that I want to dry them out, but I want to cool them down, because if they're too hot, the mycelium will get cooked. And I've done this before. There's another way to do it where you just do layers of cardboard. And then between each layer, you put a sliver of the root here that I'm going to cut out. And that works perfectly well. I just wanted to try this different way. See all that nice mycelium growing here in the base. And I'm going to cut the tops off. And so now, this base, what I'm going to do is just really slice it as thinly as I can. I want to make as much surface area as possible. I want to give that mycelium plenty of chance to come in contact with all my cardboard. People made mushrooms before they had clean rooms, right? Today, what you have to do is basically make like a clean room in your basement, something that's completely covered with plastic and has a HEPA air filter and all these different things. You need to sterilize a whole bunch of jars and stuff like that. I don't want to do that. So I'm trying to experiment with ways to make mycelium grow more like a sourdough starter where you have a mother batch and then when you need to inoculate some substrate which is basically kind of like planting seeds into a garden bed, you take off, you draw off a portion of that mycelium and then you put it into your growing substrate. Well, I'm going to take this pot container and I'm just going to do layers of cardboard and then mushroom. And cardboard and mushroom. Now I'll give it a shake. I just want to mix up cardboard and the mushroom as much as possible. All right, now I'm going to let this sit in a cool, warm place. I'm not going to seal it. I'm just going to put the lid on lightly because it does need some air exchange and we'll check back in a few weeks and see if the mycelium is growing through the cardboard. What the fuel crisis means to us right now is that we have less trips to town. Typically we'd go to this grocery store at least once a week for our main shopping and then invariably we'd forget something and we'd stop by another time, so twice a week. We tried always to combine trips to town to go to the grocery store, the hardware store and a couple of other things and run all the errands. We can't all at once but still even with the rising fuel prices we're having to reduce our trips down to a quarter. So that means this month we're only going to the grocery store twice. And this of course comes at a time when we're trying to stockpile a bit of food to get us through the gap between now and when our garden starts producing. We're about to eat the last of our potatoes and squash from last year and we have a bit of canned food left that we canned from last year but it's going to quickly dwindle if we're not careful. So today I need to make potting soil and one of the prime ingredients I use for potting soil is worm castings. We have a box full of worms down here and essentially what I do all winter is bring down my compost and put it in on top and give it to the worms and the worms work their way up from the bottom eating their way through the compost and they live in the top six inches or so so what I want to do is take out the bottom six inches of soil now when I designed this originally it's got this pull here and it's got a rack across the bottom and you pull that out and it's got a piece of wood that moves back and forth and drops out all the nice worm castings great on paper but it doesn't actually work so what I have to do is dig out the top six inches with all the worms or most of the worms put in the one bin and then dig out all the worm castings from underneath them and put that into this bin and then I will take that and mix it into my potting soil and now I'll put back that top layer into the bin I'm going to save a little bit because I need to put in all the compost we've been saving for the last week I was giving the worms a chance to finish as much of the compost as they can because every time I add a new compost I want to give them a chance to finish a lot of this now that I have my worm compost or my worm castings I'm going to mix it with well this is mostly peat moss and soil and so I'm going to do a two or three to one ratio so three of the soil and peat moss to one of the worm compost and then I'm going to mix it all together that will make a pretty decent and rich potting soil to start out most of my plants for growing this year obviously peat moss is not a renewable resource peat moss is essentially mined out of swamps in the Pacific Northwest and other places so this is not something I'm going to be able to use next year I happen to have a lot of peat moss laying around so I'm going to have to think ahead next fall to find something that I can add to my potting soil a bungee type organic material to replace peat moss if you have ideas or suggestions for me put them in the comments that brings me to another point if you have questions or comments or suggestions let us hear them put them in the comments and I'll try to address them at least in the comments and probably even on the next episodes the first thing I'm growing this year are onions the first things that I'm planting it's time to grow so what I'm going to do is start them off in this multi-pack fill this with soil and spread the seeds quick way not super fancy not super exact but it fills up this thing nicely I'm not an expert in growing onions by any means I try from seeds every year and I got more success last year I actually got them planted out but they never really developed bulbs and things like that I haven't been super successful with onions so let's hope my luck improves this year because otherwise we are going to be sad and onion-less this winter which would be a real knock on the flavor profile that we're eating so I'm growing New York Early organic yellow onions things are looking pretty good at the seed stores right now it starts at the greenhouses and things just to hedge my bet and hopefully get something for the winter but essentially what I'm doing is I'm really lightly sowing these seeds over over the cell and not all of them will germinate but most of them will and then I will as they get bigger obviously they can't be contained in this small space but this is really just to get them started and then what I'll do is go through and weed them out pick out the strongest ones separate them into three piles strong, medium and weak and I'll plant the strong ones and try and grow them out so I can plant them out in the yard and the weak ones I'll try and plant them out too but I'll spend less time and worry on them so again just trying to spread these out evenly now I'm going to pop these onions into the oven with some other things I've been starting I've been trying to grow Camillus or tea seeds but what I'm doing is popping them in here because we still have fossil fuels so we still have a pilot light on and it's a nice 80, 85 degrees in here which is a perfect propagating temperature it'll raise these up as we run out of propane to run our stove then we're in trouble and that pilot light is running so we might as well use that heat for more than one reason oh and that's just a loaf of bread that's rising and they're also thanks for watching this week's episode next week we'll continue with maple sugaring as well as starting plants for the garden we'll be working on construction projects the garden trying to get our hands to go broody so they can hatch us out some chicks this spring we'll also put a few things on the blog one of them is going to be our planting schedule we're going to plant what weeks and what we expect to harvest on different weeks you can find that at lowtechinstitute.org don't forget to sign up to receive our blog by email on the website just go down to the bottom of the page and you can type your email address right in there we won't spam you it's just an update when we have blog posts and while you're here why don't you click the subscribe button below and at the end of the video thanks again to those of you who have already subscribed to spread the word by using the share link below and send this video or the playlist along to a friend who might be interested in what we're up to we'll also be working on our first podcast soon and this is going to be a behind the scenes look at the project a little more in depth detail talking about what we're doing here at home you can find that episode coming up soon and more as well by subscribing to the lowtech podcast Google plays, Stitcher or other podcast apps thanks again for watching stay safe and good luck