Modern Geekery

As promised, you can click through here and get a list of resources that I used in putting together my talk and that you might find helpful in general. I appreciate the great audience that I had – everyone was really engaged in the subject and I’m glad that so many of you got a lot out of it.

There are a couple of points I want to reiterate. First is that I think that true wealth can only be measured in Joules, the unit of energy, and that access to energy is a key human rights issue. I also think that the current and coming energy crisis can be solved by breaking both design and technology constraints on our production and use of energy. Of these, I think that the design constraints are going to be hardest to solve.

Continue reading ‘Notes from my Renewable Energy talk’ »

Somewhat belatedly, I got the last of the summer crops in and planted the last of my fall crops. My four basil plants, which never really flourished, got snipped, and the leaves are even now sitting in my dessicator on their way to being dried basil. In the past, we’ve had an annual pesto making party, but this year there wasn’t really enough basil to make pesto. I also pulled the last two fennel bulbs and now have two bags in the fridge – one for the bulbs and one for the foliage.

Just like the beds I planted earlier with fall mustard greens and sugar snaps, I went through where the fennel, basil and tomatoes were and dug the bed. In a slacker version of John Jeavons’ recommendation, I simply went along with a spade and loosened the top 20 cm or so of soil. Jeavons would have recommended pulling that dirt out, then using a broadfork to loosen the subsoil. I didn’t have time for that, so I didn’t go to that length. Since I still have very little topsoil, most of what I loosened up was huge chunks of clay. I added about a centimeter or two of compost, most of which came from my own compost bin, and mixed that into the top layers of soil as I broke up the giant clods of clay. Once I got that done, I inoculated an envelope of fava beans and planted them in the loosened bed. I’m still of two minds about the favas. Half of me wants to till them under in the early spring to add organic matter to the soil on top of the nitrogen they will be fixing all winter and the other half wants to have fresh favas in the spring. No need to make a decision at this point, though.

My peppers are producing like mad, and I still have blossoms. M. and I harvested three gorgeous Nardello peppers on Friday, one of which we ate on the way back to the house, another wound up in a breakfast omelet and the last wound up in a veggie quesadilla along with some fresh shiitakes from my CSA share. The Cuban peppers are putting out another flush right now, which should be ready in a week or so, and my red bell peppers are a few days from being picked. Identical plants that I gave to my back door neighbor have been producing like crazy for the past two weeks, so I’m taking that as a sign that my soil is a bit tapped out right now.

I flew to Chicago today and my flight was late enough that I was able to have a nice breakfast with the family before leaving for the airport. As I was sitting at the table, drinking my tea, the doorbell rang. The nice fellow from Progress Energy at the door informed us that he was there to cut off the power. After my initial “do what?” reaction, we dug out the last bill and took a look at it. I’d paid it online and the amount didn’t match what the guy’s disconnection notice said. I pointed out to him that the account numbers did not match and that he must therefore have the wrong house.

When he got around to asking our names, he discovered that they didn’t match the one on the account he was supposed to terminate. We pointed out that the folks next door had just moved in and that we’d gotten a misdirected bill for them a few weeks back. We’d dutifully set it back out for the mail carrier and thought nothing more of it. It is alsoimportant to note that our own power bill, then one we’d just paid, had been for a short pay cycle.

It turns out that the folks next door had applied for a connection using our address by accident, realized it, and then re-applied with the right address. Progress Energy decided to simply cancel our account and transfer the service at our house to the guy next door. I was astounded to discover that they would do this without even the most cursory phone call to make sure that we wanted our service disconnected.

After discussing the situation with the company, we’re confident that we’ve got our side of the situation straightened out. They’ve opened a new account for us and made sure that we’d have uninterrupted service. I feel sorry for the poor guys next door. They had almost assuredly been paying their bill – the one that actually was for their address. But when I left, it looked like their power had been cut and the outstanding bill will almost certainly be applied against their credit report. Mainly though, this appears to be a total failure by Progress Energy to sanity check their billing and account processes.

HeavyPetal has a quick HOWTO on plugging shiitake logs. Her version includes the cheese wax step, with picture, which I didn’t bother with, so I highly recommend checking her post out. My guide to plugging a shiitake log is, of course, here.

• Mowed yard, composted the clippings.
• Mowed clover in the garden area, mulched in place.
• Planted lettuce, basil, sunflowers, transplanted various seedlings
• Installed the last bits of the new hardwood floor in our craft room with my father-in-law
• Hiked about 2 miles with the family
• Weeded around the pawpaw trees
• Started research on a new idea for a self-directed research project at work.

Not too shabby.

Tonight’s dinner is a salad containing thin strips of red-leaf lettuce mixed with thin strips of fresh sorrel from my garden, topped with a fresh radish from my garden, thinly sliced vidalia onion tops, almonds, and a homemade vinaigrette. Excuse me while I have my foodgasm.

Last year, I had to have a dying hickory in my yard cut down. While I paid to have most of the trunk hauled off, I still have a pile of the limb wood. I had decided a while back that I would plug these logs with shiitake spawn and make shiitake logs. Its best to do the plugging after the last hard frost, so I waited until yesterday to do the work.

I ordered my plug spawn from Fungi Perfecti, a neat company near Olympia, WA. They’ve got spawn for lots of different strains of mushrooms, but I love shiitakes and shiitakes love hardwoods. The spawn arrive in a little bag like the picture on the right. The spawn themselves are small dowels, about 1.5″ long, with a spiral groove cut into the side. You can clearly see the white mycelia from the shiitake in the groove. There is also some grain in the bag as well, which I surmise are how the dowels were inoculated.

I had ordered my spawn about a month ago, so by the time I pulled the bag out, there was plenty of mycelial growth in the bag, which you can see in the picture on the left as the white matting around the dowels. According to the instructions, this is normal and probably wouldn’t have been so bad if I’d used the spawn more quickly. Fortunately, no mushrooms had begun to bud, so I didn’t have to pull those off.

Continue reading ‘Shiitake logs’ »

After a a couple of months of moving the cold frame around, the structure had gotten a little less than sturdy. When I started putting it together, I figured that this would be the failure mode, since without corner supports, only the thickness of the wood would support the screws holding it together. I’d been looking for some untreated 2×4 or 4×4 scrap for a while to make the reinforcements, in keeping with my theme of “cold frame on the cheap,” but I finally broke down and bought an untreated 2×4. ($2.70 at Lowes.) Cutting the appropriate length pieces from it, I took the frame apart and reattached them properly to the supports.

And just in time too, since its supposed to be right at freezing tonight and tomorrow night.

When I started my small garden plot last year, I was appalled at the state of the soil. Looking back at the blog post, I didn’t say much about it, but I recall loosening the soil and discovering a thin layer of topsoil over greasy red clay. I worked some leaf compost into the plot and went from there. I also noticed that in digging up the roughly 80 square feet of garden, I found only a couple of earthworms.

At the end of the growing season last year, I seeded the plot with crimson clover as a green mulch and leaf mulched the swiss chard in hopes of having some of it survive the winter. This spring, when I started planting, I noticed that the soil seemed much healthier – black and a bit deeper, and nicely crumbly. Most excitingly, when I was digging up some of that weird 6-leaved running ground cover that had crept in from the edges, I found that I couldn’t lift a spade of soil without turning up at least one earthworm. Fantastic!

Garden potential
Fingers buried in the dirt
Ah, simple pleasures!