Awesome discussion!
On gardens & gardening
Permaculture is great, but can often be a little overwhelming. Another perspective to play with is Masanobu Fukuoka’s “Natural Farming” or “Do-Nothing Farming”, which is really a form of horticulture. One of the things that the method relies on (that he does not always draw proper attention to, IMHO) is that timing is very important!
Admitedly he spends less time on a simple veggie garden than anything else, but there’s still some great ideas like:
"Sowing a good quantity of fall vegetables such as daikon, turnip, and other crucifers will hold back the emergence of winter and spring weeds. When left in the orchard until the following spring, however, these flower and age, becoming something of a nuisance in gardening work. If a few of these vegetables are left to grow here and there, they will flower and drop seed. Come June or July, the seeds will germinate, giving many first-generation hybrids close by the original plants. These hybrids are semi-wild vegetables that, in addition to having a taste and appearance quite different from that of the original vegetable, generally grow to absurdly large proportions: great big daikon, turnips too large for children to pull up, giant Chinese cabbages, crosses between black mustard and Indian mustard, … a garden of surprises. As food, they are likely to overwhelm and many people may be hesitant about sampling, but depending on how they are prepared, these vegetables can make for very flavorful and interesting eating."
http://fukuokafarmingol.info/fover.html
And, on a more personal note, I’ve found that my gardens are actually pretty good places to encourage certain weeds to grow (my neighbors think I’m crazy, but…). So I have a pretty decent sized patch of lamb’s quaters in one garden (finally tried that cooked this past weekend, and god damn that stuff’s good!), clover, shamrocks (wood sorrel), wild onions, dandelions (of course!), chufa, rose of sharon sprouts, pokeweed and probably other stuff I haven’t managed to identify yet!
On Peak Oil
Yeah, once “Peak Oil” sank in, I just kind of walked around lost in thought, not saying anything for a few hours as I worked through it. It can be a pretty big pill at first, but, once you get past that, it’s really for the best. Anthopik’s “30 Theses” is an excellent guide to getting comfortable with the position that leaving civilization behind is the best thing we can possibly do for both ourselves and our world.
Also, I’d like to add this site to list of urls to visit:
http://poweringdown.blogspot.com/
It’s often not specific to Peak Oil, but it’s still an excellent blog.
On signing on as Guest
Yeah, I do that too sometimes. If I need to clear out my cookies during testing and/or debugging, I might be wandering around for a couple weeks w/o actually signing in!
(oh, yeah, I’ve got an office job I’m not that thrilled with either… )
