I wonder how many acres to support the average family annually? I guess it would depend on how much meat and how intense the farming/gardening techniques are, location etc.

Great story, Nate. I did this myself too, grew three hybrid tomato plants (Bush Early Girl) on the deck for the first time this year. I didn't have quite as good luck. They grew well at first, but they're looking pretty sick now from aphids and disease. I did get some tomatoes off them, just barely enough for a few salads and sandwiches. Hope I have better luck next year.

Like your father Nate, my wife finds the concept of peak oil too far out in the future to worry about. That was until our water pump in the cellar bit the dust last Saturday morning. In the 48 hours we were without water, she started to come around to the stark reality of doing without. Lugging buckets of water from the river to flush the toilets became a better alternative for her than braving the mosquitos while trying to use the great outdoors for a bathroom:)

We are fortunate that our spring is less than 20' deep. My wife was extremely excited when I told her an old fashioned pitcher pump would provide clean water just yards from our back door. Next year I'll bring up gardening:)

Only a few miles from your meager home, the land of sun and tomatoes, I too captured the sun in my photovoltaic system and fondled my garden. Others here are doing the same. They are shifting, becoming aware. Today I talked to my renter about making preparations for the winter and the new increasing costs of dealing with that. She knows it is changing. This year they will heat fewer rooms, as we do. Her pickup is gone. The windows will have heavy curtains and she admitted she tried not to use the air conditioners after she received a $125 electric bill last month. It is a hard shift but money and necessity seem to have a way. The key is information and that is what The Drum does. It is my hope that slowly the information will trickle down and the settling into the new paradigm will be gentle. I have my doubts, however. The thoughts of steady state economics, exponential growth, resource depletion, scale paralysis, cognitive dissonance and the never ending hype of Madison Avenue certainly disrupt my wishful thinking. Do keep up the good work and believe me there are untold number of lurkers like me in one way or another keeping track of your work.

Do you have a picture showing more of the dog? We planted 5 tomato plants which is too many. They are weeds. Fortunately our golden retriever eats the tomatoes off the vine when they become ripe.

Several days ago I purchased a book at a local antique store. The first edition was written in 1866; the second in 1874. The title "Gardening for Profit. A guide to the successful cultivation of the Market and Family Garden" by Peter Henderson (Jersey City N.Y.) Published by the Orange Judd Company. Broadway N.Y.
This book was written before the start of the oil age, and provides the information necessary for the cultivation of small gardens in the Post Oil Age. It uses New York as its location and states that suitable changes to timing of planting must be made to account for ones location in the 'States. It provides detailed information as to how to run a small market garden for profit - information which can be adjusted for a small scale family garden. This book is a great read and a good buy if you can find it.

With respect to having land to produce meat. You really don't need a lot of land if you just concentrate on raising small animals such as rabbits, free range chickens, and other poultry. You can also raise fish in small ponds. Beef and swine use too much energy (grain) and land to produce meat. Also, you can concentrate the manure for composting since rabbit manure is very potent (hot) and can be use to produce compost along with the chicken manure. Eggs are a plus and large animals don't give eggs. You can supplement the protein from the small animals with beans and legumes. I also take the waste from our meals (no meat products) and canning and put it in the compost pile. All of this is very sustainable and doesn't require a lot of land. If you develop a powerful hankering for beef or pork, you can buy a few pounds for way less than it would cost you to raise them. We buy our beef and pork from a cattle farmer who sells his meat to us for way less than the market would sell it to us for.
Also, you can rotate your crops to maintain soil fertility. I use cover crops( green manure)to accomplish this also.

Yes, I remember the story: We Wasted a Day of Sunlight!. But you won't feed a family on tomato sauce, nor will you have a freezer to put the FF based freezer bags into. No, I would direct folks to drying and pickling, and then into foods that store well on their own (carrots, potatoes, turnips, etc).

Indeed: Had you ordered the tomatoes and Fed Express delivered them ---"Damnit, you wasted a whole season."

Here, our problem is no natural water and bad soil. We are working on it. Apples galore, some berries, some tomatoes, squash, watermelons, but not enough to feed the family yet. Building soil is very time consuming. A PV pump in our well should be plenty to irrigate the garden and hosehold water. It is only a 30 foot lift.

In 1947 as a 14 yr old I worked in a Purina feed store. We had 4 white chickens in cages. It was my job to feed the chickens and collect the eggs. Many days, I got 4 eggs for a little feed. Prices were of course different but it was profitable then, probably still is. The store owner got most of the eggs but I brought enough home for my Dad and Mom and me.

Now we have a little barn so I will go back into the egg 'business' again next year but with free range chickens. I have to teach those chickens to only eat tomato worms and other garden bugs. :-)

"Nevada Handbook. Forth Edition” by Deke Castleman.

"It’s estimated that upon contact with the first explorers, 3,000 Washo Indians occupied a small territory from the Pine Nut Mountains east of Carson Valley to Lake Tahoe in the west and Truckee Meadows to the north, where Reno and Sparks are today."

This is about 800 square miles. So after most everyone leaves this high cold desert, a few of us will get together and make do on what's left.

Cheers

Lyn

I very rarely buy veggies any more. I have tomatoes in the dehydrator right now (heirlooms and Early Girl's). Freshly picked yellow squash in the curry tonight, and picked wild huckleberries yesterday.
Chard, Collard greens, onions, basel, peppers, egg plant, etc---
And I live in a apartment! It does have a large backyard, and there are enough blackberries and abandoned fruit trees locally to overwhelm any attempt to harvest a fraction of the bounty.
Mushroom hunting in the fall and winter, surf perch just about anytime.
I am horrified most people cannot identify a edible mushroom in the environment they inhabit, or collect and forage for food.
When in Montana, elk were my main source of animal protein, and Axis deer in Maui.
I live in Marin now, and can grow year round.

We have a little different approach. We can (put up in sealed glass jars) rather than freeze, and use an iron wood cook stove out in a summer kitchen in this effort. We want to be practiced at living without electricity, relying on the most likely fuel we will have available in a societal breakdown. And solar is too complicated for my old mind when something so much easier and time proven comes right out of our abundant woodlot.

I didn't notice you talking about saving seeds for the next year's crop, and I would like to add this as an essential skill, simple, but which should be practiced in advance.

And finally, if you want to go to gastronomic heaven, I want to brag about one that can make you float up in the air. Basil is the premier sauce herb to my taste. Some oreganos are ok, but even the best do not do what basil does.

To delight your taste buds, first use the ultimate tomato sauce tomatoes. For pasta sauce get some Roman Plum tomato seeds. This is an heirloom variety that will knock your socks off. This is a striped tomato (red and yellow) that is very, very large for a plum tomato; you probably have not ever seen them because they are relatively rare, but can be mail ordered from Bakerville Seed Company in Missouri.

You want to have one head of chopped, fresh garlic for each 20 or 30 tomatoes (keeps the Vampires away, don't you know, but if your are not into garlic, then you can cut down the amount to your taste). Put the garlic in an iron fry pan with a generous pan bottom coating of olive oil (or any other that might be available in the future) and cook the garlic down, but don't let it brown. Simultaneously, boil some water and then dump the tomatoes in the boiling water for only about 1 minute. This makes the skin easy to peal off. After removing the skin, squeeze the innards out, and use the outer skinless fruit. Just throw the tomato fruit in the fry pay with the garlic and oil. As it cooks down a little, just use the side of your spoon to break apart the tomato pieces. If you have previously made tomato paste with more ordinary heirloom tomatoes, and want to thicken the sauce, throw in about one cooking spoon's worth for every 20 or 20 plum tomatoes, but this is not necessary. Add about 25 fresh chopped average size basil leaves and enough fresh Greek oregano (or sweet marjoram, the annual variety of oregano) to fill the palm of your hand. Finish it off with a tablespoon or more of crushed, dried, stevia herb to sweeten it to your taste.

This is nice thick tomato sauce that will knock your socks off. I promise, you will wonder what your have been eating all your life before you discovered this. It is great on whole wheat spaghetti or ravioli. Or if you really want to die and go to heaven, then use it as a sauce for eggplant parmigiana (or just skillet fried, Italian breaded eggplant, if you don't have the parmigiana cheese). Talk about a great pizza sauce also.

To can all your excess Roman Plum tomatoes just ramp up the above proportions, and can as you would any tomato sauce, and then plan on a heavenly winter as you bask in the warmth of your wood heated home enjoying an Italian sauce of which the food network could only dream.

By the way, the basket of tomatoes you showed looked really great. Makes we want a bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwich for lunch tomorrow, as I have some Arkansas Traveler tomatoes ready to pick.

Great to see this again, and I wish tomatos did better in Hawaii. Though they have low calorie density, they often make up for it through sheer enormity of excess. The tropical bugs seem to shred the tomato plants pretty fast if you're lazy, and we are. We do have to fight the dogs for the pineapples.... whenever my dad bought one, he'd cut off the top half-inch with the leaves and stick it in the yard, and they're still coming up with tiny ultra-sweet fruit that the dogs often beat us to. No elaborate planting was necessary, my dad had a 30-second rule.

We have both a sloping lot and aging bodies, so have leaned more into tree crops. One of the things that makes that useful here is that the lack of seasons allows you to have trees that fruit out of phase with one another, so for instance we have avocados 7 months of the year. We also have so much starfruit it goes to waste - dunno where it finds all that potassium - and lillikoi, mango, banana, mountain apple, and other stuff, and are currently sprouting a zillion papaya seedlings to fill in some sunlit gaps recently created with a chainsaw. The big food crop has to be the dozen mature coconut trees, and alla this stuff just basically grows and falls. (this is on the back slope of a rather standard suburban houselot). Of course, most of the stuff goes uneaten, but in the future it may not, and I have a policy not to chop out any food trees that plant themselves in a good spot... which the avo's and coconuts and mango are doing with wild abandon.

But what I've been really trying to get going is breadfruit, because those are some kick-ass starch producers. So far, have failed on that; though the three trees are healthy no fruit so far. My wife wants to start an initiative on Oahu to encourage breadfruit tree planting in as many yards as possible; but the concept that someday people might want to eat them is considered far-fetched. We've also converted the swimming pool that the house came with to a pond; not enough fish to fry up, though I have notions of attracting termite-swarm biomass with halogen lights to boost that if we wind up staying here through the energy crash. And the pool will also be the main reservoir for drip-watering of the trees during droughts. (I've scored a bunch of 55-gallon plastic drums for $10 each and will be creating mosquito-coast style water systems and storage with 'em.)

I've also idly wished I had a vehicle which would hold an old projection TV, since people advertise broken ones for free all the time, and I think many have whompin' fresnel lenses in them; with the sun we get here, not only could we cook stuff but we could probably melt scrap copper.

Yes, the neighbors think we're kinda nuts, but my dad gave the projects his blessing; he was raised by his grandmother who was a hard-edged farm girl from the plains in the mid-to-late 1800's. The family considers it harmless, and somewhat entertaining. And though we lost my dad two years ago now, we're still eating his recycled pineapples.

Mind you, this is just using "stick it in the dirt and ignore it" techniques. However, one morning a few months ago after reading a Bob Shaw NPK post, I bought a half-ton of 10-20-20 on general principles so we can shift into overdrive if necessary. (and yes, the family DOES think that was peculiar).

So now that we've done that, and I've put on the catchment-grade 50-year metal roof, all I have to worry about is the million armed cannibals converging on my yard once the Matson barges full of twinkies stop coming. Not only is growing stuff fun, but in the future it may well provide a plausible reason my ribs aren't showing as I secretly consume my buried spam.

I think we could get a lot of our calorific needs just from home grown tomatoes, potatoes and corn. It's up to our ingenuity to find ways to keep them interesting and to store well. For example salsa di pomodoro can keep tomato pulp fresh in 26 oz beer bottles without using vacuum equipment. Seeing as how Michael Phelps eats a bowl of hominy grits every morning I might try an old recipe using corn and wood ash. It's still frosty here Down Under but I just had a tip from a professional to start potato plants under black plastic. In fact I'm extending a cellar to store the expected harvest.

No luck however in growing wonder cereal quinoa from seed I bought in a health food store. In tough quarantine countries you just can't get viable seed.

Nate,
You should be so lucky. Here in the UK it's been the wettest August for 100 years. No sun and almost continuous cloud.

But - it's great for my potatoes and blackberries (I've got 2 gallons of blackberry wine on the brew).

And a lot of interesting mushrooms popping up.

Can I post a little puff for the Foxfire books from the 1970s onwards in here?

A school in the Appalachians got their kids to interview ther grandparents on how they lived, cultivated, made moonshine, built wagons, rode their mules to market, etc.

I've got the first two books which are great. It seems there are 12 now see:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foxfire_books

No freezers or solar cookers, though.

BobE

Nate
In a recent post you talked about cognitive science, our ancient evolved drives toward novelty, gratification and position in the cultural swim; and the connection with BAU 'growth'. Perhaps, rather, we (specifically the human bit)evolved in small groups having massive detailed knowledge bases built on top of cultural habits(accompanied by physical brain plastic modification) that instilled priorities devoted to individual endogenous stability harnessed to acute reciprocal learning and constant 'in the world' awareness. I guess 'we' often coped very well.
(Recent advertising and etc., via co-option of scientific method, has created hooks to human cognition that make a very different use of the positive and negative feedbacks and create a very different, unbalanced, consciousness - "waste of sunlight"?)
I guess from the above set of comments in this post that you are beginning to recreate a pretty good hunter-gatherer band with access to a bit of growing and storage technology.
I would like more on that dehydrator somebody mentions. We need to know how best to store the key phytonutrients that make sense of Kiashu's calories. Hunter gatherers like key kit and slippy techniques that make for timely action.
best
phil

As a dialup user, I am quite sensitive to big files.

Did you know the image posted to the main page of TOD is 652,700 bytes long? (IMG_0648(2).JPG)

This makes TOD load very slowly for those of us who do not have high speed access.

I hate to complain about anything, but this one image causes me a lot of grief, a lot of churning on the disk drive trying to buffer it, and was the cause of a technical support call to my ISP trying to figure out why the system kept disconnecting on me.

Does anyone take care to avoid Genetically Modified seeds from companies like Monsanto?

Is anyone worried about transgenic contamination?

I bought a home recenlty which is still in town but has a larger lot enabling me to have my first vegetable garden this year. I set a modest goal of producing 1% of the food for my family of four this year. I hope to reach 10% in the 2nd or 3rd year. Frankly, I probably didn't even reach my 1% goal this year. Part of the problem is that I don't live at that house yet as it is being remodelled and I didn't have enough time to devote to it. I hope to do better next year. My experience so far has been that fertilizing organically is not too difficult. We have lots of trees and plant material that creates more compost than I can use. Next year when I live there, all our other appropriate waste will get added to the compost. Organic pest control seems to be the harder part. I lost all of my peas to pests. My first crop of sunflowers was destroyed entirely (by cutworms I think). Tried to grow ground cherries and not a single one germinated. Anyway, I learned a lot this year and next year I'll actually live there so I hope to have much more success.

Anyone who really wants to get serious about growing food themselves or purchasing locally is going to have to get into home canning in a big way.

You cannot use a freezer and pretend to be reducing your impact on the environment. My mother-in-law had shelves filled with various preserved fruits and vegetables while my wife was growing up in Canada 60 years ago.

Ball jars are easy to master, there are many books out on how to do home canning and the best thing is to prepare a big batch of whatever is in season at once. The jars last forever, all you need to do is replace the lids each season. They also come in a wide range of sizes so you can store everything from a single serving to enough to feed a church social in an appropriately sized container.

As I posted once before , we grew all our food for over 12 years.

In order to get your 2-4000 calories/day you have to get your basic grains produced and stored for year round use.

A plant based diet is the only way to go.

Look at your current diet ... most of your calories probably come from fats and sugars.

Nate,
You mentioned a solar dryer. What kind did you use?
Is there any way to use the solar oven as a dryer? I have a sun oven and can leave the lid up a bit so it doesn't get to full temp (375 degrees F). My heirloom tomato plants are coming in now too, although I have only a half dozen, not 37.

Its possible as we go Post Peak that all indiginous sources of Energy resource start to get used up and that means coal (consider the amount of Gas used to keep the lights on).

Coal usage will accelerate global warming and this will cause mayhem to the current food production patterns. There was a piece in yesterdays Drumbeat concerning 'Climate Wars' and one of its key iisues was forced population migration due to loss of production / food scarcity.

Even if you have found the perfect bit of land NOW it might change in the decades ahead and you will have to adapt to that.

Eventually any survivors will probably end up living in a floating island at the North Pole eating krill and seal blubber... ;o)

Nick.

I've commented before how much I like Mr. Hagen's attitude. Part of the old "waste not, want not" philosophy, but I suspect more. End of August, the days are shortening rapidly, esp to those who spend some of their life outside. Very little time to get ready for the winter, and so much to do. The thought of doing certain chores in the chill, mud and rain only weeks away hastens your actions.

I'm surprised more don't sense it, the impending winter, notice the dulling or browning of leaves, browning of fields, new birds showing up, or even slower growth on their fertilized lawn. Today we are reminded of winter by back to school specials at the department store or on the TV.

It's great to read the post again, hear the admonition of wasting a day of sunshine.

Biggest lesson from putting in a moderate sized garden (around 1000 sq foot) + some fruit trees.

It ain't cheap.

I have often thought that low income folks should grow tons of their food but we have several thousand dollars and counting in to it and only providing a small % of your consumption.

I realise this will level off to a degree and some planting could be accomplished on the cheap but their is always a price to pay.

I converted a discarded paraboloid shaped rattan chair into a solar cooker/dehydrator. It works like a champ. A cookie sheet placed at the focus of the 5 foot diameter reflector (plastic sheets covered with aluminum foil) will dry halved tomatoes in two days. Lower moisture vegetables such as diced onions or peppers are dry after a few hours in full sunlight. When not drying vegetables, I use a stew pot to hold 3 quart jars for canning in about an hour at midday. A 12 inch rim from a child's bicycle is suspended at the focus to support the cookie tray or cooking pot.

Gardening on TOD?
I feel like the man who went to a fight and a hockey game broke out.
Your dog ate your tomatoes?
My dogs eat my tarragon.
Have to grow it in a pot up high where they cannot reach.
Highly recommended: Frances Moore Lappe, "Diet for a small planet".
Also (less well known but another classic): Bradford Angier,
"One Acre & Security, How to Live Off the Earth without Ruining It"