We had a bit of an emergency this weekend that easily could have been a major catastrophe. It really reinforced the importance of planning for likely risks, having redundancies, and building resilience through diversity. A very, very tall and mature oak fell on a shed. That sounds bad and it…
We frequently see people excoriating others not to use pesticides. Pesticides, we are told, shouldn’t be used. To some they’re everything that’s wrong with industrial agriculture. Some will even say “don’t use pesticides: use soap/beer/garlic oil/diatomaceous earth”. The thing is, those are all pesticides. Soap is a pesticide when you…
The following is an excerpt from the in progress guide to raising food in a changing climate and uncertain future. Two of the techniques that most aid in maintaining rich soil in gardens are extremely simple and also probably the most important for microbial life: hugelkultur/core gardening, and deep mulching…
Since starting The Resistance Garden I’ve had it in my head that I wanted to write a guide aimed at helping people figure out how to grow enough food for their families and communities even if climate chaos related disasters (or any other disasters) make it hard or impossible to…
I’ve posted a few ways recently we’re propagating edible mushrooms at our sites for increasing production next year, and there’s another that’s very worth mentioning: turning cardboard and newspaper into mushroom spawn. Specifically, we’re growing mycelium of wine cap mushrooms (Stropharia rugosoanullata) in these, but I expect some other types…
Earlier today I went and harvested some oyster mushrooms (Pleurotus ostreatus) from a big dead maple we keep walking and driving past. I grabbed a small chunk of them last week, and since they were getting a bit dried out I didn’t go back. But then with a soaking rain…
This week at the mini farm we’re applying some design principles to more actively start cultivating an area of the forest for food production. We mentioned earlier in the year doing some selective cutting and debris cleanup in order to encourage some patches of berry bushes and small hazelnut trees…
Here’s some blue oyster mushroom mycellium growing in coffee grinds in a sterilized mason jar. We’re doing this with small batches of grinds to later innoculate garden bed mulch and hay bales, the later of which we’re also conditioning over winter to use as potato beds in the spring. Using…
Ostara came late for us, I guess? Real life egg hunt after finding a pile of 13 eggs near a stump I was checking for mushrooms. I guess we figured out why a few of the hens try so hard to get out of their run. Found another half dozen…
Leftists will often stress that the existence of hunger and starvation isn’t a simple matter of resources not being available, but rather of uneven and unjust distribution. More than enough food is grown for everyone in the world, and that’s typically only counting the output of mass, conventional agriculture. The…
