The amateur tapper

We have a couple maple trees near the house, but they are red maples, not sugar maples. We also have a few box elder trees of middling size. Our wooded area just doesn't have any maples to speak of, but I still wanted to try tapping and making syrup, so three years ago, tried it for the first time, with ok results. I'm strictly an amateur, and small scale, but it is fun to boil down and make your own syrup. One more thing to add to our self reliance.

So many of the commercial maple tappers in the area have switched to these tubing systems spiderwebbing up the hillsides and gravity flow down to their collection tank. Much less work. With only six trees, I'm using buckets.

Weather this year was ideal for tapping. Best weather is when it gets above freezing and sunny during the day, and drops down below freezing at night. We've had that pattern more or less for two weeks, and I just stopped collecting day before yesterday.

Box elder syrup is sweet and mild, pretty similar to maple, and my blended syrup tastes just fine on pancakes or waffles.

BUT, since I'm only making small batches, I really have to watch the pot, as it doesn't take very long to complete the boil down. This year unfortunately, one time I got distracted, and let the batch go. I use an outdoor propane burner, and it gets hot. Here is what happened with that batch.

You can see a shiny little projection at he base of the pot. That is Aluminum (or aluminium)

Stainless pot with aluminum laminated to the bottom for even heat distribution. Aluminum melts at 1220F (660C). I had no idea the burner got that hot. So this pot is shot. Good thing I wasn't using my wife's good pot, or you wouldn't be reading this entry.

I am told that syrup is done when it passes the sheeting test, or when it reaches 219F (104C). I haven't seen the sheeting test done, and don't bother with a thermometer for such small batches, so sort of eyeball it by the bubbling at the end. Some of my batches go a bit long, with some crystallization happening, and some are on the thin side, but it's just for us, so no big deal. I also don't bother filtering out the sugar sand, so the jars below look a bit cloudy or vary in color. I'll be leaving them in the fridge to avoid spoiling, since I didn't sterilize the jars either. I plan to try harder this year to identify and eat more foraged wild foods, but this one is so easy, it doesn't count.

Maple syrup tapping- another key sign of spring. On recent sunny days, we haven't even started a fire, and our sunroom is getting warm enough on sunny days, we open the door and let it warm the house.

seven generations

The Great Law of the Iroquois is said to be the origin of the admonition to think of seven future generations in any decision made now. More generally, deliberations of the leaders are to consider the whole community, the whole nation, and not be swayed by relatives or other personal benefit. To a rough approximation, this was considered 140 years. Seven generations might be a bit longer here in the developed world right now, as people are waiting a bit longer to start families. Let's say 150 years.

When political and economic policy discussions circle around to "sustainable" these days, I think we have become too lax in confirming that we all have a common definition of "sustainable". When you start trying to pin it down, lots of assumptions have to be made. The devil is in the details, as always. But what if we used 150 years for a thought experiment.

All the infrastructure, all the manufactured goods, all the energy sources, all aspects of our busy, comfortable lives would need to be fully replaceable ( and presumably with no reduction in ability to continue replenishment)  over 150 years if we were to try to meet this criteria.

Does anyone think we are on track to meet this target? Of course, we aren't even on a stable, level track of population, consumption, or average consumption. In my estimation, if we ( it ain't going to happen, but IF we did) stopped growth right now, and merely projected current population, resource use and impact on our planet, could we make it 150 years? The answer is no, in case you were not sure. Forget fossil fuels, which draw the most attention. Many other key inputs in to our economy are nonrenewable resources, with dwindling easily obtained stores. Many metrics on the state of the ecological health of the planet are trending down, and some are close to collapse.

For those thinking that raised costs will bring newly economic resources to market, this only works to a point. Demand for some items is inelastic, and there are some resources that don't react to the substitution effect like the economic alchemists and philosophers would like to think.

So current lifestyle in the developed world, and especially the U.S., is not sustainable by this seven generations definition. Probably by any definition. To reach that level would be the end of the world as we know it. And yet, Some cultures in the past lasted for centuries, though they eventually declined. Life would not have to be nasty, brutish and short, but would be quite a bit different. We have the germ theory of disease now! Maybe we could figure out a way that was not so bad?

Nah, probably not going to happen. Not sure if it is too late to change course, though many are sounding the alarms and trying to do so. I wish them luck in grabbing the wheel and pulling a hard u-turn.

My personal response to the dilemma we face is to plant trees. Trees can be used for building materials, stabilize soils and moderate microclimates, they suck CO2 from the air, produce food for humans, as well being the backbone of a system that provides food and habitat for a complete ecological community. All for free!

Here is a Handy list of average tree lifespans. It's for Virginia, so my neighborhood in Wisconsin would be a bit different, but close enough.
http://bigtree.cnre.vt.edu/lifespan.html

The white oaks I'm planting live an average of 300 years, and as much as 600. The chestnuts live 100 years, and as much as 300 years. Sugar maples ( next year's project) live from 300-400 years.(lifespans are probably a bit shorter here in the north)

Plant trees. Your great, great, great, great great grandkids will appreciate it.

Some of the oaks I planted in tree tubes last year. Without the tubes, the deer will kill them all.

soap and cider

This fall, I'm working on two new skills. As I mentioned in the last post, we are having a huge apple year, and have already bottled one batch of cider, with a couple more planned as the next varieties ripen.

I am also trying to make soap the old fashioned way, with pig lard and wood ashes. Anyone who is familiar with the foxfire book series ( https://www.foxfire.org/about-foxfire/#history ) knows that early pioneers in the American wilderness had to make a lot of their day to day essentials, and making soap was one of those things that was cheaper than buying if it was even available.

Mix lye, water and any type of fat in the right proportions, and you can make soap. Most homemade soap these days is made with purchased lye and various vegetable oils or goat milk. I wanted to try the old school, no "store boughten" ingredients.

Here is my setup to leach lye out of the wood ashes I've been saving for a couple years.

In times past, they would have filled a hollow tree log, or made a wooden bin with a sloped collection trough underneath to catch the lye dripping out the bottom. Straw or some crude filtering material was used to keep the ashes in, but let the liquid drip past. While I used an old scrap piece of PVC pipe, I did use straw for the bottom filter media.

First, I sifted all the small bits of charcoal out of the ashes, then filled the pipe with ashes.






The last time we bought a pig from a neighbor ( We didn't butcher it, the local locker did. Maybe next time? ), I asked for the lard to be saved. Turns out there wasn't that much, but I rendered it out easily enough. Slow and easy is the trick.  Not sure if the pig was just lean, or the butcher didn't save as much as he could have.

On the cider side of things, our cider making turned out well this fall. I actually followed a recipe. For a 5 gallon batch, I first killed the wild yeast with Campden tablets, then used purchased champagne yeast and then a lot of brown sugar. Ending alcohol content was around 4.5%, but the taste was tart, dry, and had a clean aftertaste.

Here was one batch during fermentation.

We used cleaned and sanitized beer bottles we had been saving, and capped with a simple capper.

horatio alger, social mobility, and gini indexes

Horatio Alger is famous for the many novels he wrote that conveyed the idea that hard work  and moxie would result in a rags to riches ( or at least middle class) success, that is, a slice of the American Dream. 

Unfortunately, while many Americans believe we are still the land of opportunity, and are exceptional, it is not the case. 

http://fortune.com/2015/09/30/america-wealth-inequality/

We have become as class stratified as many other countries we think ourselves superior to, and data confirms this.

When  combined with the fact that America has a poor gini index, I see the potential for troubled times ahead. Gini index is a calculation of how evenly, or equitably income is distributed through the population. A zero index mean everyone has exactly the same income, and a one would be all income to one person, and nothing to everyone one else. Obviously, there are no ones, but comparisons and trends still can tell us how GNP is being shared.

Gini index does not tell the whole story, as a nation could be desperately poor, but very equitable about it, for  zero score, but that isn't a situation to strive for. 

http://www.the-crises.com/income-inequality-in-the-us-1/

You can see the run up in the late 20s and 30s, till speculation and overreach caused the great depression( OK, it was a bit more complicated than that  http://www.ushistory.org/us/48.asp) at which point things remained more equal with help from the New Deal and WW2, but took off again in the 80s. 

That chart shows the evolution of the U.S. gini index over time, but how does the U.S. compare to the rest of the world? Well, it turns out from my brief study, it is complicated. Data from many countries is suspect, or calculated differently, or spotty and out of date, so it's hard to do comparisons. Just generally, from the sites I did find, the U.S. is rather high compared to the developed countries, but I saw several different results. Here is one. 

So what made me look in to this?

I was traveling a while ago, and picked up a Wall Street Journal for the first time in several years. It still is the paper of record for the wealthy and the elite. After I skimmed through the headlines and main section, I found a section headed "Mansion". I thought, weird, some sort of special edition? No, it turns out that this is now the header for the WSJ real estate section. And it's just what you would think, a real estate section focussed on only the very top of the housing market, and the woes of trying to find that perfect mansion.

Most intriguing and maybe telling for what is on the minds of the wealthy, there was an article titled "Luxury for the Apocalypse". It described a large planned community going in in Texas that was comprised of underground condos, with a secure perimeter and many self reliance features. There are similar ones in development in other states as well. 

In the past, and not just here in the U.S., when there is too much inequity in society, revolt, violence, and rebellion can occur. At some point, it doesn't take gini comparisons, or other data crunching, it is in the wind. Sometimes you don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.  The wealthy are aware of this, even as they continue to work the system. 

So, what's a poor working stiff to do? Pay attention to history, and plan accordingly.

out with the old, in with the new

A while back ( Dec 2016) I posted about the demographics of farmers, and the possibility that we might be seeing the early stages of a resettling of Americas rural areas. The article at the link seems to indicate others are seeing the same thing. 

One point I did not make before, is that in addition to relearning farming with low input, sustainable techniques, many of these new urban to rural migrants were not raised on farms, so have even more to learn and will unfortunately have higher failure rates than if they had started from conventional farming.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/a-growing-number-of-young-americans-are-leaving-desk-jobs-to-farm/2017/11/23/e3c018ae-c64e-11e7-afe9-4f60b5a6c4a0_story.html?utm_term=.3e2e62f7624c

On top of that, access to land, capital to buy land, are both hard to get. Even back in the 70s, my dad said that to be a farmer, you had to either be born to a farm family, or marry in to a farm family. 


We haven't reached that point where fossil energy is cost prohibitive and human and animal labor move to the fore yet,  and it may be quite a ways off, but it is inevitable. Once this trend is further along, many more farmers will be needed. 

Resource misallocation

Recently read about the new sky scraper being built in Chicago. It will be the third highest structure there, and will be done in a couple of years. And here I thought Chicago was in deep financial trouble, had plenty of available office space, and generally was over the ego driven need to build these phallic monuments. The last big one was topped out in 2009 (A trump tower no less!).

Turns out this one is for very high end condos and a hotel. A Chinese company is making it happen. I guess there are still a lot of millionaires in the Chicago area that would go for a nice view of Lake Michigan. (Or millionaires looking to move some assets out of China and invest in a "stable" location).
https://www.vistatowerchicago.com

And there are also a lot (54!) of other, shorter buildings being built, but still very tall and elaborate.
https://chicago.curbed.com/maps/chicago-tower-highrise-construction-map

Skyscrapers are very complex structures, use huge amounts of materials, and are very dependent on a fully functioning economy, stable utility costs, and paying tenants. There have been a few articles in the past pointing out how the ultra high sky scraper craze has taken off and given the host countries some sort of ego boost.

China alone built 84 skyscrapers in 2016!!
https://qz.com/883681/shenzhen-built-more-skyscrapers-in-2016-than-the-us-and-australia/

And it appears that here is a weird correlation between skyscraper frenzy and imminent economic collapse:
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2012/jan/11/skyscrapers-china-india-recession
if this correlation holds, then rough times are ahead.

Regardless if economic collapse follows, skyscrapers are, I would argue, a vast resource misallocation. While they improve city density, density is not an automatic good thing. A downtown that is too vertical can be sterile and uninviting, and large buildings can mean lots more long distance commuters.  Instead of walkable cities or neighborhoods, we get harried train riders.

I have no expertise in city planning, but from a purely resilience viewpoint, skyscrapers seem vulnerable and brittle in response to changed conditions. Makes you wonder why mayors, city councils, zoning and permitting departments encourage them. A single story building, or even one that is walkable can be designed to be habitable without power, but not skyscrapers. They do not function without large amounts of electricity.

It's one thing to tear down a three story building or a big box store that has become obsolete, but tearing down a scraper that no one wants would be a formidable task, and a real waste of resources.

Where should a city, or a country be investing in infrastructure, housing stock, utilities, and so on? A look in to the future is needed, and a frank assessment of the available funds to do any chosen plans.

With the remaining "cheap" energy and resources left to us, I would argue that we as a minimum stop building infrastructure that is highly grid dependent and can't be repurposed. The wider question is, what should we be building, or not building?

Here are a few principles I will throw out, which COULD be used as a checklist to wisely build, but won't be. They assume vastly less energy and materials available in the coming decades to continue building like we have up to now.

The majority of transportation infrastructure spending should be shifted to rail and mass transit, instead of adding new roads. NO NEW ROADS.

Any existing transportation infrastructure should be repaired and modified so that it either is very cheap to maintain (gravel roads) or built like the Romans, with a design life in centuries. Obviously, only a few main arteries would justify the later approach. There are already a lot of  rural local government units choosing to transition paved roads to gravel because of tight budgets. This trend will increase.

Overall, transportation infrastructure will need to transition ( over ~50 years?)  to facilitate local transport, with minimal regional or national traffic assumed.

Any new housing infrastructure should be built with nears zero energy needs, like the passive haus movement out of Germany.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_house

All existing housing should be evaluated to be either recycled at the end of its useful life, or upgraded to as near to passive house standards as possible.

All new structures should be designed to beyond LEED certification, such that they have very low life cycle environmental impact. This can be done either through completely renewable materials and simple construction, or very long life span design, measured in centuries. and designed to be easily maintained.

Yeah, these pie in the sky goals are not politically or culturally viable here in the states, but the funny thing is, as we continue to transition to a low energy society, ( fossil EROEI continues to decline) at some point we will be stuck with the built infrastructure we have.


Here is an example of resource allocation I have chosen. This apple grinder and press will last for decades if stored and taken care of properly, and needs no electricity, no further fossil fuels than were used to create it, and just needs friendly neighbors to come help during harvest time.

nothing goes to waste: black walnut edition

I did a post back in Feb 2016 on black walnuts, but have a couple new observations to share. Last year we had zero nuts because of bad timing on a late hard frost in our area.

This fall is a very heavy nut crop in the woods around here. Some years there are very few, so one had best gather while the gathering is good. We don't have commercial nut orchards, but plenty of "wild" black walnut and shagbark hickory trees to forage from.

I've been gathering, processing, and storing, noting at the same time that most nuts go unharvested. It was this way in the suburbs, where they are often considered a nuisance, but even here in the country there isn't much competition when nut gathering.

The black walnut has a thick, green husk around it while growing, and when nuts first drop from trees, the husk is often still firm and hard to remove. Most people who are aware of black walnuts at all say to dump them in the driveway and run over them with the car, but that seems like a real pain to me. After a while on the ground, the husk starts darkening, even all the way to black, and gets soft and mushy. I found that by just waiting till this happens, the husk comes off very easily, if messily.

What one finds, though, is that the black slimy mess is almost always crawling with some sort of maggots. Looks kind of gross the first time you see them.

Turns out that there is a single fly species, the walnut husk fly, that competes its life cycle by eating on the slowly rotting husk. Now, I find this to be a real convenient collaboration, as the maggots eat and soften the husk, without damaging the nut, and makes my husking operation much easier.

This husk, which the tree expended energy to produce, is now feeding another species, which as far as I can tell, affords the walnut tree no reciprocal benefit. No waste here, nature has found an energy resource and filled the niche. I think the husk, which contains a fair bit of juglone, may act as insect protection, which the husk fly has evolved to resist.

And in yet another commentary on the perverse industrial ag approach to things, nut producers in the west of the U.S. consider this a big problem, to be dealt with by using pesticides to kill the flies. Why? They are concerned about the cosmetic appearance of the shells, which will be darkened by the rotting husks. Some sources I read voiced concern that the dark juice will actually soak in and stain the nut meats themselves, but I have never seen this.

Unshelled walnuts store very well, the nuts themselves are a good source of fats and calories, and are free for the harvesting, so those of you where they grow, what's keeping you from gathering some yourselves?