Guests included: Dominic Frongillo, Deputy Town Supervisor for the Town of Caroline; Katie Quinn-Jacobs, founder of IthaCan and PreparedTompkins.org; and Chris Burger, Binghamton Regional Sustainability Coalition.

You can listen online or download the program here.

Long term planning for energy descent can be simplified into three steps: research, plan and take action.

First: Research energy descent

Websites

• PreparedTompkins.org
• Transition Towns
• Future Scenarios
• The Oil Drum
• TC Local

Books

• Peak Everything by Richard Heinberg
• The Great Turning by David Korten

Video

• The Power of Community
• The Story of Stuff
• The Crash Course
  

Second:  Make a plan

Take stock of where you are now and where you want to be.  Consider how future trends will influence your daily life.

• Figure out where you want to live – and get there.
• Figure out what post-peak skill you have to offer or would like to have and where you can best use it.

Third:  Take action

Now it’s time to implement your plan.  Prioritize your tasks and begin to work your way through to do’s. Don’t try to take on too much at one time.  Set quarterly launch dates, introducing something new each quarter.

Gather. Share. Make food.

Check out IthaCan to share information about all types of food preservation, including canning, drying, freezing, fermentation and much more! Also, great discussions on home gardening and root cellaring.

Sign up to share what you know on the IthaCan discussion board and to connect at home food gatherings with other IthaCanners.

Where:  Cornell Cooperative Extension, 615 Willow Ave, Ithaca

When:  Jan 8, 2009 * 6:00-8:30

Home Food Processing is an important part of building our local foodshed—keeping food on everyone’s tables.  Join experienced IthaCan food preservers for an evening mini-workshop featuring five different food saving techniques.  Hands-on activities in Canning, Cellaring, Drying, Pickling and Freezing will be offered.

Dinner:  Provided and Dishes-to-pass welcome    6:00
Slideshow:  How & Why to Put Up Food    6:30
Workshops:  Choose one of the five    7:00

This event is free and open to all.

Sponsored by:

• IthaCan
• Sustainable Tompkins
• PreparedTompkins.org
• Cornell Cooperative Extension Healthy Food for All

]]> http://www.preparedtompkins.org/?feed=rss2&p=150 0 http://www.preparedtompkins.org/?p=138 http://www.preparedtompkins.org/?p=138#comments Fri, 03 Oct 2008 15:44:48 +0000 Martha Geddon http://www.preparedtompkins.org/?p=138

Adding a small root cellar to your existing home will provide you with fresh veggies throughout the winter and spring. Irma calls the design provided here a root closet, because it’s roughly the size of a bedroom room closet (the interior space is 3½’ x 7½’). At less than 27 square feet, it will be one of the hardest working corners of your basement.

For more on the benefits of root cellaring see, 11 Reasons to Have a Root Cellar.

Some details to consider:

• If your basement is heated, be sure to insulate the root closet walls, ceiling & floor against warmth that might seep in from your basement. Insulation also prevents cold from the root closet from flowing into heated areas.
• Vents to the outside are essential to keep air moving. There should be two: one intake and one output pipe. Install a vent near the ceiling and bring the other to the floor, using elbows and pipe as needed to place them diagonally across from one another. This maximizes the passive exchange of warm & cool air. It’s a good idea to screen you vents so mice and bees can’t nest in them.
• Plastic or wire racks designed to carry at least 200# per shelf are better than wood shelving, which attracts mold and warps. Plastic or wire shelves are easy to clean, allow air to circulate and won’t bow under the weight of a bushel of potatoes. We found the perfect specimens (pictured above) at Home Depot. Freestanding shelving, as opposed to built-in fixed shelves, also allows you to change your storage arrangement as needed.
• The perforated cans in the design (pictured left) are available at Agway. These galvanized steel cans are terrific. They allow air to circulate, stand (on their own legs) 2″ above the floor, have tight fitting lids, keep critters away from your prize veggies, clean easily and last forever. Bea Reddy’s cellaring cans are over 20 years old and still going strong.
• Use a thermometer with a hygrometer to keep track of the temperature and humidity. Ithaca Agway has a terrific selection of these.
• Install an overhead light in your root closet. You’ll want to be able to see what’s going on in the bottom of your storage cans. But be sure to remind the kids to turn off the light when leaving; a large part of your success cellaring is dependent on keeping the root veggies in the dark.
• Some veggies, like onions and potatoes, do well stored in ventilated boxes on shelves; others, like beets and carrots, do best stored in layers of sand or leaves in the perforated cans (above).

Root cellar reference: Root Cellaring by Mike & Nancy Bubel. A terrific resource, Irma keeps finding herself looking up storage tips in it. The book includes many different root cellar plans, shelf life of common garden produce, humidity and temp recommendations for fruits and vegetables, nifty root cellar innovations, and lots of examples of root cellars.

“Release your inner carrot. Think like a beet when setting up your root closet. Keep the space dark, moist and cold.”

-Irma Geddon-Reddy

The creation of Chris Martenson, PhD, the Crash Course is one slide show you won’t want to click away from. It even has a pleasing voice-over. Written in a series of 20 slides that you can listen/view individually or all together, the course takes you through some basic street smart economics and then guides the viewer through the rocky terrain of how the financial world will be impacted by peak oil and a depleted natural resources. The entire course takes about 3 hours if done in one sitting, but you can break it up, progressing at your own speed one slide at a time.

Pass the Crash Course along to your family and friends! And if you like what you see, consider supporting Martenson’s work.

- is easy

- preserves nutrients

- saves energy

- is space efficient

As a food preservation technique dehydration is only eclipsed by root cellaring for preserving valuable nutrients. Dried foods have a 3-5% nutrient loss; compare this to freezing’s 30-40% or canning’s 60-80% nutrient loss.

You can dehydrate fruits, vegetable and meat using a variety of methods. There are convection ovens designed with dehydration settings (check your users’ manual), electric dehydrators (sold in most department stores) and solar dehydrators (which you can build yourself). More creative methods are out there too, like dehydrating in the back window of your sun-drenched car or using the low heat from the pilot light on your gas stove.

However you dehydrate your food, the trick is in keeping a steady low temperature and low humidity. Dehydration temperatures need to be high enough to prevent mold from setting in, but low enough not to cook the food as the moisture is being extracted. The optimal range is between 120-140°. Here’s a great how-to site from the National Center for Home Food Preservation on the topic.

Bea Reddy’s dehydrated tomatoes that you see featured here will be dropped into winter soups or reconstituted with oil olive for stir fries.

Title: IthaCan – Team Tomato ‘08
Location: Local Homes
Description: Water-bath canning of locally grown tomatoes. Join in the fun. For more info contact: pdoliner@twcny.rr.com
Start Time: 09:00
Date: 2008-09-13
End Time: 13:00

You can install a hand pump on top of your existing well casing, if the static water level in your well is no more than a 200 feet down. Much deeper than 200 feet, it becomes hard to pull up the water manually.

What’s the static water level? It’s the height that water rises to inside your well casing. For example, the well you see pictured here is 160 feet deep, but the static water level is 80 feet, which means if you drop a line down the well you’ll hit water 80 feet down. Hand pump casing is placed typically 20 feet lower than the static water level to account for seasonal variations in the water supply. Even if you have a very deep well, check out the static water level to see if a hand pump would work. You might be pleasantly surprised. Martha Geddon’s well is over 330 deep, but her static water level (she’s measured it twice to make sure) is 17-30 feet, so the hand pump casing mounted on her well only needs to go down 50 feet.

Will the hand pump interfere with the electric pump? No. The submersible electric pump found in most household wells is placed at the bottom of the well, so there’s room at the top to install a backup hand pump cylinder. The hand pump casing is much smaller than standard drilled well casing so it fits easily inside.

The pump featured here is from Bison Pumps. Bison hand pumps are stainless steel and manufactured in Maine. Lehman’s also carries a full line of hand pump supplies and has an instructional installation DVD available as well. You can also hire local plumbers to install the well head for you, if DIY plumbing isn’t your thing. Burris Plumbing & Heating has experience doing such installations in our area.

Whether you’re building new or looking to retrofit on your existing well, consider leveraging the investment you’ve already put into your drilled well by installing a hand pump as part of your preparedness plan.