Red State Green

I just ran across an interesting site called Window Farms. The idea is to use the light and space of a vertical window to raise food plants in:

Their blog is quite fun to read, and gave me some ideas about what to do with a couple of windows in my house.

Check out this Oklahoma City video “The Cost of Green”
There’s a lot of good stuff here about the costs and savings of “green” practices and technology in Oklahoma.

Got too much produce? Are your neighbors hiding because they don’t want any more zucchini?
Don’t you hate it when you have so much produce from your garden that some ends up going to waste?
I just found a wonderful website called Veggie Trader, which lets you put your excess produce up for trade or sale, without [...]

Hi, everyone!
We’re having a bit of a cool spell — it’s only 90 instead of 102 here! — and our summer is going pretty well. I just read Sharon Astyk’s blog, which reminded me to do my Independence days update. It’s been quite dry here, the bit of rain we got a couple of days [...]

Dmitry Orlov does it again: Definancialisation, Deglobalisation, Relocalisation
I’m in the middle of reading this and it’s just a great article.
One quote I really like:
It is an unfortunate fact that the recent centuries of settled life, and especially the last century or so of easy living based on the industrial model, has made many people too [...]

The WaterBOB:
The waterBOB® is a water containment system that holds up to 100 gallons of fresh drinking water in any standard bathtub in the event of an emergency. Constructed of heavy duty food grade plastic, the waterBOB® keeps water fresh and clean for drinking, cooking, washing and flushing. Water stored in an open bathtub, with [...]

I’ve been following a free online video series called The Crash Course, and I wanted to tell you about it:
The Crash Course seeks to provide you with a baseline understanding of the economy so that you can better appreciate the risks that we all face.
And boy, does it!
Now, I took Economics in college, so I [...]

I cooked local leg of lamb in my solar oven. I put it in at around 11:30 am, rock hard frozen. At 4 pm it was done perfectly, using free energy and the house not heated at all.
I could get used to this

Remarks given to the Vestas Wind Technology Training Center, today, in Portland, Oregon.
The full text here.
Discuss.

I almost didn’t listen to Julie Frieder, research analyst for the Calvert Group, because this topic didn’t sound all that interesting to me. But the weather was blustery out, and they moved her from outdoors to where I already was, so I stayed. Am I glad I did! This turned out to be a speech [...]

If you’d like to understand more about what’s happening with oil, take a listen to an interview last month with Matthew Simmons, author of “Twilight in the Desert”, a book documenting the global oil situation:
Part One
Part Two
I found the interview very interesting and informative.

Here’s an interesting article, even if it gets a bit weird at the end: The Waking-Up Syndrome
[...] While the sky may not be falling, this day-after-day onslaught of alarming news is making it more difficult simply to overlook the triple threat of environmental, climatic and economic concerns. It’s leaving many of us feeling like Alice [...]

You might be surprised:
It all started last August when I used a coupon from Gurney’s to order asparagus roots. By the third week of September my order hadn’t arrived. I decided something was amiss and called the company.
The customer service representative I spoke with assured me my order would arrive at the proper planting time [...]

Ice storms came through here on Sunday and Monday (click on a picture to enlarge).
This is our neighbor’s tree:

The crape myrtle bush in our front yard:

Our persimmon tree:

Each blade of grass and each twig was encased in ice. My son is showing off a blade of grass and a twig here:

Everything was encased in ice, [...]

Take a look at this video of an engineer who made a solar tractor, solar-powered chainsaw, and a solar-powered car (suitable for driving here in America). Simple, easy, and not bad looking, either!

Our Thanksgiving dinner went well. This year, I put the potatoes and sweet potatoes in the solar oven!

The temperature inside got up to 220F, but after a few hours the clouds rolled in and eventually I had to finish them up indoors.
Here’s what we had for dinner:

Locally grown free-range turkey with regional brown rice stuffing: [...]

I finally found my camera. For some reason it was in the boys’ room.
Anyway, here’s the picture of my backyard sweet potato harvest (click to enlarge):

That’s just the ones from the back yard. The small ones I’m saving to plant next year. Even though it doesn’t look like much I was still pretty happy with [...]

Tennessee town is out of water
The severe drought tightening like a vise across the Southeast has threatened the water supply of cities large and small, sending politicians scrambling for solutions. But Orme, about 40 miles west of Chattanooga and 150 miles northwest of Atlanta, is a town where the worst-case scenario has already come to [...]

This has been a busy week. A bunch of plants I ordered came in, along with my solar oven! I made an apple cake in it yesterday, which turned out perfectly. Yum…
Also, I took a continental knitting class today. Now I know how to knit! (Well, at a beginner stage, but it’s a start [...]

Today I planted a tree (actually a hardy citrus bush) and made a salad with almost no lettuce. In it was snow pea leaves, basil leaves, young beet leaves, young chard leaves, green onion leaves, green garlic leaves, and purslane, all from my garden. The lettuce that was in there was left over [...]