The real work

Although I have community wind power consulting to do every single day next week, that's still not work like teaching, writing reports, and especially attending committee meetings is work, and so this was the first real weekend of our professorial summer break, and it was also the start of our official Maine growing season.

As celebration, and because it's raining this Sunday morning, and because I'm stiff from digging much of yesterday, I thought I'd post some pictures of our homestead life from our blog at http://womerlippi.blogspot.com/. This is what I would call, borrowing from Gary Snyder, "the real work" of teaching sustainability. I see it as foundational. How can you teach ecological sustainability if you don't know how to live it?

Don't get the wrong idea. We're not purists. It's not as if we live entirely without fossil fuels. We still use some, mostly for transportation to and from work, and on trips for work. We also still use some to run the house and to run farm equipment. But through fairly careful planning, and quite a bit of not-so-careful trial and error, we have eliminated most wasteful use of fossil fuels from our home life. That would be the point. We also know how to eliminate most of the rest of our fossil fuel use, and have a kind of personal "climate action plan" to do so as time and money permit.

There are other benefits. We get lots of healthful exercise in the outdoors working on jobs around the farm. We are entertained by the relationships with animals and neighbors our lifestyle engenders. And we get the full income benefit of most of our efforts tax-free, a real Yankee "wise investment" policy.

First lesson: the growing season: Here's our garden after the first day of planting. We grow enough food to feed ourselves and then some, although we limit ourselves to the most productive varieties that grow well in our garden. We don't try to grow everything we need. Here we planted all the "earlies": peas, onions, potatoes. The goal is to get enough potatoes for our own use and for seed and a little trade, to get most of the onions we need, and to supplement our salads with snap peas.



Mean last frost around Unity/MOFGA area is usually given as May 18th or thereabouts, but we're a good deal higher at our farm in Jackson twelve miles to the east, 525 feet to be exact, in our dooryard. I expect June 1 was the standard date used by gardeners and farmers for generations in Jackson.



Then there's ewes and lambs mowing lawn. We hate to mow lawns. Mowing uses gas, which makes carbon emissions. Sheep are so much better at mowing than humans, and they make only fleece and meat, which we humans get to use. The white electric fence permits sheep to be placed temporarily around the farm on both lawns and brushy spots, where they work to control grass length and brush without the need for equipment or gas. We only use equipment for really heavy brush removal, and for an occasional tidy-up mow because the sheep don't leave such a nice finish. For comparison's sake, we know folks who spend about 6-7 hours a week in midsummer mowing away.



Then there's the firewood operation, about 1/6 done. We grow and harvest all our own wood, which is most of our winter heat. This is an example of an operation where we use some fossil fuel: gas for the chainsaw and gas and/or diesel for the tractors. We might use as much as five gallons total for the whole firewood operation each year. We also fix and maintain all our own equipment, and cannibalize parts and improvise to keep things working without spending a lot of money on it. This causes occasional frustration and hilarity. Aimee thinks my use of this old Bolens mower-trailer combo to haul firewood out of the woods half a cord at a time is pretty silly because I'm such a big fat guy on such a little tractor, and so it looks like a clown tractor. I think if she wants to carry 6 cords of wood 100 yards uphill one armful at a time, she's welcome to try! We also get a lot of flat tires, and have perfected the "spray foam insulation" technique for last ditch repairs of pneumatic tires for farm equipment.



Then an example of how we dicker and trade with other local farmers and gardeners. This is our silly ram lamb that has perfected the rear approach to nursing. It works fine except his face is rather poopy. All the time. Aimee christened him "Pongo," which, since that's UK service slang for a soldier, is fine by me since I was in one of the other two UK service arms, although don't write me nasty emails about it if you are a UK soldier. I didn't invent the nickname!

His mom is tired of him, and we want him cleaned up because this is obviously not a great situation, so we sold him on to our MOFGA buddies John Mac and Nancy. He'll be going soon, along with one of the other ram lambs. Because of college work pressures, we were too late with our spring jobs to castrate or "knacker" this year, so it will be good to thin out the rams early. Less knuckle-headed-ness when the time comes. Un-castrated ram lambs get rambunctious in the fall, and compete with each other to breed ewes if any are around.

Then there's a shot of a chicken inspecting Aimee's cedar shingling work on the barn. We do all our own building, wiring, and plumbing where permitting and other codes allow. We built this barn three years ago, but shingling takes a lot of time to do well, and Aimee is a perfectionist about it. We like the shingled effect, but we also like that it's a local product, that the waste makes good kindling, and that shingled siding lasts for 20-25 years or more. Aimee's next job will be to replace the ugly green vinyl siding on the farm house with these. We'll strip it off one wall at a time, blow some more insulation in the walls and fit more foam board insulation to the outside while we're at it, seal it up tight, then cover the whole shebang with cedar shingles. Part of the "climate action plan."

Then there's Vincent (Van Gogh), our new piglet which is a gilt or female and so should perhaps have a girl's name, but we already have hens named George and Harry so why worry? We raise pigs for food in the summer season. She's "Van Gogh" because she has lost her ears. She's a runt. We do well with runts. We get them from some of the fairly horrific local informal pig-rearing operations, where conditions are often pretty bad and runts get culled, so it's a bit of a rescue operation. They're usually a few bucks cheaper, and Aimee babies them so, they soon catch up, and get much friendlier to boot than non-runts. They get a whole new lease on life. This little girl is still afraid of us. She was in a yard with big pigs, as well as turkeys and chickens, getting picked on constantly. They even ate her ears off! Now she sleeps and eats and plays all day, and is starting to relate to us without fear. Here she is enjoying a heat lamp.




Finally, our new greenhouse. Built from local lumber and recycled glass over the winter as Aimee's Christmas gift, this is a great addition to the farm and the farm lifestyle. It permits the extension of the growing season. Aimee has all our plant starts in here right now. As soon as it dries up so I can finish tilling, some of these will be going in the ground, specifically the brassicas. When those are done most of the tomatoes and peppers will also go into the ground, but a minority will be "potted on" to big pots just for the greenhouse, to make early and late tomatoes and peppers for the table.

So that's how we live when we're not teaching about biodiversity and sustainability.

The rest of our "climate action plan" we hope to implement in the next few years. Transportation is the big bugbear. As we wear out our current vehicles we hope to replace them with the new battery electric and plug-in hybrid ones now coming on the market.

The next is household energy. This is where we have made the biggest inroad, but there's more to do. We already purchase 100% Maine-made renewable power for the house. That shingling/better insulation project for the main house walls, which is really just the next element in the constant house energy retrofit begun in 2005 when we bought it, will eliminate the last 100-150 gallons of # 2 heat oil consumption currently needed to supplement wood heat inside the house. A solar hot water system with electric back-up is another big part of the plan. We currently heat our water with propane.

All that will be left then will be propane for cooking, whatever fossil fuel our plug-in hybrid car might use for long trips, tractor fuel, some chainsaw gas, and travel fuel for freight. I hope to make our pick-up last for many years to come, and so there'll be some gas for that, but we really only need it for picking up grain and big items.

My ideal would be to get our total petroleum product consumption down below 200 gallons a year by 2020. It's do-able. That would be far more than the 80% needed by 2050 to reduce the possibility of dangerous climate change.

Why not do it all right away?

Not enough money. We have to phase the expenses in over time.

Plan B? What if the rest of the country and world doesn't come up with a program of emissions reductions to match ours?

I will be very disappointed, of course. I moved to Maine partly because I liked the climate.

But then I'll go out and plant a vineyard. By then the growing season on our south facing well-drained Maine hillside will be perfect for premium white wine grapes.