Another excellent article. And a great post, Cycling Commuter. We are certainly both in the same corner.

If you're not vegetarian, it's suggested that a few rabbits in a small greenhouse will provide adequate heating to advance your growing season.

After tasting mo qua at the local Asian food court I had to buy some from the vegetable stands. I don't know whether it grows locally, but I've kept seeds to give it a try.

For me, being gouged at the pumps has its upside. As I cycle around, over the last three months I haven't had to buy a potato (dropped by trucks) have put up three dozen jars of fruit compote (all free) and, since I start my cycling at 5.30am, it's a rare day that I don't pick up a dollar's worth of empties.

On those photovoltaic panels, CC, with the increasing interest in hybrids (even trains) I look at the potential for tractor trailers with that huge expanse of roof above the trailers and cab to reduce the diesel fuel component.

Hey--if you're looking to bond with others while canning and shucking, maybe look into either Vancouver Community Kitchens communitykitchens.ca or the Vancouver branch of the Slow Food Movement slowfoodvancouver.com I bet you could find some interest there.

Great idea for a series! My partner and I recently went picking wild apples here in the Kootenays (on abandoned farmsteads) and canned up a storm--best damn applesauce I ever tasted! Makes supermarket apples taste like styrofoam by comparison.
What we couldn't help noticing was how many people here have apple trees in their yards or acreages yet leave the fruit to fall and rot. Meanwhile, they dutifully get into the family van or SUV and trundle off to Safeway to pay up to $1.79 a pound for commercially grown apples. The brainwashing is clearly complete!
Not only that, but according to the UN Food & Agriculture Organization, as much as 70% of the nutrition has been stripped from fruit and vegetables over the past century due to chemically intensive farming. Grain grown in 1900 was 90% protein; it's now only 19% protein. Even organically grown food is subject to this unless the land was not formerly used in commercial farming.
But best of all, by growing and canning truly organic or wild foods, we avoid the looming plague of cancer. According to medical scientist Dr. Samuel Epstein, research overwhelmingly demonstrates the links between various man-made chemicals--from fire retardants used in everything from computers to living room furniture and food additives--and cancer. Thus, again, prevention is the best cure, not more drugs.
Soon enough, when the oil economy collapses, we'll all be canning food--not as a lifestyle choice--but simply to survive.

I couldn't agree more with your views on the quality of apples, chameleon. Homegrown, wild and abandoned are best. And if you have to compete with the occasional maggot or worm, that's okay. They know what's best.

The true crab apple, if you are lucky enough to find them, are great for jams and jellies because of their natural pectin.

I find that in preserving, pears mixed with apples works well. If the pears are fully ripe very little, if any, sugar is needed.

I'm looking at a mass of rosehips. Might try something with those this year.

If part of squirrelling your winter food supply involves the use of your freezer/frig, and there's a bit of the survivalist in your makeup, you might consider buying a small power generator to get you by if there's a power interruption, since a powerless freezer is at best good for three days if left unopened, and a frig even less.

The cost of the generator could well be much less than the cost of the food at risk, not to mention going without the food, since all the store's food will be going bad, too.

I recall my grandma and mother doing less and less canning and more and more freezing in the 60s. They added drying in the 70s. Beyond a freezer, do our heroes have a good root cellar for vegetables and apples?

For January greens try sprouts -- maybe Westcoast Seeds in Delta has Hundred Mile Radish seeds.

Anybody with a garden should check out Westcoast Seed's winter hardy vegetables -- kale and leeks can be pretty hardy, and there are great later winter/early spring cauliflowers and broccoli that can be producing before March in milder winters. The winter garden (you plant it July/August) can work in our rain.

There's a great push all over the world, including here in Canada and BC, to wipe out small farms and replace them with multinational agribiz conglomerates to cover everything with chemicals and rake in the profits.

There have been mass suicides of farmers in certain countries, as in India, where farmers have been pushed off the land. In China some 400 million are being planned to be forced into huge highrise complexes to get them off the land. I've seen photos of some. They're incredible and I would sooner be dead than exist in them, because it can not be called any kind of life.

This is neoclassical market economy, to make people incompetent and totally reliant on big business for their daily survival, as it raises the GDP etc. etc. Meanwhile the prices are rising in the supermarkets every day. We do our very simple shopping twice a month and my wife, who knows all the prices by heart, calculates that our living costs, with all our organic meats, eggs and most of our vegetables grown by ourselves, goes up about $10. per month.

As far preserving is concerned, we find freezing much preferable as it is easier, less work and the foods remain more natural. As we live in the boondocks, where we often have power interruptions, sometimes for days, we have a small, built in generator of 1800 W. we can start in a minute, which is enough to feed built in lights around the house, special sockets, 1 fridge, 3 large freezers, computer, TV, etc. small tools. Ed Deak, Big Lake.

One of the first things Bush & C0 did in Iraq was to order the destroying of all the stored seeds for the grains Iraqui farmers had developed over the millennia, make it illegal to possess them, and replace that traditional seed with the "new improved" GM seed developed by Monsanto & its clones.

They're slowly working towards that goal here too,
& the continuous shift to Corporate farming is making it easy to do.

Another hit on the Bush crime family. And another solid argument for canning.

Be daring. Having entered that dead zone might be a good time to go "off topic" - or slightly so.

Today's front page of the Province concerns a car-thief with over 1,000 vehicles to his credit. He is currently cannedand is shortly expecting to be parolled.

He was the one whose video-image was flashed around the world as he was caught stealing a bait-vehicle.

Okay, let's give them fifty cars. You would think that after that, an extremely close watch would have been kept on the individual.

In the video-clip heist he appears not to be wearing gloves. His fingerprints were on record. So what about those 950-plus vehicles.

I'm concerned that there has been more interest in bureaucracy- building and, perhaps, other more-sinister motives, than in bringing car-thieves to justice.

It might be interesting to consider who benefits and who loses.

The losers are, those who don't want their vehicles stolen, those killed and injured with vehicles involved, all who pay increased auto insurance.

The beneficiaries? The whole auto industry from sales, to parts, to bodyshops, loves car thieves. They also give auto-insurers justifcation for raised premiums. And let's not forget the windfall in taxes to government.

There are other beneficiaries, but it may appear ghoulish to mention them.

Nice to see such a constructive discussion.

Hasn't anybody adopted solar energy component, rather than back-up generators?

BC Mary,

There are so many solutions, that we should not be even considering building more dams but taking some out of commission and reclaiming, as much as possible, the natural rivers and fertile valleys.

Lighting, and very much in the home can be converted to 12-volt. Those units requiring greater power can be run from an inverter. This would require a substantial photovoltaic array plus solar water heating.

LED lighting systems should assist much toward such a conversion plus, the hot water on-demand system much in use in Europe. One of our biggest wastes is keeping 30/40 gallon water near boiling.

We've used solar panels and 12 volt lighting for 8 1/2 years. The problem is the huge batteries you have to have, which are very expensive, have relatively short lifespan and are polluting themselves.

Also, you can not use any tools, household kitchen appliances, or make a living. When we first moved up here we didn't want to have any Hydro coming in, but found out that the generator we had to have to run our machinery and equipment to make a living with, cost far too much in money and pollution, plus had a limited use.

Then when we had no sun, especially in the winters, when we needed lights from 3 pm on, we still had to have a small 12 volt generating system with a 3 hp gas engine clattering away for hours, polluting the air with noise and gases. So, after 8 1/2 years we had to admit that we were wrong and had Hydro come in.

Of course, that was between 1979 and 87 and in the meantime the technology has improved, but 12 volts are still 12 volts and batteries are still batteries with a lot of lead and acid in them. I could go into great detail about our experience, but this should be enough as a rough picture. Ed Deak, Big Lake.

Thanks for that, Ed. For quite a while I was a solar booster, too. I found it's OK only when there's no alternative, otherwise it's just cutting off yer nose to spite yer face.

Shortly before I arrived here, there were still some who had done their own generating and boy, did I get an earful when queried them re generating and storing your own power. Their experience was identical to that of Ed's.

On top of that, besides the high per-watt cost of solar cells and batteries, it's still an environmentally zero-sum game when you factor in the power and materials used in producing them and the cost of production and purchase - which is financed by todays "cheap" fossil-fuels.

But all that becomes irrelevant when you have no power, making generators a sensible last resort.

Fiat lux, scylla,

I take issue with both of you.

While it is desirable to remove oneself totally from the grid, initially one may be able only to reduce that dependence - just as hybrid vehicles are still needful of gasoline. (Unless driven at moderate speeds, on short trips and recharged from a wall-socket or solar panels or both)

A large Vancouver house of mine had two suites.
With solar water heating that I built and installed for less than $200, my Hydro bill was reduced by a third - even though the water tank remained connected to the grid.

There are alternatives to lead-acid but, as with the solar panels, you will be punished for attempting to go green by artificially high prices. You really need to shop around to get past the unconscionable markups.

If you doubt the punishment thing; A lottery
offers a prize of that puddle-jumper, the SmartCar, or $25,000. Hell, it's little more than a motor cycle with a cab on it. Would I like one? Sure! But not until I'd haggled down to $10,000 incl. stripes and whitewalls.

I recommend a book to you both The Sun Betrayed

Sorry this got pushed to the side before I got back to you.

I am a farmer, I grow food for people.

The first question that most people ask me is 'can you make a living being a farmer?'

This question indicates that society as a whole is aware that the farm 'economy' is challenging.

However the 'economic' problems are minor compared to the societal 'disconnection' that allows the question in the first place. -If farmer's can't make a living then who is going to manage the nurturing relationship between the earth and society, surely the question should be more relevant to the survival of non-farmers before farmers.

My answer is this, in current economic terms my farm is not viable. [so if you define 'making a living', as making money then I'm dead, -but then so are you] However if you allow yourself to see that my farm is still producing enough food to sustain several families including my own then you will see that, yes, I am making a 'living' and some of your 'livings' too.

The land I farm doesn't grow money, it grows food which sustains life, this relationship is valid and exists completely independent of economics. As with all of nature, the nature which I interact with on my farm to produce food has no responsibility to behave 'economically'.

Economics is a flawed ideology, there is no useful relationship between life/nature and economics. Our focus must be to reconnect ourselves to each other and the earth. Ultimately our 'living' depends on whether human society is able to become a responsible member of 'nature's social union'

Consider these two questions:

Food comes from farms -where's your's coming from?

and, If you are what you eat,-do you eat where you are?

Tell that to the Trolls, foggybottom. I'm sure they'd tell you back that destroying the ALRs is good economics.

foggybottom,

a.k.a. mistyass :-)

There are still those ignorant specimens who will call one a farmer, thinking it to be an insult.

Another interesting read:

http://www.lintrezza.com/

An Australian family whose goal was to not spend any $s for 6 months ... they had to make exceptions, but I reckon they ended up doing better than the 100-mile scenario.

I've been reading this site for months now, and I think they're amazing!

I keep taking in so much information on so many topics ... permaculture, 100-mile food radius, energy reduction ... and even though I can't do the whole lot, I'd like to think I'm moving closer all the time to my ideal way of living.

Someone once hypothesised that if 80% of people did "the right thing" environmentally 80% of the time, we wouldn't be having environmental crises. Problem is, a small percentage of us doing more than our 80% still isn't enough.

I still keep taking my own baby steps, though, no matter how loony the neighbours think I am!

Yeehah, good for you! Even baby steps can be trailblazing.