The Girl

In the wake of the wake, The Girl has been asking a lot of questions.

“Papa, what does it feel like to die?”

I don’t know firsthand, honey – I’ve never died.

“Why do we have to die?”

If we didn’t, no new babies could be born.

“I wish it didn’t have to end, though.”

I know. But that’s what gives it value.

Mountain Stream

The Wake

Thanksgiving is solely an American phenomenon, so this is just another workday here, but there was a thankful gathering here recently - a friend of the family died after a long illness, and soon their home was filled with celebrants.

Yes, celebrants. That is the nature of an Irish wake, which I remember fondly from my own family, and which runs deep in the culture here. A whole community gathers at the home of the dead, to laugh, cry, drink -- sometimes too much -- and give thanks that we knew them. Everyone's culture has its own rituals, but this seems to me the right way to go.

FADA update

In the last week I have been very busy and preoccupied with unexpected health issues, and I appreciate your patience during the break – I try to put something on the blog once a day and a substantial article once a week, but sometimes need a week or so off.

We had our annual election for FADA last night. I’m still vice-chair, and the admirable Triona Muldoon is our new chair. We each talked about the projects that engage us, and we need to do that more often: it reminds us how much we are doing, and how much this dozen volunteers have accomplished in three years. In the last six months, for example:

• Thanks to one of our members, local people who recently lost their jobs are now earning educational credits by working on some local land, turning a bankrupt blueberry farm into crops. More on that as it develops.

• The community garden, Bia Linn, has been going strong for five months now, and we are continuing to have courses there and elsewhere in Newbridge.

• Our group created a new web site at www.fada.ie.

• We are hosting a course in herbalism over the next few weeks, showing people how they can use local herbs for everything from medicine to cosmetics.

• One of the heads of the local beekeeping organisation gave a presentation at Bia Linn on how to keep a hive of one’s own.

• We are hosting a course in organic gardening over the next few weekends, demonstrating how people can grow their own food.

• Our group is hosting a DIY seminar next month on making your own hot-water solar panels out of recycled materials.

• We have begun a food club to order food in bulk, so people here can pool their resources and buy high-quality, local and organic food without spending much money.

• Some of our members have enlisted local students to create an energy audit of the area, to see where we are wasting the most energy and how we can cut back.

• We are trying to compile information from area elders about how people here used to live, back when people lived on less.

• Our members have done several radio interviews with local and national stations, have continued to run a weekly newspaper column on living in the Long Emergency, and we have published articles in local magazines and church bulletins.

• We have continued to give talks to local organisations, schools and churches.

• The Feile na Samhna (Halloween Festival), which drew hundreds of people from the community. My end of it – the talks on local currency, local agriculture and peak oil – did not draw the numbers of people I had hoped, but other aspects of the festival went well and drew substantial crowds.

• Luka Bloom performed a benefit concert for us, which drew several hundred people.

• We have forged relationships with local Fair Trade organisations, local community groups and churches.

Most of this was not me personally, but all the same, I’m quite proud of what this small group has done in a short time.

I know many people around the world transforming their lives, restoring the old traditional communities and building a new, underground economy in their local chrysalis. It probably seems as tedious for you as it does for us, the accomplishments miniscule compared to the magnitude of what needs to be done. But then we stop, every so often, and look back, and see the road stretch to the horizon behind us.

Blogging to resume tomorrow

Busy

Back soon.

Sprouts

Re-run from last year.

Supporting yourself generally requires land, tools, weeding, composting, practice, and finally the months of waiting for things to finish growing. There is one kind of food, however, that can be grown by anyone, indoors, in any time of year, in a few days – sprouts.

I don’t mean Brussels Sprouts – nutritious as they are -- which are the buds of a certain type of cabbage. I mean seeds or beans – mung beans, broccoli seeds, radish seeds, alfalfa seeds -- that have been soaked and kept moist for a few days and have begun to turn into green shoots, as they would in soil.

The Chinese have sprouted for at least 5,000 years, and many Westerners have found growing sprouts an easy source of nutrition in lean times. Captain Cook used sprouting as a source of Vitamin C to avoid scurvy on long ocean voyages, as did soldiers in World War I and Indians during the famine of the 1930s. Sprouts are also high in protein – seven cups have an average person’s daily recommended allowance.

You can sprout the beans or seeds of most edible plants – the only common ones to avoid altogether are nightshade plants like tomatoes or potatoes, whose sprouts are as poisonous as the leaves of the grown plants. Mung beans -- for sale in most health-food stores for a euro or two a bag -- are a common and easy way to begin. School-children are often told to let them lie on a wet paper towel, but I get fine results just from letting them sit in a bowl-sized plastic tub or (unsealed) Ziploc bag.

Rinse the beans first, and then let them sit in a tub of water for about six hours or so. Then drain the water and let the beans sit in the damp tub for the next few days, rinsing them every eight hours or so -- the beans need to be kept moist but not swimming in standing water. Every morning before work, every day when you come home, and every night before bed, fill the tub with water again and then let it drain out. Take care that the damp seeds do not grow moldy – I found this to be a hazard with broccoli and alfalfa seeds, but never with beans. In three days or so the beans should have sprouted into white-and-green shoots, at their height of nutritional value.

Sprouts can be eaten in salads – I like to mix mine with shredded carrots and beets in a lemon-and-wasabi sauce. Many people eat broccoli, alfalfa or radish sprouts on sandwiches instead of lettuce. Soybean sprouts, popular in Chinese cooking, are the only ones that are better cooked.

As mung beans cost very little and keep for years, you can get all your protein and many of your vitamins for only a couple of euros a week. You might love them, you might not, but you should have them handy for emergencies.

Remembrance Day

Veterans' Day to Americans. Photo courtesy of WikiCommons.

The view from our front gate

The one-lane gravel road curves around the canal.

Heating

As winter approaches, families in our area will heat their homes in a variety of ways – using oil heaters, propane, stoves that burn coal, wood and peat turf, and of course electricity. We will heat our rooms, our water tanks and our food, and the price of this heating seems to rise every year.

We need to think seriously about how we heat our homes, for a few reasons. First, the cost of heating and electricity seems to rise every year, even as we expect to face both more and more severe economic troubles. Second, many of our heating systems rely on fossil fuels, either directly – say, by burning oil in a home tank – or indirectly, by burning fossil fuels to generate electricity. Fossil fuels like oil have gone up and down in price in recent years, but will generally become more precious in the years ahead – and they worsen climate change. We should try to wean ourselves off them as much as we can.

One of the easiest ways to save on one’s energy bill and carbon emissions is to simply turn the thermostat down and use less. I am not a model citizen in this area – I moved to Ireland from land with hotter and drier summers, and am less tolerant of the Irish climate than natives are. I get my own back in the summer, when I happily bask in the lukewarmth and those around me are panting and sweating. Either way, though, it teaches us that we are adaptable --- there are people who live in 50-degree deserts and polar icecaps, and we are perfectly capable of surviving a slightly cooler home.

You can, of course, buy long thermal underwear, thermal socks and multiple layers. You can, of course, keep the heat off when you are not at home, and you can heat only the room you will occupy in the evenings. We also generate our own heat, so families keep warmer when they spend the evenings playing games than when they each stare at their own computers in separate rooms. We can also use hot water to warm us in various ways – holding hot water bottles, sipping hot tea or soup and keeping our feet in baths of hot water in the evenings.

Another simple way of coping with the winter chill is to use passive heating. This can take the form of a south-facing conservatory, or a polytunnel for your garden. Consider putting a polytunnel right up to your back door, to have an inexpensive place to sit outside and keep plants all winter. Consider whether it is feasible to put a half-conservatory on the south side of your home, creating a garden patio and slowing the loss of warm air.

Wood-burning stoves might not seem like the greenest solution, but they can work well if you have a good supply of fast-growing wood. We have dozens of willow trees which we pollard, resulting in piles of firewood that renew annually, along with many fast-growing pine trees. As long as you grow back as much wood as you are using, you are not damaging the environment or the climate.

It’s hard to get too much home insulation, and most of us don’t have enough. If you want to add more insulation yourself, consider using fleece – farmers might have some left over, and a fleece will trap heat without introducing toxic chemicals into the home – and it does not catch fire. Whether you use fleece or the more conventional insulation, however, it will probably help you save that much extra at a time when we all need it.

Photo: me and Girl in Minnesota.