Playing For Change - Peace Through Music

See "Playing For Change" Peace Through Music, an interview by Bill Moyers, of Mark Johnson, a young man who created a moving documentary, recording and mixing 100 street musicians all around the world, simultaneously playing songs we all know and love.

Love, Michael

"Farmer in Chief", by Michael Pollan (my hero!)

Michael Pollan, author of "Omnivore's Dilemma" and "Botany of Desire", two incredible books about our global human relationship with FOOD, has written a "letter to the next President Elect", in the NY Times Magazine, Oct.9, 2008.
For this important and visionary essay, Jerome believes that Pollan deserves a Pulitzer Prize. Here he tells the next President of the US that we must completely rebuild our food production and distribution system, not just nationally but globally, and that this effort will form primary solution components for health care, environmental quality and global warming problems.
Click on the chapter you want to hear below, then click "play" on the next page, and I will read Michael Pollan's essay for you. You may also click "download", and put these audio files on your ipod. (the player "loops", so you must actively hit "stop" at the end, or just "play" the next chapter)
1. Dear Mr. President-Elect: (play time 10:22)
2. How we got here: (play time 07:06)
3. Re-solarizing the American Farm: (play time 16:48)
4. Re-regionalizing the Food System: (play time 09:10)
5. Rebuilding America's Food Culture: (play time 12:52)

Thank you for listening, and for helping build a sustainable future!

Homebrewers Impasse

Here's the story of the "Great Beer Accident", for your listening pleasure.
Just click here, click "play" on the next page, and I'll read it for you.
(playing time 8:07)
Enjoy listening!
MT

Maude

Our backyard apricot tree is having another bumper crop, her fourth year in a row. I named this tree "Maude", after an original Basaltine, Maude Elmont, who was the longest running "Postmaster" ( she refused to tolerate being called "post-mistress") in Basalt's history. Maude died in 2001, at 101 years of age.

Maude was our neighbor, and she was the "Apricot Lady" of Basalt. Her modest house shared it's 1/4-acre lot with 31 apricot trees. Two of the oldest and largest of these hung over the road, and people walking by often gathered a few from the ground in August. I'm sure that many of the neighborhood trees we harvest today sprouted from pits grown around Maude's house, and tossed around town.

Twenty-four years ago, I found a waist-high apricot tree growing in our front yard, under one of our century-old mountain maple trees. "You won't get much sun here," I thought, "you're moving to the back yard." Our "Maude" has thrived there since. She even recovered from the sudden shade we placed her in when we added a second story to the house, in 1997. I trimmed and pruned Maude every other year since, in an atempt to get her to be a second-story tree, so she could see around the addition, and I could prune and harvest her from the flat roof deck.

Maude was the Apricot tree from which we enjoyed "winter blossoms" all winter long, by placing pruned branches in a vase of water indoors. She even supplied our Christmas Tree, which I photographed into a slide show (click here).

Every day now, I'm on the roof deck, harvesting them as they ripen, between half-a-gallon and a gallon a day. Some of them I split and pit, arrange on cookie sheets and freeze, to store in big ziplock bags, for winter tarts, pies, jam and smoothies. The really soft ones I pit and run through the food processor with a small amount of sugar and some lemon juice, then freeze in ziplock-bag "bricks", to eat as apricot sorbet, quite a delicious treat.

Thank you, Maude!

CRMPI's "Phoenix" Greenhouse

Construction of the new greenhouse at CRMPI, the Central Rocky Mountain Permaculture Institute in Basalt, CO, is underway:
http://www.crmpi.org/

Over the past 25 years, Jerome Osentowski's permaculture institute has become world renowned as a great place to learn the arts of "permanent, sustainable agriculture", as permaculture is known. Here Jerome weaves together the plant, animal and insect communities into an orchestra, playing together to produce food for us. Using greenhouses and outdoor "forest gardens" CRMPI is a veritable Garden of Eden, located on an arid mountainside here.

In the Autumn of 2007, Jerome's tropical greenhouse, the largest of his four indoor growing spaces, burned to the ground in the middle of the night. Were it not for the Basalt Volunteer Firefighters and their speedy mobilization in the wee hours of a Sunday morning, Jerome's house and his Mediterranean greenhouse, home of his famous mature Fig Tree, would also have been lost.

Now, the old Nexus greenhouse Jerome helped plan and build for the Planted Earth Nursery in Carbondale 30 years ago, which they gave to him because they are no longer using it, is being re-assembled where his tropical greenhouse stood. Jerome gave half of the parts to the town of Carbondale, and we hauled the rest of them up the narrow, cliffside mountain road leading to his paradise, and we have begun to erect the frame for it's next incarnation as a renewed tropical house. It took us a long time to build a new foundation for the old trusses, but now the trusses are finally rising from the ashes. Before Winter sets in on us again, the banana, pomegranate and other tropical fruit trees and shrubs will be sheltered comfortably in their new home.

Big thanks to Eric, Jack, Kelly, Chris, Andreas, Zack, Brian, Danny, Deanna, and everyone else who are donating their time and energy to help bring "Pebble Beach" back to renewed life!

Noah

Noah Wilson is the eldest son of my friend Bice from Pratt Institute, where we attended Architecture school. Noah is an extremely energetic and intelligent guy, filled with enthusiasm for any passion that seems important to him. He spent two years after high school learning to be a professional chef, and landed a job in a restaurant in Vermont. It wasn't long before he saw that he had more interest in learning to grow the food, than in learning how to make the best creme brule' in the world.
He told his Dad that he wanted to redirect his education toward sustainable agriculture and building anything and everything he perceived to be in need of a "new paradigm" for the future of his generation.
Right about this same time, Bice had learned about what we're doing here in Colorado, with our Eco Systems Design, and our Fat City Farms non-profit, starting up a school to "grow farmers" for an expanding wave of local organic food growing in the Rocky Mountains. I happened to be visiting New York City in March this year, so Bice conspired to have Noah meet me. We settled the next step in Noah's education, a month in Colorado, in early Spring.
When I met Noah, it didn't occur to me to ask if his name was part of his inspiration for wanting to study sustainable agricultural systems. Most of the young people I've met in the last half-decade are concerned with the future - their future - and the challenge of high energy costs that are sure to accompany it. They are focused on rebuilding the world with a "sustainable" infrastructure for energy, agriculture, housing, transportation, everything. They are all, in a sense, "Noahs" - seeking to salvage their future from a possible collapse of unsustainable practices.
Noah arrived ready for anything. He came equipped for travel by bicycle, adventure on skis in the mountains, and he came with his own chef's knife and a bag full of exotic spices. This young man, a towering 6'-7" tall skinny guy with dark hair and a funny beard - would become our personal chef and cooking instructor. Before Noah arrived, we thought we knew how to cook.

When Noah made dinner, it was fantastic. Every vegetable was finely shredded with his razor-sharp chef's knife, and sauteed with all kinds of worldly spices I had never heard of: curry leaves, turkish pepper, mustard seed, too many to name. He always made too much food, which pleased me no end, because I am a leftovers freak. After several days of Noah's cooking, I looked in the refrigerator and said, "Hey, we have enough leftovers for a whole dinner! Let's have leftovers tonight!"
My mouth watered at the prospect of revisiting the cuisine of the past several evenings, but when Noah announced that dinner was served, I was surprised to find that he hadn't just re-heated the leftovers, he had completely re-invented them. Noah had re-cooked them with more and different spices, harvesting some early chives and mint from our garden, plucking dandelion leaves from our awakening lawn and sauteeing them with some baby arrugula, also just emerging in my raised beds, volunteers from last year's crop. It was a whole new delightful meal, not leftovers at all.
I thought about secretly hoarding some of these new leftovers in a neighbor's refrigerator while he is away, and sneaking into his house late at night, to revisit some of Noah's culinary delights.

Noah's arrival coincided with a landmark meeting of the "food groups" in our valley, a "summit meeting" of our Fat City Farms, several local farmers, our local chapter of Slow Food International, our Children's Health Foundation, Aspen's Canary Initiative, our local cheese-monger, and a rancher bent on raising a series of milk-producing animals for cheese making. Noah got to meet them all, to listen to our plans for re-creating a local food production network, and to tell everyone why he wants to help create this line of work. Just in the few months since Noah was here, gasoline prices have gone from $4.00 to $4.60 per gallon in our area, and they are predicted to reach $5.00 by the end of the year. It's no wonder we have people planning to grow food nearby.
April is also fruit-tree pruning season around here, so Noah got intensely involved in learning how different species - apple, pear, apricot, plum and cherry, grow and respond to pruning. It was great to have his help, and not just because the work went quicker and with fewer ladder relocations because of his height, but because Noah learns very quickly. After helping me to prune Mo, our apple tree, and Maude, our apricot, Noah became a pruning instructor when we helped two groups of Heritage Fruit Tree adopters at nearby orchards. It was like being in two places at once, listening to him teach someone in a tree on the other side of the orchard, how the tree wants to be pruned, and how it will respond to the cuts they were making. Noah had me include a set of hand pruning shears and folding saw in my next order, and they arrived before he left. He used them while visiting his uncle in California, where he pruned somebody's tree, making his tool investment back, and then some.
We will enjoy hearing from Noah as he travels the path he has chosen, leading next back to college, with a very strong compass setting in agriculture and design. We hope he'll come back occasionally though, to our small home in the mountains, to "guest chef" and help us burn the dinner candles down.

Aspen Homegrown CSA

What's a "CSA"? Community Supported Agriculture, otherwise knows as "subscription farming", is a bargain between the farmer, growing vegetables and/or meat directly for the consumer, and the consumer, who is often part of a buying club. The farmer gets the consumer's subscription money up front, and provides a bountiful bag of food, usually once a week.
Our Fat City Farms non-profit, whose mission is to "Grow Farmers", is funding a "CSA Farm School" in the Roaring Fork Valley of Western Colorado, this summer of 2008. The school is off to a great start! Some of the students have already started up their own CSA Farm, called "Aspen Homegrown", and the Eagers-Thompson household is a proud charter member.
Our first bag of fresh produce arrived on Wednesday, June 25th, and the second week's supply arrived yesterday. We're not finished eating last week's food! Help!
We are eating salads for lunch and dinner, and still we must give away some to the neighbors. It appears to me that the dream of abundant local food is not just a dream, but a distant goal we are working toward, a little closer every year.

Bon appetit!

Composting - a Sheet-mulch Method

People tell me all the time that they can't compost at home, because the smell will attract bears and other wildlife to their yard.
Here's a method we call "sheet mulching", done in a way that discourages wildlife. The primary access barriers are straw to reduce odors, heavy wire mesh panel to restrict digging or burrowing critters, and a few heavy flagstones, so the mesh panel cannot easily be removed.
Of course, I must qualify that with the story of the REALLY BIG BEAR who entered my backyard years ago, during an especially lean drought year. The bear flipped the flagstones across the yard, tossed the mesh panel after them, and proceeded to munch down on rotten veggies, straw, dirt and worms. When I saw the evidence the morning after, I couldn't imagine how hungry the poor bear must have been, to stoop so low on the food chain.
I won't go into too much detail describing this sheet mulching method, because the pictures should suffice. The layers are simple:

• Flagstones, over
• Mesh panel (heavy-duty fencing mesh, galvanized steel) over
• Straw (preferably chemical free), about 3" thick, loosely laid, over
• Garbage (without meat products, just organic plant matter) over
• Last week's garbage, straw, soil and worms - pull back the loose straw, spread new garbage over old, and cover with some old, some new straw, then water generously. The worms will come up and start processing immediately.

Oh, one last thing, which I did not include in the photos - the best critter repellent you can use is urine - piss on the wet straw just before you replace the flagstones. Men might have an easier time with this than the ladies, but it can be one good reason for a gal to keep a man around.
Happy composting!
MT

Spring Skiing on Sopris

My daughter March, my friend David Bedford and I went for a Spring Ski on Mt. Sopris, Sunday June 1, 2008.

Fruit Blossom Christmas Tree

I have always frustrated the ladies in my house, especially the young 'uns, with my unorthodox Christmas Trees.
First there was the National Forest tree, harvested in the hills above Ruedi Reservoir, and hauled home on the roof of the VW Beetle we drove exclusively back in the 80's. The problem was one of perspective, when I had gone off to harvest this tree by myself, leaving the young ladies home to help Mom bake Christmas cookies. I failed to have with me the proper female representation, which would have resulted in a proper tree.
Instead, I selected a little, stunted tree that was being blocked from any hope of sun by three enormous trees, that did not look as if they were going to retire anytime soon. This scrawny thing was immediately christened "Dad's Charlie Brown Christmas Tree" by our then 5 and 7 year old daughters.
The next year, I visited our local tree rancher, and bought a small, beautifully shaped Colorado Blue Spruce, and a huge plastic pot to plant it in. For several years, I got away with bringing "Mr. Christmas" into the house on a hand truck, padding it's container with all kinds of insulating blankets to keep it from thawing and waking up. To the annual cries of our children, I moved Mr. Christmas back outside before New Years Day, so it wouldn't lose it's seasonal rhythms and die when shoved back into the cold. Eventually, the tree got too big to bring indoors, so I gave it to some friends to plant in the backyard of their new house.
Since then, we've tried a fake tree nobody liked, and a rusty-metal Christmas Tree Sculpture, which was a story all its own.
Our daughters came home for Christmas 2007, and I had installed a completely new kind of Christmas Tree, which met, finally, with their complete approval. Haley and March are in their twenties now, and independent. They are also, as life experience would allow, more tolerant, maybe even appreciative of their Dad's quirky ways.
This Christmas Tree was a large branch from our backyard Apricot Tree, rigged into a bucket of water in the corner of the Living Room, and wired with strings of tiny red lights. It looked very artful, if I don't say so myself. The ladies all loved it. I was happy too, because I'd used a live tree branch that I was going to prune off this winter anyway, and the parent tree would live on, making new branches and new fruit every year.
Imagine our surprise, when two weeks after I had installed this Christmas Tree, flowering buds began to pop open all over the branches. In the next several weeks, the branch rewarded us with a full display of hundreds of Apricot blossoms. They filled the house with their beautiful spring aroma. (You can see a slideshow of the blossoms by clicking here)
For the rest of the winter, I gained a new perspective, and incentive, for pruning fruit trees. Our house became an arboretum, with vases in every room, sporting apple, pear, plum and cherry branches, all of them growing blossoms and/or leaves. Those with only leaves turned out to be from trees taking the 2008 season off from fruit production. A handy preview tool, these winter blossoms.
Would you like to have a blossoming Christmas Tree next winter? Stay tuned to this blog, where I will publish a way for us to get together and place local Holiday blossoms in as many homes as we can around here. We will also have our plans for this "Fruit Blossom Christmas Tree" sale on our Fat City Farms website:
http://www.fatcityfarms.org

Re-grown Lettuce

My wife Jan brought home what seemed to be an over-packaged head of lettuce, one of these large heads of Colorado-grown Bibb Lettuce, complete with it's root ball (hydroponic?), in a large plastic bubble package. Don't always trust your first reaction. This may be treasure in disguise!

Indeed, when we finished eating the lettuce, I placed the root ball in a wide-mouthed glass of water, and left it to sit on the counter by the window. Three days later, voila! The plant is growing new leaves. I planted it in the garden after a week, but it was set back by a couple of hungry, marauding slugs. I had forgotten to fill the slug pool with some Bud, distracting them by opening the neighborhood pub. No matter, the head started growing again immediately when I did get the slug-distracting pool of beer installed.

The second head of lettuce like this we ate, I'm leaving it in the window for a week or two longer, let it get a good headstart on the pill bugs and slugs.

Now, what to do with the large plastic bubble?! It is recycle-class #1, so I could just toss it in the recycling bin, and know it will be headed back into clothing, new packaging, or whatever.

Or, I could save a few of these bubbles for autumn, when I harvest the lettuce again. Then I'll plant the root ball again, only this time back in the bubble, to protect it from the cool nights, while I see if we can harvest a round #3 from each head of early summer lettuce.