Food security - what does it even mean?

I was born in a Jewish-Russian family in the USSR, early '80s. We were lucky that my parents decided to leave the USSR and managed to do so in the very early '90s, just before the collapse of the USSR. People that stayed had to live through a very tough period of time, when they were not paid for months (despite performing their work as usual), and even if they were paid, there was hardly anything to buy. Many had to grow vegetables at their cottages, if they had those, or in random forest or abandoned city lots just as a means to survive.

Even growing up, before the actual collapse, there were continuous shortages of food. To be fair, a lot of those shortages began in the '80s, when I was born. Nothing we thought of as abnormal, since that was all we knew. Mandarins were available only around Christmas time and were considered a delicacy and one of the "must have" presents for the kids. I remember loving bananas, probably mainly since they were not freely available. Come fall, we would make huge batches of sauerkraut, buy and put away in the root cellar a whole whackload of potatoes for the winter, pickle tomatoes and cucumbers, pick berries and make jams, pick mushrooms and pickle and dry them. Even living in a large, industrial city (Yekaterinburg, formerly Sverdlovsk, formerly Yekaterinburg), having that root cellar full of vegetables and preserved food likely meant a less stressful winter.

In Canada, people have been lulled by the constant presence of huge amounts of food. Here people don't think about how they're going to go through the winter, because there's a constant supply of produce from around the world. While that gives one peace of mind, it also means that we eat out of season, amply support the oil industry, and can get swept away by the effect of globalization on supply and pricing, which also drives the smaller farmers out of work globally. One example is the sharp increase in food price in general, and rice price in particular in 2007-2008. As an affluent country, Canada probable didn't really notice, but others certainly did. How long will this buffer of affluence protect Canadians from fluctuating and rising food prices?

One of the things that reminded me of this recently was the price of almonds. I used to buy them in large bags, ~ $11/1 kg, which is outrageously cheap. Overnight, those bags became $22. It took me a while to figure it out, but then I remembered that California provides a staggering 82% of the world's almonds, and California is having a VERY rough time. And almonds are just a very small example.

So what does food security mean to me, personally? Food security to me means that we know where our next year's worth of food comes from. It means that the availability of our food will not be based on whether grain-exporting countries are supporting biofuel instead of feeding their people or the price of oil. Specifically, Josh and I feel that we have to eat much more locally (otherwise, we fall into the globalization rabbit hole), and that requires some imagination and will power during the cold Canadian winters. I will be buying as much as I can locally (farmers' markets and potentially CSA) and try to grow and put away as much food as I can for the winter. This winter, we had 30 liters of home-made plum jam, 10-20 liters of different salsas, and 20 liters of pickled tomatoes and cucumbers to keep us happy. I hope that as we get better at things, our pantry will look closer to this:

It's not waste, it's an opportunity!

Let's talk about toilets. We sit on the throne, do our business, wipe, pull on a lever, and feel all clean and sparkly, never having to deal with our own waste. This process requires copious amounts of water, crazy piping systems, and large-scale effluent treatment (can you say wasteful, expensive, and complicated?). It leads to a whole variety of problems, ranging from clogged pipes, pest infestation, the occasional overflowing during floods, etc... (I omitted links to pictures and sites, I'm sure you'll understand). In the rural areas, where urban sewage is not an option, septic tanks are usually required, coming with the added bonus of occasional tank pumping, tank backup, and septic failure ("Most septic systems will fail sometime" - what?? I didn't actually know that).

In the meantime, the process does not need to be gross or complicated. Poop is basically future earth, it just needs to be reminded of it :-) By composting the waste (also lovingly called humanure), you can avoid creating a smelly health hazard and instead create compost, the stuff happy food grows in. If you think about it, animal manure has been used for soil amendment for as long as humans farmed. We're just as good at producing the stuff, why not use it properly?

Is it gross? No, it shouldn't be. Here's a good and humorous list of the reasons why a flush toilet is actually way, way grosser. We just don't think about it, because flush toilets are the current mainstream paradigm (= because that's how we currently do things).

So there we had it, hippie-mode Sima meets urban, kinda squeamish Josh (wasn't there a TV show about that?). There were several mildly heated discussions, one moment where Josh asked hopefully "well, can put one regular toilet in the house, just in case?", but I stood my ground, and we have a winner! Looks like we'll be getting one of these slick things:

Considering that you can use things like dry grass clippings and cedar wood shavings to "flush" your goods, that bathroom is going to smell awesome. At least, we sure do hope so!

Cleaning our house, cleaning ourselves

I have not used deodorant since... I'm not actually sure. Sometime in summer 2013? In fact, I forgot where it was the one time I did want to use it this year. I have not used shower soap since December 2013. No, I do not stink, at all. Josh keeps forgetting that I don't use soap, and has that surprised look on his face every time it comes up.

We have both made big strides toward decreasing the amount of chemicals we use at home both for cleaning and personal hygiene products. What drives me is my hippiness and the fact that maintaining a healthy greywater system will require us to not use heavy any chemicals. What drives Josh is a mystery, but simplicity, $$ saved, and a desire to please me probably all play a role.

The key to all of our house cleaning supplies? Realizing that we don't actually need a lot of the cleaning products we buy. Eliminating the unnecessaries, a bit of edibles (vinegar, baking soda, lemon juice), Dr Bronner's castile soap, and some elbow grease work for the rest. Examples -

• We do not have air fresheners; since we've reduced our meat consumption, smelly bathrooms have not been an issue. 
• I only use water and a brush to clean the toilet (and no, it doesn't smell or try to take over the world), eliminating any nasty toilet-cleaning chemicals. 
• We use Dr Bronner's for most things like hand soap, bathtub and sink cleaning. 
• Josh uses a mix of vinegar and soap in a spray bottle as his "doomsday weapon" against clothing stains, windows, and such other things. 
• When running the dryer, we use wool laundry balls (hehe, balls) with a couple of safety pins in them to 1) reduce drying time, and 2) remove static, and have not needed formalin-infused dryer sheets. 
• This weekend I finally mixed up our own laundry detergent. 

Personal care -

• Twice now, we've tried the no-shampoo approach, for approximately a month or two. The second time it worked better, but I still have to figure out the perfect concoction. 
• For my "beauty products" I use oils and food items - castor and jojoba for oil cleansing, same + nutmeg for an amazing scrub, argan oil for moisturizing, coconut oil for the occasional hand moisturizing. 
• No shower soap for me, just water and a cotton shower cloth do marvelously well.
• No deodorant at all for me, and Josh only uses his during the workweek.

Overall, this means that we have far fewer chemicals around the house. Less money paid to the big companies, less worries about anyone ingesting anything horrible, and much happier lungs and noses. Honestly? Cleaning yourself or your house should not be leading to "occupational asthma and other respiratory illnesses" (see in full). Our grandmas kept sparkly-clean houses and laundry without an army of bottles under their sink or in their bathroom. I'm sure we can do just as well...

Greywater system

I have put a fair bit of thought into incorporating a full greywater system in our (future) house. Greywater encompasses any wastewater that does not contain human poop. Once Josh was on board with a composting toilet (yay!), utilizing the rest of our water properly just made sense. In a time when water resources are getting very scarce (US example, UN facts, China) and water pollution is increasing (no support links needed, I hope), we both feel that it's important to reuse and clean up whatever water waste we produce...

There are fantastic (and free!) resources for planning one, e.g., this and this. NB being NB, government regulations aren't super helpful for doing things using common sense and physics, rather than by-the-book and grid-based. The current regulations stipulate that a "non-conventional" sewage system must be designed by an engineer and installed by a licensed person (I have still not been able to find one of the latter). Since our kinda-neighbours on the Kingston peninsula are building a legitimate off-grid Earth Ship, complete with all the permits, we could basically follow in their footsteps (= creep up on their FB page and find & hire all the people that did the work for them).

Once I talked to the environmental engineer that designed their greywater system, I got discouraged. He suggested we use a septic tank and a pump, both things that I was trying to avoid - greywater that sits for > 24 h will become fetid, and relying on pumps may be a big mistake. Apart from pushing us to use system components I didn't want to use, the exercise would be quite expensive (and that's before the installation costs!).

Josh provided the voice of reason, as usual. Current plan? Install a composting toilet and go ahead with a septic tank/field "conventional" installation. However, plumbing design will also have to include stub outs - allowing us to incorporate a greywater system down the road, once regulation is more flexible and we have a better feel for what would work for us.

Of all our water will end up being used for irrigation. The initial treatments will likely include things like mycelium filtering and reed bed treatment. The outflow water will have to be lab-tested a few times under different scenarios to ensure proper filtration is taking place.

In the meantime, here's a picture of the system I thought up. I wonder, once we have our system up and running, how naive and silly will this look to me? Can only guess at how many details and important bits I didn't even think of at this point :-)

What's in our garbage?

In the past year or two, I have been slowly transitioning into a "Spaceship Earth" mentality. I have become exceedingly aware of how much garbage we produce - both Josh and I as individuals, and our society as a whole.

Until fairly recently, all refuse could be either composted (food scraps, old clothes, bodies of noisy neighbours) or reused/repurposed (broken tools, bricks, only somewhat used clothes). The idea of garbage as we know it surfaced when we came up with things that don't fall into these two categories - TVs, oil filters, car tires...

The amount of waste is just staggering. The average Canadian produces 777 kg of garbage a year (=1713 lbs); assuming 60 years of adult life, that makes 46,620 kg (=102,780 lbs) per person's adult lifetime. The only time we see it, is when there is a workers' strike (see examples from Toronto, Vancouver, Amsterdam, Naples). If you think "oh, I recycle, it's OK", consider the resources required to pick up the recycling, separate it, re-process, send it to the factories, and make things out of it again. Is it definitely better to recycle than to throw it out, but  it is best to either not have it or to reuse it...

As we transition to an off-grid mindset, we're trying to reduce our garbage stream as much as possible. Guesstimating by weight, compost accounts for ~ 75% of our refuse, recycling for ~ 15%, and garbage constitutes the remaining 10%. As a result, Josh and I have about 1 kitchen catcher bag of garbage every 3 weeks or so (21 L bags, we're guessing at ~ 5 lbs when full). That's considered very, very little (annual guesstimate average of 43.5 lbs of garbage or 65.3 lbs of garbage + recycling for each of us, an equivalent of 3.8% of the average Canadian). However, using this average, over the course of our lives together we'll produce > 4 tons of garbage (next 50 years =  2600 weeks = 866.7 garbage bags = 4,333 lbs of garbage for the two of us).

We decreased our garbage output by several steps. Recycling was a given, and composting using our back-yard pile was a huge step forward (composting isn't hard and doesn't require city pickup or much space, take a look here!). We compost anything that isn't meat (= 99.99% of our diet), as well as paper products - Kleenex and paper towels. I moved completely to reusable feminine hygiene products (no, it's not gross, and it's WAY better and cheaper). To store leftovers, we use containers instead of plastic wrap or foil. We stopped using parchment paper (granola and nachos don't stick if you stir/move them immediately after baking). What's left? Mainly packaging from breakfast cereal and nachos (Josh's 2 remaining sources of processed food), packaging from tofu and cheese (about 2 packages / month, on average), packaging from meat or fish that we buy (~ once a month on average), glass jars and bottles from the occasional sauce or condiment (BC, why you no recycle glass??).

While Josh is (rightfully) happy about the huge decrease in garbage output, my ultimate goal is to reduce both our garbage and recycling to almost nothing. How? Use cardboard and newspapers in the garden for sheet mulching, grow, store, and make anything we can, buy in bulk anything we can't grow. The day we stop buying packaged food altogether, I might throw a party. Let me know if you want an invitation :-)

The things we'll eat in the next 5-50 years

Permaculture gardens try to include as much variety as possible. One of the outcomes is that if one crop fails, there are still dozens of others that make it. My combined Russian-Jewish paranoia craves food security (WWII genetic memories, anyone?). The first time Josh saw my (very) long list of plants I wanted to have at our home, he was pretty worried - was this crazy Russian going to waste all of our money on thousands of trees? No, she was not. That said, the back-of-the-napkin calculation of the cost of this preliminary list is ~ $1,600. Considering that I was aiming for $1,500, we're not doing too bad, tree shopping spree or not :-)

The plan is to buy the minimum number of plants from each variety for now, and propagate (by cuttings or seed) the most successful ones. I'm also planning on propagating wild local plants like maples and chokecherries, low-bush blueberries, lingonberries, bunchberries, wild ramps, any amount of wild flowers, and whatever else I can get my little hands on.

The list is long, but the purchase and planting will happen over the course of likely three installments, starting in fall 2014, continuing in spring 2014 and (hopefully) ending in fall 2015. This way we'll have more time to get to know our land and its microclimates and properly prepare planting sites.

So here is the list. If you're curious enough, you can even see where the different trees were planned to go on the preliminary orchard design in my previous post!

Fruit trees -

• Apples (several varieties - yellow transparent, wealthy, Dudley, aurora gold gala, gold russet, and 2 mystery apple trees already present). Most of these (apart from the gala) are heritage varieties. Some are good fresh, some for cooking, some for storing over the winter.
• Crabapples - dolgo and scugog varieties; great for pollination, nectar for bees, and jams and jellies.
• Pears - Ritson and either Northbrite or Clapp or Patten variety.
• Plums - Toka and Superior varieties
• Quince - Cook's jumbo (gotta love the naming!) and Kaunching varieties. Quince are like super-hard apples; they really shine in jams, pies, and stews.
• Chums (a cross of cherry and plum) - Sapalta and Convoy varieties.
• Apricots - EZ pick variety
• Cherries - sour (Montmonercy) and sweet (Stella or some other variety)
• Paw Paw - the best kept secret in North America. It's called a poor-man's banana, is native to North America, and has that distinctive tropical taste to it - a mix of banana, custard, and baked apple, based on what I read.
• American persimmon - the other best kept secret in North America.

Nut trees -

• Butternut - a North American native tree, similar to walnut.
• Black walnut - another North American walnut-like nut.
• Heartnut - a Japanese walnut-like nut.
• Buartnut - a cross of butternut and heartnut; made for resilience and heavier crops.
• Chestnut - both Chinese and either American or American-Chinese cross.
• Hazel
• Pecan - there are cold-hardy varieties, and I can enjoy one of my Mediterranean favourites :)
• Hickory - a North American native.
• Pine - either Siberian or Korean, the best kinds of pine nuts.
• Almonds - there are cold-hardy varieties!
• American beech - a North American native, produces tasty nuts.
• Yellowhorn - a cold-hardy tree that produces nuts similar in taste to Macadamia nuts. Considering that I have actually looked into growing Macadamias in Canada (and no, you can't), this is a huge win for me and Josh. You do NOT want to know how much money I have spent on Macadamia nuts in Bulk Barn...

Small fruit and berries -

• Arctic and hardy kiwi - vines that produce kiwis that are as tasty as the regular fuzzy ones, but without the fuzz. Less work peeling and I can grow them in my yard. Sounds like a win-win to me!
• Currants - red, black, and white. A big favourite in Europe and Russia. Fantastic for fresh eating, smoothies, jams, pies, and just about everything else.
• Elderberries - great for jams and wine, and loved by bees and birds.
• Haskap - I know these from Russia, but they're fairly new in North America. Fantastic berries all around.
• Gooseberries - same
• Raspberries
• Highbush blueberries
• Saskatoon berries
• Highbush cranberries
• Mulberries 
• Sea buckthorn - very popular in Russia for both eating and the medicinal properties of the oil made from the berries.
• Cherry olives - a native North American small tree that fixes nitrogen in addition to making delicious berries full of antioxidants.
• Goji berries - considered a super-food for a while. To me, all berries are super food...
• Aronia berry - also called chokeberry (not to be confused with chokecherry!) - very nutritious berry producer.
• Strawberries
• Hip rose
• And a few native and introduced, small-fruit trees: nannyberry, Cornelian cherry, Cherry silverberry, Sand cherry, Nanking cherry
• Huckleberries
• Cloudberries
• Lowbush blueberries
• Bilberries
• Lingonberries

To seal off this epic list, a few indoor-grown trees:

• Meyer lemon - juicier and sweeter than the regular lemons you buy in the store
• Loquat - a huge favourite of mine from Israel, didn't even know you could grow them indoors!
• And maybe a kumquat, if I distract Josh long enough to make my online order without him stopping me ;-)

Our vision of (NB) paradise

As we were trying to narrow down the list of potential things to do with our land, we were doing a LOT of googling. Orchards, crops, chickens, ducks, bees, herbs, mushrooms, everything sounded like great ideas and was ours to discover. In one of my Google searches about organic techniques and approaches, I happened upon the permies.com forum. Within that evening, three more searches led me to the same site. Reading through the incredible amount of information on that forum, I was soon convinced that permaculture was the best bet for us. A few weeks of excited stories about all the new things I have learned, and Josh joined the permaculture front as well.

What is permaculture? It is a 'science of design', meant to create a truly sustainable living. It is a way to design and implement productive, self-sustaining systems, which do not require drudgery. For a good but short overview, take a look here. If in conventional farming the owners must work very hard every single day of their lives, permaculture farms aim to decrease this modern slavery over time by mimicking nature. With every passing year, a permaculture farm will be more productive and resilient and require less maintenance. The best go-to example is what is called a food forest - a forest made of fruit and nut trees, with a mix of interplanted berries and vegetables. The trees and most of the understory is perennial, and annual vegetables and flowers are allowed to reseed themselves freely, thereby minimizing maintenance. Compare that to a field of wheat that needs ploughing, seeding, and several applications of pesticides to make it through the growing season.

How is this low-work-high-awesomeness accomplished? By a mix of approaches -

• Managing rainwater to provide for future irrigation needs and eliminate soil erosion 
• Not turning the soil (i.e., no digging, tilling, ploughing) and not using pesticides ensures that all soil organisms, whether earth worms, bacteria, or fungi, are alive and well. Successful agriculture requires happy and living soil.
• Mulch, mulch, mulch - both protects the soil from erosion and retains moisture and nutrients.
• High plant diversity (big no-no to monoculture) to ensure ecosystem stability, as different plants provide different services - attracting pollinators, deterring pests, pulling nutrients into the top soil via deep roots, breaking up tough soil using root vegetables, etc.
• And the biggie - observe your own piece of nature and conform to it. Work with nature, not against it her. Arid areas should have mostly drought resistant plants; cold areas should rely on hardy varieties. Growing things that can't make it themselves will mean endless, futile, work for the farmer. 

The principles really appealed to us - planning things well, healing the soil and creating an ecosystem while growing our own food, and ensuring increased yields through decreased work sounded fantastic. I spent a few of the following months reading all I could get my hands on and dreaming about our own Garden of Eden (see below for a preliminary design).