Tag Archives: open-source

Acorn Acknowledgement; ‘Nuts as Staple Foods’ with Osker Brown; and More – for “The Creation of a Thousand Forests is in One Acorn.”

Acorns have great potential as a staple food. This may seem like it takes a lot of processing, but compared with conventional staple food sources with similar nutritional profiles and palatability, this and many other tree crops require less energy overall to enjoy, potentially require less capital as a cost-of-entry, and have numerous co-benefits. This calls for a different culture however, as there’s a shift in where much of the energy is expended in enjoying regional nuts and trees for basic needs:

In conventional systems, energy use and negative externalities occur “Not In My Backyard“, in rural areas and in far away oil and fertilizer producing places. In systems offering greater food sovereignty, resilience, and positive externalities, energy use is brought closer to the point of consumption and after the point of sale.

Shelf stability of acorns highlights a trade-off of this shift in the point of energy use to enjoy the crop: acorns and many nuts are very shelf stable, but when they’re processed enough to be ready to eat (e.g. as acorn tortillas or roasted hazelnuts) they become less shelf stable. This is not a critical issue, as acorn flour and many value-added nut products can last for weeks dried or refrigerated and be preserved for months or maybe years frozen. This trade-off affects the culture of use and markets for local nut crops:

Tree nuts are long-lasting, resilient, more intimate staple foods which require more labor close-to-home, but

tree for basic needs also bring home closer with the source of one’s well-being and being well in ecological mutualism with that which supports oneself.

And with this in mind, I give thanks to Osker Brown and Living Web Farm for the information below about acorns for landscapes and livelihoods.

Distribution of time for tasks to enjoy acorns:

  • 1/3 labor gathering and drying
  • 1/3 labor cracking, leaching, processing
  • 1/3 labor quality control, removing nuts with signs of mold

Gather & quality-control red oaks, dry, store in-shell . . . here is a very informative video series, starting specifically at part 5 which details home and community-scale acorn gathering.

Ready to prep for meals? De-shell red oak acorns using hammer, nut cracker, nut crucible…or for large home-scale (e.g. ‘5lbs batch weekly for two months’), Davebilt #43 nut mill has been found effective and robust.

Sort and quality-control, winnowing kernels from shells. Discard kernels that are not a shade of brown whether dark or cream colored, e.g. remove nut meat colored white, yellow, green, or blue), discard shells for mulch or fuel or tanning.

Leech (various methods) until astringent flavor is no longer noticeable when tasting nuts. Dry. Break down further into flour using food processor or similar methods. To begin with cut with 50:50 all-purpose flour and use as you would all-purpose flour. Acorn flour can replace all purpose flour for many recipes.

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An Agroforest Manifesto: the Prime Directive of Perma(nent Agri)culture

https://permies.com/t/59524/Prime-Goal-Permaculture#506066

We urgently need to act to reverse our direction of widespread, rapid & accelerating, deep degradation of Earth’s resources and processes we rely on for survival. Our response needs to be faster than that of governments, and we cannot rely on those invested in degrading ways as they will be an obstacle-or-worse until converted by being shown better ways that they can see from their greedy perspectives. We must act with the long-term care-taking mentality in which it is clear that helping that-which-helps-oneself is…helpful to oneself! We must do the simple and obvious – and fast – to mitigate and adapt as much as possible. We must do the most practical and broad scale – at the foundations of our wellbeing – to mitigate and adapt as much as possible. We must farm and support farms that are both producing what we need and conserving what we need: farms with diversity to increase resilience for farmers and societies; farms with trees to provide long-term value generation while reducing costs of crop nutrient- and risk- management; and a number of other scientifically-supportes, time-tested techniques currently in action but not on nearly a large enough scale. Farmers control the ecology of vast, vast tracts of land. We must act to reverse degredation, to regenerate livelihoods without insurmountable and unending debt, to regenerate landscapes with nutrients and healthy cycles rather than toxins and worsening margins. We must act while in this relatively peaceful period, for it is much easier to shift gears and start building (rather than losing) healthy topsoil on a farm than on the desert conventional farms leave in their wake.

‘The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The next best time is now.’

Tuning the Antenna

“There is a common misconception that the good things in life come from being in the right

place at the right time. In truth, everything that is good comes from being on the right channel with the right reception.

This is what the sages call z’chut—sometimes translated as “merit.” What it really means is a kind of fine-tuning of the soul.

How do you fine-tune the soul? You have three knobs: What you do, what you say and what you think. Adjust them carefully for static-clean reception.”

Rabbi Tzvi Freeman

via http://facebook.lightsofkabbalah

With that, and the following observations at my station, I took a step back from Facebook, though I do appreciate some of its services as human networks are indeed wondrous! Wondrous in a way as to remind me of a quote dubiously said to be spoken by a king, “My magician’s have their heads in the highest heavens and their feet in the lowest hells!”

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Exploring Solarpunk

The world is in need of more hopeful outlooks.

Exploring various links out of the extensive Solarpunk: a Reference Guide gives me a feel for a budding genre. The library of solarpunk content is relatively sparse yet inspiringly diverse. It is a genre that extends from books to fashion to video games. In being so sparse yet diverse, the genre may come off as spread thin or lacking direction, yet at the core of each connection between nodes there is a strong fiber.

What is that fiber? Having only glanced at its surface, it appears to me to be: the radically optimistic near-future vision of the world, shifted from ecological-exploitation to ecological-harmony, blooming with *regenerative lifestyles and landscapes*. This act of envisioning a better world reminds me of my related experiences/writings (From Mind to World: Envisioning a Better World In Route to Building a Better World), deeply appreciating the power of imagining better ways.

Perhaps it is not just a strong fiber, but a fiber which regenerates! And in that, I suspect, is the movements punky nature. May this genre plant seeds and this movement build soils. Continue reading →

internet_madness

1. net neutrality – ah what a tangled web we weave
 
skeptical of mega corporations
skeptical of big government
skeptical of unauthenticated opinions (be it via paid trolls or simply simpletons)
…
thankful for the spiders
 
time to decentralize
localize
theorize: what could the internet be like?
we’re probably only a hop and a skip (rather a wireless transmit) away from mesh networks being able to turn cloud computing into fog
 
2. and in other news from the caverns of the internet:
bitcoin and other cryptographic currency was meant to be a currency(!) but has become a penny stock.
distributed ledgers, contracts, and authentication technology could no doubt prevail, but would it be as bitcoin? ethereum? …jp morgan’s version of ethereum? in any case, let’s hope it’ll be open source, at least for security’s sake.
in the mean time, good game & congrats to those who made bank on the wobbling web, and to the rest interested – hold on! (“The price was the least important thing about Bitcoin when I first read the whitepaper. It still is.” – Emin Gün Sirer)
 
3.

Indigenous * Technology

It’s interesting to find a lot of solutions for improving one’s life nowadays in seemingly opposite ends of a spectrum: modern technology (e.g. motors, computers) vs. indigenous ways (e.g. Traditional Ecological Knowledge). This is written with the will to transform the “vs.” to an “&”. The challenges of today are of a scale that calls for modern technology, yet are of a depth that calls for indigenous ways.
A couple of examples – by no means an exhaustive list – to clarify the importance of…

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