Local Business Highlight: The Tailored Touch

Broken zippers, ripped seams, or worn out elastic might be the end of a favorite article of clothing, or maybe not! Here's a listing for one of Hickory's Garment Repair shops. You might not have to say goodbye just yet!

The Tailored Touch
Kathy Crandall (Proprietor) 
10 21st Ave. NW #204 
Hickory NC 28601
(828) 322-3181

Business hours: 
Tues– Fri 12:00pm– 5:30pm, 
Sat 12:00pm–4:00pm 

Local Business Highlight: The Seat Doktor

Cane seat chairs are a real beauty. My great grandfather rescued and caned several chairs that have been passed down in my family. I have thought now and then, what will I do when these chairs need repair? I certainly won't be throwing them out!

I find it a real challenge to find skilled crafts people these days, but they are out there! Here's one such resource:

The Seat Doktor
Dick Knotts (Proprietor)
215 Lucky Hollow Rd.
Hickory NC 28601
(828) 495-3029
(Website) www.seatdoktor.blogspot.com (E-mail) canuist215@yahoo.com
By appointment
Seat weaving (hand and machine woven cane), color matching, pickup and delivery available, free estimates 

Thoughts on Meditation by John Wepner

 The Empty One

The empty one is the only one who has enough room to hold all the riches of the land.

But the empty one does not hold on to them, but keeps letting go.

And in letting go, the empty one creates room for more riches to enter.

Yet, the empty one does not care if riches or rags come in,

For they are the same to such a one.

The empty one wants to share the riches of the land with you,

but you are already too full of dull jewels and worn tapestries,

from all the roles that you play.

Only one who is empty enough has room to hold all the majesty of this world.

The empty one says, “Let go, and you too will be filled with all the riches of the land."

“Release your grasp, keep Letting go.”

By John Wepner

This empty one in this poem is in each and every one of us. The empty one is our awareness, the empty space that all we see and notice fills. Our awareness can hold everything, riches and rags. Often times we are so full of the dull jewels and worn tapestries of our ideas, stories, directions, emotions, that we miss the fullness that is present in each and every moment. This fullness is all the riches of the land, and only when we can become empty in our awareness of things, can we feel and notice it.

In the weekly meditation group I lead at The Wepner Wellness Center, our aim is just this. To become empty so that we can experience the riches of the land. Obviously it is easier said than done. Often times our minds are so woven into the fabric of our lives, that it takes time and dedication to allow the mind to unwind. It takes time for the mind to release its grasp on us.

I know when I started doing a daily meditation practice for myself, that it took a whole month and a half before I could sit in relative peace for ten minutes. Because I was committed to simply sitting for ten minutes each day, I could sit through my mind going nuts, it was a very unpleasant ten minutes day after day. Then almost as if it were magic, my mind stopped, and I could sit in peace. Like I said, it took a while for the magic to happen, but it did happen, and it was very pleasant. Now I am sure you would love to hear that I continued this practice and was able to sit in peace forever and live happily ever after, right? Wrong.

After maybe three weeks of being able to sit in peace for ten minutes a day, I lost my commitment and motivation, and stopped my daily meditation practice. Have any of you every experienced this? Where things were going too well and it got boring or you lost interest? On one hand I accomplished my goal of being able to find peace in meditation, and on the other I had given up that space I allowed myself each day to rest in. Life continued, and after a few months I sat to meditate again, expecting the peace I had found would still be there waiting for me. Guess what I found? I found my mind going nuts again. And again it took time to allow the mind to die down and rest. It took time to find peace again.

The moral of this story is finding the peace you want in your life comes at a cost. The cost is giving up the ways you keep it from yourself. For me, it was finding the time to simply sit for ten minutes in meditation, and then seeing it through. I had to give up my desire to keep letting my mind be the most important asset I had. In sitting in meditation I allowed something greater than my mind to take hold. 

In returning to meditation, I had to sit with the consequences of allowing my thoughts to rule me, sitting with my mind going nuts again. I still pay this price when I allow my mind to take over. In this world of ours, allowing our minds to run our lives is actually encouraged. That is why a regular meditation practice of sitting in stillness is important; it creates space for letting go of this false sense of control. I invite you to consider such a practice for yourself as well, especially as we enter a new year. The curative agent for all the business in our lives is not to find a better activity; it is to rest, to sit in stillness. And if you give yourself enough time, and are willing to see it through, I can guarantee you will find peace. Even if that peace only comes in fleeting moments, it is worth the endeavor. The peace and aliveness you will find in life contains all the riches of the land.

Blessings on this new year we co-create together,

John

Growing Power at the Interfaith Food Shuttle

This week's blog post was originally published in our February 2013 newsletter, contributed by Edward Marshall.

From the moment I'd heard of Growing Power, I wanted to visit. As it turns out, this fall I had the good fortune to attend a Growing Power workshop at Raleigh's Interfaith Food Shuttle, an urban farm site minutes from I-40 and the capital's downtown. Situated in a former industrial warehouse with approximately an acre or more of land, the location's proximity to consumers and markets was beset with the pollution issues of its past history and location.

Growing Power was started by Will Allen, a recent McArthur Genius Award winner who has created a revolutionary way of producing a bounty of farm fresh produce, fish, eggs, and compost in the shadows of Milwaukee, Wisconsin's housing projects. There's a plethora of press on this farmer, his techniques, and his Growing Power non-profit, and I highly recommend a virtual tour of his urban 2-acre operation for inspiration.

This weekend conference by Interfaith Food Shuttle was organized around the need to get their production up and running, with intensive on-site composting facilities, a 40' x 100' greenhouse, vermiculture bins, an aquaponics system, and specialty mushroom production.

Will Allen himself was on hand to jumpstart these systems. Aware of the pitfalls and solutions of raising food in the cities, especially the hazards of what lies in the soil, Allen knows that one solution is to literally build the soil from the ground up--rather than till down. Here are some highlights mixed in with some how-to's of the Growing Power systems from that weekend.

One other great feature of this conference was that Will Allen's Growing Power was able to bring together 130 people from across North Carolina and assemble them into productive teams. Teams of people worked on the following projects, making their assemblage so much easier for the needs of the Interfaith Food Shuttle. Community is key to successful regenerative farming, and Will Allen's group serves as a great model of farming, of serving the community, and of working together as a community. We achieve so much more through conscious interdependence than by holding onto the myth of ‘going it alone’.




Vermiculture

Will Allen likes to refer to Growing Power's earthworms as the best employees of the operation. One feature activity at this conference was to get vermiculture bins going.
Using these biological plows (worms) to eat spoiled produce, digest it, and excrete it as pH neutral fertility is both easy and sheer genius. In fact, when my wife (fellow We Are All Farmers Permaculture  Institute co-founder) and I lived in New York, we had two worm bins in our apartment that silently and without smell turned junk mail (non-glossy and non-color), receipts, and food scraps into beautiful compost.

If you want to know how to get started with vermiculture, it's easy to do, and here's how:

First rescue some 40 gallon+ plastic totes from the waste stream, or, buy some wherever fine plastic totes can be found.

Next, drill 1/4" holes across the bottoms for drainage, and some 1/8" holes 1" down from the tops.

Then, figure out a way to harvest the worm tea that will eventually leach from the bottom of the bins where you drilled the holes. This liquid gold is a fantastic fertilizer that will not burn your plants.
I have my bins perched on top of bricks, with the lid from the first tote placed on the floor below the bricks. Beneath this, I have a small tray that can collect the worm tea. Inside the bins, I layer scrap paper and kitchen scraps, and this is covered with a scrap piece of cardboard. Everything is kept moist like a damp sponge so that the worms can perform their work. New compostables are added as they appear into new areas of the bin, and this mixture is amended with scrap paper, leaves, and a sprinkling of soil to create a hospitable environment. In a few months time you'll notice that the worms will have turned your scraps into a friable black soil that is their castings. You can separate the worms and their egg sacs (tiny little light yellow-brown balls) from these castings and fertilize your seedlings and enrich your gardens.

Will Allen does exactly this, using custom wooden bins, to produce several million pounds of vermicompost annually to grow his custom salad mixes and sell as fertilizer.

Compost

At the workshop, Will Allen discussed the merits of building your garden soil on site, as all urban areas must assume that the ground they are working with is heavily contaminated. However, this is not a problem when you intervene in the urban waste stream, intercepting compostables such as spoiled produce and lawn clippings free of pesticides, mulch materials such as leaves and wood chips, and cardboard. These are used in various ways to build rich garden soils.

Here is how to make easy compost bins:

Gather recycled pallets.

Line with 1/4" hardware cloth to keep out rodents.

Screw the pallets together with carpentry screws to build a box from the ground up.

Mix spoiled produce with dry carbonaceous materials such as leaves, straw, or finely ground wood chips at a ratio of 1 part produce to 4 parts carbon, with a layer of compost of soil to top it off.

Repeat this layering process until the pallet box is filled.

At some point, a brave soul needs to climb on top and compress this mass further into the compost bin. It is watered to the state of a wrung out sponge, and a final pallet with hardware cloth is fastened to the top of the compost bin. Then, an adjacent compost bin is started. By the end of the conference there were twenty compost bins set up in the Growing Power tradition. These will be emptied in four to six weeks time into an adjacent empty compost bin, and finished compost that can be spread onto your garden beds should be realized in another four to six weeks time.

Bed Building

Will Allen discussed the importance of growing healthy food in the cities where it is needed most, while acknowledging that the cities' soil was terribly polluted from industry and automobiles. His solution was to build the soil up, and he demonstrated the creation of garden beds that were 36" high, 24" to 36" wide at the top, and that sloped down on the sides. These beds had a pathway that was 20" to 24" wide, and they were about 40' in length. Once you have the recipe, you can build them in any configuration that you want. Here's how.

Start with cardboard or scrap newspaper, and cover the site. This is your biodegradable weed barrier, so you'll want to layer this thickly to keep unwanted additions to your garden from joining the summer party.

On top of this, add several inches of compost. Then, add several inches of carbon, like leaves, leaf mulch, wood mulch, or straw. Then, add more compost. If you are envisioning lasagna, that's the appropriate image to keep in mind.

Now, add some more compost and mulch.

Top your new bed off with a healthy layer of leveled compost on the top.

You'll be able to plant into your new bed and mulch around the plants to conserve moisture and prevent weeds from taking over your hard work. In time, the 36" height will melt down quite a bit, so be prepared to continue enriching your garden beds with new compost. In between these beds are deep layers of wood chips to both cover the cardboard and hold water while suppressing weeds. In my design, I would plan these types of beds on the contour so that the pathways in between could harvest and slowly infiltrate water into the soil and moderate the need for irrigation.

Aquaponics



This example of system's thinking has made Growing Power's reputation, through the combination of growing fish in tanks and filtering their waste-laden water through grow beds of high value greens for fertilization of the greens and filtering of the water. It is then returned via gravity to the fish tank. I participated in this workshop, and after going over the biology and economics of this system in the morning, we built it in the afternoon out of treated dimensional lumber and 45 mil pond liner.



Mushrooms

We also learned about integrating mushrooms with garden beds as a way to further break down woody materials into garden soil, as a way to harvest a mushroom crop, and as way to further stack functions into greenhouses. For example, shiitake logs can be suspended above the aquaponic tanks to harvest moisture from the tanks, and produce a valuable crop in an underutilized space. Oyster mushrooms were grown to continue breaking down compostables into valuable garden soils for vegetable production. These mushrooms were also grown in hanging chandeliers that were hung throughout the greenhouse, again harvesting moisture from the fish tanks and producing valuable food in an underutilized vertical space.

Greenhouse building

With the greenhouse building workshops, in two days the Interfaith Food Shuttle had a working 20' x 60' greenhouse where there had previously been vacant industrial soil. All the materials were ubiquitous--parts for chain-link fences, dimensional lumber, electrical conduits, and common construction fasteners. The exceptions would be the UV stabilized greenhouse plastic and the greenhouse cross-bracing hardware for the purloins. Inside, we replicated Will Allen's garden bed construction techniques to create four 36" high garden beds to produce out-of-season produce.

Conclusion

Again, this was a great weekend of community for the cause of increased food responsibility (our preferred term to independence). It was a privilege to witness Allen's work, to work to benefit the Interfaith Food Shuttle, and to hone more of my alternative farming methods.
--Edward Marshall

Edward Marshall is the co-founder and principal instructor of the We Are All Farmers Permaculture Institute in Union Grove, NC. In addition to three free workshops a year for non-profits, the We Are All Farmers Permaculture Institute runs permaculture design courses to foster food responsibility, community, systems design, and alternative skills. Their spring course begins Saturday, Feb. 2, 2013. Sign up for their courses and learn more at www.weareallfarmers.org, by calling (704) 592 2557, e-mail weareallfarmers@gmail.com or by visiting them on Facebook.

From Concept to Reality

by Uncle Bear

After reading Melissa Napier’s excellent essay “Plastic Bags,” in the Foothills Transition newsletter, September 2012, my thoughts were, “What a great concept. Imagine my not using plastic grocery bags (PGBs). I bet I can do this.” Then reality set in.

What would I do without PGBs? While I grew up before they existed, now they’re an integral part of my daily life. Stop using PGBs? Was it possible? Slowly I began to develop a plan to do just that. Three days later I put it in motion.

Standing in a checkout line with four small items I smiled. My purchases would fit nicely in the tote sack I carry.  This would be, “One small step in reducing my use of PGBs, and one giant leap toward helping save Mother Earth.”

Arriving home I realized I would have immediately put the (now offensive) PGB to use. “Now what am I to use? And, what am I going to do when my stock of PGBs was exhausted and I had no replacements?”  were my thoughts. Because I save and use plastic bread wrappers (PBWs), it occurred to me, I could try substituting a PBW for a PGB.”  With childlike amazement I watched myself easily make the switch.

In the final analyses how close to “PGB free” can I become? I don’t know. I do know, however, I’m enjoying all the challenges connected with trying.

CORNWELL ON COB

By Robyn Cornwell, CSBA

OK, I’m sorry, but I just had to write that title. And no, cob has nothing to do with corn-on-the-cob. It has everything to do with green building – just about the greenest building, in fact, that you can imagine. Not only that, it can cost you from $100 to $3,000 to build your own home using cob – dirt cheap! You heard me right. And, green in this case means that the clay has the property of drawing impurities OUT of the air instead of adding toxic substances to it.

That is because cob is a material made up of clay, sand and straw – all of which can be either dug from your own land or bought very cheaply, or obtained from a friend who might give it you. In fact, if you are observant you might notice construction going on where they must dig up a lot of clay and then find a place to put it, which might just as well be your yard, saving them umpteen tipping fees if you know what I mean.

In my plan, almost one quarter of the circle is enhanced with closet space (something all you women out there might appreciate), which I think doubles rather effectively as insulation – something cob is not. In fact, since part of that is the north side of the house, I might just add some straw bales for insulation on that side, or some other material in between two layers of cob for that purpose. The south side is a long stretch of windows – ideal for passive solar, but may pose a problem in terms of structure: windows must have a lintel above them unless they are arched – so this is something I will need to research. The w/d is really just a washer as I would utilize a solar dryer (read clothesline), and the toilet may very well be a composting toilet even if code requires a septic system.

The shower is made of cob with a special type of plaster coating it to make it waterproof as well as quite attractive. And yes, that is a two-burner stove since that is all I ever use. Note the kiva against the southwest wall which is a cob oven that works extremely well for steady radiant heating in addition to baking bread. Of great consideration to me was designing the home with all the water use concentrated in a small area, hence the kitchen and bath back-to-back. Also, putting the kitchen and bed in the middle of the space alleviates having to deal with the traditional problem of how to break up a round design (pie shapes really do not work well).

Ordinarily, you would dig a trench going below freezing depth – generally two feet – and add gravel along with conduit to wherever you want water and utilities to go, and along wherever you will be installing a foundation for the cob walls. At the cob workshop, we were able to skip this step as we were building on a ledge of limestone, plus there was no water or electricity to bother with either since this structure is only meant for outdoor use (namely, spirit worship). So we built the foundation of large stones directly on the ledge mortaring them together with concrete, not letting it show from the outside (especially since concrete is definitely not green due to its huge embodied energy). We leveled this off at about 18” high, and it is two feet thick, by the way, typical of cob walls.

Next, we mixed the clay, sand and straw by stomping on it with our booted feet on numerous tarps. As soon as a group of mixers got their cob mix ready they shouted “cob toss” and we all lined up to throw their balled up mix (what “cob” really means) to each person in the line just like a water bucket brigade until it gets to the wall where other people are waiting to pack it into the wall.

Only later did we discover that there is a much less labor-intensive way to do this, so instead of taking weeks to mix the amount of cob you need by boot stomping, you can utilize a Bobcat to drive over the mixture and have it ready in minutes (sounds really good to me). Then, you can drive it to the staging area, replacing the fun you could have had with the cob toss – not to mention all the mud you could have gotten all over yourself and others in that process. In addition, you can use the plow of the Bobcat to stand on when you need to reach higher levels, instead of climbing on less stable bales of straw.

Our instructor, Christina Ott, explaining to us the reasons the wall fell down: In addition to the rain (the least of it), the fact that we built it up too fast (under orders, I might add) as it did not have enough time to dry between layers, may not have been the best formula of clay versus sand versus straw, we did not stitch it in properly,  and was not kept plumb as we built, meaning “Get your saws ready.” The day of the wall failure the workers were notably quite late getting back from lunch.

Worker sawing the wall to make it plumb (so it won’t fall down again). Note the wood blocks stuck in the wall in preparation for a door frame. Note too, the popularity of wearing coveralls – the better to protect oneself from the errant ways of the cob tossers.

If all of this intrigues you in the least bit, you might check out a book by the original cob builder and instructor, Ianto Evans, called The Hand-Sculpted House. The cob workshop is offered by Christina Ott at www.barefootbuilder.com.

And, if you have any questions about my house plan (or anything else), you can reach me at 828-758-0880 or robyncornwell@yahoo.com.

FUEL YOUR CAR WITH PERMACULTURE

By Robyn Cornwell

I could tell you all about how to grow nitrogen-fixing plants during the winter season, like with Austrian field peas or clover. But, that is about all there is to it, and now there is a whole lot of space to fill on this page.

So instead, here is a review of a very interesting book: Alcohol Can Be a Gas! Fueling an Ethanol Revolution for the 21^st Century, by David Blume. For all you doubters out there, here is a 1980s newspaper excerpt featuring an interview with Buckminster Fuller who also contributed a forward to David Blume’s book:

“If you were in charge of the energy program, what would be the first thing you’d do? – J.I., Anderson, S.C.

B.F.: The first thing to do to solve our energy and gasoline problems is to emulate the Germans in WW II. The Allies cut off the German petroleum supply. The German scientists immediately undertook to employ the natural-energy income from the sun as harvested photo-synthetically by the trees and all other vegetation. The German scientists then produced four kinds of alcohol, and from those alcohols they produced the synthetic rubber, all their high octane gas for their airplanes, all animal foods and plastics in general. Though full records are held by the American intelligence of this operation, none of this is being referred to in the present emergency.”

David Blume is a qualified authority: In 1970 he taught his first ecology class; 1978-79 he taught 7,000 people how to produce and use low-cost alcohol fuel at home or on the farm; when KQED (San Francisco public radio) asked David to air a ten-part series Alcohol as Fuel, it was squashed by the oil companies who threatened to pull out their funding! Since 1993 Dave has led the permaculture-based International Institute for Ecological Agriculture that is establishing a biofuels station that offers alcohol fuel in a driver-owned cooperative. He has consulted all over the world and the USA.

Dave busts the myths (all the result of excellent propaganda): 

“It takes more energy to produce alcohol than you get from it!
Fact: The most exhaustive study on the energy balance, by Isaias de Carvalho Macedo of Brazil), shows an alcohol energy return of more than eight units of output for every unit of input – and this study accounts for everything right down to smelting the ore to make the steel for tractors.

There isn’t enough land to grow crops for both food and fuel.

Fact: Upon considering the numerous ways David suggests making fuel from plants (from kelp to mesquite), the real question becomes, ‘After we replace all the gasoline, diesel, and heating oil, do we sell our surplus alcohol to the rest of the world – or do we use it to replace all the electricity coming from nuclear and coal plants?’ Let’s do both.

Ethanol’s an ecological nightmare!

Fact: The major crop for ethanol fuel in the world is sugarcane. Unlike corn, which is an annual crop that must be planted each year, sugarcane is perennial, planted only once every five to ten years, and it can be harvested continually. Since Brazilian and Indian alcohol plants return most of the byproducts of alcohol production to the fields, little fertilizer is needed, and soil builds in fertility rather than loses vigor.

It’s food versus fuel – crops for food will compete with crops for fuel! We should be growing our crops for starving masses, not cars!

Fact: The first thing to realize is that there is no food shortage and none impending at this point. Anyone can look at world crop production and see that we produce around twice the calories we need to feed everyone. What we do have is a money shortage, since food is a commodity and not a right: Whoever can pay for it gets to buy it. And, note that 87% of the U.S. corn crop is fed to animals even when exported.

Big corporations get all those ethanol subsidies, and taxpayers get nothing in return!

Fact: Alcohol fuel subsidies actually increase government tax receipts, since fuel production is done by U.S. companies, not trans-national corporations with massive tax breaks. And, small-plant economics are especially attractive if the farmer can cut out the middlemen and sell the fuel directly to 500 – 1000 people locally in a community-supported energy CSE) system. 

Ethanol doesn’t substantially improve global warming! In fact, it pollutes the air!

Fact: When using pure alcohol, the reductions in all three of the major pollutants – carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides (NOx), and hydrocarbons (HC) – are so great that, in many cases, the remaining emissions are unmeasurably small.

So if we use ethanol, we can still keep burning through fuel like the irresponsible consumers we are?!

Fact: The U.S. is consumes the most energy in the world and is one of the greatest users per capita. Even if we can produce all the alcohol we need, we still have to become more responsible with energy use [given the growth rates of India and China].” 

Much of Blume’s book is devoted to describing the many crops that can produce much larger amounts of alcohol fuel than a monocultural crop such as corn. States Blume, “A key to the success of the permaculture system is crop rotation, where different nutrients are used each season and nothing becomes depleted. Right now, the only common rotation in the Midwest consists of corn and soybeans. As long as much of the organic matter from production is returned to the soil – as in permaculture – an agricultural system will increase in fertility each year.

“Once the level of organic matter in the soil reaches around 5% (much of America’s farmland is currently 2% organic matter which means the soil biology has collapsed), organic farmers need only about five tons of compost per acre per year to maintain fertility. Spread evenly over an acre, this would appear as a light dusting. With more organic matter than that, farmers would build topsoil depth and soil biological activity.

“For example, if you were to grow relatively shallow-rooted corn one year, the next year you might grow fodder beets that will go several feet seed, using their huge system of roots to bring potassium and phosphorus up near to the surface. When you harvest the massive 15-pound beet, it is only the top of an inverted conical pyramid of roots that fan out to probably more than three feet in diameter at the soil surface, tapering to a point five feet down.

“The part we harvest is less than half the weight of this entire root system. Fungi and earthworms can feed on the many pounds of smaller roots left behind throughout the soil, freeing the phosphorus and potassium for the next crop.

“With rotation of crops grown for energy, today’s corn farmers will begin to ask themselves, ‘Why not grow 800- to 1000-gallon-per-acre crops like fodder beets, Jerusalem artichokes, or sweet sorghum – and still be able to grow a cover crop like fava beans over the winter, to be turned in, providing fertilizer and organic matter to grow the next crop?’ Why not, when it not only is productive and profitable, but gives us a cleaner environment and healthy soil?”

I have only addressed a small portion of this 600-page book that tells you in detail how to go about growing the plants you need, and building the distiller it requires to create your own ethanol, and how to turn the waste into profit. In addition, you can learn how to convert various vehicles to run on 100% ethanol, and he addresses the economic and legal considerations - and more. Perhaps the most interesting part is on creating community-supported energy using a community-supported agriculture (CSA) model – something a Transition Town can use!