The Story of Glass Gem Corn

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Wow! This corn looks so beautiful! I’d love to try growing some! -Andi

The Story of Glass Gem Corn: Beauty, History, and Hope

If you’ve spent any time online lately, you might have noticed a striking photo making its rounds. Feast your eyes on Glass Gem corn: a stunning, multi-colored heirloom that has taken Facebook and the blogosphere by storm. With its opalescent kernels glimmering like rare jewels, it’s easy to see what the buzz is about. This is some truly mind-blowing maize.

For the staff at the Tucson-based seed conservation nonprofit Native Seeds/SEARCH, the viral explosion of interest in Glass Gem has been thrilling—but not surprising. As the proud stewards of this variety (along with the bioregional seed company, Seeds Trust) we are lucky enough to have grown and admired this extraordinary corn ourselves. Rest assured, this is no Photoshop sham. It is truly as stunning held in your your hand as it is on your computer screen. When you peel back the husk from a freshly harvested ear to reveal the rainbow of colors inside, it’s like unwrapping a magical present. And this is a gift that is meant to be shared far and wide.

Like many heirloom treasures, Glass Gem corn has a name, a place, and a story. Its origin traces back to Carl Barnes, a part-Cherokee farmer living in Oklahoma. Barnes had an uncanny knack for corn breeding. More specifically, he excelled at selecting and saving seed from those cobs that exhibited vivid, translucent colors. Exactly how long Barnes worked on Glass Gem—how many successive seasons he carefully chose, saved, and replanted these special seeds—is unknown. But after many years, his painstaking efforts created a wondrous corn cultivar that has now captivated thousands of people around the world.

Approaching the end of his life, Barnes bestowed his precious seed collection to Greg Schoen, his corn-breeding protégé. The weighty responsibility of protecting these seeds was not lost on Schoen. While in the process of moving in 2010, he sought out a place to store a sampling of the collection to ensure its safekeeping. Schoen passed on several unique corn varieties to fellow seedsman Bill McDorman, who was owner at the time of Seeds Trust, a small family seed company then located in central Arizona. (Today, Bill McDorman is Executive Director of Native Seeds/SEARCH.) Curious about the oddly named Glass Gems, he planted a handful of seeds in his garden. The spectacular plants that emerged took him by surprise. “I was blown away,” McDorman recalls. “No one had ever seen corn like this before.”

The story of Barnes, Schoen, and their remarkable corn is not unusual. For millennia, people have elegantly interacted with the plants that sustain them through careful selection and seed saving. This process, repeated year after year, changes and adapts the plants to take on any number of desirable characteristics, from enhanced color and flavor to disease resistance and hardiness.

The bounty of genetic diversity our ancestral farmers and gardeners created in this way was shared and handed down across generations. But under today’s industrial agricultural paradigm of monocropping, GMOs, and hybrid seeds, this incredible diversity has been narrowed to a shred of its former abundance. A 1983 study compared the seed varieties found in the USDA seed bank at the time with those available in commercial seed catalogs in 1903. The results were striking. Of the 408 different tomato varieties on the market at the turn of the century, less than 80 were present in the USDA collection. Similarly, lettuces that once flourished with 497 heirloom varieties were only represented by 36 varieties. The same held true for most other veggies including sweet corn, of which only a dozen cultivars were preserved out of 307 unique varieties once available in the catalogs. Though this data leaves some questions around actual diversity decline, the trend toward dwindling crop diversity is alarming. In just a few generations, both the time-honored knowledge of seed saving and many irreplaceable seeds are in danger of disappearing.

Though much of this diversity may be gone, all hope is not lost. The emergence of a breathtaking heirloom variety like Glass Gem reveals that the art and magic of seed saving lives on. It reminds us that we can return to this age-old practice and restore beauty, wonder, and abundance to our world. Indeed, this renaissance is already underway. The rising seed library movement is encouraging local gardeners to become crop breeders and empowering communities to reclaim sovereignty over their food. Our pioneering Seed School program at Native Seeds/SEARCH is training people from all walks of life in building sustainable local seed systems rooted in ancient traditions. And as eye-popping images of Glass Gem continue to spread around the world, Carl Barnes’ kaleidoscopic corn has become a beacon—and perhaps an inspiring symbol—for the global seed-saving revival.

To Purchase Glass Gem Seed

Many people have contacted us looking to obtain Glass Gem seed. We are currently sold out of the small quantity we had in stock, but there are plans to grow out a substantial amount this summer. Fresh seed should be available by October 2012. In the meantime, we have set up a waiting list for all who wish to purchase Glass Gem. Click here to be added to the list, and you will be notified as soon it becomes available. Native Seeds/SEARCH members will get priority access; click here to become a member. For those that have asked about its edibility, Glass Gem is a flint corn used for making flour or as a popping corn. Unlike sweet corn, it is not edible right off the cob. However, it was likely bred as an ornamental variety—for obvious reasons. Many of these exquisite ears are simply too beautiful to eat.

We encourage everyone who grows Glass Gem corn to rejoin the ritual of seed saving by setting aside your favorite selections for replanting the following year. Share seed with your friends and neighbors, organize a seed swap, or start a seed library in your community. Support Native Seeds/SEARCH in our work to conserve and protect Glass Gem corn along with the nearly 2,000 rare, aridlands-adapted crop varieties we steward in our seed bank. Your efforts and energy make a difference. As Carl Barnes has taught us, all it takes is one person to create a more colorful, diverse and abundant world—one seed at a time.

Original Article HERE

Agriculture

A New Year’s Recipe for Fixing the Food System

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A New Year’s Recipe for Fixing the Food System

Andrew Casner, an urban farming activist, walks through the South Bronx with a delivery of freshly harvested vegetables grown in the neighborhood

Posted by: Danielle Nierenberg and Ellen Gustafson on December 31, 2012 (Originally posted at businessweek.com)

As we start the New Year, many people will be thinking about plans and promises to improve their diets and health. We think a broader collection of farmers, policymakers, and consumers need new, bigger resolutions for fixing the food system—real changes with long-term repercussions in fields, boardrooms, and on plates all over the world. Below are 13 resolutions (for the New Year, of course) that the world can’t afford to break when nearly 1 billion people are still hungry and more than 1 billion are suffering from the effects of being overweight and obese.

We have the tools available to change for the better the way we grow, distribute, prepare, and consume the food we eat. Let’s use them in 2013.

Urban farming

Food production doesn’t happen only in fields or factories. Nearly 1 billion people worldwide produce food in cities. In Kibera, the largest slum in Africa, farmers are growing seeds of indigenous vegetables and selling them to rural farmers. At Bell Book & Candle restaurant in New York, customers are served rosemary, cherry tomatoes, romaine, and other produce grown from the restaurant’s aeroponic rooftop garden.

Better access

People’s Grocery in Oakland and Fresh Moves in Chicago bring mobile grocery stores to food deserts, giving low-income consumers opportunities to make healthy food choices. Instead of chips and soda, they provide affordable organic produce, not typically available in those communities.

Eat what you recognize

Food writer Michael Pollan advises not to eat anything that your grandparents wouldn’t recognize. Try eating more fruits, vegetables, and whole foods without preservatives and other additives.

More home cooking

Home economics classes have declined in schools, and young people lack basic cooking skills. Top Chefs Jamie Oliver, Alice Waters and Bill Telepan are working with schools around the country to teach kids how to cook healthy, nutritious foods.

Share a meal

Nearly half of all adults in the U.S. eat meals alone, according to the Hartman Group. Sharing a meal with family and friends can foster community and conversation. Recent studies suggest that children who eat meals with their families are typically happier and more stable than those who do not.

Eat your vegetables

Nearly 2 billion people suffer from micronutrient deficiencies worldwide, leading to poor development. The World Vegetable Center is helping farmers grow high-value, nutrient-rich vegetables, including amaranth, spider plant, and eggplant, in Africa and Asia, improving health and increasing incomes.

Stop the waste

Roughly one-third of all food is wasted—in fields, during transport, in storage, and in homes. There are easy and inexpensive ways to prevent waste. Initiatives such asLove Food, Hate Waste offer consumers tips about portion control and recipes for leftovers, while farmers in Bolivia are using solar-powered driers to preserve foods. A simple storage bag, developed by Purdue University, keeps pests from contaminating cow peas (also called black-eyed peas) an important staple for millions of people in Western Africa.

Engage young people

Making farming both intellectually and economically stimulating will help make the food system an attractive career option for youth. Across sub-Saharan Africa, cell phones and the Internet are connecting farmers to information about weather and markets; in the U.S., Food Corps is teaching students how to grow and cook food, preparing them for a lifetime of healthy eating.

Protect workers

Farm and food workers around the world are fighting for better pay and working conditions. In Zimbabwe, the General Agricultural & Plantation Workers Union of Zimbabwe (GAPWUZ) protects laborers from abuse. In the U.S., the Coalition of Immokalee Workers successfully persuaded Trader Joe’s and Chipotle to sign the Fair Food Program, agreeing to buy their produce only from growers who pay fair wages.

Farmers are important

Farmers aren’t just farmers; they’re businesswomen and businessmen, stewards of the land, and educators, sharing knowledge in their communities. Slow Food International works with farmers all over the world, helping to recognize their importance in preserving biodiversity and culture.

The role of government

Nations must implement policies that give everyone access to safe, affordable, healthy food. In Ghana and Brazil, government action, including national school feeding programs and increased support for sustainable agricultural production, greatly reduced the number of hungry people.

Change the metrics

Governments, NGOs, and funding organizations have focused on increasing production and improving yields, rather than improving nutrition and protecting the environment. Changing the metrics, and focusing more on quality, will improve public environmental health and livelihoods.

Fix the broken food system

Agriculture can be an important part of the solution to some of the world’s most pressing challenges, including unemployment, obesity, and climate change. These innovations simply need more research, more investment, and ultimately more funding. In December, the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, issued a report calling for the U.S. to increase its investment in agricultural research by $700 million per year to help create a new “innovation ecosystem” in agriculture.

We can do it—together.

Danielle Nierenberg and Ellen Gustafson are cofounders of Food Tank: The Food Think Tank.

Green Energy Sustainability

Fiat Goes “Into the Green” On Worldwide VIP Tour Debut of All Electric 500e

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Its finally here, the 111-horsepower electric-drive motor with 147 pound-feet of torque and its 24 kWh, all so that it can provide the estimated range of “more than 80 miles” on the 15-inch Firehawk GT low-rolling resistance tires. Fiat says that city driving “typically” yields “greater than 100 miles.” The rating is an “estimated 116 miles per gallon” and charging time on a 240-volt outlet is less than four hours. Now they will tour the world to show it off…

Hot on the heels of the launch of the new Fiat 500e all-electric car, Fiat are going on a worldwide VIP event tour to showcase the Italian brand’s commitment to protecting the environment.
In recent years, Fiat have been recognised for producing cars with the lowest level of CO2 emissions in Europe and Fiat S.p.A. has been included in the Dow Jones Sustainability indexes (both world and European) for the past four years in a row.
It is hoped that the “Into the Green” VIP event tour will build awareness of the Fiat group’s dedication to environmental advances in automotive technology. The touring event will showcase the Fiat brand at a number of red carpet events taking place across the globe in 2013.
“Into the Green” will promote the Fiat philosophy of environmental responsibility combined with Italian style and great design to celebrities and guests at these events. Many attendees at the events on the world tour are considered to be ‘trendsetters’ and it is hoped that their influence may encourage others to become more environmentally conscious.
The first of the “Into the Green” VIP events took place in LA at the Museum of Contemporary Art. Vehicles featured included the quirky small car, the Fiat 500 and the all-electric model, the Fiat 500e.

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Natural Playdough

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Every winter I find myself trying to find enough indoor activities for the kids to keep us all from going absolutely stir-crazy. Homemade playdough is always at the top of the list: if you’ve never made it, you simply MUST try! We have made it countless times over the years; with careful supervision you can allow the kids to take part in most of the process. Our favorite part is when the dough comes off the stove, is dumped out onto the table, and is just cool enough to handle. Kneading and pressing into the still-warm dough, amazingly pliable and smooth, is a sensory activity that both kids and adults enjoy. Adding color to the dough is essential! I thought the idea in the following blog post by Thrifty Mama was new and exciting. Instead of food coloring, why not try using natural dyes?

To avoid the artificial colorings in commercial products, we’re going to explore a homemade playdough recipe with natural dyes. Don’t be intimidated. This is going to be a blast.

You might remember this homemade playdough recipe tip from last year. Well, I’ve come up with a few new colors I wanted to try out. So join me as we see if we can improve on an old favorite.

NOTE: Even though this will eventually bring hours of joy to your children, I would suggest the making of this homemade playdough recipe be for adults only. The boiling water and stovetop are major accident concerns for young children. Let’s have fun and be safe at the same time!

The first thing we need to do is create our natural dyes. Use this list as a guide to help you choose the colors you’d like in your homemade playdough and then follow the recipe below.

Natural Dyes for Homemade Playdough

Red and Pink – Cut up 2 small beet roots and combine with 1 cup of water. Simmer over low heat for 20 minutes or until liquid is reduced by half. Puree in the blender. Strain. (Raspberries and strawberries would be a great alternative for bright red coloring.)
Orange – Simmer 4 large chopped carrots in 1 cup of water for about 20 minutes. Cool completely. Don’t worry if the water looks clear now. Mine did, too. Mix in a blender and mash through a sieve to retain 1/2 cup of dyed liquid. (Carrot juice would work really well for this. Nothing else would probably come close the bright orange in carrots.)
Yellow – Combine 1 cup boiling water, 1 whole grapefruit including rind, and one small sweet potato in a blender. Puree. Strain. Admire the beautiful yellow dye! My kids thought it was orange juice. (Turmeric and saffron are very bright yellow colorants. These would be great alternatives if you already have them on hand. Also, golden beets might work for a paler yellow.)
Green – Combine 2 handfuls of spinach with 1 cup of water in a blender. Puree in blender. Simmer on low heat for about 20 minutes or until liquid reduces by half. Strain and cool. (Kale is a great alternative for the green hue.)
Purple – Combine 2 cup of water with 3/4 head of red cabbage (roughly chopped). Simmer on low heat for about 20 minutes or until liquid is reduced by half. Puree in your blender and strain. Reserve ½ cup as purple and set aside ½ cup for blue in next step. (Blackberries and grape juice would work really well for purple.)
Blue – Use 1/2 cup of the cooled red cabbage dye and add small amounts of baking soda until the desired blue color is achieved. (Blueberries could be used for this instead.)
Tan – Combine 1 tablespoon of cinnamon with 1/2 cup water. Strain. (An alternative for brown/tan would be cocoa or coffee grounds.)
Off White – Place a dash of vanilla extract in a 1/2 cup of water.

Now that our natural dyes are ready, let’s dive into the homemade playdough recipe!

Homemade Playdough Recipe

Ingredients

½ cup of flour
½ cup of dyed water (use natural dye instructions from above)
¼ cup of salt
½ tablespoon cream of tartar (for elasticity)
½ tablespoon cooking oil (to help keep from drying out)

Directions

Combine all ingredients into your least favorite pan (It might stain or stick. My pan was stainless steel and caused no problems, but you’ve been warned.)

Cook dough on the stovetop on low heat until the mixture pulls away from the sides.

When the mixture starts to look like the first time I tried to make gravy I pull it off the heat and let the heated pan finish the cooking. It should look like mashed potatoes. Dough should be clumping in the middle of the pan and no longer shiny.

Make sure to wash the pan and stirring utensil in between each color batch.

Allow it to cool enough for handling. By the time I cooked all of my colors and washed the pan they were all cool enough to handle. If it’s sticky you can try adding a small amount of flour. Knead in your hands and enjoy the vibrant colors you have captured from nature.

Aren’t you proud of yourself for making this homemade playdough recipe? Now call the kids in and have a ball with your homemade playdough.

Some final notes from my experience:

The cabbage in the blue and purple dyes really stinks. I actually like cabbage and the first day the dough didn’t bother me at all. But the smell of the dough after 4 days was almost unbearable to me. Just a heads up.

Also, all of my doughs kept really well, but I did notice that the blue dough was much more tacky than the rest. I kneaded in flour until I liked the consistency. This did mute the color a little, but not too much. Conversely, if the dough was a little dried out I just carefully added tiny amounts of water and worked the dough really well. They all bounced back to like new condition.

Visit this page for more fun playdough ideas.

Agriculture pestecide

Cornstalks Everywhere But Nothing Else, Not Even A Bee

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I found this article and kept coming back to it, greatly disturbed. I can’t say that I’m shocked to learn just how much biodiversity has been destroyed by agriculture, but seeing it presented in this way is sobering, and scary. -Andi

Cornstalks Everywhere But Nothing Else, Not Even A Bee

by ROBERT KRULWICH

November 30, 2012 8:09 AM

Nikola Nikolovski/iStockphoto

We’ll start in a cornfield — we’ll call it an Iowa cornfield in late summer — on a beautiful day. The corn is high. The air is shimmering. There’s just one thing missing — and it’s a big thing…

…a very big thing, but I won’t tell you what, not yet.

Instead, let’s take a detour. We’ll be back to the cornfield in a minute, but just to make things interesting, I’m going to leap halfway around the world to a public park near Cape Town, South Africa, where you will notice a cube, a metal cube, lying there in the grass.

Sifting through samples within the cube, photographer David Littschwager counted 90 separate species, including 25 types of plants just on the soil surface, along with some 200 seeds representing at least five of those species.

David Liittschwager

That cube was put there by David Liittschwager, a portrait photographer, who spent a few years traveling the world, dropping one-cubic-foot metal frames into gardens, streams, parks, forests, oceans, and then photographing whatever, or whoever came through. Beetles, crickets, fish, spiders, worms, birds — anything big enough to be seen by the naked eye he tried to capture and photograph. Here’s what he found after 24 hours in his Cape Town cube:

These 113 creatures observed, and then photographed, include over 100 species of plants and animals that use one cubic foot of this highly diverse shrub land over the course of a normal day in Mountain Fynbos, Table Mountain, South Africa.

David Liittschwager

There were 30 different plants in that one square foot of grass, and roughly 70 different insects. And the coolest part, said a researcher to the Guardian in Britain, “If we picked the cube up and walked 10 feet, we could get as much as 50 percent difference in plant species we encountered. If we moved it uphill, we might find none of the species.” Populations changed drastically only a few feet away — and that’s not counting the fungi, microbes, and the itsy-bitsies that Liittschwager and his team couldn’t see.

Another example: Here’s a cube placed 100 feet off the ground, in the upper branches of a Strangler fig tree in Costa Rica. We’re up in the air here, looking down into a valley.

Along the stout limb of a strangler fig a hundred feet up in the canopy of the Monteverde cloud forest in Costa Rica, a luxuriant garden grows. To survey this tropical richness, Liittschwager sampled day and night, and the team recorded 24 plant species and more than 500 insects representing 100 species within the cube's green borders.

David Liittschwager

What’s up? More than 150 different plants and animals live in or passed through that one square foot of tree: birds, beetles, flies, moths, bugs, bugs, then more bugs…

Part of the contents of One Cubic Foot, more than 150 different kinds of plants and animals were found in the Monteverde cube over 100 feet up in the canopy of a Strangler Fig Tree, Location: Monteverde Cloud Forest Biological Reserve, Costa Rica.

David Liittschwager

E.O. Wilson, the Harvard biologist, in his introduction to David Liittschwager’s book of these photographs, says that it’s usually big animals that catch our attention. But if we get down on our knees and examine any small patch of ground, “gradually the smaller inhabitants, far more numerous, begin to eclipse them.”

They are the critters that create and aerate the soil, that pollinate, that remove the clutter. And there are lots and lots and lots of them.

Getting Back To The Corn

Which brings me back to Iowa, where my NPR colleague, commentator and science writer Craig Childs, decided to have a little adventure. As he tells it in his new book, he recruited a friend, Angus, and together they agreed to spend two nights and three days (“We’ll call it a long weekend”) smack in the middle of a 600-acre farm in Grundy County. Their plan was to settle in amongst the stalks (there are an “estimated three trillion” of them in Iowa) to see what’s living there, other than corn. In other words, a Liittschwager-like census.

Cornfields, however, are not like national parks or virgin forests. Corn farmers champion corn. Anything that might eat corn, hurt corn, bother corn, is killed. Their corn is bred to fight pests. The ground is sprayed. The stalks are sprayed again. So, like David, Craig wondered, “What will I find?”

Heather Nemec /iStockphoto

The answer amazed me. He found almost nothing. “I listened and heard nothing, no bird, no click of insect.”

There were no bees. The air, the ground, seemed vacant. He found one ant “so small you couldn’t pin it to a specimen board.” A little later, crawling to a different row, he found one mushroom, “the size of an apple seed.” (A relative of the one pictured below.) Then, later, a cobweb spider eating a crane fly (only one). A single red mite “the size of a dust mote hurrying across the barren earth,” some grasshoppers, and that’s it. Though he crawled and crawled, he found nothing else.

“It felt like another planet entirely,” he said, a world denuded.

Organisms found in and Iowa cornfield: an ant, one mushroom, a cobweb spider, a half eaten crane fly, a red mite and some grasshoppers.

Illustration by NPR

Yet, 100 years ago, these same fields, these prairies, were home to 300 species of plants, 60 mammals, 300 birds, hundreds and hundreds of insects. This soil was the richest, the loamiest in the state. And now, in these patches, there is almost literally nothing but one kind of living thing. We’ve erased everything else.

We need to feed our planet, of course. But we also need the teeny creatures that drive all life on earth. There’s something strange about a farm that intentionally creates a biological desert to produce food for one species: us. It’s efficient, yes. But it’s so efficient that the ants are missing, the bees are missing, and even the birds stay away. Something’s not right here. Our cornfields are too quiet.

David Liittschwager’s book, called A World In One Cubic Foot is a photographic collection of all the plants and animals that turned up in his various cubes, as you see in my post. But the book takes you to many more places, coral reefs, streams, rivers, backyards. Craig Childs’ account of his long weekend in the cornfield comes from his book, Apocalyptic Planet; Field Guide to the Everending Earth. Craig writes like a dream; he uses the cornfield as a metaphor for what a mass extinction might be like, where the Earth becomes “lots of one thing and not much of any other.”

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Bubble Wrap Window Insulation

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Here’s a great tip for insulating your windows to save some energy this winter. I usually have bubble wrap laying around from mailed packages, and other than crafts I really never have a use for it–so this is perfect! The bubble wrap can be reused year after year, too.

Bubble Wrap Window Insulation

I’ve used bubble wrap on windows for two three+ years now, and I’m amazed how quick and easy it is. This year, we are even covering the windows in the guest room — we just take the bubble wrap down when guests come, and put it back up when they leave — 15 seconds a window.

This is a simple technique for insulating windows with bubble wrap packing material. Bubble wrap is often used to insulate greenhouse windows in the winter, but it also seems to work fine for windows in the house. You can use it with or without regular or insulating window shades. It also works for windows of irregular shape, which can be difficult to find insulating shades for.

Its been five years since I put this page up, and I’ve heard from MANY people who are quite happy with using bubble wrap for window insulation.

The view through the bubble wrapped window is fuzzy, so don’t use it on windows where you need a clear view. But, it does let plenty of light through.

I like the medium to large size bubbles. The larger ones appear (from surface temperature

measurements) to insulate a little better, and you still get a nice artistic effect looking out of them. The small bubble warp totally obscures the view, but you still get light. Most people seem to prefer the large bubble version.

Installation

Cut the bubble wrap to the size of the window pane with scissors.
Spray a film of water on the window using a spray bottle.
Apply the bubble wrap while the window is still wet and press it into place.
The bubble side goes toward the glass.
To remove the bubble wrap, just pull it off starting from a corner. You can save it and use it for several years. It does not leave a mess or stains on the window glass.

If you have trouble with the bubble wrap separating from the window when the film dries, you can try adding a little Glycerin to the water, but this probably won’t be necessary.

A few small pieces of double back tape can be helpful on really stubborn windows.

The bubblewrap can be installed in the fall, and removed in the spring. Judging by how mine looks after a year, it may last quite a while.

When you take the bubble wrap down, put a small number in on the upper right corner of each piece of bubble wrap, and write down which window that number goes with on a piece of paper. Save the paper for the installation next fall. This tells you instantly where each sheet goes, and which way its oriented.

Some places to get bubble wrap:

– Save up bubble wrap packing material that you and friends receive

– Check places that sell larger items like canoes or furniture — bubble wrap is often used for packing these.

– Check for wholesale suppliers of packing material in your area — these places will often sell a roll to the public.

– Here is one potential online source: http://www.uboxes.com (I’ve not actually tried them, but looks OK)

– As a last resort, places like the UPS store have it, but the prices are usually high.

Suggestion from Pat:
“Bubble wrap small bubble and large can be had for free by contacting furniture retailers or rental shops. They throw it away by the tons!”
I’ve heard the same thing for places that sell canoes.

(2/27/07 — see note below on reported bubble wrap life)

Installation:

Click pictures to enlarge:

Spray water on glass with bubble side
toward glass

Smooth bubble wrap out so that water
contact holds it in place.

Double Bubble (added Nov 15, 2007)

I thought it might be worth a try to see if two layers of bubble wrap might be used.

This may be going a bit far, but it does seem to work.

I applied a 2nd layer of bubble wrap over the first layer in exactly the same way as the first layer was applied to the window glass. That is, spray the first layer of bubble wrap with water mist, and while its still wet apply the 2nd layer of bubble wrap to it and smooth it out.
For both layers, the bubble side face the glass.

It has been a couple days since I did this, and it is staying in place OK — not sure if it will stay up with the added weight in the long term or not.

The two layers of bubble wrap fuzzy the view a bit more than one layer, but it still seems to transmit quite a bit of light.

The surface temperature on the 2nd layer is higher than the surface temperature on the first layer, so it is adding some insulation value.

Click on images to enlarge.

View through single and doubled bubble wrap.
Blue tape is to take temperature readings on with the IR thermometer.

Payoff

The bubble wrap has a short payback in cold climates. About 2 months for single glazed windows, and half a heating season for double glazed widows. Details on payback:

For an 7000 deg-day climate (northern US), and single glazed windows, the bubble wrap increases the R value from about R1 to about R2. This cuts the heat loss from the window in half.
Heat losses with and without bubble wrap for 1 sqft of window are:

Heat loss w/o wrap = (7000 deg-day)(1 ft^2) (24 hr/day) / (1 ft^2-F/BTU) = 168K BTU per season

Heat loss with wrap = (7000 deg-day)(1 ft^2) (24 hr/day) / (2 ft^2-F/BTU) = 88K BTU per season

If you are heating with natural gas at $1.50 per therm (100 CF) in an 80% efficient furnace, then the saving for 1 sqft of wrap for the season is:

Saving per sqft = ($1.50)(168K – 88K)/(100K*0.8) = $1.65 per season per sqft of window

The bubble wrap cost about $0.30 per sqft, so the payback period is about 2 months — not too bad!

If you repeat the numbers above for double glazed windows, the saving is $0.60 per sqft per season, and the payback period is a about one half heating season.

If you use a more expensive fuel like propane, fuel oil, or electricity, the savings will be correspondingly more.

Performance:

Here is my Rough Performance Test

Some interesting work done by students at LIU on insulation value of packing materials. Probably not exactly applicable to windows, but interesting.

Bubble Wrap Life:

Doug reports that bubble wrap that he installed 6 years ago has about had it. He thinks the life is around 5 to 7 years. In his application, the bubble wrap stays up year round.

He reports that at the end of its life, it tends to stick to the glass, so replacing it before this happens might save some cleanup work.

The bubble wrap he is using was intended for packaging, so this still leaves open the question of whether the bubble wrap intended for greenhouses will last longer. The greenhouse bubble wrap we installed is on its third winter, and is still doing fine.

Source: www.builditsolar.com

Using your Harvest

Nature's Candy

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Want a sweet and tasty snack that your kids might even choose over their dwindling bag of Halloween candy? Dry some apples! You will end up with chewy, unbelievably sweet morsels of happiness. You will put a lot of work into them and they will disappear shockingly quickly. But really, the work is well worth it!

Follow along with me as I dry up a big batch myself!

1). Borrow a food dehydrator. You could always buy one if you have cash laying around, but maybe you have a really nice family member like I do who buys lots of food gadgets, and then lets you use them, sometimes for months on end. 😉 If the weather is perfect (i.e. it’s still mid-summer) and you want to get really rustic, try drying your apples outside on a warm day. Two ideas that intrigue me (and that I may be crazy enough to try with the kids next summer):

*put the fruit on trays on and put them in your car

*lay the fruit out on your trampoline on a hot day, covering it with mesh

Let’s say that you have a food dehydrator handy, though, and electricity. Here’s the one I borrowed:

2). Get your apples ready. I found the most efficient way to get somewhat-uniform apples was this step by step process:

*Cut a big old mess of apples up, using an apple corer-slicer. Put a dark colored towel under your workspace; the sticky juice that oozes every time you use the slicer will stain the towel if it’s white. Trust me, I know. Make a mountian of apples, and don’t worry that some of the apples will have bad spots or mushy yucky parts–you will sort them out as you peel them in the next step. Just keep going, shoving that slicer through the apples like you are on a slicing marathon. Beware: you will get juice everywhere, your hands will get very sticky, and juice will spray into your eyes on multiple occasions.

*Wash your hands of all the stickiness so that you are clean and fresh for the next step. Peel each apple segment with your favorite knife. Depending on the size of the apple it came from, you may need to slice the segment in half. Throw all the segments into a big bowl as you go along. You want all the pieces to be somewhat similar in size, but it’s not even close to rocket science–they will all dry eventually.

*Dump the segments onto the trays of the food dehydrator and spread them around so that no edges are not touching. No need to be perfect. Though if I do say so myself…mine look spread out pretty perfectly. It was my third batch of apples–what can I say, I’m becoming a natural.

*Dry the apples for the time recommended on the dehydrator. I didn’t have a manual to refer to, so I did an internet search, which gave me the very precise time of anywhere between 7 to 24 hours. Since I don’t believe in specific times for anything anyway, I just opened the lid and checked the apples every hour or so. After about 8 hours, my apples had a perfect chew to them. You want to avoid getting them so dry they are brittle, but you definitely want all the moisture out of them so that they will keep on your shelf for months.

*Open the finished product right up on the table around a gaggle of children. For some reason leaving the apples in the dehydrator is more appealing than ever. They will dive in on it, peeling each dried apple off the trays to put right in their mouth, and think you are amazing.

If there are some dried apples left, pack them up in airtight containers.

If not devoured, they will stay good through the winter.

Animal Rights

Rethinking the Turkey

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Ahh, Thanksgiving. Family, friends, pie, buttons on the pants becoming unbearably tight. It’s a harvest celebration, when all the summer crops have been picked, stored, and preserved, and we make a humble attempt to be truly thankful for all that earth has provided us.

Some have the day off, some have to work, some choose to volunteer on Thanksgiving. Some will have to rely on the kindness of others to receive any semblance of that beloved bountiful meal that epitomizes the day. No matter what the personal situation, as a culture, our attention is turned to the idea of a table filled with food that we will share with people we care about and love.

Of course, a side dish of guilt goes along with the meal. While it’s a very real representation of family get-togethers and homecomings, Thanksgiving is also a day when moral issues can tug at that precarious inner sense of peace. Beyond all the current heartache unfolding in all corners of our planet–which we can insulate ourselves from for at least a day–are the bigger truths behind the heart of Thanksgiving.

I’m not going to get into depth about our confused sense of history, even if the traditions and false fairy tales beg to be debunked. Much has been written in attempts to analyze our complicated history, and the information has been more readily available to us than ever before. Each of us is responsible for recognizing the wounds of our past if we ever hope to reconcile and improve our present. Though it’s crucial, this post is not an analysis of the Thanksgiving Story–this post is about the TURKEY.

The controversy may not be as obvious as our historical struggles; most families, most people, do not give the turkey a second thought. It’s just there, purchased from the grocery store and prepared in any number of traditional ways that have been passed down for generations. Who wants to harbor even more guilty feelings about our lovely holiday–isn’t it enough to solemnly remember that history isn’t as clean and simple as we would love to believe? Who wants to debate what is on the table, and how it got there? Not to mention that in a very real sense, the cooking of the turkey ties us to our past. We can bite into a slice of turkey and realize that our great-great-grandmother probably did the very same thing, and we get a true sense of belonging, continuance. A Thanksgiving meal without a turkey would be unthinkable to a good majority of American homes.

But that centerpiece, the perfectly roasted bird, is a glaring symbol of some of our current ethical dilemmas, all history aside. The industrial production of food has been more closely examined in recent years than ever before, and the negative effects of factory farms in particular are astounding. Our environment suffers, our society suffers as we compound our reliance on a completely unsustainable system, and the birds themselves suffer. When raised and processed conventionally, turkey production is another of those uncomfortable truths that I think everyone needs to take a peek at. One of the most trusted names for Thanksgiving turkeys, Butterball, has had criminal convictions in the past for its treatment of animals, and as this undercover video shows, they continue to callously hurt the birds they raise.

Butterball Abuse Video

I am not a vegetarian, though I respect the lifestyle. I admit, that even if I think meat has played a part in the human diet for many thousands of years, in today’s world meat eating has become insanely excessive and completely unnatural. I would love for those of us who are not vegetarians to seek out a better choice for our Thanksgiving turkeys. Factory farm birds are mistreated, abused, and frankly, just not natural. They have been bred to develop such large bodies in such a short amount of time that they cannot hold themselves up on their own feet. They lead miserable short lives, with no sunlight or fresh air.

Seeking out a humane turkey is a step in the right direction. www.Eatwild.com is a great resource that will help those who want to find humane, natural, sustainable meat year-round, including the Thanksgiving feast bird. CLICK HERE to find a farm that will provide meat from animals who have lived a good, clean life. If meat stays in your diet, seeking out local, sustainable, and ethical farms is a favor you can do for yourself AND your environment.

The controversy gets even deeper if you look at some of the claims made by PETA and die-hard vegans. Many animal-rights activists claim that even on farms on which a turkey is allowed a natural, more pleasant life, the slaughter of the animals is never done in a humane way. The cone method of killing chickens and turkeys is widely used on small sustainable farms, and deemed humane by many–however, there are those who have seen it firsthand and don’t agree. I have not watched poultry slaughter, and I think that I really should, to make my own informed choice, as should everyone. Looking death in the eye is one of the most important aspects of eating meat, though very few of us actually do. I have a sneaking suspicion that if meat was considered in its true form–from birth, through life, to death–and not just available in a neat and tidy package in the grocery store, that many would deeply rethink the animals in their diet. If you are vegan or vegetarian and are not going to be eating any meat, period, CLICK HERE for a list of options to replace the turkey with.

If you do one thing differently this Thanksgiving, rethink the turkey on your table. Butterball and other factory farms see a huge boost in sales every Thanksgiving as millions of families prepare their feasts. We can all help lessen the downward spiral of the industrial food system by seeking sustainable, humane meat, or foregoing the bird entirely.

Peace, and Happy Thanksgiving!

CSA Urban Gardening

Sprouting an Urban Farm

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Hey, Fort Wayne folks! Right here in our neck of the woods, Matt and Ann Merritt are attempting to accomplish exactly what I feel like the future needs for our food production. Kudos to their hard work. I plan to visit their booth at our new year-round farmer’s market that gathers every first Saturday of the month (see details here), and begin to get to know them. I especially like that as they searched for land, they were dedicated to finding a space that would be accessible to urban and suburban areas, even though they could have found a more rural property. When I picture the future of locally grown food, I see this! I’m so very excited to see real people putting into action all of my ideals! -Andi

Photos by Samuel Hoffman | The Journal Gazette

Matt Merritt tours his greenhouse at ATOM Acres. The Merritt family grows vegetables and herbs to sell locally.

Published: November 11, 2012 3:00 a.m.

Sprouting an urban farm

Couple hopes to expand operation with CSA, classes

Rosa Salter Rodriguez | The Journal Gazette

Merritt checks his kale for bugs in the greenhouse.

Merritt carves away the comb to harvest his honey.

Matt Merritt, wife, Ann, and sons Trace and Oliver plant kale in the greenhouse at ATOM Acres.

Matt Merritt is standing inside his kitchen on a recent sunny, if chilly, October morning. A beehive, honey dripping from honeycombs, lies in partial disassembly on and under his family’s round oak table.

Merritt pulls out a shelf and starts scraping the caps off one of the combs. Then he’ll place the rack in a hand-cranked centrifuge to extract the honey – a job, he says, that his blonde-haired 3-year-old son, Oliver, likes to “help” with.

“This is our sugar. Well, we sometimes use regular sugar, but we also use this,” the 30-year-old says. “It’s great stuff, because it smells so great.”

His wife, Ann, 26, smiles, while crocheting on a step nearby while the couple’s second son, Trace, 1, naps in another room. “Matt comments all the time about the smell. He says he likes the job because he smells like honey afterward.”

Yes, to Matt and Ann, this is the sweet life – life on what they hope will become a sustainable urban farm.

They call their nearly 6-acre patch of ground at the corner of Bass and Thomas roads ATOM Acres, an acronym made from the initials of family members’ first names.

From their land – across from a housing development and around the corner and down the street from a major local shopping strip – the Merritts plan to provide year-round vegetables, herbs, flowers and other products to area residents – while educating them about food production and preservation.

“This is everything that I thought that I’d need,” says Matt, who came to farming after a stint as a helper to a personal chef in Chicago made him curious about where the high-quality ingredients he was using came from. “Everything,” he says, “just felt right.”

Nonetheless, the two acknowledge theirs is a long row to hoe.

For now, after being able to purchase the land with the help of Matt’s mom and stepfather, Bobbi and Jerry Suetterlin of Fort Wayne, they’ve started with what growers call a hoop house – a plastic sheeted greenhouse – that Matt found at a public sale.

Inside, rows of beds are sprouting spinach, kale, Swiss chard and several kinds of leaf lettuce ready for harvest. The produce will be sold at the year-round farmers market at Parkview Field that is open the first Saturday of each month.

There are also several kinds of herbs and tiny pea vines that will be planted outdoors in the spring – and a germ chamber for sprouting seeds.

On the grounds, about 2 1/2 acres of which are tillable, Matt has eight beds for other vegetables, including broccoli and cabbage now, and tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers and other produce next year.

His goal, he says, is not just to sell at farmers markets, but to start a community-sponsored agriculture program, or CSA. He’s not quite sure what form it will take – “Winter is a good time for mapping that out,” he says.

But it likely will involve recruiting shareholders who will pay an entry fee and would determine at least in part what foods they’d like to receive.

Still in its earliest stages is converting an existing equipment garage into a facility where produce could be sold – with a kitchen where food could be preserved and classes given.

If all that sounds idealistically lofty, Matt says, well, it is. But he and Ann, who met in a health foods shop when both were living in Hawaii – “I overcharged him for peanut butter one day, so he remembered me,” she says with a smile – also come to the task with a well-suited background.

After working with the chef, Matt went on to study organic farming in a nine-month program at Michigan State University, commuting weekly to East Lansing, Mich., while Ann lived with his parents. There, he learned to manage a hoop house and flower fields, as well the business of structuring and marketing a CSA.

He says with the amount of land he has, and only a slightly larger growing space, the university program supported a 160-member CSA, farmers markets and wholesale sales. “That’s a lot of food,” he says.

Ann grew up on a 400-acre ranch cooperative in Washington, where dairy cows, pigs, goats, chickens, sheep and horses were raised. She says she started gardening, growing “strawberries, potatoes and petunias” at the age of 9.

Later, she lived in Florida and worked for a tree farm and plant nursery while taking botany and related courses at a community college. She says she knew when she met Matt that their goals and experiences meshed.

After leaving Michigan State, Matt tried helping friends raise chickens on a farm for a time. But when his parents said they wanted to help him farm on his own, he started looking for a suitable property.

“We looked everywhere – Waterloo, Syracuse, Bluffton, Avilla. We looked at a place in Leo. We wanted to be within close driving range of markets,” he says. “That’s the problem with famers – they’re not where the people are.”

The land they found was a fluke. It seems as if the land should be within city limits. But it’s actually in Wayne Township and zoned residential/rural agriculture. Other conventional crop lands lie nearby.

By going to farmers’ markets this summer, he’s been building an online newsletter subscription list that he hopes will become a customer base.

“One of our biggest goals,” he adds, “is to have heirloom varieties of vegetables that are beautiful and different,” he says, adding he’d someday like to start another Michigan State idea – “an edible forest” of fruit and nut trees.

“The whole idea is to get back to local food – food that hasn’t sat in a truck for a week and in the store for a week. We need to get out of the industrial revolution mindset when it comes to food that bigger is better. It can be useful in some ways, but maybe it’s not the safest way or the most economical way,” he says.

“Maybe we all need to eat more like farmers eat.”

rsalter@jg.net

Nature

Bittersweet Bites

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Because I am very new to the beginning-to-end process of growing food, I don’t have a specific–or heck, even a general–mental timetable yet. I don’t have memorized, from experience, what is supposed to come first, what crops come and go different during seasons, and what is an average date for the summer crops to be absolutely finished.

I do know, however, that finding these surprises, just a few days ago in November, is not a common experience. I know this just by reading books. By browsing seed catalogs and looking at a zone chart. By listening to seasoned gardeners and food growers around me. November 3 is not a ‘normal’ day to find 3 cucumbers (albeit very odd looking ones), enough green beans for a meal, and a dozen bright cherry tomatoes that should be hard and taste terrible, but instead have a sweet, summer ripened flavor.

I would not have found these goodies at all if I’d cut all the plants down 2 weeks ago like I had intended. I had figured their time was up, and they were starting to look terrible, anyway, but I never found the time to go out and clear everything out. I couldn’t have imagined that any more seeds or fruits would have burst from them like a last hurrah. I didn’t know that warm days and sunshine would hang on…and on.

After my initial surprise and enthusiasm, worry settled deep. Alongside the sweet tomato flavor left on my tongue, there was a sour aftertaste. “This is part of it. This is another small hint that things are changing,” a voice said in my head.

I realize that global warming is hotly debated (pun only sort of intended), but when my instincts and observations inch toward evidence that something is amiss, even in subtle ways, I’m hard pressed to just ignore it. If we only had longer summers, perhaps that would be a good thing, and everyone, in every growing zone, could easily grow food year-round with the help of simple hoop houses and cold frames. I mean really, if I’m completely honest with myself, the thought of never having to shovel snow from the driveway again makes me sad for only a moment, because I’d pine for drifts to jump in and snowmen to build. Mostly, I don’t love winter. The older I get, the more winter makes my bones ache and my heart dread the extra work and energy used to keep warm and from being buried in. However, cold, harsh, and long winters are a part of the midwest cycle I’m used to. Several months of ice and snow are part of the cycle that my surrounding ecosystem has been going through for countless lifetimes.

If it were only mild winters and longer growing seasons, then perhaps there would be reason to celebrate. I only have to think harder on this for a few moments to realize that no, it is not that simple at all. Mild winters themselves can have negative effects–pests that would normally die back during the freeze are suddenly a huge problem in spring when their numbers are much larger than usual. If the planet really is warming up, we won’t just conveniently gain mild winters and long summers. We may be facing unpredictable weather, just like we did this past spring, when an unexpected killing freeze in April affected apple orchards across the midwest and the east coast. The trees had blossomed with the early warm spring, then the freeze killed many of the tender new blossoms, irreparably harming the crop for the year. Along with strange up-and-down temperatures, we might experience more damaging storms, droughts, floods, with no rhyme or reason. We may have horribly frigid winters mixed in with other years of mild winters. As human beings we’ve always had to deal with nature’s patterns, and have had lots of surprises thrown in, but at what point do we start to realize the changes are more than just flukes? It seems possible that some very fundamental pieces of our weather patterns are shifting right before our eyes.The idea that weather may begin to seriously lose its predictability, on top of the fact that it can throw some very damaging tantrums at us regularly, has me bothered and concerned.

Today I went to finally get some cleanup done in the garden, and after having hard frosts the past couple of nights, it’s clear that there will be no more last minute bittersweet snacks. Everything from the summer is definitely dead. I am excited to get to work on some fall crops and build my hoop house. But as I cleared away the dead and rotting (and smelly) summer garden plants, I kept thinking of the surprise harvest from just a few days ago, and realized that deep down I am very wary of, and a bit alarmed about, the changes I feel around me. I can only hope that the changes are not so fast and harsh that we’ll be helpless to adjust to them.