How do you degrow?

SUBHEAD: Facing large obstacles, huge consequences, humbling lessons and above all, mixed feelings.

By Constanza Hepp on 23 November 2018 for Degrowth.info -
(https://www.degrowth.info/en/2018/11/how-do-you-degrow/)


Image above: Handwashed cloth diapers hanging in the sun to dry. From original article.

We live nextdoor to my partner’s grandmother, Maria, who was born during the Second World War in Northern Italy. This means that she knows what hard times look like. Maria could not believe we would be using washable diapers for our baby boy.

With genuine surprise she asked me, “why?”, and then she was curious in which pot we were planning to boil the diapers. In her eyes, we could not possibly be choosing to use washable diapers – to her, an extinct garment reminiscent of poverty and manual labour – when there exists the comfort of the disposable.

Therefore, it must be that we cannot afford disposable diapers. Needless to say, for the first six months of our son’s life, every time Maria went to the supermarket, she bought us a packet of disposable diapers.

Everything about the lifestyle we are accustomed to, as rich westerners, has to change. If we let that sink in for a little bit that is when the real disruption comes in, giving way to a radical shift in perspective. So, where do we go from here?

As practitioners of the degrowth creed, the first challenge we face is precisely this, where do we start?
This is a very real question that needs to be answered when degrowthers decide to settle down. Since it’s possible to start anywhere, why not start with the closest and most immediate: ourselves. Our life.

Our lifestyle, our diet, our jobs. I want to bring forward how this radical decision – to choose the self as the first point of action towards a degrowth future – brings large obstacles, huge consequences, many humbling lessons and above all, so many mixed feelings.

How do we go about practicing degrowth?

So again, how do we go about practicing degrowth? Keeping in mind that the larger goal of degrowth is to socially organize through sufficiency, not to individually organize a lifestyle that soothes colonial guilt.

As I see it, there are two paths for practicing a degrowth lifestyle. One is to build an autonomous off-the-gird community that performs the visions for a degrowth society and the other is to coexist within existing ‘conventional’ communities, neighbourhoods and families.

I can only speak for the latter path, as it has been my experience for the last couple of years. Through coexisting with the status-quo, we are trying to change it from within. So far, the result is a living contradiction: we live in a small town, we manage a small homestead, and share with our community, but at the same time we are constantly breaking apart from them. The cultural obstacles are soul crushing.

Being surrounded by conspicuous consumption and judged by the same standards is overwhelming. It’s too easy to feel constrained when we are just trying to live in a way that is respectful of the natural world.

“I don’t understand this poverty vow you have taken for the sake of the environment”

Before my son was born, my mother said to me once, “I don’t understand this poverty vow you have taken for the sake of the environment”.

Only in that moment I realized what my choices look like to others. To me, it was both a sobering and a liberating choice, choosing to living with less in some aspects but really having so much more in other regards. However, to a set of very pragmatic eyes, voluntary simplicity looks a whole lot like poverty.

It’s hard to swallow just how much privilege is contained within that sentence, but it’s true. With her comment, my mother was echoing the common renunciations of Degrowth, which is something we (as a movement) absolutely must learn to deal with.

Part-time jobs mean more time for the unpaid reproductive labour in the home and the farm, but it also requires to make do with half the salary.

Second-hand clothes are an opportunity to be creative and original, but they also look like you cannot afford clothes and rely on hand-me-downs.

Fostering cooperation is a way of strengthening the bonds within a community, but it could also mean you are just needy and always seeking help. And so on.

Can we calmly coexist in communities when the waters are turbulent and bitter with contradiction? Not really, that’s my honest reply. There is no way around it, wherever both voluntary simplicity and frivolous materialism (and its resultant over-consumption) occur, a permanent contradiction exists that must be dealt with, never reconciled.

A couple of weeks ago, our neighbour’s daughter handed me a bag full of boy’s clothing and begged me not to be offended. Since the clothes were still good she thought maybe I could find use for them.

Twice she apologized for offending me in such a way. Offended! If anything, I am offended she thought I would be offended! I tried to show my gratitude and praise her gesture, but still she shied away.

In the performance of degrowth principles, the everyday things that add up to our existence become tense, there are constant contradictions and irreconcilabilities with the status-quo. And that’s a good thing. But a great deal of support is lacking, because there is definitely a kind of solitude in trying to be alright with a paradoxical existence.

There is a large degrowth community out there

The good news is, we are not alone! There is a large degrowth community out there; many odd-duck degrowthers living amidst capitalistic exploitation who can inspire and encourage each other. We are the revolutionaries that are living with less, the ones whose food choices imply a long explanation, and the ones choosing to wash diapers.

I’ve always accepted Maria’s weekly gift of disposable diapers. Although I’ve tried to explain several times, my point doesn’t really get across. She is doing us a favour and refusing her gift would damage our friendship. She is a generous woman who takes pride in her position of caretaker and the diapers are one of the many ways she helps us out.

I am thankful for that, but we don’t really understand each other. She has come to interpret that we are ‘artistic’, ‘eccentric’, and that we ‘experiment’ a lot. To her, we are not degrowthers, we are just poor.

This is an invitation: we want to read and share your stories.

How do you degrow? Share with us your experiences, your challenges, or even better – your successes. Write to us at blog@degrowth.de

Author:

Constanza Hepp studied Journalism in Santiago (Chile) and Human Ecology in Lund (Sweden). She is currently living in northern Italy, caring for her young family and establishing a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) project. She is interested in creating a bridge between academic activism and social practices with potential towards systemic change.

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Comfy?

SUBHEAD: After a hard day's work homesteading, snuggle down for sunset and the dusky onset evening stars and conversation. 

By Juan Wilson on 26 July 2018 for Island Breath  -
(http://islandbreath.blogspot.com/2018/07/comfy.html)


Image above: Detail of backyard panorama. On building hotwater panel, solar PV panels, rain catchme4nt gutter to 1,000 water tank. In yard foreground: pepper trees, two cassava, ginger. Midground: papaya, 12 cacao trees. Backgound: Macadamia nut and litchi tree, to right is corner of enclosed raised-bed garden.  Photo by Juan Wilson. Click to see panorama view. ().

Homesteading in retirement is hard work. In some ways harder than having a nine-to-five job forty hours a week. With the full time job eating out or buying prepared food was normal.

It's not as demanding as commercial farming, but there are dozens of tasks that keep piling onto the "to-do" list as well as many regular routines needed to be done frequently... even on a half acre lot.

Checking the fruiting plants daily is a daily activity. Avocado, mango and macadamia nut trees are seasonal.

It getting into macadamia nut season right now. We have three producing trees now. That's enough macadamia nuts in a season to get us through the year.

We make macadamia nut butter, and eat roasted nuts for snacks. We need to check under each tree a few times a day. In July it begins as a trickle of a few dozen in a day. Later we will be picking up a few hundred nuts in a day.  Lots of bending over.

In their own seasons are mango, avocado and always papaya. Other fruiting trees are oranges, tangerines, grapefruit, limes, lemons... and that's just the citrus. There are also a few oddballs like cacao, starfruit, litchi, noni, surinam cherry and Hawaiian chili peppers.

Plus, we cannot forget the staples like taro, cassava and breadfruit, plantain, banana, coconut.

This does not count the daily tending, weeding, watering and harvesting of our 16' by 32' raised-bed garden.

Nor does this work does includes the husking, peeling, chopping, drying, canning, and other processes needed daily to keep the plant production converting into usable fresh or storable food.

Are you having fun yet? Well don't forget the composting of plant waste, amending the soil,  trimming of trees, etc.

Homesteading is more than a full-time job. It's a life. And about the most secure and rewarding one.

We are inching our way back to the Garden of Eden. Don't be left behind.



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Convert Freezer into Fridge

SUBHEAD: Solar power couldn't run the conventional fridge, but converting a bin freezer worked. 

By Kendra on 23 September 2014 for New Life on a Homestead -
(https://www.newlifeonahomestead.com/convert-chest-freezer-to-fridge-solar/)


Image above: A typical low cost small bin freezer. From original article.

[IB Publisher's note: We are facing the same problem with our 16 cubic foot refrigerator - it's not efficient enough to run on the the batteries charged by our solar PV system. We are looking to convert a 10 cubic foot freezer into a refrigeration unit and live with the inconvenience of organizing and searching the bin for its contents. We'll let you know how that goes.]

Why Would We Want a Chest Fridge?
\In the months before purchasing our solar kit, we took measurements of how much power each of our appliances pulls using a Kill A Watt Meter.

After plugging our fridge into the meter for several days, we were able to determine that our upright unit was pulling about 2.25 kWh/day. With a solar system that will only produce 4-6 kW/day (assuming sunny days and clear skies), we had to find a way to reduce the load our fridge required.

I did a lot of research online, reading solar forums to find out what other people were doing for refrigeration off the grid. Many people use propane or gas refrigerators, but we didn’t want to have to depend on buying fuels to keep a fridge running.

Some people recommend solar refrigerators, but with the smallest models starting out at around $700, this option was way out of our price range. A more primitive alternative is using a Zeer Pot, but we really need something more practical than that for our everyday needs.

And then I came across something that sounded too good to be true:

Converting a chest freezer… a regular ol’ chest freezer… into a super energy efficient fridge.

Surely it would be complicated. There would be re-wiring and all sorts of complicated electrical modifications. Right?

Actually, not at all. It’s as simple as an extra plug. But I’ll get to the technical stuff in a minute.

One of the best things about a chest fridge is that they require just a fraction of the energy an upright model uses. Think about it. Cold air sinks. So when you open an upright fridge, all of that cold air you’ve paid to produce falls right out of the fridge at your feet, which in turn causes it to run more often. But with a chest fridge that cold air just sinks back down into the unit, requiring less energy to keep it cool. That’s why grocery stores like to use chest fridges.

Even if you don’t have any plans for going off the grid, you might want to consider the benefits of replacing your upright fridge/freezer with chest units simply for the energy savings.

Switching to a chest fridge isn’t for everyone. There are definite drawbacks to a system like this, which we’ll talk about later. But for us, it was a perfect and affordable option to use alongside our solar kit.


Step One: Finding The Right Freezer
When shopping for a chest freezer to convert to a fridge, find the smallest unit to accommodate your needs. Generally, the smaller the freezer the less energy it will require.

We found a 6.8 cu. ft. Magic Chef freezer for $80 on Craigslist. It’ll fit an 8×13 casserole dish down in the bottom, so there’s plenty of room to store leftovers or make-ahead meals. Although this unit isn’t Energy Star rated, it was comparable. Before deciding on a purchase, do some research into how much energy it uses compared to other models of equal size.

The amount of watts it uses as a freezer will be different from what it’ll use once converted to a fridge, but by comparing models you can at least get an idea of whether it uses more energy than necessary or if it’s pretty energy efficient from the get-go.

To figure out how many watts a freezer pulls, you’ll need to use the formula: Amps x Volts = Watts.

There should be a plate or sticker somewhere on the freezer that tells you how many amps and volts your freezer uses.

Just for reference, our freezer breaks down like this:

2.0 Amps x 115 V = 230 Watts, or .23 kW (1 kW = 1000 Watts).

This tells us approximately how many watts the unit uses per hour.

After converting the freezer to a fridge, our unit was pulling .68 kWh/day. Once we loaded it up with food the chest fridge is now reading about .51 kWh/day. That’s less than a quarter of the energy our upright fridge used!

If you get a used chest freezer, make sure everything is in good working order, and
ask about the last time the freon was topped offscratch that, but do make sure there isn’t a leak in the line.

Step Two: Controlling The Temperature

Once you’ve found a chest freezer the next step is to convert it to a fridge. The easiest way to do that is to purchase a Johnson Controls Freezer Temperature Controller. We got ours for about $50 on Amazon.

With this device, there is no re-wiring or complicated configuring whatsoever. It’s as simple as a plug.

Here’s how it works…

Plug your freezer into the controller. Plug the controller into the wall outlet. Set the thermostat on the controller to a good temperature for refrigeration (we’ve got ours on 32*). Place the copper prong in the freezer, feeding the copper wire underneath the lid. The temperature in the box will raise to the new thermostat’s setting, and your unit will automatically go from being a freezer to a fridge. Easy enough?

We mounted the controller to the wall behind the chest fridge. You can see the copper wire leading into the fridge from the back side. It just slips right underneath the lid. My husband also mounted a power strip with timers for our chest fridge and freezer, so we can control how often they come on when our solar is low on power.

Here’s the inside of the fridge before it’s filled. You can see the copper wire and probe in the center of the fridge. We try to keep it hanging around the middle of the fridge to keep the temperature consistent. If the probe is closer to the top of the fridge, it may read warmer air causing the unit to cool down unnecessarily.

I try to keep the prong from touching the wall of the fridge. Not sure if that matters, but it seems like a good idea.

A refrigerator thermometer helps us make sure it’s staying at the right temperature.

Getting Used To A Chest Fridge

Once I had sufficiently emptied our upright fridge/freezer, I was ready to move what remained to the new solar powered chest fridge. I was shocked by how much space was being taken up in our fridge by stuff that didn’t even require refrigeration.

I’m still working my way through the condiments and canned goods (I had like six jellies open in the fridge… yikes!), but when it comes down to the basics, we really only need the fridge for dairy products, a few condiments, leftovers, and more delicate produce such as leafy greens.

Down in the bottom of the fridge I put a milk crate to hold condiments and things we don’t use that often. Over time, condensation builds up in the bottom of the fridge and it needs to be soaked up. Having all of the loose jars up out of the water and in one easy-to-remove container makes cleanup a little easier.

I’ve used two freezer baskets to take advantage of the space at the top of the fridge. In these I put the stuff we use most often. I’ve found that having our leftovers right on top where they can’t get lost has really helped me use them up, where as before they would often get pushed to the back of the fridge and forgotten.

Having two baskets is a good use of the space, but it isn’t as practical as I’d like. To get to anything below, we have to remove one of the baskets first. Ideally, we would just slide one basket to either side to reach the bottom.

Frugal Kiwi has an excellent post on Organizing Your Chest Refrigerator, in which she shares some fantastic ideas for making the most of your space while still allowing access to the bottom of the fridge. I’d love to make shelves like her husband made, eventually.

But what about a freezer?

Yes, we still have a freezer. Instead of having an upright fridge/freezer AND a chest freezer (which is what we had before), we’ve consolidated all of our frozen foods into the one chest freezer. The chest freezer by itself pulls about 1kWh/day, which we can support with the solar panels alongside the chest fridge.

Drawbacks
Yes, there are trade-offs when switching from an upright to a chest fridge. Here are a few I’ve discovered so far…

Convenience– Obviously, having to move stuff to reach down into the fridge is a little less convenient than we’re used to. But honestly, it really hasn’t been too much trouble.

Condensation– The fridge does accumulate water in the bottom from condensation. About once a week I pull everything out of the fridge and dry it up with a towel.

No Instant Filtered Water– With our upright fridge, the kids were used to helping themselves to cold, filtered water straight from the fridge door. Now they have to get water from the kitchen faucet, ’cause it’s too far down for them to reach into the bottom of the fridge. I’d like to get a Berkey or other beverage dispenser to fill with ice water to keep on the kitchen counter so that it’s easier for the children to fill their cups whenever they need to.

No Ice Maker– Of course, we don’t have an automatic ice maker now either, so it’s back to the old fashioned ice cube trays. Which works just fine.

Space– Having a chest fridge and a chest freezer definitely requires more floor space than an upright model. This may be a deal breaker for you. We have chosen to be unconventional (imagine that!) and move our chest fridge and freezer into the master bathroom, which is on the north side of the house and stays the coolest.

We had to sacrifice the garden tub, but honestly we probably wouldn’t have used it anymore anyways since we’ll have to be more conservative with our water usage. (Now I get to figure out the best way to fill the empty space where our fridge used to be in the kitchen.)
With a little adjusting it really hasn’t been difficult to get over these minor inconveniences. In our opinion, it has definitely been worth the trade.

Total Cost
The total setup cost to us was about $130 for a fridge that now runs on solar power, which we quickly made back by selling our upright fridge. Your cost will depend on the deal you can find on a chest freezer, plus about $50 for the thermostat controller.

Refrigerators generally don’t cost that much to run for a year, especially newer more efficient models. But when your power is limited and every watt adds up in a big way, converting a chest freezer to a fridge is a great way to significantly reduce your household energy load.
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Millennials abandoning suburbia

SUBHEAD: A generation is turning its back on suburban sprawl and automobiles for homesteading.

By Charles Hugh Smith on 13 April 2017 for Of Two Minds -
(http://www.oftwominds.com/blogapr17/millennials-halfx4-17.html)


Image above: Millennials are embracing gardening like no recent generation. From (http://thechronicleherald.ca/homesnews/1440355-millennials-on-the-hunt-for-outdoor-spaces).

Real solutions have two parts: changes in values and operational changes in habits and processes. Many Millennials are homesteading, buying affordable homes and building community.

While it's certainly good sport to mock "snowflakes," not all Millennials are snowflakes. Many are homesteading, buying affordable homes and building communities that get stuff done.

I discuss these trends with Drew Sample, who is living them in Ohio. ( hear a 60-second excerpt or listen to the full podcast on Drew's site.)

Although the mainstream media focuses on bubble-priced Left and Right coast homes costing hundreds of thousands of dollars, there are perfectly serviceable houses that can be had for $50,000 or less elsewhere in America. Drew just bought one, and rather than go through a bank for the mortgage, he arranged (with the help of a real estate attorney) for a family member to put up the mortgage.

This arrangement is win-win: the family member earns a much higher return on the cash than a savings account or equivalent, the loan is secured by the property, and Drew cuts out the bank/lender.

It may surprise those who only read media accounts of Millennials living in their parents' basement playing videogames, many of the Millennials in Drew's "tribe" are growing food via homesteading.

This is arguably a global trend, as the short video below from Japan reveals.

An increasing number of Japanese Millennials are abandoning the high-cost, long work hours life in big cities for a rural lifestyle that is described as "half farmer, half X," with X being whatever part-time work generates the modest incomes needed to sustain the village lifestyle.

I recently watched a Japanese TV program (Soko ga Japan is the name of the series) profiling the young residents of a Japanese farming village. Each household pays $200 or $250 per month for a spacious old house and adjoining farm plot.

This is roughly 10% of what the households were paying for cramping flats in Tokyo. One of the homes is an expansive 200-year old farm house which the young tenant has fixed up to host informal gatherings for those interested in the village community.

Drew reports his mortgage is a bit over $300/month. Including property taxes and homeowner's insurance, the basic cost of ownership is roughly half what neighboring homes are renting for.

So what is X, the other source of income? Raising animals and high-value vegetables that can be sold to restaurants is one source, but many of the young homesteaders continue to do the work they did in the city, only remotely: graphic design, illustration, IT (information technology), translation, etc.

This is an example of what I call the Mobile Creative class, the non-age specific class of people who have broken free of Corporate-State wage-slave serfdom by cobbling together multiple income streams doing work they care about, and radically slashing their cost of living to enable this freedom to do meaningful work.

America's Nine Classes: The New Class Hierarchy (April 29, 2014)

The New Class: Mobile Creatives (May 1, 2014)

The Nitty-Gritty of Financial Independence: The Self-Employed Mobile Creative (February 8, 2017)

I describe how to fashion a mobile creative work life and income in my book Get a Job, Build a Real Career and Defy a Bewildering Economy.

When people say they want solutions, they're actually seeking only a specific kind of solution, one that leaves everything they have now intact but guarantees them more of something: more security, more healthcare, more education, more money, etc., but at no cost or inconvenience to themselves.

Anything that fits these parameters isn't a solution; it's magic. Magical thinking and magical fixes are endlessly appealing precisely because they don't require us to change anything or work at anything outside our comfort zone.

In the real world, solutions change core values and processes. If they don't, they're not real solutions.

Fake fixes come in various types: cosmetic band-aids, alleviation of the symptoms while the disease continues unchecked, public-relations relabeling of the problem so it appears to go away via semantic trickery, and so on.

The credit-card fueled shopping-spree of suburban malls is dying for a variety of structural/systemic reasons. Embracing that as the only model we have is to choose extinction.

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Building your resilient homestead

SUBHEAD: How the long-term approach of creating a resilient and regenerative farm can and will sustain future generations.

By Jenna Clark  on 8 July 2013 for Transition Voice -
(http://transitionvoice.com/2013/07/building-a-resilient-homestead-of-your-own/)


Image above: Detail from cover of Ben Falk's book. From (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1603584447/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl).

“Imagine inheriting a food forest,” farmer and author Ben Falk suggests in The Resilient Farm and Homestead: an Innovative Permaculture and Whole Systems Design Approach.

And although Falk does eventually go on to describe exactly how one would go about creating a low-maintenance, edible forest garden, the idea he poses ignites a greater question – what does it mean to leave a legacy and what will our children inherit on this earth?

In an uncertain future with a declining economy in a world of rapidly disappearing natural resources, is accumulating individual wealth the best and most ethical inheritance for us to leave to our children?

Wealth of nations
For Falk, the key ensuring the livelihood of future generations is not by amassing and passing down wealth in the traditional monetary sense, but by growing and creating your own thriving farm and homestead based on the concepts of regeneration and resilience – starting today.

Whereas some books on permaculture take a more theoretical approach, Falk’s manual is rooted in direct personal experience, adding an element of credibility occasionally lacking in manuals that rely on theoretical knowledge and second-hand accounts. It is essentially a case study that describes what has worked and not worked for Falk and his team over the last decade at the Whole Systems Research Farm in Vermont. The term permaculture is introduced early on as a “design approach and framework for problem solving,” and although Falk uses the language of permaculture and its ideas throughout the work, more detail into the movement and specific principles itself is omitted in favor of Falk’s direct, practical experience.

Early in the book, Falk creates a sense of urgency that now is the time to take responsibility for the future, and he describes how the long-term approach of creating a resilient and regenerative farm can and will sustain future generations.

Subsequent chapters of the book give the reader the tools needed for creating such a farm and homestead, starting with the design process and moving deeper into chapters on specific topics such as water and earthworks, food crops and regeneration for the long haul.
 
Learning from mistakes
Most helpful, Falk includes what failed on his farm along with what has worked – for example, Falk continues to work on creating the perfect potting soil mix and has yet to attain the germination rate he would like to see (I can relate). As someone with prior knowledge of permaculture, the manual presents some new-to-me concepts (such as tall grass grazing as a method of building soil) and sparked many new ideas (here’s one: the exciting possibility of growing my own staple crop of rice on the East Coast!).

Many of the lessons learned are most applicable to those living in a similar climate to the Whole Systems Farm in Vermont; however, the farm’s thriving ecosystem has been created on marginal land, and Falk stresses that the concepts can be transferred to other locations where only marginal land is available and creative solutions are needed. Falk also does a good job of breaking up the text of the manual by providing useful photos, graphs and anecdotes, as well appendices providing checklists and definitions of words and concepts.

Falk encourages a shift from consumer to producer by replacing dependency with self-reliance. Permaculture is used as the lens for making this shift, a tool of empowerment that allows individuals to cultivate their own nutrient-dense food and create a productive and meaningful lifestyle despite ever-changing circumstances. The steps to make this transition are presented concretely and candidly. Ultimately, Falk is describing a transformation that starts within each person and inevitably extends to family, home, the land, the community and finally future generations.

“Be confident, try stuff”
More than a just manual, this book inspires action, self-reliance and a kind of empowerment that can only be felt when you willingly tie yourself to a piece of land and begin to truly engage with the earth. Our current reality is constantly changing. There is no guarantee that the world will look as it does now in a year, much less ten or twenty. More often than I would like, this thought paralyzes me and fills me with a sense of helplessness.

This book combats such a fatalistic view of the future by taking a positive, action-based approach. Perhaps this quote of Falk’s sums it up best – “be confident, try stuff.“ And today is a great day to start.
• Jenna Clarke, a Virginia native, recently joined the ranks of women who grow food in the beautiful Shenandoah Valley. She is the Marketing & Outreach Coordinator for Project GROWS, a youth-oriented educational farm based in Verona, Virginia, as well as a fellow at the Allegheny Mountain School. Homepage image of rice paddies courtesy of Whole Systems Research Farm.
- See more at: http://transitionvoice.com/2013/07/building-a-resilient-homestead-of-your-own/#sthash.VdcmzNHq.dpuf

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