On the farm, the rhythms of life so far remain pretty much unaffected by global concerns such as global warming and peak oil.

Increasingly frequent extreme weather events aside, the day to day climate we are experiencing now doesn’t seem different than before. Any change has been so minute, so gradual, so overwhelmed by natural variability. Earth takes several decades to respond to increased CO2 because of the thermal inertia of the oceans. Consequently, the effects we’re seeing today result from what we thoughtlessly dumped into the air 25 to 50 years ago. Annual global greenhouse gas emissions really took off about fifty years ago . . .

. . . and are today greater than ever.

By the time the effects of today’s (or even yesterday’s) emissions are felt, we’ll be long dead. The consequences will be borne by our children’s children’s children.

We can’t pin unusual events like a mid-May frost event on climate change wrought by global warming. The loss of ~75% of this year’s grape crop is just one of the vagaries of farming.

We’re already seeing what peak oil looks like. Stubbornly high gas prices. Stubbornly high unemployment. An economy that refuses to return to “normal”. Asinine describes our new reality in a post at Daily Kos:

[T]he economic and geopolitical turmoil we’ve been observing is exactly what Peak Oil would look like.  Oil production has stagnated, ceasing its endless growth that we were used to in previous decades.  Economic growth rates have also stagnated, causing problems with debt financing that have brought the Euro zone to the brink of collapse.  Austerity plans cause even more economic pain and fail to alleviate the debt problem, while stimulus plans fail to result in sufficient growth to overcome debt burdens, although they do mitigate the impact on the lower classes who suffer most.  Any amount of world economic growth feeds directly into an increased global demand for oil, which quickly runs into our inability to increase global oil production, raising oil prices.  With great respect for Krugman’s opinion that Keynesian economics offers the way out of our current mess, he has not yet addressed the negative feedback loop between stimulus, growth, and oil prices.

Peak oil or no, spring means it’s time to muck out the sheep shed, clearing it of a winter’s worth of manure. I used to do this job with a tractor. I’ve found the work to be much more rewarding done as it was in the past and will be in the future, by hand. It doesn’t take any longer. It’s peaceful and quiet. There’s no inhaling of exhaust fumes. And the absence of machines means you can enjoy the camaraderie.

When the work was done, we all sat at a shaded table on the patio, sharing a lunch of burritos and beer, salsa and chips. The misthaufen will be next year’s compost. Our soil grows richer and richer each year.

Our children’s children’s children deserve a life equally bountiful and joyous. We owe it to them to do what we can now, every day, to increase the odds that they’ll at least have a chance.

For the last two nights, the low temperature hit 30° – a bit scary for the grapes, which are already in bloom. Tender young leaves were frostbit on about 50% of the shoots. It’s a little early yet to tell how much damage was done to the blossoms. Viewed through a loop, it looks like most may have escaped harm even though surrounding leaves were killed. Hopefully. It would be a bit discouraging to lose half the crop this early in the season.

Tomatoes, which are still covered at night, escaped damage. Elsewhere in the garden, spring is in full spring. The side panels have come off the solarium. With hot weather in the forecast, squashes and cucumbers are now in the ground and protected from foraging ducks.

Our first batch of ducklings has hatched – a communal effort among three hens, who laid and incubated the eggs as a team. Seventeen hatched – a single flock, with three mothers. Here they all are, on a walkabout.

With a couple of weeks of warm, dry weather promised, it’s time to get corn and beans seeds in the ground. And at the end of the month, peppers.

Flowers are blooming like crazy.

Nasturtiums

Dogwood

Iris tenax, growing around an erratic – a chunk of Montana granite, detritus from the Missoula floods

Even the oaks are beginning to leaf out. It’s spring in earnest on the farm. No reason to go anywhere else.

This last week the sun came out, and the soil dried out a bit. Our raised bed gopher-proofing project could finally get underway.

First, the beds had to be excavated, down to a depth of about 16 inches. Luckily, Zooey was there to help.

Then we lined the beds with hardware cloth.

Finally, fill the beds back in again. The one is now planted with peas (tomatoes are in the background).

The other, with carrots – prime gopher bait. That’s a sheep grazing in the background, on lush spring grass.

Gophers – hahahahahaha. You’ll not be munching our carrots, peas, and beans this year. Or so we hope.

Nasturtiums, overwintered in the solarium, are already in bloom . . .

. . . and the ivy geraniums are beginning to come on.

So much beauty – and it’s not yet May.

The first day of spring brought one and a quarter inches of rain. The morning of the second day of spring, we awaken to snow.

It’s been continuing to snow all morning. The ducks refuse to come out of their shed. The sheep stay in the barn, crying for alfalfa rather than venturing out to graze. The daffodils don’t look happy, either.

Mother Loth is taking the snow with her usual aplomb.

Snow is no matter in the greenhouse, as the tender young plants remain warm and toasty. After several weeks of experimenting with heating cables equipped with a built-in, nonadjustable thermostat, I concluded that a non-automatic, heavy duty heating cable plugged into a separate thermostat would offer better and more precise control over temperatures. For a little over $100, the entire lower shelf in the greenhouse  – 12′ long by 20″ wide – is now warmed by a single 60′ cable buried in a ½” thick layer of sand . . .

. . . regulated by a thermostat hanging on the wall controlled by a probe buried in the bed of sand.

Some seedlings are now ready to go. I’ve got lettuces, spinach and pac choi to plant out, and raised beds to armor against gophers, if the weather would ever cooperate.

Spring snow -
slush on the paths
dripping from tree branches

(Apologies to Basho.)

Thursday morning, third day of spring: four inches of fresh snow on the ground. But the sun is shining!

It’s been a quiet week on the farm. A few weeks of warm, almost springlike weather in January and February have been followed a renewed (hopefully last) assault from winter. Too cold and wet to work outside. A good time for cozying up by the wood stove and catching up on more sedentary tasks.

And time for comfort food. A friend surprised us with a gift of four duck carcasses. Ooh, duck soup! We have a favorite recipe, from the south of France.

Alicuit

Ingredients, for each carcass:

Carcass of duck (including wings & neck)
1 onion, diced
2 carrots, diced
1 turnip, diced
~ 1 doz. mushrooms, sliced
~ 1 doz. Kalamata olives, rinsed and sliced
1 large potato, diced
~ 1 T flour
1 C white wine
bouquet garni (thyme, parsley, bay leaf, celery)
1 clove
1 piece star anise
salt & pepper

Preparation:

Roast the duck carcass(es) in a roasting pan in a 400° oven, turning a couple of times, for about an hour or until bones are golden brown. Move to stove top. Add a healthy splash of white wine & add water until carcass is immersed. Add a couple of cloves, a piece of star anise, salt and pepper, & bouquet garni. Bring to boil and simmer for about an hour.

Strain stock through a colander (don’t forget to put a pot under the colander to catch the stock!). Skim the duck fat from the surface of the duck stock & save – it’s precious stuff.

When the carcass has cooled enough to work with, pick out and discard the bouquet garni and then pick the duck meet off the bones (save the skin, fatty bits & other bits you don’t want to eat as a treat for your dog).

While the carcass is cooling: in a stock pot, sauté the diced onion in duck fat until softened and translucent. Add the diced carrots and cook a bit, then add the turnips, then the mushrooms, & finally the olives. Add the flour and cook a bit (we were having a gluten-intolerant guest for dinner, so we left out the flour  & thickened with corn starch at the end instead). Add the stock, first a little bit at a time, stirring to incorporate the cooked flour as a paste.

Add the duck meat to the stock pot, bring to a boil, and simmer for ~ 1½ hours. About 30 minutes before the end, add the potatoes. When the potatoes have cooked so they’re just tender, serve.

Speaking of comfort food, nothing says “comfort” on a cold winter day better than a pot roast. I remember as a kid looking forward to a trip to Grandmother’s house on Sunday afternoon, where a pot roast would be simmering on the stove top. We’ve since discovered that adding a couple of spicy sausages to the pot makes a pot roast even more delectable.

Pot Roast à La Ferme Noire

1 beef rump roast
4 of your favorite sausages (we prefer something spicy, like Hot Italian or Southwest Chicken)
1 onion, diced
2 carrots
1 doz. mushrooms, sliced
1 oz olive oil
2 T flour
1 C red wine
1 T tomato paste
bouquet garni (thyme, parsley, celery, bay leaf)
2 cloves
salt & pepper
1 C beef stock

Pat the beef roast dry, then coat generously with salt and pepper. In a stock pot, heat the olive oil. Brown the meat and the sausages on all sides; remove and set aside. Add the onions and cook, stirring, until softened and translucent. Add mushrooms and cook a bit, stirring. Add flour and cook, stirring, for a couple of minutes. Splash in some red wine, stirring to make a paste with the flour. Add the rest of the red wine, stirring, then the beef stock. Add the tomato paste and stir in. Return the beef roast and sausages to the pot. Add the carrots, bouquet garni and cloves. Bring to a boil and simmer, covered, for 1½ hours or until the beef is tender enough to pull apart. Discard carrots and bouquet garni. Arrange roast and sausages on serving platter, surround with sauce, and serve.

Pot roast served with boiled potatoes & shredded turnips steamed with apple

We had a set of triplets this week, all girls. Triplets are always a bit worrisome, as you never know if the mother will be willing or able to handle all three. Two were big and strong, and appeared to be faring for themselves okay from the get-go.

But the littlest one, even though she’s feisty, gets a bit of supplemental feeding.

Zooey is mighty interested in that new lambchen

The forecast is for the weather to warm up and dry out a bit. As soon as it does, I’m back out into the garden. We took care of the deer problem last year. This year:  gophers, consider yourselves on notice. You’re not getting my carrots again!

Brent crude hit a nine-month high last week, breaking through $125 a barrel. While oil in dollar terms remains $24 below the all-time nominal peak of July 2008, oil is now above the July 2008 peak in terms of both sterling and the euro.

The reason? Global crude use is soaring, while the most important oil wells on earth are rapidly depleting. We basically stopped finding conventional super-giant, high production rate oil fields forty years ago. Oil production has remained stubbornly flat regardless of price, as shown in this chart posted by Gail Tverberg at Our Finite World.

The oil supply shown above is “all liquids,” which includes unconventional sources including biofuels, extra heavy oil, tar sands, and natural gas liquids, as seen in this chart posted by Stuart Staniford at Early Warning.

“Crude plus condensate” on the right hand scale, other components of the liquid fuel stream on the left-hand scale.

Staniford notes that during the C&C plateau period since 2005, about 1 mpd in additional total supply has come from a long standing trend in the increase in natural gas liquids (NGPL), while another 1 mpd has come from “other liquids” (mainly biofuels).

These “other liquids” are not the same as crude oil. Natural gas liquids are not oil, and they contain only 65% of the BTU of oil. Biofuels are much worse. They are, at best, barely an energy source: rather, they are the product of a conversion process of other energy inputs. Taking into account energy returned on energy invested (EROEI) – the amount of energy required to extract, process, and deliver oil, natural gas liquids, unconventional oils, and biofuels – the world’s energy situation is much more dire than apparent from the gross “all liquids” production numbers. Even if “all liquids” production has still been rising – barely – the same can’t be said for net energy from liquid fuels.

High prices for crude means high prices for gasoline. Oil prices in 2011 averaged record highs, and 2012 isn’t looking to be any better as gasoline prices in the U.S. have never been higher this time of the year and are continuing to rise. No matter how much we might like to believe there’s a “solution” to high gasoline prices, there is very little government policies can do to deal with increasing demand for oil from Asia, or depleting oil reserves, or intractable conflicts in the Middle East and Africa.

Why do I bother to talk about oil supplies, when people say they much prefer to read about farm life: the ducks, the sheep, and the garden? It’s because the reality of peak oil is the driver behind this kind of life we have chosen to live, the main driver of the decisions we make. Peak oil means the end to the growth paradigm. However haltingly, we’re struggling to come to grips with this reality in our daily life.

Over a decade ago we began to think about disengaging from an oil-dependent lifestyle. We’re far from independent of oil, but we realize oil represents the past, not the future. So it seems silly to invest in new vehicles. For farm chores, our pre-WWII tractor will probably still be running even after the oil runs out.

1939 Ford 9N

We keep repairing our ’80s-vintage cars and ’70s vintage farm truck rather than replacing them. We drive as little as possible, fondly remembering the days we lived in the south of France where we get around almost entirely by foot and pedal power. Life has never been more glorious.

Sallèles d’Aude, “our” village in the south of France, by the Canal du Jonction

Sallèles d’Aude, street scene with pickup

We don’t take on debt, as haven’t now and don’t expect in the future to have any income to pay it back. We grow as much of our own food as we can, and as much as possible turn to neighbors for what we don’t or can’t. We rely on our own woodlot for heat.

We seem to not be alone in dis-investing in the automobile culture. Jazzbumpa at Angry Bear points to Department of Energy data showing vehicle ownership in the U.S., measured as vehicles (both cars and trucks) per 1000 population, peaked in 2007 at 843.57. It dropped by 1.88% to 828.04 in 2009. Nationmaster.com shows that the “most recent” value for the U.S. is 765 (though it’s not clear what “most recent” means). If this is accurate (which Jazzbumpa questions), then vehicle ownership has fallen off a cliff and is back to 1994 levels.¹ It is pretty clear that automobile ownership in the U.S. has peaked for good and is now going down rather than up.

Driving is down, too – both vehicle miles traveled and total miles driven. The Federal Highway Administration reports that last year, U.S. drivers logged 35.7 billion fewer miles than in 2010 — down 1.2%— to 2.963 trillion miles. That’s the fewest number of miles since Americans drove 2.890 trillion miles in 2003.

A drop in both vehicle ownership and vehicle miles traveled are indicators of a change in the way people are choosing to live in this world. Don’t be surprised when other indicators begin blinking, too. In our lifetime, we’ve come to expect to see GDP and other economic metrics always going up – after all, growth is normal, isn’t it? Perhaps growth will prove to not be normal, after all – and sooner than anyone thinks.

¹ The Census Bureau estimates the population of the U.S. as of January 2012 at about 312,780,000. The DOE’s Transportation Energy Data Books pegs the U.S. light vehicle fleet at 234,880,00 as of June 2011. Using those numbers results in a vehicle ownership rate of 751. A vehicle ownership rate of 765 may be too high, not too low.

Snows in December, a solid week of 23°- 24° lows just this last week. Yet we’ve been eating lettuce out of the garden all winter long. Row covers have proved to be the trick.

The wire framework is made from 5′ wide remesh, which comes in 150′ rolls. The wire frames are covered with 6 mil polyethylene sheeting; a weight at each end an another section of wire mesh thrown over the top keeps the plastic from blowing away when the wind blows. The row covers not only provide additional warmth during the days and protect from frost at night. They also keep the soil from becoming soggy and compacted from the rains, keeping the soil loose and fluffy.

We’re now harvesting lettuces we planted out as seedlings late last fall.

We planted spinach at the same time, but it mostly got eaten by voles. A few surviving plants are finally beginning to send out new leaves.

In early January, we planted out a new set of seedlings which should be ready about the time the bed we’re harvesting now is done.

We grow mostly loose leaf lettuces to be harvested leaf by leaf: Australian Yellow, Black-Seeded Simpson, Flashy Butter Oak, Royal Oak Leaf, New Red Fire, Merlot, Red Sails. We’ve also planted a couple of head lettuces: Anuenue, a batavian; and Winter Density, a romaine type.

After years of frustration, mâche is finally thriving beneath the Solexx row cover.

In the greenhouse, seedlings are growing for the next planting of mâche, lettuces, and spinach.

And we’ve started other seeds as well, so plants will be ready to transplant out when the weather warms up in spring: onions, scallions, shallots, and leeks; pak choy; a selection of tomatoes; and a few sweet peppers. Normally we wouldn’t start tomatoes and peppers this early, but rather wait until temperatures warmed up a bit in March. But a friend loaned us a home-made heat mat, and since we’ve now got an outlet in the greenhouse we just had to give it a try. We’ll see what kind of germination rate we get.

Thursday morning (January 5), our first lambs of the season were born, twins – a male and a female. At first, things looked to be going fine. Each was strong and healthy, although the male was a bit bigger than the female; and mama was feeding both. But Friday evening, we noticed that mama was no longer holding still for the female to let her feed. She was now markedly smaller than the male, who had been growing and putting on weight. She was looking weak. If we didn’t do something, she wasn’t going to make it.

Irina fixed a self-feeding bottle for her, but milk replacer is not a satisfactory solution. Even if you can get the lamb to drink from the bottle and feed itself, formula just isn’t nearly as good as mother’s milk. Lambs don’t grow as much or as fast, and they never catch up from a slow start to become big, healthy adult sheep.

That night, I dreamt of sheep grooming stands. The headpiece would hold mama still while our little black lamb snuck in and suckled to her heart’s content. Next morning, I went straight to the computer and googled “sheep grooming stand”, looking for inspiration. This design I found promising:

The concept is simple, the device quick and easy to use, and effective. Kind of like “stocks” for recalcitrant livestock.

So first thing Saturday morning I went to work, using scrap lumber and remnants of a dismantled dish antenna. The device was designed to be installed in the railings separating the two pens so as to be usable from either pen. It was ready to be put into service right after lunch.

Mama may not be happy, but baby sure is. Five times a day, Malingering Mama is in lockdown for nursing.

Results were immediate. She’s strong and healthy again, and quickly catching up to her brother.

Sunday morning, we woke up to a bit of a hullabaloo. Four new lambs were scattered about the yard, two white and two black. Lambs were bawling, mamas were baaing. We gathered up the lambs from the mud, cleaned them up, then set out to sort things out, figure out who belonged to whom.

Finding the mamas was pretty straightforward. Pick up the lambs, put them in the lambing pens, and the mamas should follow. That part went smoothly. Problem was, we only had one open lambing pen. The other was occupied by Malingering Mama – if she was minding her young ones properly, she could instead be let out with the flock. Crammed into a single pen, the new mamas were butting each other. Little lambs were flying. So we had to quickly erect an emergency, auxiliary pen and separate the combatants. Then came the hard part: which lambs belonged with which mama? After careful watching, seeing who was being fed by whom, Irina finally figured out the highly improbable solution: one mama had had triplets, all female, two white and one black; the other, a single female.

So at the moment, all is calm in the sheep shed.

This morning (January 10), Malingering Mama was observed freely feeding her female lamb, without being restrained. Maybe she was just suffering from a bout of post-partum depression. A release date is pending, depending on continued good behavior.

2011 will see the annual average price of crude oil the highest in history. Brent is expected to average about $111 for the year at the end of 2011, well above its previous high of about $97 in 2008. Despite record high oil prices, global oil supplies are defying standard economic theory and stubbornly refusing to grow.

The chart above, posted by Stuart Staniford at Early Warning, shows production of crude plus condensate has been basically flat since 2005. The meager increase over the last seven years in total liquids is largely coming from increases in NGPLs (hydrocarbons larger than methane removed from the natural gas stream), “other liquids” (biofuels, coal-to-liquids, gas-to-liquids, etc), and “refinery processing gains” (volume gains which occur in the refinery as heavier oils are cracked to lighter fuel products).

One economic consequence of stubbornly high oil prices in the U.S. is that people are driving less and less. Petroleum (gasoline and diesel fuel) consumption is well off peak 2007 levels, as seen in this chart posted by Mish Shedlock.

Vehicle miles traveled (VMT) in the U.S. has been in a down trend now for almost four years – an unprecedented occurrence.

Mish offers an explanation of what’s happening:

The best explanation for declining gasoline usage is that millions have dropped out of the labor force.

* * *

People have given up looking for work, entered forced retirement collecting social security, ran out of unemployment benefits, do more shopping online, or are simply too broke (or have less desire) to travel than before.

Don’t expect the economic exhaustion that is a consequence of peak oil to end any time soon. John Michael Greer this week warns that already, the future can’t pay its bills.

Over the last decade . . . crude oil prices have more than tripled; over the last decade, behind a froth of speculative booms and busts, the world’s industrial economies have lurched deeper into depression. Peak oil researchers have pointed out for years that the former trend would bring about the latter, but long after events proved them right, the connection still remains unnoticed by most people.

Given the reality of a collapsing economic superstructure, a quite rational response is to begin to ease your way out and re-engage in the household economy, where wealth is unreported and untaxed and cannot be siphoned off.

Last spring you planted cabbage seeds; then transplanted the seedlings out to the garden; watered and tended the cabbage plants all summer; harvested the cabbage heads in the fall; shredded and salted the cabbage and pressed it in a big crock.

It’s December, you’ve got a hundred pounds of sauerkraut sitting in the cellar. Now what? How often can you stomach sauerkraut with sausage?

We’ve found that we really like sauerkraut prepared with a variety of meats: pork belly, sausage, ribs of all kinds – pork, beef, lamb – and poultry, especially duck. Duck hindquarters work well, as they are best braised. The other day non-pork eating friends visitd. Sauerkraut with our own Muscovy duck seemed the perfect treat.

Since there were to be eight of us, we used the wings as well as the hindquarters, to ensure we had enough meat to go around.

Sauerkraut with Muscovy Duck

1.5 liters sauerkraut
2 Muscovy ducks
2  medium onions, diced (we substituted leeks)
1 apple, peeled and diced
12 juniper berries, crushed
2 whole cloves
1 small bit nutmeg, crushed
2 bay leaves
1 C duck stock (chicken stock, if you don’t have duck stock)
1 C white wine
Salt and pepper to taste

Rinse sauerkraut well (three times in fresh water) and drain.
Cut wings and hindquarters off carcass. Remove duck breasts and save for another meal. Reserve duck carcass for stock or soup. Trim duck fat and save.
Trim upper part of wing from lower 2/3, reserving middle part and wing tip for soup or stock. Separate leg from thigh; chop thigh into two pieces.
Render duck fat.
Brown duck pieces; when browned, remove.
Add diced onions and cook, stirring, until softened.
Add apple and cook a bit, then sauerkraut. Cook for  a few minutes, stirring.
Splash with white wine; add stock, then browned duck pieces, bay leaf, juniper berries, cloves and nutmeg.
Bring to simmer and cook, covered, for 1½ hours or until duck is tender. Season to taste.
Serve with mashed potatoes and a nice little pinot noir.

Here’s the finished product.

This recipe would work equally well with a stewing chicken, game hens, or a small turkey, and would be even tastier with the addition of some pork or sausage. The possible permutations are endless, offering myriad ways to enjoy your summer garden all winter long.