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Six weeks later the vertical grow pots are doing fantastic. There is so much space this is saving and running on my 650 litre system does not increase the load on this system. This system is still running at 50% capacity in my opinion. I can easily add another few more vertical grow pots and two more regular grow beds. Periodically I have been adding a little seaweed extract which seems to take care of some of the micronutrient deficiency. Compost tea is the next addition which I will be trying soon.
Jumat, 01 Juli 2016
Family Promise Founder to Speak at Grand Opening of New Day Center in Albuquerque
Below is a speech that Ms. Olson gave at the University of Arkansas Clinton School of Service in May of 2011.
Hunger No More
Reprinted from the Looked with Compassion blog, (Dec. 12, 2015 post)
By Rev. Greg Henneman
There are many injustices of our culture that we tolerate as normal. We assume that the way things are is how they have always been and how they will always be. Although the human spirit continually shows potential for amazing things, we limit our creativity when we simply accept poverty as normal.
Yesterday, nearly 200 people came together to no longer accept situation normal. Leaders of faith communities, non-profits, and medical systems raised their hands in a commitment to end hunger in Ohio.
Yes, end hunger. Why not?
David Beckmann, president of Bread for the World, shared the story of recently visiting Bangladesh. He had previously lived in Bangladesh and saw a noticeable improvement in the homes people lived in, streets, infrastructure, and health of the children. Beckmann stated that since 1990 the number of people in the world living in extreme poverty fell from two billion to one billion.
This led me to wonder, if noticeable change can happen in Bangladesh, why not here?
Ambassador Tony Hall shared the story of Mother Teresa grabbing his hand and showing him that with his five fingers he could remember five words: for the least of these. Hall described hunger as a political issue. That the effort to end hunger is not a matter of finding the resources but the will to end hunger.
With 48 million food insecure people in the United States, Hall asked shouldn’t this be one of the most important issues? What are you doing about hunger?
Ending hunger is not a matter of food supply. We have plenty of food. Nearly 40 percent of the food in America is wasted.
Hunger is a health issue.
Hunger not only results in billions of dollars of medical costs, but real people and whole communities who experience diabetes, hypertension, and low birth weights because of our lack of creativity to end hunger.
Will you raise your hand to end hunger in our country, your state, your community? In 2015, no one needs to go hungry. Hunger is a basic human right.
Next time your hand brings a piece of food to your mouth, remember the words of Mother Teresa, “for the least of these.”
How are your hands being used so no one else’s hands shake with hunger?
(Editors note. There was a similar conference in Albuquerque in May 2015. Read more here)
By Rev. Greg Henneman
There are many injustices of our culture that we tolerate as normal. We assume that the way things are is how they have always been and how they will always be. Although the human spirit continually shows potential for amazing things, we limit our creativity when we simply accept poverty as normal.
David Beckmann, president of Bread for the World, shared the story of recently visiting Bangladesh. He had previously lived in Bangladesh and saw a noticeable improvement in the homes people lived in, streets, infrastructure, and health of the children. Beckmann stated that since 1990 the number of people in the world living in extreme poverty fell from two billion to one billion.
This led me to wonder, if noticeable change can happen in Bangladesh, why not here?
Ambassador Tony Hall shared the story of Mother Teresa grabbing his hand and showing him that with his five fingers he could remember five words: for the least of these. Hall described hunger as a political issue. That the effort to end hunger is not a matter of finding the resources but the will to end hunger.
With 48 million food insecure people in the United States, Hall asked shouldn’t this be one of the most important issues? What are you doing about hunger?
Ending hunger is not a matter of food supply. We have plenty of food. Nearly 40 percent of the food in America is wasted.
Hunger is a health issue.
Hunger not only results in billions of dollars of medical costs, but real people and whole communities who experience diabetes, hypertension, and low birth weights because of our lack of creativity to end hunger.
Will you raise your hand to end hunger in our country, your state, your community? In 2015, no one needs to go hungry. Hunger is a basic human right.
Next time your hand brings a piece of food to your mouth, remember the words of Mother Teresa, “for the least of these.”
How are your hands being used so no one else’s hands shake with hunger?
(Editors note. There was a similar conference in Albuquerque in May 2015. Read more here)
Aquaponics,
hunger,
more,
no
Aquaponics Tilapia Harvesting
Aquaponics Tilapia Harvesting
This video shows how to harvest, clean, and fillet tilapia from your aquaponics system.
Rendering Beeswax
In our neck of the woods, spring is definitely in the air. Chives and new growth on the strawberries poking through the mulch, grass in protected areas starting to green up, birds returning from the south side of things... That means its time to start getting set up for the spring flurry of activity around the homestead! On our list this weekend was the bees. While we dont know exactly where were going to site them in our new place, we know what weve got to do to get the hives ready. This year, its mainly scraping out old boxes and wiring in foundation.
The catch is that we had a place to keep bees three years ago, then not for the last two years, and now again yes! So all our equipment has been sitting idle for two years. When we cracked it open, we found some of our old brood comb had some damage from something thats been eating the honey (not sure what, but there were little grubs that looked like small hive beetle larvae in there), and some frames had the telltale scent of fermented honey (but not good mead, just to be clear). There were also some frames that hadnt had comb drawn out, but that had the foundation busted up. What to do? Looks like its time to take the unusable comb/foundation and render it down into beeswax!
The rendering process for beeswax is pretty similar to the process we use for other fats, like tallow and meat trimmings. Except this time, were not going to make cracklins out of the leftovers. (Although maybe the leftover pupae wouldnt taste too bad...) Its also pretty similar to the process that Don uses in his YouTube videos (which we found out after the fact!), but we dont have the luxury of dedicated equipment that doesnt have to be thoroughly cleaned. (So well share a couple tips we figured out in that regard, too.)
Note: this is a cautionary tale and contains more information on what not to do than the best way to do this. But, in case your intuition and forward-thinking skills are in a lull when you have some beeswax to render (like ours evidently were), let this be a lesson...
Now for the cleanup...we didnt take a picture during the process, but what we found works fairly well is almost-boiling water and dish soap. Beeswax melts at 140-150 °F, so boiling water definitely melts the wax, and the soap helps solubilize it in the water. For utensils like the slotted spoon, just pouring very hot water over it was enough to melt the wax and wash away any residue. For the pot and glass bowls, we scrubbed them down with a dish cloth wrapped around a spoon. Insulated rubber gloves or the hand part from Iron Mans suit would also work, but we didnt have either handy.
There was a thin residue that didnt show up until dry, but its not likely to hurt anything and will wear off over the next few uses. (Or when Katie decides to scrub it the next day...) Who couldnt use a glass bowl with some extra waterproofing? For the stove and counter top (and floor and walls and inside of the microwave...), we were able to scrape off the wax with a hard piece of plastic, and wipe up any residue with the hot wet dish cloth. No residue when dry. Yay!
Whats your process for rendering beeswax? What do you do with it once you have it purified? Let us know in the comments section below!
The catch is that we had a place to keep bees three years ago, then not for the last two years, and now again yes! So all our equipment has been sitting idle for two years. When we cracked it open, we found some of our old brood comb had some damage from something thats been eating the honey (not sure what, but there were little grubs that looked like small hive beetle larvae in there), and some frames had the telltale scent of fermented honey (but not good mead, just to be clear). There were also some frames that hadnt had comb drawn out, but that had the foundation busted up. What to do? Looks like its time to take the unusable comb/foundation and render it down into beeswax!
The rendering process for beeswax is pretty similar to the process we use for other fats, like tallow and meat trimmings. Except this time, were not going to make cracklins out of the leftovers. (Although maybe the leftover pupae wouldnt taste too bad...) Its also pretty similar to the process that Don uses in his YouTube videos (which we found out after the fact!), but we dont have the luxury of dedicated equipment that doesnt have to be thoroughly cleaned. (So well share a couple tips we figured out in that regard, too.)
Note: this is a cautionary tale and contains more information on what not to do than the best way to do this. But, in case your intuition and forward-thinking skills are in a lull when you have some beeswax to render (like ours evidently were), let this be a lesson...
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| Heres the victim: nine frames of unusable wax and/or foundation. Some of the combs are pretty dark. |
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| We broke everything up so it would fit in a pot (with about six inches of water in the bottom) and started heating. The darkest comb isnt shown in this picture. |
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| The frames and wires got set next to the door so they could be quickly taken back outside before Katie found out what had inexplicably happened to the kitchen. In retrospect, the comb-removal operation should have been done outside. EDIT: Katie says the entire operation should have been done outside. New house rule! |
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| While its cooking, we brought some of our misshapen foundation inside to flatten out in the warm kitchen. We were pretty glad we saved the wax paper between the sheets! We put a stoneware cookie sheet on top to weigh it down. Theyre not perfectly flat yet, but were not in that big of a hurry. |
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| When all the meltable stuff is melted, there are four (or five) layers. At the very bottom is a thin layer of dirt and other heavy stuff. Then comes the water and all the water-soluble stuff. At the interface of the water and beeswax is stuff like propolis and lightweight dirt. On top of that is the beeswax, and at the very top is a bunch of dark-colored floaties. The floaties are things like pollen chunks, dead bees and pupae, and other stuff from the bees junk drawer. |
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| When it looked like nothing else was melting, we scooped off the floaties and stacked them as tall as possible in a glass bowl. A lot of wax ended up coming with them. If we had another big vessel to add them to like Don did, we could have filtered through a t-shirt or something. But we thought a kitchen strainer would be very hard to clean. |
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| As it was, we poured what wax we could back into another bowl, but still werent happy with how much we were losing. So, we filtered through a t-shirt anyway, dripping the liquid into the new bowl. We figured out that if we put the floaties in the middle, and twisted on either side that we could squeeze out more wax without burning our hands. (Coincidentally, this is also the point where the term diminishing returns starts to be an adequate description of getting more wax out of the floaties.) The t-shirt might not ever be wearable again, but it will make some good candle wicks! |
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| In retrospect, pouring back into the pot would have been a better idea. (Katie rolls her eyes.) But we got two thin cakes of wax instead of one thick one, and two is better than one, right? Next time well find a bigger second vessel and strain through an old t-shirt. All the hot water coming through the t-shirt will send most of the wax through anyway, and well avoid this messy step! We set the pot outside to cool down overnight. Then we added some water to this bowl, heated in the microwave until everything was melted, and set it outside to cool down overnight. |
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| After the first melt, both cakes of wax were kind of dirty, like this. So we put them back in the bowl with some water, and heated them in the microwave until everything was melted. |
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| We repeated the process of adding water, melting, and cooling until the wax was clean enough for our standards. (It took three times for this batch.) |
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| We werent quite sure what we want to do with the beeswax yet (so many possibilities!), so we decided to store it in some canning jars until we have a better idea. Looks a lot better than the dark brown mess we started with! |
Now for the cleanup...we didnt take a picture during the process, but what we found works fairly well is almost-boiling water and dish soap. Beeswax melts at 140-150 °F, so boiling water definitely melts the wax, and the soap helps solubilize it in the water. For utensils like the slotted spoon, just pouring very hot water over it was enough to melt the wax and wash away any residue. For the pot and glass bowls, we scrubbed them down with a dish cloth wrapped around a spoon. Insulated rubber gloves or the hand part from Iron Mans suit would also work, but we didnt have either handy.
There was a thin residue that didnt show up until dry, but its not likely to hurt anything and will wear off over the next few uses. (Or when Katie decides to scrub it the next day...) Who couldnt use a glass bowl with some extra waterproofing? For the stove and counter top (and floor and walls and inside of the microwave...), we were able to scrape off the wax with a hard piece of plastic, and wipe up any residue with the hot wet dish cloth. No residue when dry. Yay!
Whats your process for rendering beeswax? What do you do with it once you have it purified? Let us know in the comments section below!
Quando Umni Flunkus Moreggnogi
Those unfamiliar with public television in the United States probably have never heard of the Red Green Show. Thats a true tragedy, as the show had unparalleled success with a fifteen-year run, and in our opinion, should still be running today. (The success could not be paralleled because the shows trajectory was more of a random walk than a straight line...)
The Red Green Show has everything one could ask for in a sketch comedy masterpiece: a possum-themed van, a duct tape fixation, Canadians, a possum-themed lodge complete with latin motto, multi-colored suspenders, loads of old-timey wisdom, a possum-themed club, creative repurposing (what we call whatchagotamology), and bad puns. If youre not familiar, you definitely owe it to yourself to check out a few episodes, which are readily available thanks to the magic of the internets.
Anyway, the Red Green Show debuted in January, 1991, which means that this month is the 23rd anniversary of arguably the best TV show ever. This is the type of event that we celebrate with eggnog. We had originally planned to make a possum-themed eggnog, but Katie vetoed that before we even had time to catch a possum. So instead, here is a red- and green-colored eggnog.
The recipe:
6 egg yolks
3 cups milk, divided into two batches of 1.5 cups
1 cup sugar
1.25 cups cranberries or other red fruit
0.33 cups water
0.33 cups cherry jelly (or jelly from other red fruit)
Green sprinkles to taste
Beat egg yolks until thick and yellow, then mix in 1.5 cups milk. Heat until 160 °F, mix in sugar and then the remaining milk, cranberries, and cherry jelly. Blend until homogeneous and red-colored. Cool to room temp (or colder), pour into glasses, and garnish with green sprinkles.
How do you color your eggnog red? Is the Red Green Show also your favorite PBS show? Let us know in the comments section below!
The Red Green Show has everything one could ask for in a sketch comedy masterpiece: a possum-themed van, a duct tape fixation, Canadians, a possum-themed lodge complete with latin motto, multi-colored suspenders, loads of old-timey wisdom, a possum-themed club, creative repurposing (what we call whatchagotamology), and bad puns. If youre not familiar, you definitely owe it to yourself to check out a few episodes, which are readily available thanks to the magic of the internets.
Anyway, the Red Green Show debuted in January, 1991, which means that this month is the 23rd anniversary of arguably the best TV show ever. This is the type of event that we celebrate with eggnog. We had originally planned to make a possum-themed eggnog, but Katie vetoed that before we even had time to catch a possum. So instead, here is a red- and green-colored eggnog.
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| Start with some type of red berry leftover from the holiday season. For us, that was cranberries, but this nog would also work great with cherries, raspberries, strawberries, pomegranites, or all of the above! For the cranberries, we had about 1.25 cups, which we added to a pot with 0.33 cups water, and cooked until the berries were mashable. We started cooking them in the microwave, but they sounded like they were going to explode after a few seconds, so we switched to the stove (by Katie decree). Also, if we had more cranberries, we would have probably doubled this amount. The red color and cranberry flavor could have been stronger. |
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| While the cranberries were cooking, we started same as always: beat six egg yolks until thick and bright yellow, mix in 1.5 cups milk, and microwave until the temp reaches 160 °F. |
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| Then we mixed in 1 cup sugar and another 1.5 cups milk, then the mashed cranberries. Thats more sugar than usual, but the cranberries turned out to be pretty tart. |
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| We had trouble breaking up the cranberries fine enough with just the egg beater (we keep forgetting to sharpen the beater blades!), and our stick blender is on the fritz, so we had to resort to Big Bertha for the homogenization. If possible, add all the berries and just enough eggnog to make it blend right. If you add all six cups at once, the cranberries take longer to blend, and you might have to clean up the kitchen before your next picture. |
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| On second thought, that nog doesnt look quite red enough. Lets add some sour cherry jam! |
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| There...thats a little rosier! Maybe we could have also used up some leftover red sprinkles to make it even more red. Or we could have added other red-colored spices to help fend off the cold January weather. |
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| Now for the green part: leftover sprinkles from decorating Christmas cookies! (Since were fresh out of mint and kiwis, and garnishing with parsley didnt seem quite right...) And there it is: Red Green-themed eggnog. Feel free to adjust or embellish this recipe as you see fit. After watching a few episodes of the Red Green show, youll definitely have some ideas for how to make it better. Remember: if the women dont find you handsome, they should at least find you handy. |
The recipe:
6 egg yolks
3 cups milk, divided into two batches of 1.5 cups
1 cup sugar
1.25 cups cranberries or other red fruit
0.33 cups water
0.33 cups cherry jelly (or jelly from other red fruit)
Green sprinkles to taste
Beat egg yolks until thick and yellow, then mix in 1.5 cups milk. Heat until 160 °F, mix in sugar and then the remaining milk, cranberries, and cherry jelly. Blend until homogeneous and red-colored. Cool to room temp (or colder), pour into glasses, and garnish with green sprinkles.
How do you color your eggnog red? Is the Red Green Show also your favorite PBS show? Let us know in the comments section below!
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