Tag Archives: Anchorage

Make Me!

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By Todd Logan

No, that’s not the cry of a spoiled child.  It’s food, calling to you!

Anyone can grow, gather, or make a lot of their own food.  We do it on four fronts –  we garden, we catch a lot of fish, we raise chickens, and we make some of our favorite foods from scratch.  What have we learned along the way?

We just wrapped up a very successful second season of our big garden – over 1,200 ft2.  We also have three raised bed gardens from our early years.  Successful vegetable gardening isn’t hard, but you do have to pay attention to your climate.  Which vegetables can survive your weather? We need to provide good soil, sunshine, and nutrients.  We planted a good diversity of vegetables this year – beans (green), beets, broccoli, brussels sprouts, cabbage, carrots, cauliflower, collards, kale, kohlrabi, lettuce, onions, parsnips, potatoes, radishes, rutabaga, snap peas, spinach, summer squash, Swiss chard, turnips, and zucchini.  We feasted from our garden all summer and fall.  As the snow is about to fly, we have a 13 cubic foot freezer full of broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower, collards, snap peas and squash.  In our root cellar – our cool damp garage – are burlap bags of potatoes and buckets of carrots, parsnips, and rutabagas packed in damp wood shavings.

Of all our plantings, only green beans were a bust.  Germination failure.  I don’t know why.  I thought the brussels sprouts would be bust #2.  We had lots of leaves, but only pea-sized sprouts.  But I’ve delayed garden cleanup, and we’ve had a warmer than normal October.  Some of the sprouts are now marble sized, so it looks like we are probably going to get a few! I say probably only because I want to let them go a little longer, but that has some risks.  Last week a young bull moose apparently learned that he could take out our two strands of electric fence wire with his newly grown antlers and not get shocked.  At least he helped a little with the garden cleanup.  But he left no fertilizer. We put our young chickens out in the garden after harvest to turn the soil and provide some fertilizer; they’re good soil managers. As Mather’s chickens say, “Sometimes the good stuff is buried where you can’t see it.”

With two growing seasons now under our belts, we also now have some feel for how we should alter quantities to be planted next year.  We probably overachieved in the turnip/rutabaga department, and maybe also with 85 pounds of potatoes!  We’ll see how we feel about them in the spring after countless meals this winter.   We will definitely plant more snap peas, collards, and other greens that freeze well next year.  Probably more broccoli, but of all the things we grew, broccoli seems to have the most plant for the least harvest.

Vegetables need the sun.  When we decided to greatly expand our garden, we faced a dilemma.  Our lot is 90 percent undisturbed forest and we love the trees.  The solution:  garden the open ten percent, even if that ten percent happens to be the front yard.  So much to the dismay of one of our neighbors, our street-side front yard is a vegetable garden.  We think it’s quite pretty.  Maybe all those folks we see slowly drive by our house all summer think so too.

Our native soil is a challenge.  It’s a cold mineral sandy-clay mix.  Our goal is to get to no-till gardening, but we’re not there yet.  For the past two years we’ve tilled in many cubic yards of local organic compost, composted cow manure, and partly composed leaf mulch just before planting.  Each year the soil seems richer and lighter.  We plant seeds or starts in hoed up single-row raised beds.  It improves soil warming.  We leave the soil bare for the first few weeks after planting to maximize solar heat gain.  But once the weeds start to appear, we weed well once and then apply a 1” layer of leaf mulch.  This mulch is ground up birch leaves that we collect from our neighbors each fall.  Some of them think we’re crazy, taking their trash.  But this finely ground leaf mulch holds moisture, greatly reduces weeds, and eventually adds both nutrients and organic mater to our mineral soils.  Some people swear by plastic for soil warming, moisture retention, and weed control.  We can’t do it.  We’ll stick with the brown gold.

I know several other successful organic gardeners, and they generally agree that successful vegetable gardening, year after year, requires greater nutrient inputs than that gained by just adding organic materials to your soils.  You can find organic fertilizers at both big box and local garden stores.    This season we found a great source of local organic fertilizer – fish bone meal made from salmon fish waste.  While it can’t be certified as organic (who knows where those salmon have been…), it’s a rich, if fragrant, 5-5-1 fertilizer.  To bump up the potassium, we supplement it with ashes from our wood stove.  Our plants seemed to thrive this summer despite it being unfairly cloudy, cool, and wet.  We just ordered a soil test so we can fine-tune our fertility management next year.

A good gardener blends tried-and-true with things anew.  Already the subject of an earlier post, we put up a greenhouse last year to extend our growing season.  We had some big successes – like fresh lettuce and other greens in May.  However, mid-summer we switched to tomatoes, cucumbers, and peppers.  All produced, but none at the levels we would have hoped or expected.  We’ll try doing things differently next year.  Two other fun experiments were the potato barrel and growing lettuce and other greens under LED lights.  The jury is still somewhat out on both of these experiments.

Feeding oneself isn’t just about growing or catching one’s food.  You can also eat better, with few if any pesticides or preservatives, by making some of your basic foods from raw ingredients.  During the last year or two, we’ve made some real strides in this area.  We make almost all of our own bread.  And yes, I often cheat with a bread machine.  Mary is more of a purist.  Stating the obvious, the other basic food group is beer!  It’s a rare day when I don’t have something bubbling in the guest room closet.

Our local grocery stores stock a variety of yogurts produced in the Pacific Northwest.  We decided we wanted local.  We now make our own yogurt using low-fat milk from the nearby Matanuska Dairy and our slow cooker.  And granola?  We love what one of our local bread stores makes, but we’ve recently found several make-your-own recipes that we like even more.  Last week a local farmer promised Alaska-grown oats on Craigslist.  A hand-mill may be in our future!

Producing your own food can be fun, incredibly rewarding, and a great adventure.  At times it can be physically demanding and a little tedious.  At other times the process is intellectually challenging.  It takes time.  Make some.  Don’t wait for boredom, food lines, or ill-health to get you moving.  As Pollan says, “Eat food. Mostly plants. Not too much.”  Read books.  Search the web blogs.  Learn from friends.  Experiment.  Get your hands dirty.  These are all good things.

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Digital snow days

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by Mary Logan

Folks in the Anchorage bowl woke Wednesday morning to widespread power outages, trees down, traffic lights out, and closed schools and businesses. An early September winter storm created hurricane force winds. The power at the house was out for about eight hours, and we have a tree down in the yard. Much of Anchorage is in the same boat. Score one for Mother Nature in man’s apparent battle for control over nature. Fortunately this power outage came in early September and not the dead of winter, serving as a good consciousness-raising event and needs assessment for future power outages. So this post is both pragmatic and fanciful, covering personal, pragmatic issues related to sudden loss of complexity events and some “what if” questions about the future of digitization. I’m typing this during brownouts and occasional triggers of the generator, which got its first real test last night. We are near a trunk line, with underground power, so our power came back quickly. But close neighbors are not so lucky. Today is woodcutting day, for us and our friends, whether we need the wood or not. So this post may ramble a bit, like my thoughts, between the impacts of events at the larger scale like windstorms and regional blackouts, and personal preparation at the local scale.

As we progress further into descent, we will see more electricity brownouts, blackouts, and other events where there is a sudden failure of complexity, resulting in a shutdown of productivity. This failure of complexity has created a new urban word–“digital snow day.” And since our digital snow day in Anchorage coincided this time with termination dust on the mountains, the name is especially fitting. When we lose complexity suddenly, much of modern life stops, as our subsystems are highly connected. When complexity brownouts occur, what systems will be impacted, and what will some of those snow days look like? Does digitization make the failures worse, with a drop to a lower trophic level than would have occurred without digitization?

We used to live in southern Mississippi, in Hurricane Alley. The locals there were resigned to big winds, and were pragmatically proactive about protecting power lines and the house. Many would cut down all the pine trees in the yard, as pine trees were wont to snap off about 20 feet up in a big windstorm. A tree came down in our yard last night next to the house. Trees that stand together are protected from high winds but once you thin or have isolated trees, they are hit with the full impact of a storm and are vulnerable. The Venturi effect also creates vulnerability, as wind is funneled around rigid structures such as buildings that do not sway with the wind. What might have been harmless in a yielding natural system is magnified and made deadly in a man-made system ill adapted to flexibility in the face of the larger scale impacts. Beach groins, dams, and channelization of rivers are similar examples of the dangers of inflexibility. These physical principles have lessons to teach us about the importance of community and flexibility in descent. We recycled the branches into a brush pile at the back of the property. Our command and control neighbors don’t like our brush pile, but it keeps biomass on the property and helps to create a complete ecosystem, with homes for voles, ermine, rabbits, and other small consumers.

Alaskans are able; we loaned out both of our come-alongs before 9 am Wednesday morning. One friend with no backup source of heat was already reevaluating her situation for the winter. Another friend called around to find freezer space for her salmon stock. Much of the communication occurred via cell phone and Facebook–those without either cell phone connectivity or internet access were isolated. One acquaintance admitted to driving around in her car so that she could charge her cell phone. Our social reliance on the digital world may be our worst Achilles heel. A friend complains that if she lost her cell phone, she would be in trouble, since she no longer memorizes or writes down phone numbers. As more and more communication shifts to digital means, we hollow out face to face relationships and old ways of doing, such as analog address books, land lines, and snail mail. We don’t have to talk to neighbors anymore, talking instead to friends around the globe. If digital communication fails, our local support systems lack history and a basis in habit to support trust and resilience during times of stress.

A nursing friend recently had a digital snow day. And when the digital snow day occurs in intensive care, it is a bad day. The computer systems went down together in the hospital early in the day, stopping all work. Pharmacists couldn’t access the drugs, orders couldn’t be placed, lab-work couldn’t be processed, and notes couldn’t be written. Because all the systems were interconnected, they all went down, and the systems couldn’t be easily rebooted. Paper alternatives existed, but did not work as there were too many complexities of returning to the old system. Patients did not get any medications, because nurses are now required to scan all medications using a bar code scanner system, and pharmacists use several computerized dispensing and cross-checking systems. Nurses went home in tears, as most of their responsibilities were thwarted. Chaos ensued, and patient care was inadequate. My friend charted on the electronic medical record the next day, when systems resumed function.

Hospitals are one of the worst places for power outages. Intensive care units have red power receptacles that will supply generator power for essential equipment such as ventilators. But what happens to the many other operations of a hospital in a blackout? What happens when your essential people are trapped on an elevator, and patients cannot be transported downstairs for diagnostic tests? Or employees cannot come and go, or wash their hands adequately, or a myriad of other essential tasks in a hospital? It is hard to put complexity in reverse and back down.

Science fiction? No, this is an event happening all over the US, now that we have digitized many aspects of healthcare. The same sort of paralysis could happen in many other digitized forms of modern life. Consider some of the many existing forms of complexity created by reliable electricity and the added complexity of digitization:

  • Reliance on electricity for moving resources, people, and wastes in urban settings
  • Digitization of communication systems through cable, internet and cellphones–landlines and public telephones are increasingly rare
  • Digitization of books and journals, with storage and retrieval issues
  • Digitization of photos
  • Digitization of journalism as the newspapers switch to the internet
  • Digitized commerce through RFID, cash register systems, payroll systems, time clocks, and inventory systems with just-in-time vulnerabilities
  • Digitization of money through credit and debit cards, Bitcoin, ATMs
  • Digitization of stock markets through securitized assets, exchange traded funds, and other complex derivative trading systems that are only achievable through computerization
  • Digitization of clocks, ignition systems for furnaces, and other appliances
  • Data storage and retrieval for large internet commerce and financial companies (is the cloud one step too far?)
  • Distance delivery education and digital libraries–how many of our university libraries have dropped paper journals and books in their transition to electronic media?
  • Digital security and civil defense systems such as municipal safety 911, and warning systems at the personal, municipal, and national levels (who has a windup radio these days?)
  • Digital voting systems such as Diebold
  • Transportation system coordination (traffic lights, trains, buses, airport traffic control, runway lights and beacons, scheduling, coordination, ticket systems, TSA, and electric power for gas stations)
  • Digitization of records such as mortgage deeds (MERS robosigning scandal)
  • Digitization of music–in the digital era, you cannot easily share or bequeath your music collection, and if formats change, your collection is subject to instant obsolescence
  • Digitization of electricity, especially in security and stability of smart grids
  • Digitization of social relationships through reality games such as Second Life, smart phones, Facebook communications, messaging, and other digital relationships
  • Global networks (trade, missile defense, satellites)

If there is a human institution in life, we are rapidly creating a simulacrum online. We work, we shop, we love, and we connect online. Digital reality can hollow out our real lives and the real economy, so that digital interruptions create vulnerabilities and gaps. Those connected and vested in a digital second life are part of our information storm, separated from reality and vulnerable to events that decrease complexity.

Vulnerabilities from added levels of complexity

Odum, 1995, p. 24

Trophic levels are descriptions of organisms’ position in the energy hierarchy through their positions in the food chain. But what people do not realize is that trophic levels extend from natural ecosystems on into human economies, as higher and higher amounts of energy and other resources are transformed to build added complexity. If we consider human economies as complex extensions of the food chain, then electricity and transmitted cultural information yield higher trophic levels that have undergone a series of energy-using transformations that exert top-down control in regulating productivity. Information is one of the most highly embodied forms of energy, and high transformity digital information can be shared over a large territory with global impact. Odum was especially concerned about the long-term storage of information in a digital age. How many of these digitized formats have paper backups that are relatively secure for the long-term in an increasingly chaotic world?

Tom Abel – a simple visualisation of a hierarchy of world energy from an anthropological perspective, including human trophic levels. Does this “food chain” look stable?

We think that added complexity improves and makes systems secure. But when the entire system insists on a steady flow of energy, any wobble in energy production, either directly through electricity or indirectly through connected parts of the system such as drought can create instability. When almost all subsystems of our economy rely on electricity and increasingly on computerization, then failures cascade and the system grinds to a halt. Over-reliance on two different levels of complexity, electric power and the more complex, demanding high emergy complexity of the internet creates instability if it fails. Extended internet outages could be a mechanism for one or more lost trophic levels of complexity.

Digitization allows for centralized control and potential manipulation, hacking, and other security issues, as demonstrated in some trading schemes and Diebold voting machines, for example. Information systems that grow and change too fast do not allow the legal system to keep up with inequities and problems. Digitization can be an excuse for planned obsolescence, with the need to buy the same music or book in a different format with little added value. We are sure that more technology and more complexity is always an improvement, but when resource inputs fail, vulnerabilities cascade. Technology requires increasing amounts of energy for every step in added complexity.

Technology is a double-edged sword, with our over-reliance on consistent operation as an Achilles heel. Exploding transformers in a windstorm create fires. Nuclear power plants without power are at risk of meltdown. Online courseware and e-textbooks fail. Infrastructure that expects electric power as a given creates safety hazards when inner rooms of larger buildings become completely dark. Newer university buildings have digital classrooms with lock-down features–what happens to those in an outage? Students said that many doors in their dorms use electronic key readers. They were stuck in their dorms on lock down because they could not come or go easily, with finger foods to eat since the complex electronic ignition gas stoves in the cafeteria did not work either. One wit in my class said that the unintended lockdown was probably a good idea, because, “at least it kept the Zombies out.” Tall buildings that are taller than four stories rely on electric power for elevators and plumbing to move people, resources, and wastes up and down. Fixed windows mandate a controlled climate demanding heating and air conditioning. In a world with variable power, we will need to either abandon or rethink these buildings. Our engineers have a blindspot about the reliability of electric power in the future.

What we need are low-tech or down-sizing specialists, who consider and prepare backup systems for some of our high-tech organizations. In my nursing friend’s case, that hospital needs a resilience committee to begin decomplexifying their systems. At the very point in our complex economy when we should be making choices to simplify overly complex systems, we are going for broke with one last step into digitization of systems that is difficult to step down from, even on a short-term basis.

I started collecting manual appliances about ten years ago. I try to avoid acquiring things that have an electric plug. Students said that they had cans, but no manual can opener. Friends this morning found that they could not grind their morning coffee, use their cell phones, open their small businesses, get gas for their car, or flush their toilets if they were on wells, at least on a local level. My friend without the coffee rescued her habit when she remembered that she had powdered commercial coffee and a camp stove. But that is a

Rombouts et al., 2013: Trophic level connectivity before and after stress with depletion of higher level species

short-term fix, reliant on storages of imported, commercially prepared foods with a long shelf life from big companies. When outages are patchy geographically or temporally, community can accommodate losses, especially when the community has adequate storages. But when outages are uniformly broad over a geographic space or over long periods of time, trouble arises and behaviors rapidly fall back to a lower trophic level. In the example of the hospital network failure, my friend was able to finish her charting the next day. But in a long-term outage, the system would have to adapt to a lower trophic level of complexity in a hurry. Another example of this was one of the many hurricanes that hit south Florida in 2004. Many gas stations were closed, since gas stations cannot pump gas without electricity. Friends spent all day waiting in a line to get gasoline to run their generator.  Our friends found that the time spent in long lines was better spent working on other problems like downed trees, while adapting to lower energy for basic activities of daily living by skipping the gas-hungry generator, instead using their camp stove and outdoor grill to cook, which only sipped fuel. Attempts to support the higher trophic levels of complexity fail over time as we try to sustain complexity when the power wanes.

swiped from financialarmageddon.com, Bernanke as a child, click for full effect

Monetary digitization is especially vulnerable. It is much easier to trade globally and control the system when your money is digital. In a crisis, printing digital money is easier and faster than devaluing paper money, and switching to a new currency could be seamless and helpful for those in control, but not for affected people who might lose out in conversion of currencies. If we were forced to rely on paper money alone, could we have built the level of complexity in securitized assets, derivatives, and global financial complexity that we now see?

After a while, failure of the internet becomes unthinkable. But we need to think the unthinkable, as the internet is not a permanent, growing, expanding aspect of a future with fewer resources. Ironically, this week, I updated WordPress and an interaction with a plug-in in the update locked me out of the website. I had to cut the complexity by deleting all fancy bell-and-whistle plug-ins, at least temporarily. While not actually degrading information directly, successive iterations of improvement (tape player, 8 track, personal music player, ipod, iphone, beta/vhs, dvd, blu-ray) destroys information by demanding growth and expansion of the system with each improvement, making old information storage defunct and demanding continued investment while companies have mandates for growth, creating a mandate to always innovate, whether the innovation adds any value or not. Are we at the limits of information, when adding value becomes counter-productive?

At this point, iterations of improvement are derivative. Eventually the derivatives are piled on more derivatives so that profits can continue, becoming so far removed from reality that they become unstable and unsupportable by the resources. Complexity of information creates instability and errors. Complexity collects until it reaches the limits of resource availability. Descent will be complicated by the volume and interconnected nature of complexity that needs to be maintained for a large, concentrated population that is heavily reliant on just-in-time processes. Waste products of our complex civilization such as environmental pollution, swings in weather due to climate change, and accumulation of waste, information errors, and decreasing infrastructure and information maintenance will complicate the problems.

Ever increasing complexity cannot be supported in a lower energy world. Where do we draw the line and begin to make choices for a simpler society? The time is now for people to develop less complex backup systems, in response to a message sent by blackouts and disaster preparedness memes. At some point in the future, those simpler backup systems will evolve into the main system, with higher complexity residing in pockets of higher resource availability. As I edit this post on Saturday morning, some people in Anchorage are still without power after four days. I think we got the message here in Anchorage.

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Resilience in suburban Anchorage

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by Mary and Todd Logan

Summer is rapidly coming to an end. Long summer nights are waning, and I notice that I need to turn on lights in the morning now. Berries are ripe for the picking, and there is a slight chill in the air. The Alaska State Fair is coming. It is time to take stock, examining our progress in making ourselves more self-sufficient.

Since Alaska is sucking pretty hard on the fossil fuel teat, it is the last place one would expect permaculture to take hold. But there are glimmers of a new day on the horizon. Permaculture courses are beginning to pop up, and we Anchorageites now have our own active permaculture teacher, with more to follow. Alaskans have our own transition and permaculture groups. Farmers’ markets are springing up all over town, with farmers even making use of underused malls during the winter to sell stored root vegetables. Alaska finally has its own energy czar (there is no department of energy in state government). The Renewable Energy Alaska Project is moving forward with their fingers in many different pots. Biking is becoming a big summer and winter sport and for commuting. The population is active in outdoor and human-powered sports, and less focused on shopping. We’re closer to nature up here, and there is a lot more of nature than there are people. Anchorage’s tourism slogan is “big, wild life.”

While Alaskans have an attitude of self-sufficiency and think that we’re very independent, but in truth, we are very dependent on fossil fuels and imports. The recent history of Alaska has been as a territory dependent on imports from “Outside.” Our state is the second biggest users of fossil fuels, in part because of the waning net energy of our oil–it takes more and more energy to produce our oil each year. Our three biggest vulnerabilities could be lumped into three categories: heating, transportation, and food. As we take stock of successes, failures, and ongoing vulnerabilities in becoming more resilient in Anchorage, here are some opportunities for learning.

Heat

Anchorage electric power plants run on Cook Inlet natural gas fields, which are increasingly tight supply, especially in the winter, since our demand pulses greatly in winter. We have developed new gas reservoirs and closed a fertilizer plant on the Kenai Peninsula (at least in winter) to smooth out the pulses. New exploration and discovery are requiring more energy inputs, with more fracking and other techniques to get poorly accessible gas.

Anchorage houses and buildings are heated directly with natural gas. Alaskans are vulnerable to interruptions due to extreme demand from winter cold or from large-scale catastrophes such as earthquakes. I shudder to think what a major earthquake and sustained power outage would do to the plumbing of our housing stock in the middle of winter. Backup power sources are important, and many houses have either a fireplace, a wood stove, or if the house is more recent, a gas fireplace, which wouldn’t be much help in a natural gas interruption. Pellet stoves are for sale, too, but people buying them for backups do not realize that pellet stoves need both electricity and a complex, distant supply chain to run. Electric power is so invisible to us that we assume it will always be available, even in a crisis.

Much of the housing stock was built during the heyday of the pipeline, and it is grossly inefficient and wasteful of heat. The Alaska Housing Finance Corporation (AHFC) is doing a wonderful job of educating citizens and providing rebate programs to weatherize our inefficient homes.

At the house, we have a backup generator, a wood stove, and a wood fired furnace to cover any exigencies. The generator and wood stove are back-up systems.  We use our wood fired furnace routinely every winter to heat the house, downstairs apartment, all domestic hot water, and the garage (via waste heat from the furnace).  Seven cords of wood provides about 100 heating days during the heart of the winter.  We season our cut split wood for at least a year to give hot, efficient, low pollution burns.  We scavenge all our wood from nearby land and road clearing projects as well as from neighbors who occasionally need to get rid of a sickly tree.   We stumbled into several unexpected wood-cutting opportunities this year, so we now have wood on hand for the next 3 winters.

But if everyone in Alaska heated with wood, we wouldn’t be able to heat the housing stock for very long without decimating our forests. Wood makes a nice backup for emergencies, but In Alaska, a future with less fossil fuels will mean less population, more efficient, smaller housing, less heat, or all the above.  Heating with wood has given us a greater appreciation of the amazing amount of energy stored in fossil fuels like natural gas.  If we planned to heat exclusively with wood, we would also live in a smaller and super-insulated house.

Food

Alaskans have recognized our vulnerabilities concerning food security.  While villages off the road system rely in part on subsistence hunting and gathering, all Alaskans are reliant on imports, and those of us in Anchorage particularly so. There are a number of food security initiatives springing up in Alaska.

ADN.com Anne Raup Kenai River dipnets

Salmon is a mainstay of our ecosystem up here. Many Alaskans and visitors love to sport fish, but for stocking salmon in the freezer, dip netting is the way to go.  Each summer state residents can net salmon from several Alaska rivers during the salmon runs.  When the fishing is good, you can catch enough fish to stock a freezer in a matter of hours.   We process our salmon by vacuum packing steaks and freezing them–they’re good for about a year if done properly. We smoke extra salmon. The chickens love the fileted bones and skin, microwaved into a tasty treat. The birds attack the offering like tiny raptors–one can see how birds evolved from dinosaurs.

We planted strawberries gifted by friends in raised beds and raspberries near our fence. The strawberries are expanding rapidly, and the raspberries have “volunteered” to a different part of the yard. We planted them in a spot that was too shady, in competition with young trees. A bird or moose moved the raspberries through the act of consumption and either bird guano or moose poop to a better, sunnier spot. Our breakfasts during late summer include homemade yogurt, granola, and berries that taste like a shot of tart sweetness that explodes in my mouth.

Garden

We have learned that amending our poor soils is an ongoing process. Vegie production needs good soil structure, nitrogen, phosphorous, potassium (N-P-K) and a number of micronutrients. Fish make an excellent fertilizer for the garden, but since we have bears coming through the yard on an almost daily basis, we are hesitant to bury fish heads and guts on the property. We gut our fish at the river, recycling them into the ecosystem via seagulls. In the garden we improve soil structure with compost, composted manure, and leaf mulch.  We provide nutrients by adding locally produced fish bone meal and ashes from our wood furnace.  We protect the garden from moose and the chickens from bears with electric fences, which work quite well. During a vacation last year we overwatered using automatic watering, and had slugs. This year we were more careful with the water, and used Sluggo preventively when they started to appear.

Chickens

These birds apparently can’t read french, spanish, or english!

We have had barred rock chickens for 4 years. They are cold hardy, great layers of beautiful brown eggs, and they are amusing. Our first flock of four was winnowed to two last year after a hawk and a bear each made a meal of one.  This year we re-homed the still-productive pair and started a new flock.  Our only local chicken breeder closed two years ago, so we obtained day-old chicks from a hatchery near Cincinnati.  They come by way of overnight Priority Mail.  We got a lot of strange looks this spring when we walked through the post office lobby with a loudly cheeping box.  Our new birds will start laying in late October.  Five of the birds have already gone to friends.  We plan to keep six, and will sell the rest before the snow flies.

We’ve improved the coop and run over time.  We added nesting boxes that open to the outside so that you can harvest eggs without going in the coop.  For our new larger flock, we added a second level in the coop to give more floor space during the long winter months.  Since losing one bird to a hawk, we’ve fully netted the fenced run overhead with seine net remnants from a local net shop.

Storage and water

Our detached garage serves extra duty as a heat source for the chicken coop, root cellar, and freezer. We keep it heated to 40 degrees in the winter, just warm enough to melt accumulated snow and ice off of the cars.  A wall-opening into the chicken coop helps moderate the coop temperature.  The garage temperature provides good root cellar conditions for keeping potatoes, carrots, cabbage, and other vegetables from the garden. We are learning to put up food through canning, and smoking.

Water is not a big problem in Alaska. Since we use a well and septic system, we have opted to add a hand pump to the top of our well for power outages, since our well requires electricity. There is a creek nearby, too.

We are still learning things with the greenhouse.  We enjoyed great early season lettuce, spinach, kale, and chard.  Tomato plants have grown like crazy, but actual production has been less than expected.  Cucumbers too have been slow to produce.  These latter two need pollinators to fruit, which are lacking indoors.  Our manual pollination efforts are clearly not as efficient or effective as mother nature.  The celery looks great, and we plan to replant a fall crop of lettuce in the next several weeks.

Transport

Transport is where Alaskans’ footprints fail miserably in sustainability. While ecofootprint may only be a partial measure of emergy sustainability, which is more inclusive, the tool quickly provides a superficial snapshot of energy use relative to others. I have my class take their ecofootprint measure, and each year, our footprints explode to 3 or 4 or 5 worlds when we add in our air travel. Busted! Alaskans like to travel, and they fly everywhere. Residents of bush communities must travel by air, especially in summer, since winter ice makes travel by snow machine or dogsled easier across frozen ground.

There has been a flowering of winter bike commuting in Anchorage, with more and more people commuting via fat tire bikes or bikes with studded tires. But that increase is just a beginning to the transition we need. Anchorage spends a large amount of effort and energy to clear its expanding network of roads from snow. That effort was especially visible this year with our record snowfalls–we ran out of snow-dumps for storage of snow removed from road and parking lot surfaces. In a future of more extreme weather swings and lower energy support, a combination of dog sleds, bikes, skis, foot travel, and innovations such as packrafts would make all of Alaska accessible, albeit at a slower, fitter pace.

Will Anchorage ever be truly sustainable? No, probably not. Alaska has a population of almost 700,000, with almost 300,000 in Anchorage. Before fossil fuels, Alaska’s subarctic and arctic ecosystems supported small populations of seasonally migratory Alaska Native Peoples who were dependent on careful marshalling of resources through hunting and gathering. But as long as Alaska has fossil fuels to produce, Alaska will support a larger population. Alaska is a little slower and a bit behind the lower 48 when it comes to trends, fads, and the mainstream in general. Our summers are short, and we make the most of them. One last kayak trip, packraft, or bike overnight, harvesting, syllabi and course updates to make. . . gotta go, gotta go, gotta go.

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Cooperative Living

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by Mary Logan and Darcy Dugan

Do you want to live more efficiently and reap the benefits of a closer community? Cooperative living is a great strategy for getting and staying out of debt while building community, resilience and security in a tenuous economy. But it requires a change in attitudes, and a return to more communal ways of living. You don’t necessarily need to relocate into a brand new cohousing situation; there are a range of options. While we live in a close-but-separate multi-family dwelling, by design and by chance, we’ve achieved some important cohousing benefits – shared space and sense of community. So here’s our cooperative living story, as told from the perspective of both top floor and bottom floor residents–I’m going to refer to the people who live with us as our nearest neighbors, as we don’t really think of them as tenants, but as friends. Living together with extended family is nothing new, but here in Anchorage, we are often far from family, and friends are the family we choose for ourselves (Edna Buchanan).

Types of Cohousing

Cohousing options are as varied as one’s imagination. In Anchorage, several cohousing initiatives have begun to infill with planned communities. Cohousing (or pocket neighborhoods) is described as a type of cooperative living in which residents actively participate in the design and operation of their own neighborhoods. Cohousing residents are consciously committed to living as a community. The physical design encourages both social contact and individual space. Private homes contain all the features of conventional homes, but residents also have access to extensive common facilities such as open space, courtyards, a playground and a common house (www.cohousing.org). Other options include communes, intentional communities, and rental housing cooperatives.

While cohousing communities that are designed from the ground up optimize many benefits of cooperative living, a wide array of simpler approaches can also provide many benefits that don’t exist with isolated single family homes. One of the simplest and most common options is the sharing of a house  by unrelated people, usually primarily for the purpose of reducing housing costs.  This is particularly common among university students and young people first leaving home. This arrangement has the key cohousing characteristics of common facilities, resident management, and non-hierarchical structure and decision-making. A common but slightly more hierarchical variation of house sharing is when a homeowner rents out a bedroom in their house.  With this approach, one gains the cost efficiency of shared living space plus regular community-building interactions with their house mates.  In this common scenario, however, cooperative governance of the living situation is usually reduced, as the homeowner is likely to dominate in the decision-making process.

Close-but-separate living arrangements can generate benefits of cooperative living too.  There is a growing interest in creating accessory dwelling units (ADUs) in single family homes.  To the extent that ADUs exist in single family neighborhoods is largely unknown, as many are illegal suites, flying under the zoning radar, against zoning and/or code enforcement that limits the number of unrelated people living together. Vancouver’s experiences with zoning and illegal suites in an expensive rental market are especially interesting (in the Tyee).

Three generations, Gainesville, FL

As usual, my father, HT Odum was my model for how to live in descent in an ecological fashion, and he exposed me to the concept of cohousing as well. While he was focused on modeling and writing rather than home design, he did pay attention to practical matters where he felt that they really counted. HT purchased a house in Gainesville, Florida in 1968 that was close to campus. He was considering peak oil even then. He created an ADU for the random return of children and extended family, with the thought that perhaps caregivers could live in the unit, if need be, as he and his wife Betty aged. North central Florida gets cold fronts in the winter, so HT made sure that the living spaces had several different types of heating sources–gas, oil, and a fireplace as backup. In opposition to the trends, he planted trees all over the property, and let the front yard get overtaken by shade and forest floor. He favored his beloved wetland cypress trees, which he planted down by the sinkhole pond. He piled pine needles on the concrete driveway to allow nature to break it down and send the land back to its original state. Snags were allowed to stand, and deadwood was allowed to lie. Ducks frolicked in the pond, and my augmented feeding with commercial duck food provided a microcosm experiment for me of what happens when surplus energy is supplied to a system–as you can imagine, it’s not all good. HT and his brother Gene taught and role modeled age-old values of frugality, resilience, and ecological living that are finally re-emerging culturally from the jet backwash of fossil fuel living.

In Anchorage, we looked for permanent housing about five years ago with a bit of acreage to build a house where we could have a significant garden, and create resilience in a number of ways. We had been living in traditional suburban housing our entire lives, saving for the day that we could live our lives on our own terms. We found a 1 ¼ acre lot on the hillside where we could have a well and septic, and be within bikeable distance to jobs. Our builder insisted on no less than 2200 square feet, and we were constrained by many building codes, so we opted to design a home where we could live cooperatively. Our house is smaller than most newer houses in Anchorage, and it houses two households. Remodeling an existing home would have been greener, as the emergy basis of new housing is very high in Anchorage, but we couldn’t find any likely candidates at the time in a very expensive, tight Anchorage real estate market. Retrofitting the suburbs will be necessary as we go forward.

“Marrinder Cyclone’s Room, Provence” Martha Odum, 1986, watercolor

Perhaps the most helpful component of remodeling or building anew for cooperative living is the separate entrance that affords privacy and a sense of autonomy for occupants. We designed a home with a bedroom and bath on each floor, including the main floor of the house, an important element for consideration of aging. We finished the walkout basement rental unit ourselves, learning many skills in the process. The main floor bedroom is designed to be flexible, typically used as shared guest space that is accessible to both units. Or the extra bedroom can be closed off and integrated with either living space, depending on our needs. Floors are all tile in order to allow for wood boiler hydronic heat and to avoid carpets, as wall to wall carpeting and its maintenance is not sustainable. Most garages in Anchorage are attached, and benzene and other fumes are a health hazard, so we opted for a detached garage with shared storage space for bikes, skis and gear. Our garage doubles as wood-fired boiler shed, ski waxing bench and chicken coop, and it is really more of a bike barn than a garage. Later on it could be converted to a real barn if need be, as cars fall out of favor. The garage gets minimal heat in the winter from either a garage heater or more commonly from referred heat from the wood-fired boiler. The plumber who did our heating had to order a thermostat for the garage online, as there is no place in Anchorage that sells thermostats that go below 50 degrees!

We used permaculture principles wherever we could, within the restrictions of zoning policies. We let Nature do the work on the property through self-organization. Building from scratch allowed us to leave the trees around the house—we hand cleared the lot and used the wood for our wood-fired boiler during the first years of its operation. Most of the property was left for nature to manage. We repopulated the part of the yard that had been cleared with a compost/soil mix, threw wildflower mixes on it, and then shepherded what came up, guiding the succession by weeding invasives by hand. And we thinned a friend’s spruce forest to replant trees on bare spots. We opted for a permeable gravel driveway, inspired by Eugene Odum’s long gravel driveway. Now, when the tires of our car or bikes leave the pavement to turn onto our gravel drive surrounded by the trees, my blood pressure drops and my heart opens. The sound and the feel of the gravel announce to my body the arrival home to a different way of living, separate in values and form from the empire at large.

Benefits of Cooperative Living

Economic pressures in the future will necessitate more extended family living, smaller housing footprints in square footage per person, and less single-family housing. For young adults who have school debt to overcome, or who are saving for a home, various forms of extended family living are a logical solution. Cooperative living allows for symbiosis, synergy of efforts and diversity of thought. Our neighbors have been multicultural, providing lessons on diverse culture through extended French and German families, languages, and ways of living and being.

Some of the many benefits include:

Retronaut.co WPA posters

  • Opportunities to share tools, skills, services such as babysitting, cars, snowblowing, convenient exercise partners, laundry, built in ride/car sharing, garden care, pet care (who let the dogs out?)
  • Better nutrition–treats, meals, and cooking supplies migrate up and down the house
  • Economies of scale for utilities, Costco runs, DSL (we justify the fast connection and other upgrades with the rent money!)
  • Better home security with additional residents, and housesitting is unnecessary during vacations
  • Community gardens and barns are easier when shared
  • Expanded friendship circles; cheechakos and sourdoughs benefit by sharing their experiences and networks
  • Added, consistent income streams! Our insurance and taxes for the home are offset (and then some) by our neighbors’ rent payments. That monthly check makes a big difference in our independence and control over our lives!

Problems of Cooperative Living

Rules are one issue in any communal living setting, developing from a natural need for control and resulting in some loss of autonomy for members. Larger or commercial cohousing ventures may have less cohesive community and may need to fall back on legal contracts or formal mediation. These arrangements marry new social arrangements with traditional legal and financial contracts better suited to a growth economy and single family housing. We need to rethink our legal framework for housing.

From an economic perspective, debt-based arrangements work best in situations where there is more growth and more money in the future to pay off the mortgage, since debt requires interest, which requires growth of the economic system and the money system over the long term. Expectations of growth allow us to assume debt casually with the expectation that it will be easy to pay off in the future. Legal contracts that mortgage a large chunk of property over the long term among a group of people during tenuous times may create stress for those holding the contracts. Staying out of debt and living below our means provides a buffer of savings for resilience in a chaotic economy.

Code issues may be difficult to overcome in order to develop a creative sustainable cohousing situation. Current zoning favors monoculture housing of single family dwellings in un-walkable communities with strict separation of commercial and residential zones, so creating ADUs or cohousing may result in battles with your municipality and your neighbors to try to get them to think differently. We have one neighbor who is not fond of either our chickens or our cohousing, perhaps because they represent a diminished status for the neighborhood in her view. Our suite is now a legally permitted ADU, ahem. While the McMansion as a status symbol may be fading, most Americans still ascribe much of their wealth and status to their homes.

Darcy’s smooth disclosures

We’ve been quite delighted with our neighbors, who have become friends as well. Synergies abound. For example, on several workaday mornings, my husband has gone out to the garage at 5:30 in the morning to get on his bike to go to work, only to find that the smoothie sprite has deposited a fresh smoothie in a mason jar tucked in his helmet, with a whimsical poem attached. Or we come home to find a dessert elf has deposited cookies on our counter.  What’s not to love about this arrangement? And on the days that we begin to feel old, our nearest neighbors’ youth and energy is contagious. For instance, our smoothie sprite was up at 5 am this morning, before work, in typical all-out summer-in-Alaska fashion, sledding on Flattop Mountain. Life is short, play hard! And our neighbors get to play hard because when they come home, the driveway is plowed and housing chores are taken care of already.

Darcy Weighs In

Cohousing for my husband Toby and me has created a perfect world. When we were first searching for living space and saw the email and photos of the Logan’s unit, we were skeptical due to the distance across town from our jobs.  (I wasn’t sure how far I could bike happily and consistently). It was late November and we tramped up to their bright birch-encircled home with our Sorels. I don’t think we could have anticipated the offer that was about to be posed:  a tidy, thoughtfully-designed compact space, a parking spot in a garage, a hot tub ten steps away in one direction and a forested back yard fire pit twenty steps in the other, wireless internet, laundry upstairs, an attached guest room . . . and two strangers who immediately offered to open their home to us — sharing all these things like family. I particularly remember that five minutes into our introduction, one of them said “you’re welcome to use the rest of the house when we’re gone . . . it’s a great space – you can throw parties.” (The other quickly following up with “as long as they’re not too wild!”)  Welcome to the best cohousing experience ever.

Back in the car leaving their driveway, it was a non-decision. The benefits were clear.  Neither of us were new to co-housing (I’d shared a drafty new England dwelling with six other ladies in grad school) but this was a new level. The structural set up had been so well thought out the outset, and offered with such warm hands, that we couldn’t pass it up.

Looking back, however, the best aspects weren’t advertised in that first meeting.  It’s the fact we now have mentors upstairs that have ruminated on so many important aspects of life and are willing to share their wisdom. Toby and I are in our 30s with a lot ahead of us to learn, and seeing their lifestyle — from concrete things like devising an innovative heating system and greenhouse, to broader things like their commitment to sustainability, relationships, and community — has been extremely inspiring. Additionally, we have people a few vertical feet away who care. They know when we’re home alone and might appreciate a dinner invite, when we’re late from an outdoor trip, or when something comes up we might be interested in learning about. I think my mother sleeps better at night because of this. I know we do.

I will conclude by saying the bike (or drive) across town couldn’t be more worth it. We feel the benefits of co-housing each day, and are also able to save money to eventually build our own home. With the experience we’ve had with the Logans, I think we’ll work towards replicating the model when the time comes.

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Sub-Arctic Dreams: Fresh Veggies in March

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http://pinterest.com/source/good -potato.com/ US WWI Poster

by Todd Logan

Alaska has a long and interesting history of agriculture, including a government-sponsored relocation of 200 Midwest farm families in 1935 to establish the Matanuska Valley Colony near present-day Palmer. Today a modest number of commercial agricultural operations are successfully operating around the state. Nonetheless,  commercial agriculture, even when combined with subsistence hunting, fishing, and gathering, supplies less than 5 percent of the food consumed by the 720,000 residents of the state.

In recent years home vegetable gardening has seen rapid growth in popularity nationwide. The local foods movement and a growing interest in sustainable and self-sufficient living have at least in part fueled this interest. In the Anchorage area, ornamental and vegetable gardening is popular. Our long summer days are a big plus. Our short growing season and naturally cool air and soil temperatures are our biggest challenges. Anchorage gardeners typically reserve Memorial Day weekend to plant most vegetables outdoors.  We enjoy harvests from mid-summer until the hard frosts and first snows of mid-October bring the outdoor gardening season to a close.

At our Anchorage home we have had a successful vegetable garden for several years.  Leafy greens such as lettuce, spinach, cabbage, and Swiss chard do well here. Root vegetables such as potatoes, carrots, and turnips also thrive in our long days and cool soils at 61°North. However, if you lust for a good tomato, cucumber, or pepper, regardless of season, you must create more conducive growing conditions or accept the imported fare that spends weeks traveling from farm to market.

Harvest from our outdoor garden – September 2011

In 2011 we decided to build a greenhouse. We had two primary goals.  First and foremost, we wanted to grow a broader range of vegetables than what outdoor conditions allow, as well as extend the season for the leafy green vegetables we much enjoy. Secondly, we were interested in creating a sunny warm space where we could relax and enjoy a good book now and again. Our mid-winter days are short – 5 ½ hours from sunrise to sunset, and even our July days, on average, only warm up to 65 degrees. We also set some constraints – primarily that the space had to require only modest energy inputs once built, and if possible, capture heat for greenhouse and other domestic uses. We also envisioned significant application of at least 7 of the 12-permaculture design principles:

  1. Observe and interact
  2. Catch and store energy
  3. Obtain a yield
  4. Apply self-regulation and accept feedback
  5. Use and value renewable resources and services
  6. Integrate rather than segregate
  7. Use small and slow solutions

We began our research and quickly learned that our goals were somewhat in conflict. A good greenhouse does not make a great sunroom, and a glassed space designed to maximize solar heat gain would not make a comfortable greenhouse or sitting space.  We didn’t abandon our goals. We just made some compromises and hoped that we would strike a decent balance.

We chose to create an attached greenhouse – one that shares a wall with our existing home. Benefits of attached greenhouses include reduced construction costs, reduced energy needs for both greenhouse and home, and convenient location. We were fortunate to have a well-situated south wall of our house for this purpose. And the dimensions and configuration of our house prescribed the size of our greenhouse – 9’ x 14’.  We selected a local sunroom contractor to design the structure and construct most of it. His knowledge from 3 decades in the sunroom/greenhouse business was most helpful. For example, one’s choice of glazing (the glass) requires a trade-off. Glass that allows undiminished light transmission and optimizes solar heat gain has poor insulation values. Since we planned to heat our greenhouse at least part of the year, the insulation value of the glazing was quite important to us.  Contrary to standard sunroom design, we selected glazing that seemed to reasonably balance these three attributes for both the walls and ceiling of our new space (light transmittance = 65%, solar heat-gain coefficient = 0.27, U-Value = 0.25).

Many options exist to warm a greenhouse to extend the growing season and create an environment for growing temperate zone vegetables. One can maximize passive solar heating by adding mass such as dark colored masonry and/or water barrels inside the greenhouse. Potential active solar heating systems include subterranean heat and cooling systems (SHCS) and hydronic heat storage. On the fossil fuel front, we considered simple electric space heaters, a dedicated natural gas heater, and/or expanding our existing home’s natural gas and wood-fired furnace hydronic heating system. We ultimately chose the latter, but incorporated some of the solar heat capture approaches as well. After monitoring a season of greenhouse operation, we will likely incorporate additional solar heat capture.

While deciding how to heat an Alaska greenhouse is of primary concern, we are virtually certain that our greenhouse will actually overheat (exceed 80oF) on sunny summer days. Greenhouse cooling is typically handled by manually opening windows or automated with exhaust fans that simply blow excess heat outdoors. We are loath to discard heat in Alaska, even mid-summer! Two potential approaches to cool the greenhouse and capture the waste heat are (1) blowing the warm greenhouse air into the rest of the house with a fan, and/or (2) removing heat from the greenhouse with an air-to-water heat exchanger. With respect to the latter, the warm water generated  might be stored and used for greenhouse heating, home space heating, and/or domestic water heating. As stated above, we will evaluate the potential for integrated heating/cooling methods during our first season of greenhouse operation.

Foundation footers about to be poured. Footers were topped with 4’ of concrete block to support the floor

Due to all of these heating and cooling options and unknowns, we sought a greenhouse design that maximized future adaptability. We quickly realized that our choice of greenhouse foundation design would affect many options. The simplest greenhouse floor would be dirt, gravel, stone, or a poured concrete slab. While properly insulated dark colored concrete floors are often used in passive solar designs, we felt this approach would be ineffective in a greenhouse filled with shade-creating growing tables and plants.  We decided that allowing for active solar heat capture was important and promising, so we went with a joist-supported wood floor over crawl space supported by 6’ deep concrete footers. Water is a superior medium for heat storage, and insulated tanks for hot water storage are an expensive and

Floor framed. Note the access hatch for each compartment.

space-consuming component of solar hot water systems. The two crawl space compartments beneath the greenhouse were designed to allow them to be retrofitted later with insulating foam sheeting and a pond liner to make two 1000-gallon hot water storage tanks (see www.builditsolar.com). We reasoned that one 1000-gallon tank might be used to store warm water in conjunction with a greenhouse air-to-water heat exchanger. A second tank might be

Main structure complete – November 2011

dedicated to store high-temperature hot water from dedicated solar thermal panels at some point in the future.

Greenhouse construction began in early October. Contractors got the foundation in just before the ground freezes in this part of the world. We then built the floor ourselves. In early November, the contractor tented the site and built the pony wall and glass structure over a 3-week period. In January and February we finished the inside of the pony wall, installed electrical outlets, hydronic baseboard heat, two hose bibs, and water and freeze-resistant vinyl flooring. We finally had a greenhouse!

Prototype earth boxes under lights. Good lettuce production. Good tomato plant growth and flowering, but no setting of fruit to date, possibly due to inadequate light and/or low indoor humidity

With respect to growing things, we had yet another goal – low maintenance. We love to garden, but we also love to get into the backcountry regularly to enjoy the amazing wilderness that this part of the world has to offer. With this in mind, we decided to go with “earth box” design growing tables, which will self-water and feed plants for extended periods. We built and tested several mid-sized earth boxes mid-winter, under LED grow lights, and liked our results. Earth boxes (www.seattleoil.com /Flyers/Earthbox.pdf) have a water reservoir in the bottom, then an air layer for healthy roots.  Above that the box holds 8” of growing medium, which is topped with fertilizer bands between planting rows and finally a plastic evaporation barrier. Wicking tubes connect the soil layer to the water reservoir.  The soil layer stays both moist and aerated from the water and air layers below.

We built two very large earth boxes to be our primary growing tables.

We built our earth boxes out of Douglas fir and cedar 2x4 lumber.

The shell of the first of 2 boxes is done.

Boxes done (upside down) with legs being attached.

The boxes are waterproofed by lining with PVC pond liner.

Boxes in the greenhouse. Tested for leaks.

Float valves will keep 4” of water in the bottom of the box. Soil is supported above with an inch of air between.

The growing medium is supported by fiberglass window screen over expanded metal. Screen is cut away from support tubes so they fill can be filled with soil to make wicking chambers.

We filled the boxes with 25 cubic feet of commercial growing medium to ensure good wicking and aeration.

On March 15 we set the greenhouse thermostat to 50oF and planted cool season greens -– lettuce, spinach, kale, and Swiss chard. Sprouting began on schedule a week later.

Planting initial cool season greens. Organic fertilizer is laid on the surface in strips between planting rows. The surface is then covered with a 1-mil plastic evaporation barrier (inexpensive painter’s drop cloth).

We are having an unusually cool March. Nighttime temperatures have been dropping into the single digits, with days warming into the 20s. While we are still heating with our wood furnace, keeping the greenhouse near 50o has not been hard.  On several sunny afternoons we’ve seen 70o inside. These are good temperature ranges for leafy greens.  Indoors we have started warmth-seeking tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, and celery.  In a few weeks these should be of transplanting size. With our warming spring temperatures we can rationalize pushing the greenhouse thermostat to 65o and see how these do. We’ll share our success, or lack thereof, in a future post. We are quite optimistic that we can make this work, but gardeners know you don’t always get everything right the first time!

Initial planting is done. Space is reserved for tomatoes, cucumbers, and peppers after they are started indoors.

While we have attempted to share how permaculture principles shaped some of our thinking on this project, we are in no way claiming that we maximized those principles on this project. With a simple Internet search you can find some great resources on passive solar greenhouse designs, use of recycled/discarded materials in greenhouses, and even how to heat greenhouses with compost and animal manure.  We encourage you to take a look at these should you ever decide to build a greenhouse.

We are all anticipating an early harvest!

Finally, the big picture:  We must ask, “Should one be trying to grow temperate zone vegetables in Alaska at all? What’s the energy investment in an Alaska greenhouse-grown tomato or cucumber? How does that energy investment compare with one shipped to Alaska from the Central Valley of California, South Florida, or South America? In the energy scarce future, should Alaskans expect to eat tomatoes at all?” Good questions!

The Finished Greenhouse in March

The construction of this greenhouse required large energy inputs, including excavation with a tracked excavator and high tech glass and framing shipped from the East coast. High tech engineering and shipping to high latitudes demands fossil fuels, globalization and a broad base of complexity. Food security can be developed with less technology using hoop houses (here and here) and cold frames. While initial costs of an attached greenhouse are energy intensive, operation and maintenance should be much less demanding. Is a greenhouse an appropriate investment in the face of imminent descent? We think so.  Will Alaskans have greenhouses, at least of this design, in the future low-energy world? Maybe, maybe not.

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