Acorns as food!

Several years ago,  we (Elyse, Abby and I) took a class down at the White Pine School in York on Acorns as a food source.  Apparently, some native american tribes considered acorns to be a staple food, and at least in some years, they are so abundant that in those times, the only excuse for going hungry might be a lack of knowledge of how to utilize them.  They do naturally have tannic acid in them that needs to be removed before they can be eaten.  There are two ways to do this: the hot leach method, and the cold leach method. The White Pine School class we took focused on the hot leach method which entails repeated boiling and water changes, but it ends up using a huge amount of energy to do it and it cooks the acorns, and winds up removing some of the nutritional value  in the leaching process. I tried this method a couple times, but found it changes the taste, as well.  This year, I have done a couple of batches using the cold leach, and found that it is less labor intensive, uses very little energy - just enough to run a blender or food processor (and the human power to shell the acorns - that was a fun project for the girls on a snow day or two!), and should preserve more of the nutritional value of the Acorns.
Here are a couple videos on the cold leach process:
An Acorn Video by Arthur Haines, A maine based botanist and wild foods expert

And another that I found online


This video shows the technique I have been using lately.

Group order at Fedco through Portland Permies?

Anyone interested in participating in a group order with the Portland Resilience Hub and Permaculture group? There is a discussion thread here with details:

I (Ethan) would be willing to do a pickup from Portland and bring it down to our area.  You can expect to eliminate shipping, and save up to 20% on your order.
Deadline for ordering is Jan 16.  Please contact me if you are interested.

attached Lean-to hoophouse

Over the Winter break from school, I got it in my mind to build a lean-to style greenhouse.  At first I was going to build it solely from wood, but after I started pricing it out, I realized we couldn't afford to do it that way.  After thinking for a bit, I got the idea to recycle stuff we had on hand. - In the mid 2000's, I'd built a hoop house with some thick plastic water pipe back,  and for the last few seasons it had sat at the edge of the property looking sad and shabby.    As of this writing the new structure is still in it's early stages but I am hopeful it'll work out well.  Eventually we want to replace the deck on the south side of the house with a sunspace, so this will be a good test run.  In researching the project on line, I found this article from UVM with lots of good info.

2nd Community Resilience meeting

Bernie Reim and I met a second time this evening to discuss further what we'd like to do in terms of moving forward with our community resilience building effort.  The focus looks like it is headed towards fostering connections between people who are already involved in projects that increase the resilience of our community or those who would like to be.  In fact we decided to call it Connections.
We plan to feature a rolling brainstorming session whenever we get together that could spin out some exciting projects or help with ongoing efforts.

A project that I'd like to put out there and am starting to work on is an on-line sourcebook of ongoing efforts in different resource areas, such as food, energy, shelter, transportation, clothing, and so forth.

What do you think? Are you involved in anything that helps build a stronger more locally self reliant community in the area that fits in with what we're trying to do, or do you know somebody who is?

Looking forward to getting more connected!

A Journey of a thousand miles...

Last evening, Bernie Reim and I took the first step towards starting the Kennebunk Area Resilience Project (a name which may change) as we met to start planning the effort. 

As I may have mentioned before, the overall goal of the project is to increase the ability of our community to withstand potential threats such as weather related occurrences like Hurricane Sandy, economic difficulties such as the downturn in 2008, or other unexpected events that seem increasingly likely given the turbulent times in which we live.    We aim to increase the ability of our community to withstand such things by identifying opportunities for improvement and then acting on them.  This might be through  through fostering stronger collaboration by community members that are already working on aligned projects (networking!), for example, or  it might be by identifying  a need/opportunity and helping to start a new project as another example.  Ultimately, we are shooting for a stronger community and increased local self reliance.

Ultimately, we imagine a wide variety of things taking place to along the path to this goal.  This article in the Portland Press Herald describes the creation of a Community Solar Farm.  To me, it's not hard to imagine a project like this as being part of our overall effort.

Over the coming months we will be reaching out to people to join us as we work together to create a stronger, more resilient community.

Please come join us!

Primitive Skills Weekend in Wells

Among the many things we have going for us, resilience-wise, in this area is a rich knowledge of primitive skills - anything from how to make fire without matches, to how to forage our surrounding for food, the materials for making weapons and even clothing. This weekend in Wells is the Annual Maine Primitive Gathering, in which classes and workshops in a wide variety of such skills are offered.
Many organizations are involved in the gathering (or if not involved directly, offer related classes), including Broad Winged Farm and associated Homesteading Arts Cooperative, the Primitive Skills School, White Pine Programs in York, and others.

If you can't make it this year, but are interested, keep an eye out for next year's gathering.

Calling All Community members - an open invitation!

Earlier this week, I had a great back to school experience (I teach science at the Biddeford Middle School) during our Welcome Back to school in service training which inspired me to see if I can get a Resilience Initiative started here in our area.  Our new principal hosted us in a 10 minute sticky note based brainstorming exercise during which the staff generated some great ideas around how to improve the school both in the short term and the long term.  I propose to do a similar exercise in the early Summer of 2015 to kick off the Kennebunk Area  Resilience Initiative.

In the first post of this blog, I mentioned that I intended this blog to serve as a virtual Transition Town until we can get a true, face-to-face effort started.  In my previous attempt at starting a Transition Town, I found that the project was not clear enough for people to get behind. Hopefully we've all learned a few things since then that'll help us move forward with building a stronger, more locally self-reliant community, capable of getting through whatever comes our way, no-matter if it is an economic recession,  a weather related event like hurricane Sandy, 70's-like energy crunch or something else completely unexpected.  Moving towards a strong, resilient community like this is what the Resilience Initiative that I propose to start is all about.

How the effort is framed is key.  Several weeks ago, I was talking with some friends about preparedness and was joking about preparing for the apocalypse, critiquing the prepper, survivalist mentality as unlikely to be successful (for more on this, please read Arthur Haines' essay on the topic).  My friend's wife said she wasn't interested in being around for what  is left after the Apocalypse so why prepare for it,  and I realized that framing the issue in this way is not helpful. It seems to me that most of us would like to have been able to survive much more likely occurrences such as the great depression, or hurricane Katrina, and time and effort spent working towards developing resilience to help make surviving (and with a minimum of hardship and travail) more likely as time well spent.

I am generally not one to speak in high blown terms, usually preferring to understate things, but this project is truly about taking control of our destiny and working to make the our local future what we want it to be.  Certainly the federal government won't be able to do it for us, nor can government at the state level - at best, the government can help foster what we would try to do, and it is up to us to really make it happen. This will only work if community members are involved in significant numbers.

Please join me in making it happen.