Inner City Farmer

Have you heard about this miracle weed? And, no, I’m not talking about the stuff featured in Pineapple Express. Jatropha curcas contains a seed that when crushed produces a high-quality biofuel capable of powering a standard diesel vehicle. The plant yields four times as much fuel per acre as soybeans and more than ten times more than corn. Even better, it grows almost anywhere, thriving in even the poorest soil. I’ve got plenty of poor soil in my backyard and no desire to buy any more carbon-producing gasoline for my van. Looks like it’s time for me to start planting some jatropha….

I’m really embarrassed right now. I just took the Ecological Footprint Quiz designed by Redefining Progress, and my results stunned me. The bottom line: If everyone on the planet lived my lifestyle, we would need 3.14 Earths! My monstrous footprint requires 121.91 acres when I am ostensibly trying to survive on just one-fifth. Ugh.

The good news, I guess, is that the average in this country is 246.41 acres so I am doing much better than most, but, still, 121.91 acres! You have got to be kidding me! How can this be? As you might imagine I have an incredibly small housing footprint but my carbon footprint is through the roof. Why? Mostly because of air travel. If you take even a couple flights each year, you’re basically offsetting all the good you might be doing by biking to work and eating from your garden. Air travel as we know it is unsustainable, and I foresee it becoming a luxury in the very near future in the same way taking a cruise across the Atlantic was at the turn of the last century.

Despite my horrific score, I’m glad I took the quiz because now I know exactly what I should be working on around here. I challenge you to do the same. It takes less than five minutes and only stings a little bit.

Who knows from one day to the next what project I’ll be working on? It all depends upon factors out of my control. Now that it’s so freaking hot I find myself doing far more inside activities. With the kitchen window complete, I’m now preparing to work on the interior of the new Garage Room, aka the Man Cave.

I had envisioned using cob to make my interior walls, but was set straight during a conversation with Tony Beurskens, an itinerant cobbing guru and natural building artist I met at the Natural Building Colloquium. He suggested I attach lathe to the exposed studs and use cellulose or denim as insulation behind it. On top of the lathe I could smear an earthen plaster just like stucco. This immediately made so much sense to me. It will provide the same look and feel as cob with less work and waste of interior space. I can still build in niches and it will be healthy and affordable.

Meanwhile I dream of building soil and planting shrubs and trees. As much as I want vegetation that I can eat, I also wish to be surrounded by plants that lift my spirit. I am particularly looking for bushes that flower during this time of year when the oppressive heat is trying to drain your will to live. Texas Sage is a native shrub that really comes to life during the summer. This one, at the intersection of Nelray and Chesterfield, is going off right now. It makes me want to plant a row of them on my front lawn….

It’s a common problem for homeowners. How do you get rid of the critters you don’t want while at the same time attracting those you do? My neighborhood is plagued with mice and rats, creatures I prefer to admire from a distance. Once they start trying to get into my house, I feel the need to start taking direct action.

The most effective remedy I’ve come up with is the brother-sister cat combo I adopted two years ago. Thanks to Zephyr’s incredibly logical system of naming things, they are named Brother and Sister. Compared to his skittish sister, Brother is quite a showman. Here you can see him proudly showing off the rat he has just eaten three-quarters of.

Like most female cats, Sister is actually the better mouser. They become particularly efficient, I have found, the less I feed them. Unfortunately, their utilitarian value dips every time I discover that mice and rats aren’t their only prey. I used to have far more birds and lizards visit my backyard before I decided to adopt two kitties. Oh well. Everything in life is a trade-off, isn’t it?

Until I started this latest project, I forgot how much I enjoy working with wood. All building materials have their pros and cons. As much as I hate concrete, I readily admit that for certain jobs it’s perfect, and as much as I love cob, I’ll also admit that it’s got its drawbacks, namely how labor-intensive it is. But wood? I can think of very few negative aspects of building with wood other than the lack of foresight involved in its harvesting and the wastefulness surrounding its use on a typical construction site. If you use wood that has been harvested in a sustainable manner, i.e. only cutting down trees of a certain size and then replacing them with saplings, and find a use for every bit of the tree, you’re not going to find a better building material.

As much as I can, I try to use building materials that are locally sourced, which here in Texas means using mainly oak, cedar, and mesquite. Ideally, I would be felling and milling the trees myself. Cutting out the middlemen, in this case the lumberyards, would cut down on the total amount of embodied energy expended in the process as well as the monetary costs, which is how Matt was able to trim his entire house several years ago. His uncle harvested thousands of square feet of wood from his property in Ohio and gave enough to Matt to allow him to redo the trim on all 44 windows inside his house. Oh, what I would give to have such an uncle right about now.

On the Austin Permaculture listserv I did hear of a woman in East Texas who was offering to let anyone come to her property and harvest trees that had been downed by Hurricane Katrina. Unfortunately, hauling that much wood to Austin would require the use of an ungodly amount of gas. Would the procurement of that much sustainably harvested wood offset the amount of energy I would spend hauling it all the way to Austin? I don’t know. When it comes to building materials, there are no easy answers.