moldy.”
Gophers are a big problem for gardeners everywhere, but in this hippy-dippy northern California town, the solutions tend to be idiosyncratic. “People meditate to get rid of gophers,” said Julian. “We have gopher neuromancers. Everybody has a story or a solution. The stories are interesting, and the solutions don’t work.”
“We have a big gopher problem,” agreed Celine. She handed me an eight-inch-long black plastic cylinder with a pointed tip. It looked like some kind of dangerous sex toy. “You put this in the ground, and it makes noise to scare the gophers away.” She turned it on, and it emitted an abrasive tone, like a digital alarm clock. “The problem is, it doesn’t last. It runs a week or two, making that sound every minute or so, but once you put it in the ground, it stops working. I put it in strategic spots I know they like—the onion and cabbage patch and the watermelons. Then they all stopped working and the gophers all came back.”
Julian said the batteries were fine, but he suspects the problem comes from bad contacts. “This stuff has to be much more robust ,” he said. Anything not robust in the post-carbon age is going to be useless.
Julian showed me the computer that controls the irrigation system. It’s about the size of a paperback book, with buttons to program the watering schedule. The gophers haven’t gotten to it yet. It uses expensive, nonrechargeable eighteen-volt batteries. “Rechargeable batteries aren’t practical,” said Julian, “unless you are willing to change them out once a week.” Julian and Celine’s goal is to power the system with solar energy, which is “the trick with all this stuff.”
They’re also growing castor beans, which they are thinking about using to poison the gophers. (Castor beans contain ricin, a poisonous protein. A spy in London carried a James Bond-like umbrella that surreptitiously and fatally shot a tiny ricin-filled pellet into the leg of a journalist in 1978.) “We are trying to figure out if we can grind up the pods and then put them down the gopher holes,” said Celine. “Or maybe we grow them in different places in the garden, because the roots are poisonous as well, but I’m not sure. Harvesting them will be my next challenge.”
Julian nodded at the word challenge . “We find that at some stage in the process you get stuck. You get short of knowledge, short of time, you don’t know what to do with it, you’re missing the tools, blah blah blah. When you do a garden this complex, there are a lot of things to go wrong.” It was nice to hear that other people experienced problems with their gardens, too.
Celine started picking vegetables for our lunch. She came across some sorghum and handed me a sprig. A couple of days before my visit, they had harvested their sorghum crop, which had grown to a height of twelve feet, and were able to extract five gallons of the sweet, calorie-rich juice using a hundred-year-old cast-iron sorghum press.
The more time I spent with Julian and Celine, the more I respected them. They weren’t blindly optimistic about going back to the land. Instead, they approached the problem as amateur scientists, using their garden and workshop as a laboratory to test tools and technologies that might help people live in a world without cheap energy. They are hopeful about solar and wind energy, but their outlook on biofuels, which many green-energy enthusiasts promote, is gloomy. Celine and Julian have tried extracting oil from energy crops such as sunflower, flax, and canola seeds without success. They’ve used a variety of hand presses (because a gas or electric press would be cheating), and none are strong enough to squeeze oil from the tiny seeds. “We haven’t managed to squish anything,” said Julian. He held out some canola seeds, and I was surprised to see how minuscule and hard-shelled they looked. Julian said he brings canola seeds with him when he goes to conventions to show
Gophers are a big problem for gardeners everywhere, but in this hippy-dippy northern California town, the solutions tend to be idiosyncratic. “People meditate to get rid of gophers,” said Julian. “We have gopher neuromancers. Everybody has a story or a solution. The stories are interesting, and the solutions don’t work.”
“We have a big gopher problem,” agreed Celine. She handed me an eight-inch-long black plastic cylinder with a pointed tip. It looked like some kind of dangerous sex toy. “You put this in the ground, and it makes noise to scare the gophers away.” She turned it on, and it emitted an abrasive tone, like a digital alarm clock. “The problem is, it doesn’t last. It runs a week or two, making that sound every minute or so, but once you put it in the ground, it stops working. I put it in strategic spots I know they like—the onion and cabbage patch and the watermelons. Then they all stopped working and the gophers all came back.”
Julian said the batteries were fine, but he suspects the problem comes from bad contacts. “This stuff has to be much more robust ,” he said. Anything not robust in the post-carbon age is going to be useless.
Julian showed me the computer that controls the irrigation system. It’s about the size of a paperback book, with buttons to program the watering schedule. The gophers haven’t gotten to it yet. It uses expensive, nonrechargeable eighteen-volt batteries. “Rechargeable batteries aren’t practical,” said Julian, “unless you are willing to change them out once a week.” Julian and Celine’s goal is to power the system with solar energy, which is “the trick with all this stuff.”
They’re also growing castor beans, which they are thinking about using to poison the gophers. (Castor beans contain ricin, a poisonous protein. A spy in London carried a James Bond-like umbrella that surreptitiously and fatally shot a tiny ricin-filled pellet into the leg of a journalist in 1978.) “We are trying to figure out if we can grind up the pods and then put them down the gopher holes,” said Celine. “Or maybe we grow them in different places in the garden, because the roots are poisonous as well, but I’m not sure. Harvesting them will be my next challenge.”
Julian nodded at the word challenge . “We find that at some stage in the process you get stuck. You get short of knowledge, short of time, you don’t know what to do with it, you’re missing the tools, blah blah blah. When you do a garden this complex, there are a lot of things to go wrong.” It was nice to hear that other people experienced problems with their gardens, too.
Celine started picking vegetables for our lunch. She came across some sorghum and handed me a sprig. A couple of days before my visit, they had harvested their sorghum crop, which had grown to a height of twelve feet, and were able to extract five gallons of the sweet, calorie-rich juice using a hundred-year-old cast-iron sorghum press.
The more time I spent with Julian and Celine, the more I respected them. They weren’t blindly optimistic about going back to the land. Instead, they approached the problem as amateur scientists, using their garden and workshop as a laboratory to test tools and technologies that might help people live in a world without cheap energy. They are hopeful about solar and wind energy, but their outlook on biofuels, which many green-energy enthusiasts promote, is gloomy. Celine and Julian have tried extracting oil from energy crops such as sunflower, flax, and canola seeds without success. They’ve used a variety of hand presses (because a gas or electric press would be cheating), and none are strong enough to squeeze oil from the tiny seeds. “We haven’t managed to squish anything,” said Julian. He held out some canola seeds, and I was surprised to see how minuscule and hard-shelled they looked. Julian said he brings canola seeds with him when he goes to conventions to show
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