What To Do When It's 40 Below Outside?

What To Do When It's 40 Below Outside?

The advantage of being stuck inside during the cold winter days means that there is ample opportunity to plan for the coming growing season and prepare for planting.

This year I plan to use seed tape in an effort to cut down on the time spent sowing seed and thinning seedlings.

But seed tape is unbelievably expensive, so I thought that a great indoor craft for the whole family would be to make seed tape ourselves.

I looked about and quickly identified toilet paper as a potential ideal candidate for this exercise. All I needed was seeds and glue.

A handy biodegradable glue can be made from simply heating a mixture of corn starch and water. To make things more interesting, we added a bit of food colouring to two batches of glue (one for each child), so we could easily distinguish one seed line from another. 

In this post, we made seed tape for parsnips (using purple glue) spaced at 1/2 inch intervals, along with radishes (using green glue) that we will utilise as a quick crop while the parsnips are growing.

We made the glue quite runny, (1 tsp of corn starch to 250 ml of water) so it would dispense easily from a squeeze bottle in small blobs. Make sure the glue is not lumpy, as the lumps tend to get stuck in the squeeze bottle nozzle, and then release in a flood of glue all over your paper. It makes quite a mess!

Since different seeds need different spacing, I put together a few spacing markers using wheel shaped objects I salvaged from the toy box, and attached rubber bands such that they were separated by the desired distance.  In the picture here, I have a marking wheel with 1/2 inch spacings.

We rolled the spacing marker on an ink pad, and then rolled it down a strip of toilet paper. In under a minute, we had dozens of evenly spaced marks as guides for placing the glue dots.

First off was the radish seed, which one of the kids glued to the toilet paper with green glue by first making a series of dots where the marks indicated and then placing a seed into the dot before it set hard.

Once that was complete, the second child used their purple glue to attach the parsnip seeds in a similar fashion.


Once all the seeds were attached to the paper, they were left to dry overnight.

The toilet paper I used was a two ply variety, and I discovered that once dry, I could still separate the sheets if I was careful. This meant that I could get two strips of seed tape from one strip of toilet paper.

I flipped the paper over, and made a line of glue dots 2 inches apart into which I placed lettuce seeds.

Once these dried, I separated the sheets and rolled them onto old toilet rolls.

So there you have it. Very cheap seed tape, and you have the added benefit of making up whatever combinations you desire.

Come spring, all I need to do is roll out the tape and cover it with a little soil or mulch. 

If the past two seasons have taught me anything, it's that sowing seed in Thunder Bay involves being hunched over in the wind and rain, struggling to get dry seeds out of their packet with wet fingers.

This spring things will be different!

Economics and Permaculture

Economics and Permaculture

Permaculture is as much about developing sustainable and non exploitative economies as it is about sustainable and non exploitative agricultural systems.

If permaculture is going to survive and thrive, it must also make economic sense from a business perspective.

There are two business models I am currently aware of that have been developed for the specific purpose of acting as a template that other people can utilise when going into industrial scale permaculture for profit.

The first model is the "Fiefdom" model developed by Joel Salatin. Joel is a multi-generational farmer who argues that young farmers can't get into the farming business unless old farmers are getting out. Meanwhile, old farmers can't get out unless young ones are getting in.

To address this conundrum, Joel recognised that young farmers want their own independent, yet connected, profitable enterprise (fiefdom) within a farming operation to which they are wholly responsible.

He maintains that a farm is not robust or sustainable unless it is generating at least 2 income streams, and the fiefdom model addresses this by creating many independent businesses within the overall farming operation.

A fiefdom is created when a business agreement in the form of a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) is signed by the farmer and an independent business owner who wishes to operate within the farm. 

Provided that the business concept fits well within the network of other fiefdoms, and the farm as a whole, then a mutually beneficial agreement is reached and the new operation is introduced to the mini-economy.

On Polyface Farm, there are very few employees, as the people who work there operate their own business on the premises.

Here is a great article describing the fiefdoms on Polyface Farm and a link to Polyface Farm's guiding principles.

The second model is very new (as of April 2014) and is spear headed by Jack Spirko.

The initiative is called PermaEthos, which is a business that has created a template for establishing community based farming operations as profitable enterprises. 

There is a very good pod cast series available where Paul Wheaton (the Duke of Permaculture) interviews Jack on this new undertaking:

Part 1 and Part 2.

Their flagship proof of concept farm is called Elisha’s Spring Farm located in West Virginia and is currently in the early stages of establishment:

The main difference between these two models is that PermsEthos provides a template and a more traditional corporate structure to their organisation. For example, they have an advisory board, shareholders and a board of directors.

The fiefdom model is more of a conceptual design, and Polyface farm is a successful working implementation of this concept.

Whichever system you follow, be it your own, or one of the models described here, the role of debt in your enterprise will play a key part in determining your success.

Modern farmers are typically heavily indebted due to the huge capital outlays required for a modern operation. They indenture themselves, and their future generations to the bank, effectively enslaving themselves to the point of perpetual serfdom.

It doesn't have to be this way. There are alternatives. Social networks within your local community are as powerful as they ever were, and yet we seem to have discarded them and taken on the mantra of being "self made".

Why borrow half a million dollars from the bank to purchase a big fancy combine that you use half a dozen times a year when you could rent one from a neighbour? You pay for it as you need it, and you don't have the headaches of storage, maintenance, and insurance. 

Joel Salatin: Debt Free Farming