Ramen Noodles For the End Times: Homemade Ramen Noodles in a Solar Cooker

So society is crumbling, there’s limited access to fossil fuel, there’s chaos in the streets, but you happen to have some flour and baking soda and a solar cooker. You can easily make homemade ramen noodles without any fossil fuel.

I used to think of ramen noodles as a low quality convenience food. Still I depended on them back in college and I still love a doctored up packet of fancy ramen noodles from the asian grocery from time to time. But ramen noodles are very popular in Japan, and as with many Japanese things, they have taken it to a level of artisan perfection. You can pretty easily make your own ramen noodles. In this video, I show you how I make ramen noodles without any fossil fuel inputs, using only the power of the sun.

https://www.instagram.com/hardcoresustainable/ https://www.facebook.com/HardcoreSustainable/ http://hardcoresustainable.com

Supercharged SOLAR DEHYDRATOR that doubles as a COLD FRAME

When I was thinking about building a solar dehydrator, my unused cold frame caught my eye and I thought, hmm, that would make a great solar dehydrator during the off season. I use a cold frame in the spring to get my starts going early because it’s like a mini greenhouse. It gives full natural light early in the season when I start to run out of space under the grow lights.

But once I’m done with starts, the cold frame just takes up space in my backyard until the next season. I thought, why not have it double as a solar dehydrator. With a few modifications, it could become a dehydrator and not only conserve space, but save me the trouble of having to go to the trouble of building a separate dehydrator.

I’ve been frustrated with the inefficiency of an electric dehydrator since it uses over 600W and seems like just a waste of solar electric power when the sun is right there in the summer. So in this video I design and build a new kind of solar dehydrator that can double as a cold frame.

5 Best Tips From a 1908 Gardening Book: Old Timey Organic Wisdom

There have been many universe-jarring advances in agricultural technology over the past 100 years, but sometimes being more sustainable means going back to the way things used to be. A lot of those advances in technology rely HEAVILY on fossil fuel, a finite resource whose limited supply we are arguably still in the sweet spot of, but which is causing climate change on a scale rarely witnessed in the history of the planet.

In this video, I find some of the gems from the Biggle Garden Book. This was before the advent of hybrid crops, biotech, and chemical pesticides and fertilizers.

But the history of agriculture is not all peaches and cream. Many useful technologies and a lot of useful information about how everything works has been discovered since this book was published. This is back when people were ingesting lead, mercury, and arsenic like it was skittles. But it was also before DDT, agent orange, and glyphosate. In the next Biggle Garden Book video, I’ll be talking about the 5 scariest tips.

Finding Out What Corn Smut Tastes Like

It’s mid season summer and the corn is going nuts! I was determined not to let the raccoons eat all my corn this season like they did last. I was sick of messing around and it was time to install an electric fence. So I set up a three wire fence. It was much simpler and cheaper to do that I ever thought it would be. It remains to be seen if I’ll get a full crop of corn. Raccoons are wily and determined little creatures. But while I was waiting for the corn to get sweet, some of the ears started busting open with wild deformed kernals–an infection of huitlacoche, or corn smut. But not wanting anything to go to waste I decided to see what it would taste like to eat corn smut. It definitely has an earthy taste and it was slightly bitter. But since I didn’t have any corn to harvest yet, it was worthwhile making use of it. And it might even be more nutritious than just eating corn.

13 Years Living in an Ecovillage

Our entire economy is based on finite fossil fuel resources and wholesale destruction of the environment in the interest of providing for an ever growing human population. Of course, most of the “wealth” created by this economic model goes to a small fraction of the human population, so essentially we are destroying our planet to make a very small segment of the human population so rich they don’t even know what to do with all their wealth. But there are some who are trying to change the way humanity interacts with the planet.

I’ve lived in a model for a more sustainable way of living in community for over 13 years now. My impact on the planet is about a tenth the impact of the average American. It’s taken a while to get set up to live this way, and living this way hasn’t been easy. It’s a struggle to try to live in a way that mostly defies everything every American has come to depend on to make their lives easier. Technology provides many sustainable alternatives to replace fossil fuel equivalents. But inevitably living sustainably requires harder work and doing things the old fashioned way. Having lived this way for 13 years, I have a story to tell. Sustainable living may be a different way of life in many unrecognizable and unimaginable ways to the average American, but the average American might not imagine any of these could be positive on a personal level. They can only imagine negatives in a life without luxuries and conveniences they have become utterly dependent on, but there are so many benefits to living this way above and beyond the direct and indirect ecological impact. It’s a holistic way of living that doesn’t just apply to reducing your environmental impact, it restores your energy and life force in many ways on a daily basis.

https://www.instagram.com/hardcoresustainable/ https://www.facebook.com/HardcoreSustainable/ http://hardcoresustainable.com