"I Study Climate Change. The Data Is Telling Us Something New."

[MissB]

54. Determining resilience would be a first step

Last edited Mon Oct 16, 2023, 09:59 AM - Edit history (1)

Where you live, how resilient is your shelter, food and water to the changing climate?

For example, my home is well situated to any change in water level due to a warming climate. The roads that I travel on and the towns that I go to are similarly situated for the most part (roads wouldn't be cut off due to rising water levels). The increase in temperature will likely kill my grove for Fir trees eventually; we hire an arborist to come in every 2-3 years to evaluate the health of all of our trees. Once we have to take down the main grove, we'll look at replacement trees that are better situated to a warming climate. In the meantime, we make sure that our Fir grove has plenty of water during the heat of the summer.

For now, the food system is fairly stable. We do keep chickens and their primary purpose is egg laying. When they're done with their egg laying years, they live out the rest of their lives with the flock (we don't cull). We could add in meat chickens as well, as our coop is set up to hold dual flocks. We don't currently have a rooster although we could, but for now, I really like my neighbors and we all have 1/2 acre to 1 acre lots which is pretty close for a rooster's noise level. I've toyed with the idea of rabbits as well, and setting those up would be relatively easy.

I have a proper vegetable garden that is fenced due to deer. We are expanding it when we revamp the back yard next year. For a home gardener, there is never enough space unless you're talking at least 5 acres. I've crammed food-producing plants, bushes and trees in everywhere I can, given the light and water needs and resources. When we revamp the back, I'll have a bunch of corten metal planters that act as divisions between the grade change in the level of the yard. I'm sure our landscape architect planned on things like boxwood to fill them, but I envision moving my herb garden, onions and garlic to those, and putting in things like dwarf tomatoes in the summer. Again, I cram food plants anywhere I can. I started all of my food-producing plants this year from seed. I also save seed from heirloom plants. These skills took years to hone. Lots of trial and error in both starting and growing plants.

I preserve as much of our garden as I am able to each year. I pressure and water-bath can, pickle and dehydrate food. We don't grow all of our food, so we keep a deep pantry including short term and long term food storage. I have enough canning jars to process the amount of food that we grow each year and then some, as well as lots of canning lids (I'm still working through 2017 lids this season). If we grew our own meat to process, I'd be fine with pressure canning chicken and/or rabbits. Even without that, growing beans for dry beans is fairly easy and those are a nice protein source. I'm getting a greenhouse as part of my backyard remodeling, which will allow me to move my seed starting out of the house as well as growing some items year round. I do have some tunnels for some of my raised beds, but being able to have a heater in the greenhouse will be nice.

I live in an area served by a water system that gets water from rainfall, not snow melt and serves the water via gravity. Our winters are predicted to be warmer and more wet, so it shouldn't affect our water supply near term. I do keep rain barrels connected to our roof downspouts for watering parts of the yard. I just had some concrete installed along the backside of our coop, which has a metal roof. The rain barrels that we will install there can provide more potable water that could be used in a pinch (our house has a composition roof, and I'm not comfy drinking that water). Longer term, we *could* drill a well. There are few properties here that use a well, and most of them that I can find well logs for are quite deep so it would be a huge expense. The aquifer isn't tapped into a lot around here, so there would be water. But if everyone switched over to private wells, that would change.

Since we live in a forested area, our house is somewhat vulnerable to forest fires. The maps that I can see that predict near term (20+ year) impacts show a minor increase in vulnerability. We try to keep all of our forest carbon on site, not removing leaves from the deciduous trees in the forested part of the lot. That helps keep the moisture in place. I really don't like the mow-and-blow folks that scrape every bit of debris off their properties, but that's a choice they make. We rake the leaves off the grass and compost them on-site by having the hens break them down. We try to compost most of the debris that we clean out of our perennial beds and veg garden, as well as debris that falls during storms. Our household scraps go into Bokashi bins and when those are ready, they go into our compost piles outside. I don't compost bones, so those go in our curbside green bins. Each spring, I add the contents of two of the bins to our veg beds (the two that have been fully composted for a year using a cold process or a few months if I've done a hot pile). Any scrap paper gets shredded and put under the roosts for the chickens to poo on, and then that gets scraped into the compost bins.