Category Archives: random thoughts

Party Oct 30–Everyone invited

Posted on October 26, 2008 | 1 comment

Where oh where can you find a $10 all you can drink beer happy hour? This Thursday, it’ll happen at Trumer Pils, in West Berkeley on 4th and Camelia at 5-10pm. Please drop by as it is a fundraiser for the Biofuel Oasis, a worker-owned biofuel business I’ve been involved with since 2004. We’re building an awesome retro gas station/urban farm supply store and need to raise some cash.

It’s threatening to be the party of the year because of the following:

Fried green tomatoes, goat tacos, and salsa made by chez panisse and eccolo chefs!

Brewery tours (it’s very Laverne and Shirley)

Burnt honey ice cream made before your eyes (and maybe by your butt) by a bicycle powered machine!

Slideshow featuring the biofuel oasis workers doing grunt labor and destroying things!

The finest of the fine 4th street regulars and supporters will be there. I hope you can make it, I’ll be there wearing a jumpsuit and fixing up the tacos.

Just to repeat:

Oct 30, Thursday 5-10pm

1404 4th Street, Trumer Pils

$10 gets you all you can drink beer; food is $5/plate

Children are welcome. Smoking outside. Schmoozing allowed.

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Reminder: Oct 19

Posted on October 18, 2008 | 7 comments

Hey! Remember about the farm tour Sunday Oct 19, starting at noon. We’ll be extracting honey at 1pm with some awesome Biofuel Oasis customers, if you want to stick around for that. I had a little lady stop by today thinking the tour was on Saturday. Bummer. She got to see a praying mantis and feed the goats even though it was the wrong day. Tomorrow will be more exciting.
If you want to help extract, bring a long-sleeved shirt and a hat (just in case a bee wants to sting you). It should take about an hour.

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Sick hippie

Posted on June 28, 2008 | 12 comments

Been sick all week with a head cold which turned into fever with chills. I’ve had to stay in bed and the farm has been neglected. The goat shed needs mucking out, the garden watered, the rabbit cages are begging for a cleaning, the buffet of yummy greens that go to all the animals has been halted and boring processed feed will have to do. The worst thing is my sinuses are so plugged up, I can’t smell anything. Hence, I can’t taste anything. Is this a life worth living? Amid these frustrating developments on a sweat-inducing break from the bed to check my email, I learned that I had been crowned Best Hippie 2008 by the East Bay’s locally owned free weekly.
You guys!!
A few years ago, maybe even a year ago, I would have scoffed at the word ‘hippie’ being used to describe me. Hippies! that’s my parents! I would say. I don’t listen to the Dead, I listen to the Dead Boys. But, if you think about it, I *have* been milking goats, making cheese and planting chard–all tell-tale signs of hippiedom. So I’ve learned to live with the moniker, and wonder why there isn’t a better word to describe my urban homesteading tendencies in a way that doesn’t reek of patcholi or come wrapped in tie-dye. Anyone got a better term?

While we contemplate that, a sauerkraut instructional.

Get some nice heads, tight ones. Half the cabbages, then chop into thin strips. Add the cabbage to a large bowl and sprinkle with kosher salt. A TB of salt per cup of cabbage is the rule of thumb. Once sprinkled with salt, pound the cabbage so that it starts to release some water. I use a pestle from a mortar and pestle that my roommate left behind. Add this point you can add caraway or coriander seeds. Once the cabbage strips look a bit wilted, pack them tightly into a large jar. Pack them tightly into the jar using your fist to press down all the cabbage. Weigh down with a bag filled with water or a rock, or as pictured, a glass bottle of water. This isn’t shown, but you should also drape a cheesecloth or piece of fabric to keep out flies and such. After an hour or so, the cabbage should be submerged under its own juices. Let sit 2-3 days on the counter. Taste after a few days and see if you like it, when tastes right, remove the weight, and put the jar in the fridge to enjoy. Happy lacto-fermenting! As a sidenote, I make a jar of this a week for the goats. It’s good for their bowels’ flora, as it is for ours.

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My rides

Posted on June 18, 2008 | 3 comments

There’s probably nothing more uncool than driving a car. It makes me sweaty, in a bad way. It turns me into a robot. I can’t admire other drivers’ footwear or fashion. I’m not enjoying the sun, the breeze, the hellos from other people on bikes or on foot. Nope, there I am, a big dumb-ass steering a big machine around the city.

This weekend we had blow out party for my friend Willow. She’s going on a sabbatical. I roasted three pigger loins all day long in an low oven after marinating them with various rubs and brines. Then we hung up some decorations, and wheeled out the juice making shopping cart. That’s right. A shopping cart that makes juice (sorry, no photo). In Caracas, Venezuela I first encountered this miracle machine. It involves filling a shopping cart with oranges, then mounting a juicer where the toddler would normally sit while you shopped for lentils. And a place to cut the oranges (and grapefruits). When you want juice, you reach into the cart, cut an orange, then squeeze. It’s totally mobile, and if these hit on, will provide the greater Oakland area with plenty of Vitamin C. Can’t you imagine a fleet of shopping carts filled with citrus, not aluminum cans? But first I had to get the oranges. Which meant driving (I thought) to the Friday farmer’s market. I circled a five block radius for 20 minutes. I got sweaty. I even wanted to yell. I felt competitive and I think I even cut someone off. Just for some oranges! In the time it took me to find a parking space I could have ridden there and back on my bike at least two times, which would have been enough to get the six bags of oranges (3 bags per trip is what I think the bike can handle). So back to my car=uncool principle.

And yet, Orla needs some alfalfa. And it comes in big bales. Big American bales (please notice the coloring on this bale.) That’s why, just like the country song, I love my truck. It gets around 35 miles per gallon and can haul at least four bales (I haven’t tried stacking them yet–fear of unleashing hay onto the highway). It’s rusty and white and matches our other car (across the street from this). I drive for the goats, because I love them. But I’m wondering how many bales I could fit into that shopping cart….

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Goat smells

Posted on June 10, 2008 | 1 comment

At the edge of the room in our apartment that I call the mudroom, the room where we milk Bebe, store tools, keep seeds, make vinegar, house crusty jars of canned goods, right where the door opens onto the backyard, lingers an odor of Farm. Bill’s even noticed it. I’ve wondered where exactly it emanates because I harvest the goat turds and sawdusty clods of urine every morning before milking. Then I saw Bilbo pee on the back porch. Ah-a! Goat pee plus wooden deck plus sunlight.
It’s an unbearably delicious smell as far as I’m concerned. It means good things, to me. Maybe I’m remembering my parent’s farm in Idaho or an old goat barn visited in the 1970s. The odor to my mind speaks of good things–goat cheese, dirt dappled potatoes, thick slices of multi-grain bread. Promises of coffee ground with a handmill in the morning, and marijuana smoked in the evening. Of course those days are gone, and we’ve all gotten over those silly pleasures, right? I guess some of us have not.

This past weekend I took Orla and three rabbits to Berkeley Fun Fair. The Berkeley Farmer’s Market manager asked me to bring some baby animals for the kids to pet, to be a one woman band of urban farming.

When I arrived, I unfurled my ghetto fence made of chicken wire and wooden stakes, put Orla on a leash, and sat under a tree. So many kids and their parents came up and told me stories about having farm animals, some of them in the city! Of wanting their kids to grow up knowing animals. One little girl cradled a baby bunny, and I told her it was destined for someone’s plate.
“Oh,” she said. “When will he be ready?” Matter of fact, she was. It might be the parents and our culture that socializes us to think that cuddly creatures can’t be meat.
“What about the goat,” she said. Orla was curled up in my lap.
“She’s going to be a milker,” I said, “But if we have boys, well, we eat them.” A Berkeley vegetarian lady heard me say that.
“So you eat the boy goats?”
“Yeah, I mean, how many boys can we have if these are milk animals? Or how many boy pet goats?”
She nodded, handed me a benediction in the form of a Stop the Spray flier, and went on her way.
I only stayed for a little over an hour–the noise of the music freaked Orla out–but I felt like I had done my work for the day.


When I came home, the adult goats came running, as is their habit, along the concrete corridor that separates our house from our neighbor’s. Bebe sniffed Orla, let out a sighing Bah, and she was welcomed back into the fold. Where she can piss on a falling down backporch with a view of downtown Oakland. Ah, the life of urban goat!

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Biofuels debate

Posted on May 5, 2008 | 6 comments

Anyone else out there feel like a 1970s revival is on its way? I’m not talking about bell bottoms and polyester, but gas lines and fuel shortages.

As some of you know, I work/own a biodiesel station in Berkeley with five other women. Most days our customers come in and happily pay more than the price of regular diesel. They do so because they know that our biodiesel is sustainably made: we sell fuel made from recycled vegetable oil within our community (Oakland/SF Bay Area). It’s better for the environment, for the workers (we have intimate contact with biodiesel—pumping it into the truck, dispensing it, changing fuel filters), and for our customers.

Lately it’s become very easy to dismiss using biofuels. Biodiesel and ethanol are getting a bad rap. The former head of the UN called biofuels a crime against humanity. So I guess I should just shut up and get a gas car like everyone else.

The reason I got into biodiesel was self-empowerment. I learned how to make my own fuel by scrounging through a restaurant grease trap, processing it with lye and wood alcohol, and viola: fuel for our old Mercedes. I didn’t have to buy a Prius (which I can’t afford). If it rained, I had a car to drive instead of my prefered transpo option, biking. Then I joined our collective and learned how to drive a biodiesel big rig, fix cars, and run a business. So biofuel changed my life for the better. So, despite the UN, I’m still pro-biofuel. The question is: what kind of biofuel? How was it made? Local? Recycled? Does it enrich our community? Is it traceable?

Our biodiesel costs $4.99/gallon. That’s about 50 cents more expensive than regular diesel. Lately, some people have become scared. I see it on their faces at the station. Is the price going to go up again? someone will ask over the phone.

Yes. Each of us needs to change the way we think about energy, food, power. Each of us needs to come up with our own solutions within our community. If expensive fuel will motivate you to ride your bike more often (as it has for me) or start lobbying for better public transportation, or car sharing, then isn’t that a good thing? As I watch the food shortages unfold, and see the demise of cheap energy, which made everything cheap, I’m grateful that I know how to grow my own food, milk goats, breed rabbits. And I want to teach more people how to do all those things. We have to feel empowered in order to make a difference.

We have to start getting realistic about the cost of everything. The days of cheap energy are gone. We have to plan accordingly. I know at our biofuel station we’re going to start teaching more people how to farm in the city, to drive electric cars, to ride their bikes, use car share. We can’t just throw our hands up in despair. Action, not despair.

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