recipes to cut your own carbon footprint

Paul has a youtube video that explains how a rocket mass, left open in the summer, can help cool your house.

The problem with using trees as accounting for removal of carbon is that eventually, nearly all that carbon is released into the atmosphere; there’s a reason they call it the ‘carbon cycle’.

So many trees that are planted to ‘cancel’ emissions (mainly of fossil carbon which had been safely sequestered deep in the Earth) don’t survive long after planting ( a very rough process as usually done; bang! Bang! Bang!). Many others don’t survive to maturity. Others will be consumed by forest fires and go up into the atmosphere. And even those that become 100-300 year old trees will eventually die and decompose, releasing about 80% of their carbon into the atmosphere.
Climate change must be tackled through (1) increasing living plants beyond what currently exists but mainly (2) leaving the fossil carbon in the ground and transforming the way we live.

For the apple tree idea ...   I wonder if there can be people that would gladly receive a thousand apple seeds and plant them.  So if people don't want them, they will get planted.

??

- Eating an apple a day, putting the seeds in your pocket to plant the seeds when possible: cuts 100 tons

Planting fruit trees solves so many problems at once! Food, shade, leaf mold, they provide such good things.

This spring I found an apple core in my green house I must have left last fall.  I planted the seeds in some pots and now have 4, 2 foot tall apple trees!!!
Now I need to figure out where I want them.

Dennis Barrow wrote:This spring I found an apple core in my green house I must have left last fall.  I planted the seeds in some pots and now have 4, 2 foot tall apple trees!!!
Now I need to figure out where I want them.

Well done! I hope you find good homes for them with other people if not on your own land!

One of the things I love about apples is that it's not too hard to spread the harvest based on ripening times. Ripening times can be shifted both by location of the tree, and the variety of apple. I have one that ripens early in late July. The next ripens in Aug, and the third ripens in September. All three trees produce far more than I could possibly use, so I'm working on a couple more trees that should produce late in our season and store better.

If Dennis' 4 trees produce too much all at once, grafting is a great permie skill to practice!

Jay Angler wrote:

Dennis Barrow wrote:This spring I found an apple core in my green house I must have left last fall.  I planted the seeds in some pots and now have 4, 2 foot tall apple trees!!!
Now I need to figure out where I want them.

Well done! I hope you find good homes for them with other people if not on your own land!

One of the things I love about apples is that it's not too hard to spread the harvest based on ripening times. Ripening times can be shifted both by location of the tree, and the variety of apple. I have one that ripens early in late July. The next ripens in Aug, and the third ripens in September. All three trees produce far more than I could possibly use, so I'm working on a couple more trees that should produce late in our season and store better.

If Dennis' 4 trees produce too much all at once, grafting is a great permie skill to practice!

Jay, I have 5 apple trees now, 2 I am training espalier, 2 just out there that have never bloomed (three years in ground and 5 years old). and 1 crab apple.   One of my espalier trees blooms 3 weeks before any of the others, so I bought a crab apple, it didn't bloom this year.  I stopped at a crab apple near town and got a bunch of pollen. Hand pollinated the couple trees that bloomed, (different times).  Then we had a hard frost.  Lost all blooms.  No apples this year.

I have 3 plum trees.  Last year I got a couple bushels of plums.  This year, none.  That dang frost.

As far as to many apples?  No way!  We have 5 children and 14 grandkids.  A few years ago I lived near some friends that had a large orchard.  We canned apple sauce by the casefull.  Still have a couple quarts left.   I don't think I have ever had to much of any produce, well maybe zucchini.  lol  I have freeze dried a lot of zuc's this summer, zuc lasagne, zuc chips, zuc soup. etc.  My wife says NO MORE ZUCCHINI !!!   (till next summer). Wife just said she found a recipe for zuc salsa.

I wish I had the luxury of pushing an apple seed in the ground and having a viable tree as a result!

Alas, not viable here. Tough winters.

But perhaps a 20-year project has paid off? We took Evans cherries and plunked them in the ground at my parents' acreage. They lived, but produced nothing. Golf course management philosophy -- spray and be happy.

The last few years I'm running the show, which means doing the minimum, letting the clovers grow and the pollinators thrive. And then we had a wet spring after years of drought, and damned if the cherries didn't go absolutely crazy. I personally picked at least 10 gallons of fruit, hanging like grapes, and shared it with my neighbours who were glad to have it.