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Can anyone guess why I suddenly got the idea of putting a couple of boogie boards in our attic, after finding them discarded on the beach?

(If you guessed the answer right away, hold your answer for a second to give some of the other people a chance.)

BTW in case it’s not a widespread term, boogie boards are those foam boards about the length of a person’s torso, that people use to play in the water.

They are typically covered with some kind of stretchy fabric which helps hold the foam together and also probably helps cut down on the squeaky foam phenomenon. There’s often a cute design, superhero character, or some other interesting thing printed on the fabric.

I found these two boogie boards discarded on the beach over the past week, as one often does when one lives by a beach that attracts a lot of tourists who might not have room in their luggage to take home the beach toys.

OK, so have you figured out why I put them in my attic?

If not, here’s another hint: I live in a hurricane-prone region. People sometimes have to escape from their houses through the attic, or just stay up in the attic for a while til the floodwaters recede.

Now, my house is not situated in a very flood-prone part of my city, and I probably wouldn’t have thought to put those floaty recreational devices in the attic unless I had found them on the beach. (I always feel bad about the volume of unwanted stuff that gets left on the beach, so I was happy to think of a practical use!)

After sticking them up there, it occurred to me that if you had a bunch, it could double as extra attic insulation. Again, not something I’d go out of my way to buy, but if I find more on the beach they might just end up in our attic!

This little story illustrates a couple of my favorite principles of Permaculture Design: 1) making use of found/on-site resources; and 2) stacking functions (every item serves multiple functions).

Come to think of it, this also makes use of a third principle of permaculture design: “energy cycling.” This means getting the most out of the embodied energy that went into making an object, marketing it, etc., rather than just throw it away.

See this post with a photo on my Deep Green book page on Facebook. And please feel free to share this or any of my posts. The slightly quirky posts like this one might reach people that other more “heavy” posts cannot. Every person reached is somebody who might really be needing and wanting this information to get inspired and re-energized about escaping from the consumerist treadmill.

For the same reason, if you know any podcasters who might be interested in my content and philosophy, please feel free to suggest me as a podcast guest. I’ve seen synergies between host and guest reach whole new levels of people’s hearts, minds, and hands.

Developing simple protocols for next level of fridge-sharing.

For some years now, our house refrigerator has mostly been shared by an ever-changing mix of three single adult residents — some short-term, some very long-term — plus occasional guests. Typically all of the shelves and the vegetable drawers are packed. Each person gets their own shelf, and their own shelf on the fridge door.

The person who has the bottom shelf and the person who has the middle shelf each also gets one of the two vegetable crisper drawers, to make up for the fact that they don’t have as much storage height as the top-shelf person.

This format works well for when individuals have a lot of different dietary requirements / medical needs etc so communal cooking isn’t practical. Also, a lot of people have had bad experiences with communal living arrangements, including bad experiences with sharing a fridge. So it can help to have some delineated boundaries.

For the past few years, the top shelf plus top door-shelf is one person’s space. And so on with the middle and bottom. But with cubby-boxes and some streamlining as shown here, each shelf could potentially be shared by two.

(The cubby-box is actually a crisper drawer from a larger fridge that someone was throwing away.)

By tightening and streamlining, such as sharing of condiments, it becomes feasible to share the fridge among four or five adults, or more, plus kids.

If each person has their own cubby-box (which could be labeled with masking-tape and marker, if people like), it’s easier to set boundaries to reassure people who have had issues with sharing a fridge in the past and are leery.

At this moment, while we are engaged in various experimental tweaks and thought-experiments to take the communal protocols to the next level, the fridge is temporarily not fully in use. The middle shelf contains a water filter pitcher, left by a previous resident. I now use it to provide chilled water to passersby who need it.

See this post with photo here, on my Facebook page DEEP GREEN book by jenny nazak.

Further Exploration:

• You might also enjoy Sharon Astyk’s superb post on sharing a kitchen in hard times/disasters. She and her husband have 10 kids, and are very much about optimizing sharing with community, so you can bet she knows a thing or two! I’ll post the link once I see it. I thought she had posted it already but maybe not. In the meantime, enjoy reading previous installments of her excellent series “prepping room by room.” I have often shared similar thoughts here on this blog, and it’s really solid advice. https://ko-fi.com/post/Prepping-Room-by-Room-Part-3-Bedrooms-T6T51HGFH8

Here’s a page with a list of some of Sharon’s recent posts. Including the prepping room by room series. It’s got part 1 bathroom, part 2 living room, part 3 bedroom. I think kitchen will probably be soon. https://ko-fi.com/sharonastyk/posts

***Update July 9, 2025: OK, here you go! Sharon’s post Prepping room by room: kitchens https://ko-fi.com/post/Prepping-Room-by-Room-Part-4-Kitchens-P5P01HQJD4

From Sharon’s kitchen prep post: “So I’ve been putting off this part of the series because it involves so many moving pieces. For most of us, Kitchens are the centerpiece of home in so many ways, and thus they are both most affected by disasters and also most important in some ways during a crisis. The reality is that all of us need to feed ourselves even during disaster.

“Years ago I wrote that the day after the end of the world, someone is going to get up and want breakfast. And that’s the truth. Worlds end. People die. But others go on. And that going on often happens first in the kitchen. So let’s talk about that. …”

#501collective #StarshineHouse

Question asked in a post by Permaculture/bioregionalist friend & colleague Molly.

My comments in response:

Because I’m not good at growing annual vegetables. Never have been.

I’m good at foraging. And I grow some fruit trees and a lot of native plants.

Other than that I prefer to concentrate on the things I am good at, that I can contribute to my community & the world.

And I would rather pay local farmers and other local people for the food they love to grow, are good at growing, and are happy to sell/barter.

Same answer goes for my whole household, as for me as an individual.

And: I actually think the real answer to this question for me – and maybe for other people – is that it’s lonely drudge work and not a good use of energy, unless it is done in community.

Otherwise everything is too much work. The seeding, harvesting etc — It’s not meant to be an individual endeavor. It scales up a lot better than it works at an individual or small household scale.

Even a block scale or neighborhood scale would make it more appealing and fun and therefore more people would want to keep trying and working together.

Also different people will always be better with different aspects of the task, and different areas of the neighborhood will always be better suited to growing different vegetables and fruits. Even two lots next-door to each other can differ quite greatly.

On a related note that I don’t hear talked about, I think there’s a massive cognitive drain in permie + related circles, from too many people who are not meant to be farming moving out to the country on acreage because they feel like they’re “supposed to.”

Somehow the Permaculture Design concept “Grow food where the people are” (including in cities, suburbs, etc.) got warped into “move out onto a big piece of land and enact a modern-day version of that ‘American Gothic’ painting, get completely tied up in trying to grow all of your own food.”

BTW “grow food where the people are” is only one of the Permaculture design concepts. Permaculture design is about energy cycling, water stewardship, stewardship of human energy, and so much more. It’s really natural engineering that we all can have the opportunity to do, by ourselves and together.

And to expand on my thought about cognitive drain … What seems apparent, at least with a lot of people, is that when they say they don’t have time to garden or grow vegetables, they mean that their “job” takes up all/most of their time / energy. Typically the “job” is something that is done at a company, and is done mainly or only for money rather than also being something that the person loves and is a fit for their deepest skills and heart’s calling.

Furthermore, the person’s heart’s calling is likely unrelated to gardening as well as to their job. Each of us has something or some things that we feel like we were born to do, born to share — but unfortunately the mainstream economy does not value or compensate those things enough.

So here’s a person already burnt out from their company job, beating themself up because they’re not gardening as in growing rows and rows of vegetables.

And then on top of that, if they’re trying to work their job and also grow vegetables, they have less than zero time for the thing or things they are really gifted at & called to do. Things that their community and the world needs quite desperately despite the fact that the mainstream economy does not adequately value or compensate.

In this environment, the only way to carve out self-determinism is to ruthlessly cut down on the squandering of our own human energy. To be absolute fierce bulldogs in guarding our own time, energy, and creativity. Any sacrifice becomes worth it to cut the bills if we’re doing it so that we can have creative and occupational self determination.

One of my dreams is for everybody to be able to do their heart’s calling, such that all of our work will make music together like a cosmic symphony.

And yes, that will include growing vegetables.

It will also of course include all the quotidian basics basics like doing laundry, but laundry won’t be a drudge because we will be doing it together in an ecologically harmonious way, with lots of elders and kids splashing in and around a natural body of water as the work gets done. Or rain tubs or what have you. In society 2.0, it won’t just be a certain age women who are burdened with the domestic tasks. Actually I’m not sure it’s ever been that way. I think children have always helped. It’s just in recent industrial capitalist society that children get sidelined and not involved in the household economy.

A friend/colleague in Texas just posted that they have hit the road in search of places to cool off. Typically for people that tends to mean the mountains – Colorado etc. — Or at least someplace that’s not 900,000,000% humidity.

So in a little bit of a spirit of impishness, as well as fully legitimate red carpet of friendship and wish to show off my gem of an adopted hometown, I’ve offered the below comment. (I also belatedly noticed that I offered this in the spirit of bioregionalism, wanting to help my fellow hot-climate-dwellers find ways to cool off and get a change of scenery without having to escape the basic prevailing summer essence of heat.)

Well I wouldn’t call it cool exactly, temperature-wise, but you’re welcome to cruise out here to Daytona Beach; our house and low-footprint living lab has a little guest bedroom.

And the ocean just a couple minutes walk down the road is a cooling dip, and you can check out our passive cooling measures at the house, and explore some really cool history and architecture and cultural attractions in this very cool groovy adopted city of mine! You’d be most welcome! ✌️☕️🌊🌊🌊

This was prompted by a new friend showing me some of her daughter’s artworks. They are utterly spectacular. (This new friend somehow feels like a long-lost additional twin sister to me, even though she’s like 20 years younger and we just met! I say “additional,” because I have another “non-biological twin sister”; she lives on the other side of the country and is my same age.)

Also, one of my own nieces — a daughter of my biological, birth-family sister — is an incredibly talented artist (as well as being very gifted in science) and could probably benefit from the same peptalk (although this channel probably won’t reach her). Side note: My other biological niece is amazing and brilliant too. And they both have such deep kind hearts.

I’ve spoken before to my fellow Boomers about the ecological damage caused by steering our youth toward the conventional extractive-economy occupations in the name of “stability.”

But there is also deep-seated personal emotional existential damage, as well as a planetary opportunity cost, for not explicitly encouraging and nurturing and fueling a young person’s passion for the arts if that is where their calling lies.

Anyway, this is what I said to my new friend:

“I feel this so strongly I can’t really fit it into a text but I have to try — [Daughter’s name]’s artwork is absolutely spectacular and I do believe she and others will change the world by sticking with their art and considering it a valid occupational path. Too many young people have been talked out of being who they were meant to be. People your age and my age as well. I was one of the lucky ones who managed to escape although it came at a penalty.

For what it’s worth, my art is nowhere near as good as your daughter’s or my biological niece’s (my main thing is really writing) — and yet it has paid my rent in some years!

I want to encourage the precious young people to trust their art as a livelihood and a tool of liberation. Personal and planetary.

Just a mini glimpse inside the house to show the atmosphere from passive cooling techniques such as shades on the windows. The rain over the past few days has cooled down the house a lot, it was like 73° inside of here last night. But I’m afraid our rain chances are getting burned away, i see the thick clouds from this morning are burning off — BUT im still hoping & praying! I hope we still have our rain window today — there is some chance according to my app.
Anyway! If your house or apartment doesn’t have awnings or fancy shutters, never fear, there’s all sorts of DIY stuff like what I have at our house. Most of this fabric wasn’t even purchased at the thrift shop, it was free. Because people are always throwing stuff away.

For more extended content like this, including super high-quality shares from the top experts around the world, Please follow my public page DEEP GREEN book by Jenny Nazak. And to those of you who have already been following, my heartfelt thanks and appreciation!

There is a wide range of content posted there and yes some of it is very political but it’s really easy to scroll to the posts that you want to focus on. The posts on flood control, restoring the hydrological cycle, growing food in cities, building sponge cities, co-creating neighborhood resilience and so on are pretty obvious and stand out. The scroll function is our friend as always! Love you guys and have a great day.

PS. I don’t know why these darn things always end up starting with my face, I try to show pretty trees and books to start the video but it always ends up starting with some dorky expression frozen on my face lol. Oh well, hopefully this will motivate more people to navigate their shyness and put out their message to the world.

PPS. In the video I said sorry for my ugly wrinkly face. But I actually don’t believe that in real life. I quite honestly am happy with how I look! But some thing about seeing myself on video just brings out some other squicky reaction in me. I think it’s probably the feeling that one is obligated to self-monitor one’s facial expression and the angle of the light — an obligation which is very counterproductive to spontaneity and flow and sharing information. The same thing comes up when I am trying to give a public talk via zoom as opposed to in person. And I’m only doing them by zoom now for various reasons so it does come up.

PPS. Update 11:30 AM: it actually ended up starting to sprinkle and then the raindrops got fatter and it’s now fat gentle rain. Very nice and sweet on this Monday morning! Keeping the house cool down and that will be possibly a fourth totally sweat-free night even under my extreme “low-footprint living test laboratory” conditions of zero air-conditioning and zero electric fans!! (The housemates & guests can use electric fans in summer, and little space heaters in winter, if they choose.)

Unfortunately I posted this video on my personal page which I don’t share publicly. And I don’t seem to be able to download it and then re-upload it to my public page. If I do, I will post the link here so you can watch the actual video.

Exciting news at the tiny tiny dune wildflower gardenette that is both the smallest and yet the most high-profile landscape on my route.

Last night’s transplant of several blanket-flower babies (Gaillardia pulchella) that sprouted up from cracks in the sidewalk in front of my house has been successful! There’s a certain watering technique for nurturing these gorgeous hardy wildflowers through the transplant stage (thanks Amy for teaching me!) and it has been helped by some additional rain!

One of the blanket-flower plants was in bloom when I carefully eased it up from the sidewalk crack and brought it to this micro-site down the block, and When I stopped by this morning for follow up, I see the beauty has remained in bloom this morning!

The other, smaller babies look healthy too and will probably be producing buds and blooms in a matter of weeks.

#BeachsidePride #PuffyLandscaping #DuneVegetation #SpongeCity #OceanFriendlyRiverFriendlyYards #MakeBeachsidePuffyAgain

PS. Social media technique note: The final image is a montage that I made by screenshotting these shots in my iPhone app. There was one image I didn’t want to include in there so I put the green heart over it. See the post with photos on my deep green Facebook page here.