All they can think about is their own survival They can't consider you when they constantly feel like they're hanging off the edge of a cliff And no matter what you do for them, it will never make them feel like they're safe or secure It has nothing to do with you You cannot change how someone feels about themselves But no matter what you do for them, they will always want more And they will never think about giving anything back to you in return When you get involved with a narcissist You will notice that they never have anything to bring to the table It's always the other person that is bringing something to them It's like the narcissist thinks they are the table. There's always something going on with them There's always something they want There's always something they need you to do It's like they can't do anything on their own Like their big babies It's like they constantly need to be burped or fed The main difference is that narcissists never grow or develop They always stay the same So you don't get to look forward to a future where they are finally able to do things for themselves Well, they aren't constantly depending on you They will always need you around It's like they're handicapped It's like they have a condition that restricts their ability to function physically mentally or socially and that is why they always need you around The narcissist may hate you But they won't let go because they need you They need your money They need you to take care of their domestic duties They need someone to use as their emotional punching bag and no matter how hurt you may be about how they're treating you It's not going to change their behavior When you reveal your vulnerabilities or human emotions It will only make them hate you even more because they want the focus to be on them They're the victims you they're the ones who need assistance That's how they want you to see it and any time that you try to spend focusing on yourself Will only make them resent you When you try to show the narcissist that they're hurting you That's when you will see who they really are They will deny it or minimize it. They will gas like you and shift a blame onto you But they will never hold themselves accountable They will never make consistent changes to their behavior Because they don't really care about how you feel Unless it has to affect how they feel about themselves All the narcissist really cares about is their own feelings and how they see themselves They don't even see you as a real person When they targeted you They saw you as an object Something that existed to meet their needs They saw everything that you had to offer But they had nothing to give to you And as a relationship progressed They began to milk more and more out of you They gradually raised their standards and expectations of you While giving you nothing in return But they have to minimize everything that you're doing They have to make you feel like you're not doing enough Because otherwise Rather than looking at yourself and thinking you're not good enough You would look at them and realize how they've done nothing for you You would realize how much you've lost and how little you've received in return And of course the narcissist doesn't want you to meditate on that They don't want you to realize that they haven't even done a fraction of what you've done for them Because once you accept that to be true It means you've got to hit the brakes It means you've got to stop everything you're doing for them And they don't want you to stop They want to get as much as they can get from you So they will trick you into thinking that you're not doing enough for them They will act like they don't appreciate everything you've done As though anyone else would do so much more When secretly They know that they are not deserving They know that there isn't an equal exchange They know that you deserve so much more than what they're giving to you But they will never tell you this Because then that would mean that you would have to stop everything you're doing for them It means that they would have to start pouring into your cup When they never had anything to give to you If the narcissist left you today You would probably be fine Your quality of life would probably improve But although the narcissist hates you They have no choice but to stay Because they're in survival mode And they know they can't survive on their own They know that they would struggle without you And that is why they will hold on to you for dear life Even though it may seem like they hate you Because they have no other choice They will milk as much out of you as they can Until they have enough to move on Or they will target a new source who has everything they need And then they're out of there Like you never existed Because all they care about is what you can do for them Or how you make them feel You're just an object to them They don't even see you as a real person But no matter how much you give to them or do for them It will always be minimized They will never be grateful They will always act like you could have done more Well they never brought anything to the table They never did anything for you Because you're dealing with someone who is emotionally underdeveloped It's like dealing with a child and they see you as their parent They expect you to give everything to them The child isn't supposed to give anything back to the parent It doesn't work that way And the narcissist is like a child that wants to be the parent They want the most beneficial parts of both roles They want the entitlement of the child Or having the authority and control of the parent But like many teenagers may behave towards their parent The narcissist can hold a grudge and be very resentful They always feel like you should have done more for them And while that is understandable for someone at that age It's a completely different story when you're dealing with an adult Someone who should be mature enough to take care of themselves Without constantly depending on someone else But this is what narcissism is all about A person who expects more from you And they expect from themselves A person who wants everything from you Without giving you anything in return While making you feel like nothing you do is good enough But still sticking around Because secretly They've got a good thing going on with you They get whatever they want whenever they want While putting in a minimal amount of time and effort But they will act like they're exhausted They will act like they can't do any more than what they've done When they haven't done a fraction of what you've done for them And you should already be able to see where this is going If they've only done a fraction of what you've done for them And they're still expecting and demanding more from you They're just going to milk as much out of you as they can And when they're done They're going to claim that you didn't do enough for them They're going to say that they were doing everything for you When in reality Rather than being in a relationship It's like you were raising a child You invested all of your time, energy and money Things that you could have used to build yourself But instead it gets wasted on someone Who doesn't even appreciate it And in return you get nothing back Other than hate, anger, bitterness and resentment You become their caretaker Someone to look after their emotional or financial problems It's like you're giving everything you have to someone Just so they can use it to destroy you It's like you're paying for your own execution They always leave you worse off than before you met them They come into your life with nothing And leave with everything Thank you for watching I hope this video raised it with you Please like, comment, share and subscribe Click the bell icon to receive notifications For my future videos Check out the new Narc Survival website At www.narcsurvival.co.uk Where you can read my blog posts, book coaching sessions And join our support forum If you'd like to donate My PayPal link is in the video description Coaching inquiries You can email me at coaching at narcsurvival.co.uk Thank you for watching and I'll talk to you soon


Hi, I'm Sean McKenna, a Program Manager on the Azure Service Fabric team. In this video, I'll show you some of the basic commands and tools that you can use to deploy and manage Service Fabric applications. I'll cover connecting to a local cluster, deploying an application, performing an upgrade, and using Service Fabric Explorer. Finally, I'll show you how to perform many of the same tasks on a remote cluster running in Azure and wrap up with some resources to help you get started. Note that in this video, I'll be using applications that I've already built. To learn how to create new Service Fabric applications in Visual Studio, please see building your first Service Fabric application. So we'll start here in Windows PowerShell by importing the Service Fabric SDK module, which provides a set of commandlets for creating and upgrading applications. The next thing we're going to do is connect to the local cluster that's running on my development machine. If you see this type of output when you call Connect Service Fabric cluster, you know that you've successfully connected. Finally, I'm going to create a new application within the local cluster. Specifically, I'm going to create the WordCount application that I built earlier in Visual Studio. This application is actually included as a sample in GitHub, so you can go take a look at the code. Basically, what it does is send a set of random five-character strings into a ASP.NET web API front-end, which are then relayed onto a stateful service for counting based on the first character of that string. So you'll notice that the application has very quickly deployed to my local cluster. At this point, I can perform a set of queries on the state of the cluster and the state of the applications using the rich set of commandlets that are provided by Service Fabric. So for instance, I can say Get Service Fabric application without parameters, which will return me the set of applications that are deployed, in this case, only WordCount. I can drill down further by saying Get Service Fabric service, pass in the application name, and this will return the set of services that are included in that WordCount application, which is a stateful service for counting those words and a stateless front-end that provides that web API endpoint, as well as the web UI. So with that, let's actually take a look at that web UI and the application running on the local cluster. So there are those random words that are being sent in, the total count of words to date, and then the breakdown into a set of four partitions based on the first character of that string. So I mentioned that Service Fabric provides a rich set of PowerShell commandlets that allow you to inquire about the state of your cluster and the state of your applications. You can actually also do much of that management and inquiry through Service Fabric Explorer, which is a web-based tool that's included as part of the cluster and provides both a logical and physical view of your cluster. So here you can see the set of applications that are deployed. In this case, there's the word count application that we deployed. We can drill down just like we did in PowerShell and see the set of two services that are included, so the word count service and the word count web service. And I can further drill down to look at the individual partitions or the individual replicas within a partition. And for each element that I choose in this left tree view, I'm provided with a set of details about it in the right pane. So I can see, for example, the endpoint that it's reachable on, it's health state, and even which node within the cluster that replica is running on in this case. Service Fabric also supports the notion of no downtime rolling upgrades, which we can perform equally on local cluster. And the way that no downtime rolling upgrades work is as the application upgrade is rolling out, Service Fabric performs a series of health checks to ensure that the application is behaving normally as it proceeds through a set of upgrade domains. And so at any point, if the application begins to behave poorly, you can have that upgrade roll back. So let's try an upgrade on our local cluster of that word count application. So we pass in the path to the updated application package. So in this case, it's version 1.0.1, the application name, and then a set of parameters, which include things like the type of upgrade that I want to perform. In this case, monitor upgrade, which means that as the upgrade is rolling out, we are performing all of those health checks before proceeding. So I'll begin running that upgrade. And if I switch back to the application here, you'll notice that while there may be a couple of hiccups momentarily, the application continues to run normally, even as the upgrade is rolling out. And I can take a look at the state of that upgrade within Service Fabric Explorer by going to the applications element in the tree view and noticing here that there's a single upgrade in progress. And I'll see that my word count application is moving from version 1.0.0 to version 1.0.1 and is proceeding through the set of upgrade domains. Finally, let's take a look at how you would do all of this with a remote Azure cluster. In fact, all of the commands that I've shown so far and the tools are exactly the same when targeting a remote cluster. So let's once again go ahead and grab that SDK module and then connect to the remote cluster. In this case, you'll notice it's not running on local host but is in fact running inside of Azure. And I'll see exactly the same type of diagnostic information printed out upon successful connection that I did before. And finally, I'll run the exact same commandlet to perform the creation of that application inside of the Azure cluster. And in this case, I will deploy the version 1.0.1 version of the application and off it goes. And now just like I could do in the local cluster, I can hear say get service fabric application. There happened to be a few more applications deployed to this Azure cluster, but you'll notice the word count application is in fact there. So if we go and now launch the application running in Azure, we'll see that it's exactly the same app that we were running locally previously, same UI, same partitioning scheme, but now running across five nodes that are actually on five distinct virtual machines. And in fact, if I go to another tab and look at service fabric explorer, you'll see that I'm actually running the same service fabric explorer tool except now inside that remote cluster. I happen to have a few more applications on this cluster than I did on my local cluster. But if we drill down on word count, we can see that it's exactly the same app with two services, four partitions, except now if I look at the replicas, I'll see actual end points running on virtual machines in Azure. But this just goes to show that exactly the same PowerShell commands and tools, including service fabric explorer, you can use locally on your development machine and take that all the way up to your large Azure clusters running in production and transfer those skills one to one. Everything I've shown you today can be found in our latest preview SDK. So I encourage you to go get it and get started. We've also built a set of rich documentation and samples to help you learn more. Finally, we'll be looking out for your feedback on MSDN, Stack Overflow and User Voice. So please tell us what you think.


Hello again, my name is Vladimir. I think all of you use something to optimize your files for your projects. Is it so? One, just one, two, three, okay. Well, we like to have our projects fast, so we optimize them very hard and we realized that there are a bunch of tools to make your project working fast, but still we wanted to make it even better and we created a lot of tools. All of them are written in Node.js and open sourced and the first of them is CSSO, that stands for CSS Optimizer. It does all the things that you all used to when working with CSS Optimizer, it removes spaces and all that stuff, but it differs from the other because inside of it, there is CSS parser and that's why we can optimize CSS in a very special way. We can apply structural optimizations and so, and it's very smart and I think it's the only CSS Optimizer with such great results. Then we started to support Ritina displays, so we need some SVG in our projects and that's why we came up with SVG. That means SVG Optimizer, I don't understand, and it's in still in development, but even right now it results in very great optimized SVG files and again, it's written in Node.js and open sourced. Also, we have such a tool as сеточка, it's a Russian word and what it does is to parse your CSS file and take out just some parts of it according to some special rules. For example, you can write CSS for all the browsers in one file, then ask сеточka to find everything that corresponds just to Internet Explorer and get it into a separate file and include it separately just for that browser. Again, as I already mentioned, we have that CSS parser and it's open sourced too. It's called Kanzales. Finally, we have a tool and it's the only one which isn't on Node.js, it's Img.o, Optimizer for Images. Actually, it's just a bash script, but what it does is it tries to optimize your image with a lot of different optimizers and try to find the best just for your particular image. That's why the compression is the best. Of course, you can participate and help us to improve these tools and ask us the questions. All of them are presented on bm.info slash tools. Thanks.


Ooh, excellent connection. That's like that. There's always a delay. Oh, well. Welcome to Jalassette News. Take a top stories in cryptocurrency Jalassettes and break them out of bite-sized pieces. So today, I just want to do a quick live stream, just to talk about some things that we had actually been going over. Let me throw this out here. So this was our exit strategy. First of all, hello, everybody. Hello, hello, hello, hello. And the biggest strategy that we were talking about, it was a video that we did yesterday. And we talked about the different aspects because Ethereum was going to the moon and everywhere else. So people were, of course, talking about how, oh, this is fantastic because what's going to happen is it's going to be one of those Ethereum is just going to go to the moon forever and it'll never come back down, which is exactly the same thing that I thought in 2017. But of course, here we are again. So the big question was, well, what do you talk about, Rob? Why do we even have to sell anything? First of all, welcome to the live chat, everybody. This will be the first one of many. Just need to do a little quick setup the right way. So hopefully it all works out. This is what we're going to talk about today. Exit strategy, the one that we had talked about yesterday. But there were some questions that I had gotten, which was, first of all, some people were saying, well, Rob, if you're going to talk about exit strategies and you said that Ethereum is going to go up to 10,000 at some point, then why are you talking about exiting? Because that makes no sense. Why would you get out of the market if you know 100% that it's going to hit $10,000? Well, here's the thing. It doesn't always work like that. I'm going to explain using a little bit of history. But before we do that, let me jump into the chat, see where everybody else is at. Terrible connection. Next is terrible connection. That's true. What's it with the connection? Like and bad. Cell seems to hurry up. Possible to watch. This is a mess. Sure. Sure, sure, sure. What is the first one? So what are you going to do? Nothing can be perfect. So let me come over here. Ah, it's not bad actually. So the exit strategy that we're taking a look at right now. Yeah. Let's see. No. So the exit strategy that we're talking about now for Ethereum, it all comes down to this. Really, what is it that you think Ethereum is going to go to? Is it going to go to, some people will say 5,000. Some people will just say it's going to go to 2,000. Some people even say it'll go to 27,000, which is one of the many predictions that I had yesterday in yesterday's video. And when I took a look at it, I thought to myself, well, the things that we were talking about was to go to 27,000, a lot of things have to go right. First of all, Ethereum 2.0 has to go off without a hitch, there should be no issues whatsoever. The team has to continue to improve and we have to see the same thing go about as far as confidence in the program itself from all the different people that are building on it, all the different programmers and whatnot. So there is that aspect. Then also, if you go to 27,000, the market cap would be enormous. So I just said, why don't we just do this? Let's just keep at it around 10,000 and everybody should be okay. So I put together this exit strategy and the thing to me was this, let me blow this up real quick. So the exit strategy itself, it's all predicated on everything going to $10,000. Now, this is not financial advice. This is not telling you exactly what to do, this is what I'm going to do and everybody's situation is different. So if I had to sell at some point, these were the selling points I thought would be a pretty good idea if it doesn't hit all the way to 10,000. So the question then becomes this. If you know it's gonna go to $10,000, why not just wait until $10,000? Well, I'll tell you exactly why and it's because of this right here. This was the big run up in 2017. Everybody thought that Bitcoin was going to $20,000. Actually, if you were John McAfee, he thought it was gonna go to $1 million. So you had different price points and I was pretty certain at this point that it would hit $20,000, absolutely no problem whatsoever. The problem was is that it just fell short of that. Actually, it says here in 1905, but I think it was more like around 1907, 1908. Someone check me in the comments section. So if you were going to wait 20,000, the problem is is that to get there, you had to wait to that point and if it didn't hit that point, what do you do? Well, you just wait longer because you think to yourself, oh, well, it'll go up all the way. There should be no problems. And then of course it doesn't happen.  And what happens? It went down to 12,000, actually 15,000, then 13,000, then it retraced all the way back up to 15,000 and it just took a massive dump. So the thing is, even if you are the smartest money out there, nobody can time the tops, nobody can time the bottoms, it just doesn't work like that. So for me personally, I think it's just easier just to do this, just to say, okay, I think I know where it's going, but what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna take just like a stair step, I'm going to cash out along the way. And again, it's all predicated on what you think it could potentially be. So for me, this was the exit strategy based on 40 Ethereum. So if I have 40, I'm just gonna break it down. I'm gonna say, well, I think at some point it'll hit 1,000 and it did. And I'm going to sell to Ethereum. Now, of course some people will say, why do you do that?  Well, do I? Do I really? I'm not sure. I'm not sure exactly. I know it will happen. I know it will get up there, but the question always becomes when? So one is take a little bit of profit off the table and then I can roll that into something else. So then the next part, 2,000. And I would sell about 10%. And now out of my 40, I would just sell four and so on and so forth. Now the thing is, I want you to notice something. If you add all these up, five, 10, that's 15, four, 19, 20, 21, and seven, it makes 28. So I still got 12. I still got 12 Ethereum because I don't know if it's going to go to 10,000 or 15,000 or 20,000. So I will never sell all of my cryptocurrency. The big thing is, is just to never sell everything and try to take a little profits along the way. So before I get into the CME of Q2, what's gonna happen with that? And the CBOE, let me jump back here real quick. All right. Crypto six foot, let's review more H-bar doing great. That H-bar is doing great. One of those many projects that I just can't get into because very smart team behind it, but who knows what's gonna happen. Engine looking good, of course. What else we got? Wendmullet. I didn't see it. Zara, thank you so much. I only got the chats up. I haven't seen that much. So Zara, thank you so much. Really appreciate it. What else we got? Like and subscribe, like and subscribe. Real quick question. I'm trying out a new router today.  So I get a new router and I try it with that. And then also I try to do a live stream, the first one and see how that going. So how much lag do we have? Let me know in the comment section. That should be good. Crypto six foot, I sold two already. It's a pretty good idea. Crisp by bike. Welcome back. Usually you see me on theta. Now you're seeing me over here. So Crisp by bike says that the Winklevoss twins says 75,000 for Ethereum. Yeah, I mean, it could, but the thing is we know these things will go very high. We know that Bitcoin will go up in Ethereum and Cardon and everything else. We know what it will really take over, just like the internet took over, but the big question always is when? When is that actually gonna happen? And I think that is the bigger question.  That's the big question. All right. So let me jump back here. So here's one of my things. One of the things that I'm concerned about. And that is this. I don't know if anybody's seen this, but the CME and the CBOE, the CBOE, Chicago, Chicago Morgan-Tall exchange, that's it. They are going to launch futures in quarter two for Ethereum. And I was talking to Alex, Alex Massioli over on his channel, and all those guys are traditional markets, institutional players, and they're really excited about this. They're ecstatic. They can't wait till this all goes live, which it looks like it's gonna have the second quarter. So you're looking at April, May, June, somewhere around there for this to get launched for Ethereum. Plans to be futures contracts in Ethereum.  The thing is you have to remember is this. This could be great, but I will just give you a little quick history lesson about what happened for the futures contracts with the CME. This was on December 18th, 2017, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, the CME launched their futures contract for Ethereum. And everybody, sorry, for Bitcoin, 2017. Everybody was super excited, super excited about this. Like, oh, this is great. Finally, all the institutions are here. The on-ramps are in place. We can never go down. That was the big thing. We can never go down. And guess what it did? So let's just take a look at what happened during that time. So here we are, November, 2017, roughly when I got in, right around 10,000, 9,000, everybody was happy, going up, up, up. 9th of December, 15, 8th. 10 December, 17, 1, that was a pretty good day, huh? 11th till 13th, 14, 15th. 15th of December, 2017. And then the 16th and the 17th, and the next day CME launched their futures with Bitcoin, and this is what happened. But that's okay. It's only a 14,000, it'll go up, and it did. 16, 6, and it did this. It'll go up, and there we go. So again, I don't know exactly what's gonna happen. I just know I can tell you what happened in the past. Maybe it was due for it. Maybe it was because of those four-year cycles that we're always talking about, having all-time-high-dip reset, having all-time-high-dip reset. Maybe it was just a natural occurrence. Maybe it had nothing to do with the futures contract. I'm not for sure, but that is where we are at. And it just concerns me, especially with quarter two. So again, there was this, it was a great podcast. It was with Tim Ferriss. He wrote the four-hour work week, the Tools of Titans. He's got his own podcast, pretty good. And he was talking about Bitcoin today on his podcast. And he had one of his managers for his capital group. And they were talking about it, about where it is going to go. And Tim had a pretty good point. He says, everybody I meet that's been in cryptocurrency, pretty much been the same thing. They tell me how much money they've made in cryptocurrency. They say they're really into it. They can't really explain it too well, but they're really into it. And they're really excited and they think that I should get into it. He goes, the first question I always ask him is this. When it went up to that high, how much did you sell? And they always say, almost always say, I didn't sell. I still hold on. Okay, well, when it went down, when did you sell? Oh no, I didn't do that either. I just held on. And then when it went down, I just held on. And I think throughout all the different channels, you're gonna see a lot of different things on YouTube. And it's a wide swath. And again, remember, it's all about what you wanna do. If you wanna do, if you're, you know, just wanna hold, just wanna hold forever and say, I've got my Bitcoin, I've got my Ethereum, I've got my tomato coin and I just, you know, this is it, I'm gonna do this and it works out for you, then sure, you can hold it forever and whatever.  I have no idea. But then some people will be like, you know what? Maybe, maybe I wanna sell a little bit. And then the question then becomes, which I get a lot of is, well, why would you even sell? Why would you ever do that? Let me just do it closer. Why would I ever do that? Why would I do any kind of selling when I could just take a huge loan out and I can just live off the loan, right? Well, the thing is with that, when you take a loan out, I mean, you have collateral, all your collateral, whatever that could be, let's say Ethereum, right?  So right now, you would need, well, for $100,000, you would need roughly $200 Ethereum because right now each Ethereum is worth $1,000. So math, you know, not too bad. Maybe use something like that. That'll work out okay, but what happens when it's collateralized? And you just have the money and you're trying to live off it, but you hit this major dip after that. And then you get liquidated. Where does the money come from? Well, you have to give all that money back. And then guess what else? You have to liquidate all the rest of your cryptocurrency. So I'm not really too keen on that idea. We did a couple of videos about what I'm going to do, which is invest into more land and properties because it's kind of like what we'd like to do for that. But for me personally, I think it all comes out of this. Find out where you think your cryptocurrency is going. Start to think about how much percentage you should sell and then think about if you wanna sell all of it or if you wanna sell partial or just a little bit. But at some point, even my friend Mullett tells me, Rob, you need to take profits at some point. And I'm like, I'm gonna do that. And then what happens? I'm gonna do it. So this was the first year I actually started to do that. And thanks everybody for trying and getting it through my thick head to do that. I appreciate it. All right. So that is it. So let me go back. So let me go back and take a look at what I missed. A little real one. Little lag.


Imagine yourself or your family in 2050. Oil has become difficult to extract and so expensive most people can't use it in their daily lives. We spend a lot more time near where we live and have to depend on locally grown food. What would your staples be? Right now globally we depend on corn, rice, wheat, potatoes, cassava, soybeans, and sweet potatoes in descending order. Have you ever tried to grow any of these at a scale to feed yourself or your family? I have. And we're talking about why everybody needs to start learning to grow potatoes. This is the Low-Tech Podcast. Hello and welcome. I'm Scott Johnson from the Low-Technology Institute, your host for podcast number 45 on April 1st. But don't be fooled, no April Fool's here. Potatoes are where the future is at. Today I'm coming to you out of the Low-Tech Institute's gardens in Cooksville, Wisconsin. Thank you for joining us. This is part two of Talking About Potatoes. Last episode we traced the origin and history of potatoes. This week we'll talk about how to grow them and along the way we'll discuss why I think they're the staple of the future. And don't forget to follow us on Twitter. Our handle is at low underscore techno, like us on Facebook, find us on Instagram, and subscribe to us on YouTube. You can also check out our website, lowtechinstitute.org, there you can find both for our podcast as well as information about joining and supporting the Institute and its research. Also at the top here I should say some distributors put ads on podcasts. Unless you hear me doing the ad, someone else is making money on that advertising. And while all of our podcast videos and other information are given freely, they take resources to make. If you're in a position to help support this work and be part of this community, please consider becoming a monthly supporter for as little as $3 a month through our Patreon page, patreon.com slash lowtechinstitute. If you'd like to sponsor an episode directly, please get in touch with us through our website lowtechinstitute.org. This episode was brought to you by Kate Ingold. Kate is our first Patreon supporter. Thanks Kate. She's also a volunteer here at the Institute, helping us behind the scenes. It's people like Kate that keep us going. Again, all of our information and resources are free and our community supports our staff providing the resources we need to put together our podcast, videos, and research. If you're in a position to support our work, please consider a monthly donation at our Patreon page and thank you very much.  That's because I'm recording this outside in our garden. I hope you can hear all the birds. We're going to start putting our episodes on YouTube in addition to our regular channels in order to reach more people. So if you can head over there and see as well as hear me give the podcast over the course of the growing season, you'll get to see our garden sprout, grow, bloom, and then get taken over by weeds because that happens every year. Today's topic is potatoes. But before we get there, I assume there's going to be some new people watching on YouTube. Welcome. Glad to have you. Let me take a quick second to introduce our organization before we get rolling. The Low Technology Institute was founded in 2016 with three connected ideas. First we're going to either run out or stop using fossil fuels, especially oil in the foreseeable future. Second this is going to have a profound effect on every aspect of our lives as we currently live them. Third we should use the time we have now to future-proof our lives with changes to how we house, clothe, and feed ourselves and our communities. Everything we talk about is small-scale DIY solutions, things you could do in your household or community to make yourself more resilient. These range from solar hot water systems to food preservation, from growing and processing flax into linen or building with local construction materials. If you create a life that could live without fossil fuels in the future, it also helps you weather the storms of today, whether that's a literal storm knocking out the power like happened in Texas last year or a political storm that causes gas and other prices to soar. So while we couch everything we say about the coming future without fossil fuels, most of this advice is helpful today also. So now on to the regularly scheduled show. Last episode we talked about the evolution, domestication, and history of potatoes. If you haven't yet, go check that out. In short, this South American tuber supported huge societies in the Andes before being brought to Europe and after some false starts became an important staple and even fed a revolution. Today we're covering lots of information about planting, harvesting, and storing potatoes and we hope this will be useful for complete beginners. And even if you're an experienced potato grower, maybe you'll pick up some new ideas and what we're recommending comes from the results of our USDA-funded study on the best methods for growing potatoes in a small scale. Maybe we'll make an instructional video about how to grow potatoes for our YouTube channel this spring. Depends if we have time. So if you were to start growing more of your own food, potatoes would have to be the centerpiece of your calories. There's a reason why Matt Damon's character grew potatoes in the movie The Martian. They're excellent to take along if you're going to colonize somewhere new or survive on your own. So let's look at why we're not recommending you go grow the staples we generally rely on today. Corn is the dominant crop today, obviously. And what you see in the fields of Iowa, for example, is field corn. Each kernel is essentially a little chemical packet that gets broken down and turned into sweetener, plastics, fuel, and other products in a factory. Very little of that corn is eaten in any recognizable form. If you were to depend on corn, as might be appropriate in more tropical latitudes, you'd have to change the way you eat. Corn is a hungry crop requiring a lot of fertility. It stores well, but you have to know how to process dried corn to make tortillas, tomales, or other corn products.  Wheat is second across the world, but it's hard work. I'm not opposed to hard work, but we're talking about an emergency situation where growing all our own food. We don't have time. Winter wheat takes almost a year to grow. So if you want wheat this summer, it takes know-how and tools. And you should have planted it already last fall. We harvest our own wheat and each year we get better, but the learning curve is pretty steep. We'll actually have a class on growing, harvesting, processing your own wheat this summer. Check out our website, lowtechinstitute.org, slash events for that. Once wheat is harvested though, it has to be threshed. And this is a job that used to take farmers all winter. Then it has to be ground, which takes a few more hours each day, plus equipment, plus know-how. Only then do you have flour. Rice, especially dryland rice, would be a really fun addition and easier to process and cook than corn or wheat. But the learning curve to grow in North America is steep. And while maybe in the South you have access to that, dryland rice in the North is still an emerging crop. Let's contrast that with potatoes. They grow in marginal plots, meaning not the choice of soils. They benefit from compost, but they're pretty flexible. They also are easy to plant, maintain, harvest, store, and prepare. Corn, wheat, or rice, they're all very difficult. Potatoes are also great colonizers. Since they'll grow in poor soil, I like to use them to clear off new garden beds converting lawn or other land into next year's vegetable gardens. So now let's take a look at how I would recommend you started growing them on a large scale. Let's assume you're starting from a lawn and want to grow potatoes. Since lawn grass is the biggest crop in the country, even more than corn, you should be able to find some space to liberate, to grow food. Here's how I would start. First, you'll need seed potatoes. Potatoes grow from both their tubers and seeds produced in pods. Most gardeners grow from tubers because it's easier. You get a clone of the plant before. If you want to learn more about growing from seeds, check out the Kenosha Potato Project, which I'll link in the show notes. This is a really great community of potato growers and experimenters. If you're starting out, I recommend buying your first seed potatoes. You don't know what diseases would come in from grocery store potatoes, plus those are bread for mechanical planting and harvesting, not flavor. Pick varieties you like to eat. For example, we grow Kennebec for baking potatoes, Norlin Red for lefse, German Fingerlings for potato salads, Oneida Gold and Superior for mash and other uses. And after the first year, we save our clean, good-looking tubers, as well as those that have turned green for the next year's seeds. Seed potatoes should be the bigger than a golf ball, preferably twice that. The larger the tuber a plant has to start with, the better it seems to do. Big seed potatoes are sometimes larger than a golf ball, or larger than a baseball, and they can be cut as long as each section has an eye from which the plant will grow. Just let the fresh cut scab over and dry before you plant it. I take my seed potatoes and I chip them. This isn't necessary, but it's basically pre-sprouting them by setting them in egg crates or other flat containers in the sun in my house. And then the plants start to emerge from the eyes, and then I can plant them. Now, most people plant potatoes in trenches, and I'll talk about that, but it's not what I would recommend. If you're colonizing a lawn or some new space, go get yourself a ton of cardboard. Now, I mean brown cardboard, not glossy. And with as little tape as possible, preferably no tape and no staples. Refrigerator boxes are by far the best you can, and you can usually get them for free at an appliance store. Just give them a call and say you'd like some and often they'll set them aside for you. Cover the entire area with cardboard, two layers if you can. If you're planting in an established bed, then you can cut the cardboard into three-foot wide strips and make rows of strips next to one another. Next, you'll want wood chips. Ask a local arborist. Get on chipdrop.com or buy them if you have to, but spread the wood chips in parallel in two-foot paths with one foot between them. In an established bed, you can run the path right down the middle of those three-foot strips of cardboard, leaving the abutted edges free. Then you take your seed potatoes and place them at one-foot spacing on the cardboard. One trick is to use your foot as a spacer, and you can step down carefully after the first spud with your heel and then drop the next one at your toe and then repeat. And in the established bed, you can tuck those tubers in the gap between the cardboard so they can access the subsoil. Then, each spud should get covered by a quart, but preferably two or even three quarts of compost. You could even do two now and one halfway through the growing season. Finally, I use wheat straw to mulch over the now planted spud rows. If I can, I wet the bale down a few weeks earlier and let it sit for a few days so that it starts to rot and break apart. And then I spread it over the rows and this keeps the potatoes covered and it also keeps the ground cool because most potatoes stop growing in the ground. They stop producing tubers if the soil gets over 80 some degrees. Then, once it's all in place, wet the whole thing down so it doesn't blow away and that's it. This is so much easier than trenching and yields almost as much. This is a really good way to convert a lawn or grass or other land into grow beds. But if you absolutely insist on growing in trenches and doing twice as much labor per pound, have at it. In that case, you dig six inch deep trenches at three foot spacings. You'd put down the tubers the same way at one foot spacings and then you'd compost on the bottom and then cover the whole thing up. And then as the potato plants grow, you'll want to continue to hill up around the base of the plants and this is with both methods. You can do it with straw or mulch or soil and this keeps the new tubers covered from the sun which causes them to turn green. The reason I'm not encouraging the trenching method is because of the results of a 2018 study we did with 10 market gardeners across Southern Wisconsin. We wanted to find the best non-mechanized method for growing potatoes at large but non-industrial scale. You can find this on our website under the research tab, lowtechinstitute.com slash research. We'll also link in the show notes to an article that was published in Mother Earth News describing our results if you want to read more. But in essence, we tested five common methods found online, trench and hill, surface planted with mulch, surface planted with newspaper, weed barrier, grow beds and potato towers. Each plot got the same number and weight of seed potatoes, compost and mulch. Each gardener recorded for each plot how many times they watered, how much time they spent weeding, their overall labor and then the total yield. The results boiled down to the fact that there's no one best way to grow potatoes. We can say a little bit about each method. We'll start with trenching. Trenching yielded the most yield per plant but that required twice as much labor per pound. They were also susceptible to wet conditions and rot. So if space is at a minimum and you have the time to spare and it's not gonna be too wet, you could consider trenching. We also tried two surface methods, one with newspaper as a barrier and then straw and then one just with straw. Both were mulched with straw. Like I said, the surface methods yielded three quarters of the trench yield per plant but it required half the labor per pound. It also did better in wet conditions because it kept them above the moist soil. The only problem was that potatoes were susceptible to voles. So if you have the space, plant a third more than you would for trenching and you'll get the same overall yield with half the work but beware of voles.  The plots with a weed barrier required so much less weeding, almost none, than the other methods mentioned so far. So we would recommend at least one, if not two layers of cardboard and again, this practically eliminates weeding. We also tried grow bags. We found that their yield was lower but their labor was also very low. The Kenosha Potato Project exclusively grows in bags and might do better with their methods because they have a lot more experience. Check out their website. This is a good method in tight spaces with less access to land. It required no weeding but it was hard to keep them watered and cooled because they're above ground. They get hit with a lot of sun. We also tried potato towers which did not work at all. Bill Whitson has a really good breakdown on cultivatable.com. I'll link to it. He breaks down the biology but essentially I've tried them multiple years with no luck. Others have tried them with no luck. Some online say they've gotten potatoes to grow through the whole depth of the tower but the overall yield still wasn't spectacular. Don't bother with the cost and the ineffectiveness of this method. Now, as the potatoes grow you'll need to care for them a little. They need some weeding. Although if you have multiple cardboard weeding is practically eliminated. Watch out for potato beetles which look like squishy red bugs. The easiest method to get rid of them is to walk the rows in the morning or evening, pluck them off and drop them into a bucket of soapy water or feed them to your chickens. In a week or two of regular walking they'll be done for the year. Keep an eye they might come back. Potatoes don't like also to have wet soil so water them when the soil below the mulch begins to dry. If you mulch heavily you may not need to water at all. We usually don't. Again, straw milk helps keeps not only the moisture in the soil but it keeps it cool and producing. So it's worth the investment up front. As the plants grow more and more soil needs to be healed up on the plants to keep the emerging potatoes buried. With the trenching method a hoe can be used to weed and heal at the same time. For the surface method a little more wet straw goes a long way. After a hundred plus days depending on the variety the plants will die back. Once the plants are dry and after a couple days of dry weather it's a good time to harvest. The best method for surface planted is just to brush back the straw, pick up your pretty new clean potatoes. The first time we did this my partner kept giving me exasperated looks and after we finished a row I said, what's going on? And she said, why haven't we been doing this forever? Why have we been trenching? It's so much more work than she was right. And we've never trench since. For the trenchers you have to dig back down and remove all your potatoes which is why there twice as much work per pound. All I have to say is while you're digging them back up have fun and consider surface planting next year. Now that you have your potatoes let them dry a little bit and then brush the soil off with some gloved hands before storing them in bins or some other container that keeps their moisture in with a little air flow. Think about the potato bags you get at the grocery store they're plastic with little holes for ventilation. I use old grain bags with the plastic liner removed. Potatoes like to be stored in the dark at about 35 degrees Fahrenheit and 90% humidity. For me this means under the emergency stairs to my basement which doesn't freeze but is well below 40 all winter and the bags help keep the humidity in. Every month, which doesn't always happen I try to sort through the bags removing any that have turned green which become my seed potatoes and then any that have become softer mushy get thrown away, not composted because they could carry disease. How many potatoes would you need to grow to feed yourself? A perusal of various sources says that the Irish were eating nine pounds of potato per person per day before the famine. Now these were big watery coppers or whatever they were called. When I grew all our own food one year we only stored about 200 pounds of potatoes but that's still about 70,000 calories and that was done without too much trouble. We actually grew a lot more as the first lockdown was happening when we weren't sure what was gonna happen in the fall. So we grew hundreds and hundreds of pounds of potatoes and they all went to the food pantry thanks to my efforts of my neighbor Phil with whom I shared a potato plot. In the future where you're more dependent on what you can grow, you'd have to up your potato consumption. You can't just start growing all your own wheat. You have to plant it the season before you have to have the tools you have to have the know-how. If you planted or if you plan to eat two pounds of potatoes a day that's about 700 calories or a third of what you'd need. You'd need about one plant per person per day if you're planting on the surface like I do. It sounds like a lot but amounts less than seven days total eight hour days of work for the whole season. Giving you a third of your calories. Think about that seven days of work providing a third of your calories for the whole year. An acre would grow enough potatoes. An acre is about the size of an American football field that would grow enough potatoes for 40 people at that rate. 40 people, a third of their calories and with neighbors it would be a much easier task to work together on this. So let's go back to thinking about 2050. Potatoes are the clear choice for locally produced calories. If we're depending on our own ability to grow food no other staple compares to the ease of growing and storing potatoes. But this just isn't just applicable to 2050. Right now in 2022 we see growing food prices and other uncertainties in the market. During the Great Depression and both world wars people turned to growing more of their own food at home. Potatoes are the choice staple for times of trouble as long as we learn the lessons from the last podcast. That is, we should avoid relying on a single variety of potatoes like the Irish did. We should plant diverse varieties in a few different locations and with different methods if possible. This mimics the successful strategy of the Inca and other cultures in the Andes that survived El Niños. This spreads out the risk and makes a bountiful crop more likely regardless of the local growing conditions. In future episodes we'll talk more about homegrown wheat. A topic that may have a lot of interest as the harvest approaches this summer considering that Russia and Ukraine produce about 15% of the global wheat supply and the former won't be able to sell its wheat internationally and the latter won't have the chance to harvest what's left of its crops. And this doesn't even touch on fertilizer production when it's a lot of it comes from Russia. That's a story for another episode. If you wanna be sure to hear it, hit the subscribe button. And now really briefly we'll recap a little bit of what we have going on around the Institute this week. Spring is a very busy time for us to get our garden going. We are prepping our growing beds behind us. We're spreading out horse manure. There's a couple mounds behind me here and getting our thousands of seedlings going in the greenhouse, which you can also see over my shoulder. We're looking forward to some upcoming classes including one on grafting and pruning apple trees and another will learn to spin wool into yarn. We have space in both classes but they might be full by the time you hear this. You can find out more under the events tab on our website, lowtechinstitute.org. That's all we have for this week. The Low Tech podcast is put out by the Low Technology Institute. At the moment the show is hosted, edited and distributed by me, Scott Johnson, although we are looking for an intern, a paid internship this summer. If you are in mass, com or media at a university and you'd like to intern with us, get in touch. This episode was recorded at the Low Technology Garden and our intro music was walking in the rain off the album Bitter Sweet Endings by Krohander. That song is under the Creative Commons attribution non-commercial license and this podcast is under the Creative Commons attribution and share like license, meaning you're free to use and share it as long as you give us credit. Subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher or Tune in Radio and now YouTube. We hope you enjoyed this free podcast. If you'd like to join the community and help support the work we do, consider going to patreon.com slash lowtechinstitute and signing up. The Low Technology Institute is a 501c3 research organization supported by members, grants and underwriting. You can find out more information at lowtechinstitute.org. Find us on social media. You can reach me directly. I'm at scottatlowtechinstitute.org. Thanks so much for watching or listening and take care.