Robin Hill Gardens – Page 85 – Be joyful though you have considered all the facts

Banner Painting and My Artistic Family

The painting in the banner was made by my MIL – you can read about her exploits in art (and about Amie as well) in her blog: Journey Through Art. The painting was based on the original banner picture:

Isn’t it beautiful? I’ll write about my artistic family soon. Amie is of course artist number one around here, but there is also my Mom who draws, my sister who is into computer graphics, my dad who does photography, and my grandfather who was an accomplished water-colorist. DH is also quite good, and on his side there’s his mom, a Mesho (uncle) who sketches, and a Mami (aunt) who makes movies and Mamu (Uncle) who plays the violin, and their kids in turn who are painters, musicians, actors…Â I just realized the danger of making such a list: imagine I forgot someone!

Independence Days, Week 3

Plant: Still waiting for the “Fall planting” seedlings (lettuce, spinach, chard, etc.) to graduate to planting-out size. “Unplanted” most of the tomato plants (one chilly day and night and they succumbed fully to the blight). Also planted sustainable lawn seed on our erosion-prone slope: curious about the result!

Harvest: Finally harvested the first carrots (which as you can see are tiny, even after being in the ground for 4 months) and the first edibleÂ radish (they are supposed to be the easiest to grow, but my first batch produced only diminutive maggot-eaten and awfully bitter knots). Also more yummy green beans, dry beans, extra sweet peas, kale, chard, cucumber, eggplant, more cherry tomatoes from potted plants, which are still successful against the blight.

Preserve: After the frenzy of the last two weeks and because we arrived late at the Farmers Market, I bought only green beans to supplement our own beans and pressure-canned all those, making 7 quarts. Brewed up some blueberry-basil vinaigrette. Bought meat and fish on sale at the grocery store and froze it.

Waste not: More freecycling of cardboard boxes. Scored several wooden pallets they were throwing away at the local elementary school, and two water tanks (don’t yet know what to do with those). Still picking up Starbucks coffee grounds and collecting acorns. Today also chatted with the neighbor who owns the horse and she will start using our property to get to the conservation land behind us. This means the horse manure is now for the taking. Now I need to find a way of transporting the manure and assign an area for its composting (those pallets could come in handy for that). It would be good to get some finished or going at least before it starts freezing (in about a month and a half), or maybe we could stick it, fresh, in the new beds for next Spring.

Want not: Anything more and we’ll have to start the small (freecycled) chest freezer downstairs. Washed and stored away extra blankets. Organized our firewood, stacking some in a manner that’s better for drying.

Build community food systems: Had a great chat with a local inventor/entrepreneur who is building a 95% sustainable house right here in my town and gives sustainability classes. He’s keen on joining our Transition effort. Also making local-food-related plans for our immensely popular neighborhood block party next weekend.

Eat the Food: Ate everything out of the garden, and some of the canned apple sauce and jam, and we didn’t croak.

Cardboard Box Castle

Our latest adventures…

Home Canning versus Bisphenol A

That’s the second person intimating to me that my home canning might not be safe. Usually the question comes quietly: “Are you sure the jars are okay?”

Though it riles me, I’ve come to expect the attitude. It’s like with eggs. When I tell people about wanting chickens for their eggs, half the time the reaction is: “But what about bird flu?”

The prevalent philosophy is that factory food must be safer: it’s more measured and controlled, and the processing is done by machines, and machines don’t make mistakes, and also, they preclude human contaminants.

That last one, I think, is what matters a lot to many people: they find the idea of human hands touching the food, or anyone breathing on it, icky. And the average home kitchen does not stack up against the scrubbed concrete tile and stainless steel scoopers and mashers and stirrers. The latter are self-cleaning, preferably.

And of course the food manufacturers will do their best by their consumers. They won’t make mistakes. They’ll clean their equipment judiciously. And use only the best ingredients. There have been no sickness or deaths with factory-processed foods. Right?

But consider factory-canned foods and bisphenol A, the stuff that got banned from baby bottles. One of my favorite watchdogs, the Environmental Working Group, determined that almost all factory-canned foods and beverages have bisphenol A in them, simply because most cans are lined with bisphenol A epoxy resin as a sealant (here). That not just in the can, but in the food.

Infants and young children are at greater risk because of their small size and developing bodies. Studies of laboratory animals or cultured human cells have shown exposure to bisphenol A can cause neural and behavioral changes, precancerous growths in breast and prostate tissues, early onset puberty and other effects at very low doses. In addition, bisphenol A crosses the placenta and has been found in amniotic fluid and umbilical cord tissue, showing that there is no prenatal protection from a motherâ€™s exposure. (here)

Recent reports from the National Institute for Environmental Health conclude that there is concern for neural and behavioral effects in fetuses, infants, and children at current levels of exposure to BPA. Presently, there are no recommended minimum exposure limits for infants or children. More research is also needed to understand all the health effects that may be associated with exposure to Bisphenol A. (here)

But we’ve been consuming it since the ’30s.

Listen, my hands and my kitchen are clean when I prepare the food, and I follow the recipe to the letter, as well as the canning instructions. Come winter we’ll be eating our own garden-grown or Farmers Market (locally) grown food, and nothing extra.

{UPDATE} Nice discussion beginning in the comments.

Peppers, Basil, Peas, Grasshoppers, Ladybugs

Canned Bell Peppers (from Farmers Market)

Amie and I just ate our first three peas from the garden: delicious! She also ate seven green beans (from the garden) and four carrots (disks, that is, not the whole thing) (from the Farmers Market). She loves the beans especially. She also promised that when the time comes to break it out of the freezer, she’ll eat the pesto for which she harvested and trimmed the basil.

A grasshopper was hiding out in the basil and luckily jumped out before I put the batch in the food processor. We caught it and let it outside, where it sat on Amie’s finger for a long time, then gave her a fright when it jumped.

Later on a Ladybug came to visit and Amie fed it a blueberry.

I do love those still-pudgy hands…

Riot for Austerity – Month 10

This month there were no shifts in the household: just the three of us, which makes the reckoning much easier.

Amie feeds the compost tea some molasses

Gasoline: 27%

This stayed the same as last month. The school year hasn’t started yet, so DH is spending more time working from home and Amie isn’t daily being driven to school and back, all of which save on gas:

33.9/3 gallons of gasoline = 27% of the US National Average

Electricity: 8%

306 KWH = 8% of the US National Average

We’re now routinely careful with lights and appliances and we’re inching down (from 10% last month), but honestly I doubt we can get it any lower without investing in some expensive solar battery-charging equipment. But then again DH is looking into building a deluxe solar oven, which will save some more electricity, especially as the temperatures drop and stews and soups come back on the menu – though we hope to use the woodstove cook top for those. Anyway, right now it’s just chipping away.

I’ve been canning a lot, and getting that 23 quart canner up to 10 lbs of pressure really puts my electric range to work. That will show up in next month’s Riot, though.

What strikes me now about this number is how easy it was to get our usage down to within 10% . We run our laptops all the time, and we’re not ruining our eyes to candlelight at night. I run my dishwasher every other day, and my washer once a week (never my dryer)… That is, we’re not deprived of electricity at all. With a little bit of effort everyone in the States could quite easily get down to, say, 20% of what they’re using right now. All it takes is some vigilance.

Heating oil and Warm Water: 22%

13.6 gallons of oil = 22% of the US National Average

This is down from last month but warm water is still our Achilles heel. We still haven’t insulated the boiler and the pipes – one thing after another happens and distracts us from such simple measures. No excuses: it will happen this month!

Trash: 4% or 493%?

The big bill finally came in: we had rented a dumpster for the trash generated by our remodeling project that we weren’t able to recycle.Â We don’t know how much it weighed after we were done with it, only that it was under 2 tons. 2 tons, that’s 4000 lbs! I can’tÂ believe it was anywhere near that, so I estimate it was about a ton, but I really have no idea.Â So let’s say a ton, the dumpster plus our usual household garbage, which came in at 5 lbs per person per month.

666 lbs of garbage per person this month = a whopping 493% of the US National Average

Ouch. Does the US National Average include construction debris, dumped cars, etc? If not, then I can write:

5 lbs per person per month (= 4% of the US National Average)

But it’s only fair to count it. Most of it ended up in the landfill, after all.

Water: 17%

During our brief dry spell I watered only with rain water, and all our compost tea was made with rain water (as it should: the chlorine in the drinking water kills the benificials). And at the beginning of this month we installed our new flushing method, which paid off: we lowered our water consumption even more (from 20% last month), to

506 gallons of water per person = 17% of the US National Average

Consumer Goods: 10% ?

Stuff we bought but that I won’t count,Â because they are for purposes in accordance with the Riot: canning rings and lids and some canning jars – though most I got through Freecycle and Craig’s List – and the canner itself, of course; a substantial investment in our new wood burning stove,Â one of the most efficient stoves on the market and to be used judiciously;Â the (poorly designed and useless) solar lamp we purchasedÂ from – and will return to – IKEA.

Most of the furnishing in the renovated room are either stuff we had or things we got from the landfill (a nice desk and a chair). But we did have to buy some tools and lot of building materials for it. We also replaced our beaten up old porch roof with a new roof – which necessitated a surprising amount of caulk. Sigh. I hadn’t so far, but now that I am counting the renovation waste, I’m thinking I might have to count these costs as well… And then we’re talking several thousands – sometimes things are so necessary that you just stop keeping count.

If I’m not counting these, then I could write $80, spent on books for Mama, DH and Amie:

10% of the US National Average

Food

It’s been a while since I visited this category. It still boggles the mind how to calculate it, but I can at least say that we’re eating a lot out of the garden. I am canning a lot, so that will lessen our impact during the months to come. (See the last Independence Days)

But our garden failed to produce onions,garlic, peppers, lettuce… Those I buy at the Farmer’s Market, along with the honey: all local. I have many plans for improving the garden next Spring.

It all feels good, but we can do so much more. For instance, buy bulk wheat berries and grind our own flour, or the least I could do is bake my own bread. Get chickens so we can make our own pasta. Get a chain of homemade yogurt going, with local milk. Start mushrooming. Find a good storage place for the many potatoes we hope to harvest, and for apples from a local orchard…

So many more steps to ween ourselves off the supermarket, which is increasingly more expensive. Only last week I bought a gallon of organic milk: $6.99! But if we had a couple of goats…

Independence Days, Week 2 {reset}

{Reset} Since I started again last week, I’ll call this week 2.

Plant: Transplanted mostly lettuce seedlings in the old potato bed, but I’m afraid they drowned inÂ last week’s downpours; luckily I didn’t put in all of them, and I have many more waiting on the porch. I did drop a tray with mizuna seedlings, but I planted more as seeds directly in the garden.

Harvest: More green beans, dry beans, many more tomatoes, 1 cucumber, most of the basil. Amie and I collected 2 bags of acorns from our garden and the neighborhood and will experiment with processing them soon – though they already seem to have been re-purposed.

Preserve: Canned 8 more pints of apple* sauce, 14 more pints of blueberry* jam, 5 more pints of fig preserve, 6 pints of basic tomato sauce (half the tomatoes from my garden, half from the Farmers Market), 6 pints of peppers*. Froze 5 pints of pesto. Figuring out now what we’re going to do with the many potatoes we’re expecting from our potato bins.

Waste Not: On his return from work, DH is picking up coffee grounds from the local Starbucks again. Cleaned out basement of cardboard boxes, freecycled all of them, but the moldy ones. Computed our Riot for Austerity (post coming tomorrow).

Want Not: Purchased First Aid necessities, enough for home stash and two preparedness backpacks. Purchased 2 large bags of baking soda and 4 large bottles of vinegar (as that’s what I’m cleaning with now), and 5 lbs of sugar (though most of that’s gone now, after making all that jam). I also bought 4 humongous bottles of Ecover laundry detergent (206 loads each!), because they were on sale and I had coupons, though I had also stocked up on washing soda, Fels-Naptha soap and Borax, thinking to start making my own once I ran out of my last bottle of commercial detergent; they’ll keep.

Build community food systems: Contacted a couple who have been keeping a beehive for the last 30 years, quite close to where I live. They’ll help me get started in the Spring, if I’m ready – that is, if the garden is ready (no flowers!). Got the ballÂ rolling (some more) on a possible Transition Town in my town (about that later).

Eat the food: Ate some (or most) of everything in the garden, and those jars that didn’t seal (one because there was a nick in the rim – missed that one – and one for unknown reasons), and those jars that didn’t fill up totally.

* = Farmers Market.

The Mudge of Nightmares

Last night, Amie woke up around 2 am, with a scream. She had had a nightmare and, as usual when that happens, she demanded the nightlight be turned on, then proceeded to lie awake, eyes wide open, for two hours. Mama knows because Mama too was awake that entire time – oh the pleasures of co-sleeping…

This evening at dinner we discussed the nightmare and for once she remembered it. She explained:

– I dreamed about Mudge eating the blue snow glory and in my dream his mouth was a big triangle and he gobbled Wall-E up in one gulp!

Wall-E is from Wall-E. Mudge is the dog from Cynthia Rylant’s Henry and Mudge stories, which we’ve been reading non-stop. He is a big dog, but the sweetest, gentlest creature ever to be put down in a children’s book. Still, his size and him eating a blue flower in one of the books was enough to earn him a trip to Amie’s nightmare land.

– So no more Henry and Mudge as bedtime storied? I asked. I was saddened, because I love reading them to her: they’re so funny and sweet, I love the mother and father, and Henry is, like Amie, an only child.

– No, said Amie, better not, because Mudge is just too scary.

As Henry would say, Aw, Mudge!

Flushing Drinking Water, Not – and Toilet Cloth

Okay, I’m warning you. This one’s (perhaps) on the edge for this blog, but it was inevitable. It’s about our toilet flushing habits. So if you’re here to read about Amie’s drawings or how the carrots are doing (badly), proceed at your own risk.

This is the one aspect of our homestead that I don’t discuss with visitors to our home, even family and good friends.Â The garden and the rain barrels always go over really well, the Freeze Your Buns and short showers are at the next level (where “different” creeps in). But this one… Even on the Riot Group the idea of toilet cloth drew some comments.

At some point I plan to put forward our homestead as an example of suburban sustainable living and low energy consumption. I foresee the awkward moment when it becomes clear to what lengths one has to go to get an 80-90% reduction of the US national average…

So it’s nothing short of a coming-out issue. Here goes.

…

Given its daily and frequent use, toilet flushing consumes the most water in a household. Drinking water.

Here at our place we’ve been struggling with ways to minimize this waste. At first we didn’t flush after little job, but that left mineral stains in the toilet bowl, which necessitated more cleaning (albeit with all-natural products). Sometimes it smelled. Also, it wasn’t practical when we had guests or visitors. I found myself thinking each time the doorbell rang: “Did we flush?”

Then we hit upon the idea of “collecting nitrogen,” a euphemism for peeing in a container, the contents of which go on the compost heap. To deal with the toilet paper problem (we don’t want it in the compost), we decided to use toilet cloth (after little job), which takes up very little volume in the laundry. That minimizes the use of yet another disposable. The compost heaps and bins get daily bursts of fire.

{Update, in response to comment} The toilet cloths are saved with table napkins, hand and kitchen towels and underwear to be washed in hot water with a minimum of chlorine bleach – I wash everything else in cold water with bar soap, washing soda and borax, and I line-dry everything, of course.

But for big job we were still flushing all that drinking water down the drain.

Then we installed our rain barrels. One of them is not within reach of the garden – it overflows into one that is -Â but it is close to the back door. So every morning Amie and I go there to fill two 25 gallon buckets, which we put in a corner in our bathroom (lids on). We use that exclusively to flush the toilet.

Easy peasy: no smells, no yellow water and wads of toilet paper in the bowl, no wasting drinking water.

Several weeks ago a neighbor gave us an old rain barrel he was going to toss. It’s a large metal barrel that he painted green, and some of the paint on the inside bottom is peeling. I asked him if the paint contains lead and he couldn’t remember what kind it was, so we didn’t install it along with our food-grade rain barrels. InsteadÂ we will put it on the last available gutter pipe, also conveniently close to the back door, and will use that water for flushing. At some point we might even figure out how to hook that barrel directly to the toilet water tank.

…

I asked DH if I could post this, and he said “I don’t get it,” as in, what’s so risque about it? I’m not so sure: this still seems to me as one of the things we do that sets us quite apart from anyone I know personally and the culture at large. Unless we’ve we all been hiding our toilet-flushing habits – which would only prove the point. Your thoughts?

Independence Days – Week… ahum…

So behind, it’s shameful. Forge ahead, anyway!

Plant: Fall garden of spinach, kale, broccoli, purslane, various lettuce, chard, mizuna, mustard greens, all as seedlings, and in the ground peas, more green beans, chard and carrots.

Harvest: chard, kale, cucumber, potatoes, various tomatoes, beans both green and dry.

Preserve: apple* sauce, peaches* in syrup, tomato-apple* chutney, blueberry* jam, fig jam (figs on sale at grocery store), freezing dry beans. (* from Farmers Market)

Reduce waste: We’re still in our Riot for Austerity mode, so we never produce much waste. Our renovation project required a small dumpster, which came out at under 2 tonnes: lots of the wood was salvaged. We replaced the 50-year-old old yellowed porch roof, which we’re reusing as roofs for our wood piles.

Prepare and store: had our wood burning stove installed; got more mason jars from the landfill; bought large bags of sugar; large bottles of vinegar and big bags of baking soda for home-made cleaning products; am collecting glass bottles for water storage (once I have a bunch I’ll wash them en masse and fill them up). Installed rain water barrels and investigating the Berkey filter system. Purchased and began studying Kathy Harisson’s Just in Case.

Build community food systems: chatted with farmers at the Farmers Market (got a nice deal too), and someone from the Food Project about their Build-a-Garden program. Contacted a local beekeeper. Still plotting Transition.

Eat the food: ate most of all that we harvested and even some (already) of what I preserved.