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

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.

That’s a Bummer about the Berries

We were so keen on currants and gooseberries, all along the chain link fence that borders our backyard. But it seems they are still banned in the state of Massachusetts – because Ribes plants could be hosts to the fungus spores that causes White Pine Blister Rust. The ban used to be on the entire US but has been lifted in most States except some New England States, like Mass.

Never mind that there are now currants and gooseberry strains that are resistant to it. There is one grower, in Western Mass., who produces what looks like fantastic berry bushes that are just right for our situation. But they’re not allowed to sell them to customers in Mass.

I spoke with someone from the State’s Ag. Dept. and he said I could apply for a license, but the variances (distances from the closest white pine stand)Â are so tight it’s almost impossible to qualify. The “bush guy” at my Garden Center said forget it; he knows of someone local who tried and all he got was the bureaucratic runaround.

Our shade is quite deep: the places where we can grow berries are on the chainlink fences in the constant shade of pines, oaks and beeches.Â What food to grow there?

More Summer Harvest

Ah, so this is what it was all about! Finally the garden is giving up that abundance that was promised: beans of all kinds, potatoes, cucumbers, tomatoes and tomatoes, and our first eggplant (apple green). There’s enough to eat and put by.

This is one day’s harvest. The tomatoes that weren’t eaten straight away were canned in a tomato-apple chutney:

In the back are peaches (like the apple, also farmers market) in syrup. Yes, that’s my fifties kitchen cabinetry: I love it!

And Amie loves to shell the red kidney and cannellini beans. We harvest the pods when they’re dry, light brown and leathery, and when you shake them the beans rattle inside. I don’t think I’ll have enough for eating (even one big meal), but there will be enough as seed for a much bigger planting next year. I don’t trust my drying methods – no barn or garage for drying the plants – so I freeze them. I hope they stay viable that way.

Tomorrow morning I’m going to harvest and process most of the basil plants. I think I might just chop them up in the food processor and freeze them in cubes, like the Omelays. I’m also going to do a backlog of laundry, as the rest of the day will be sunny. But this afternoon I still hope to put the Fall planting seedlings in.

The Other in My Back Yard

I am reading Jerry Mander’s In the Absence of the Sacred. The Failure of Technology and the Survival of the Indian Nations. Many points are too loosely argued for my taste – as in, I doubt it would convince my DH, who is a total techno-optimist. As a confirmation for what I believe, it reads pleasurably.

But these lines grabbed me:

With each new generation of technology, and with each stage of technological expansion into pristine environments, human beings have fewer alternatives and become more deeply immersed within technological consciousness. We have a harder time seeing our way out. Living constantly inside an environment of our own invention, reacting solely to things we ourselves have created, we are essentially living inside our own minds. Where evolution was once an interactive process between human beings and a natural, unmediated world, evolution is now an interaction between human beings and our own artifacts. (p. 32)

I have read in many environmental books that we are destroying nature, that great Other. McKibben, in his seminal End to Nature, hangs nearly his entire argument on the despair of there being just us.Â I never realized what it meant until I read Mander’s words.

Don’t say that this is not true, that there is no other, that it’s just us. In many parts of our world this is already true:Â in mega cities, malls, schools, work places. Look around you: what do you see that will take you out of your own mind? What do you see that is not you? Sorry, the potted palm does not count. Nor does the lawn. The creatures visiting your lawn, yes, but how often do you see them, look for them? And it is getting worse second by second.

Then you may ask: so what?

…

A few weeks ago I was on my way to fill up the buckets with rain waterÂ when I came upon this creature amongst the weeds.

A garter or garden snake, about as dangerous as a field mouse (to us, not to the field mouse). But it’s a snake, and my biological instinct was: hark! And it felt good, that jolt of surprise and rapt attention, that lurch out of the of the ordinary.

I was, for a few seconds, out of my mind.

…

If we eliminate what is other, then we are without surprise, without instinct, without perspective, and without the possibility of ever being truly free.

How Amie’s Summer Is Going

Math

Tea Party

Parrot

…

“Mama, when you see it IN your eyes, but not outside your eyes, it’s a dream, right?”

“Yes.”

“That’s why when you open your eyes it’s no longer there.”

…

“Mama, Peter Pan [movie] is made up of pieces.”

“Yes, like Kipper: episodes.”

“No, Kipper episodes are stories by themselves. Peter Pan episodes are all part of one big story!”

…

We do a lot of outdoors stuff too, when it’s not too hot – especially gardening, and taking walks around the block. I forget my camera though.

…

Yum!

More Canning, But It’s Hot!

Yesterday, on my birthday, I cooked and canned 4 quart (1 liter) and two half pint (500 ml) jars of applesauce with my new canner – I still used the hot water bath method, no high pressurizing as yet, it was simply the only pot that would hold all those jars.

It gave me even more appreciation for the materials and effort that go into processed food. I cored the 12 pounds of apples that I bought last week at the Farmers Market (that the orchardist grew, harvested, and brought to market), peeled them, quartered them, cooked them, pureed them in batches, processed them in the canner, and after hours of slaving away in my progressively steamier kitchen (no airco),Â this is all I ended up with:

That’s it?! But it’s local and organic, and I know exactly what went into these jars, and believe it or not it turned out cheaper than or as expensive as store-bought organic applesauce (*), and they were another great learning experience.

Today at the Farmers Market IÂ bought 10 more pints of blueberries (2 of those have already been eaten), 6 lbs of peaches and another 12 pounds of apples (different varieties this time). They’re waiting in the coolest part of the house. On my kitchen counter I am “saving up” on our very own tomatoes (Ida Gold and Glacier), which are coming in about 2 lbs a day now.Â Tomorrow is promising to be not so hot. Time to tackle some more blueberry jam, some chutney, some salsa?

(*) apples $12 / sugar $.50 / lemon juice $1 / electricity $?