Blue Skies Urban Farm

Slacker, That's Me

2011-02-26T22:15:00.000-08:00

I know I've been a blog slacker on this blog. What can I say? I only have time to write this right now because I'm in a hotel room with nothing else to do. I coach my son's high school aged FTC Robotics team and we're going to the State championships tomorrow. So I have a few minutes to post. But the last few months have been total chaos.

Every day, I think of dozens of really cool things I could post about in the realms of sustainability, food security, people-powered transportation, gardening, etc. but I somehow never manage to do just that. I'm going to try to be better in the next few months.

In the meantime, we've just been keeping on. Our garden is in its usual winter hibernation, though with the cold frames I'm going to plant lettuce next week and see what happens. My kale made it through the winter in the cold frames which was nice. Even though it was 9 degrees this morning! Our kids are looking forward to getting some spring chicks to add to our flock in the next few weeks. And other than this morning when ice on our hill was too scary, I'm back to commuting on my bike as often as I can.

That's about it from our Urban Farm. Hopefully more to come soon...

Your Car Is Not A Space Heater

2010-12-18T22:46:00.000-08:00

I'm constantly amazed at how many people are unaware of the toxic effects of idling their car. This time of year, I frequently see people sitting in cars (most often parents at a school or an event like a soccer game, frequently with other children in the car), and they are idling the car, presumably to keep the heaters running. I don't think they know the increased risk they are putting on themselves and their children. People will actually wait five to ten minutes in a drive-through line at Starbucks or McD's when getting out of the car and going in not only saves them fuel and exposure to the toxic pollutants of idling, but time as well (often the line inside is minimal at rush hour, while the drive-through lines are long).

I made up a simple document that is small enough to hand to people and outlines the dangers of idling in a bulleted format that's quick to read. If you have Idlers in your area who are not aware of these issues, please feel free to copy and print these to hand out!

Please Don’t Idle Your Car

For the sake of your health and of those around you

A Few Idling Facts:

Ø Vehicle exhaust is the leading source of toxic air pollution in Oregon.

Ø Vehicle exhaust contains at least 21 air toxics which are hazardous to human health.

Ø Emissions from idling vehicles can be as much as 20 times greater than those from one traveling at 32 mph.

Ø Inhaling these pollutants can:

o aggravate asthma,

o cause coughing or difficult breathing,

o decrease lung function,

o exacerbate cardiovascular problems and

o lead to chronic bronchitis.

Ø Children are especially sensitive to the eff ects air pollution because they breathe more quickly and take in more air than adults.

Ø Children inside an idling car, or directly in the vicinity (as in school drop-off zones) are at increased risk for health problems due to inhaling pollutants

Ø Asthma is the third leading cause of hospitalization for children under the age of 15. Asthma is also the most common chronic illness in children.

Ø Studies have linked pollution from vehicles to increased rates of cancer, heart and lung disease, and asthma.

Apples to Apples

2010-12-03T23:46:00.000-08:00

This time of year, it amazes me how much fruit is left on trees around town. I wish there was a way to better hook it up with people who need food, since it seems positively shameful to waste nature's bounty like that. Yesterday I found an apple tree in an abandoned lot, just full of fruit. The leaves are all gone, so it looks like a Christmas tree except hung with perfectly bright red globes of fruit. I stuffed my jacket pockets as full as I could get them of the wonderfully tart/sweet apples, and I'm coming back next week with a bag. Applesauce anyone?

Getting Ready For the Dark Days Challenge

2010-11-23T22:04:00.000-08:00

Yes, it's that time of year again. Over at the Urban Hennery, they are once again challenging us to think local, to source local, to eat local. It's the 4th Annual Dark Days Challenge and I'm planning to do it again. Yes, it's tough to find local foods in the dark of winter when the garden is buried under snow and the locally available vegetables consist of kale and, well, kale. I like kale, so that's not a problem, but there's only so much of it one can eat.

One thing I've found from participating in the challenge in the past is that when you forge new local connections for food sources, you tend to keep utilizing them in the months to come. Or you think out of the box and plan for ways to eat more locally in the winter. For instance, I cut the Zucchini That Ate New York into small cubes and put it into freezer bags in my chest freezer. I like to use zucchini with my eggs in the morning, so I can just take a handful out of the freezer and fry them up whenever I need them. That's a great easy way to add local vegetables during a season when I can no longer grow them.

My locavore omelette includes eggs from my chickens, local goat's milk, spinach and tomatoes from my garden, pork sausage from a local pig (in my freezer) and chantrelle mushrooms harvested locally. I'll be finding more ways to eat locally in the dark days to come!

What Bicyclists Lost in the House and Senate

2010-11-08T16:05:00.000-08:00

I know that people in many states are feeling strongly about the outcome of the recent elections. But regardless of your political stance, from a bicycling and cycling advocacy standpoint, we lost some big supporters in the House and Senate last week. We lost our biggest champion on the transportation committee, Chairman James Oberstar (D-MN) and more than 30 members of the Congressional Bike Caucus in the House. Congressman Oberstar was instrumental in passing much of the important cycling and pedestrian legislation in the last two decades. Things like Safe Routes to Schools were shepherded through by this tireless public servant.

Here in Oregon, I'm incredibly grateful that Peter DeFazio is returning for another term. He has been a long-time supporter of sustainable bike and pedestrian legislation and in fact my favorite bicycling bridge here in town is named after him. If I lived anywhere near Washington D.C. or had the money to travel there, I would definitely be attending the National Bike Summit to make sure our congresspeople know that cycling is a huge priority for our communities.

Green Bean Bonus Makes More Dilly Beans

2010-11-04T16:20:00.000-07:00

Unfortunately, I can never make green beans last around here. I love dilled green beans so much that even if I have a bumper harvest, there's never enough to can. I can eat a jar like this in two days flat. Lucky for me, our green beans took advantage of the late warm fall weather to produce a second harvest. I got a couple of colanders full, and now I have at least a few days supply of dilled green beans.

Here's my easy-peasy way to make dilly beans (from my mom):

1. Save the pickle juice from a big Costco-sized jar of dill pickles.
2. Remove stems from green beans and snap in half
3. Lightly steam them just until tender
4. Throw them in the pickle juice for a few days
5. Enjoy!

How To Sling A Pumpkin

2010-10-30T12:19:00.000-07:00

This year my rogue pumpkins (all volunteers) even started climbing my fences. This one started setting a fruit while twining up my flimsy fence. I knew it would break off from the vine as soon as it started to get heavy, so I put on my thinking cap for a minute and...one mesh shopping bag to the rescue! Now I have a pumpkin sling, and these mesh bags are great because they expand so much, this pumpkin could get quite large before it tested the capacity of this bag. As you can see, the pumpkin is starting to ripen up nicely, and I think it will survive to maturity in it's happy little sling.

More Than One Out of Ten

2010-10-24T23:22:00.000-07:00

I'm happy to say that I'm one of the 11% of Eugeneans that commute by bike. Our town now has the highest bike commute rate in the nation for a city of its size or larger, according to the U.S. Census. Do you remember about a year ago when I wrote that I thought that the number of cyclists I was seeing on my commute was going dramatically up? As it turns out, that was accurate. Our bike commuting has increased by about a third in the last two years. So it's not just anecdotal, there really are lots more bikes on the road (and the bike racks are full when I try to lock my bike up somewhere).

I also just recently participated in the Pedestrian and Bicycle Master Plan process, and am excited that our city is on the path of adding even more improvements to our bicycling and pedestrian access and safety. Just this summer, in addition to the ubiquitous road improvements, I have noticed some ped-and-bike-friendly improvements just in my neighborhood. A local street was revamped and sidewalks added. This means we can now walk our dogs to the dog park safely instead of having to drive them there. The bike path near the school was widened and re-paved, taking out the unsafe bike-tire-eating cracks and making it wide enough to pass pedestrians safely. I already blogged about the new bike bridge and the intersection redesign which made my commute safer and gave my kids the ability to bike to the pool and park. We also have revamped and repainted a bike box downtown (though cycling advocates had hoped for the bold green bike box paint that Portland is now sporting for better visibility). Since I go through this intersection frequently though, it's nice to at least have it clearly marked as a bike box (it used to be ambiguous).

All in all, although there are many areas where my city could definitely improve (one street in particular), I am happy to see them continue to move in a direction that encourages non-motorized transport.

Happy Spa Chicken and Harvest Time

2010-10-06T14:20:00.000-07:00

I'm happy to report that the chicken spa treatments did the job. Voodoo's foot is back to normal and apparently we didn't have to face the dreaded bumblefoot. Now it's just harvest time in the garden, a race to get all the produce in and dealt with, as well as mulching and taking care of our late fall/winter crops. I had hoped to have a space to move my cold frames to, but it was overtaken by rogue pumpkin vines that have set fruit. Since we all love pumpkin here, I'm loathe to move the pumpkins until we've harvested them, which means the cold frames may have to wait.

Every year at this time, this blog takes a significant lull as I try to keep on top of everything going on outside in the few weeks of good weather we have remaining. Happy gardening to all!

Spa Day for a Chicken

2010-09-21T11:18:00.000-07:00

Meet Voodoo, one of our favorite chickens. She's a six month old Barred Rock, a breed which has given us some of our mellowest and most friendly hens. Our oldest hen Hera is a Barred Rock, and a real sweetie too. Voodoo however is a little more adventuresome than most, and has consistently figured out ways to defeat the chicken pen security and escape to freedom. We find her on our front lawn, with all of the other chickens clucking indignantly that they should be out to roam too (we do actually let them out to free range as much as possible, but not when we're not around the house). It was probably on one of these escapades that Voodoo hurt her foot, and we noticed that she was limping a little bit.

Then Wayne and I went out of town to the Reno Air Races with my dad, and my mom stayed with the kids. It was during this time that the foot started to swell up and get noticeably worse. From the laptop in our hotel room, I frantically started Googling "chicken foot injury" and came up horrified. Who knew that there was this dread chicken foot disease called "bumblefoot"?? Fortunately, I don't think that's what she has after looking at the foot, but Mackenzie was very panicked when it swelled way up and many of the websites talked about lancing and surgery and antibiotics.

What I did tell him to do was to go and get some epsom salts and start soaking the foot, and move her to a sterile environment indoors. So he and grandma set off to the drugstore. Unfortunately, Epsom salts have now gone designer, with all kinds of herbal addititives (gone are the days of the $3 bag of just "Epsom salts" apparently) and they came back with a scented bag of chamomile salts. So we've been joking that Voodoo is getting her twice-daily "spa treatments" at the Blue Skies Ranch, and so far the swelling on her foot has gone down almost completely and she's putting weight on it again. Another day or two and she'll be done with her little spa vacation and can go back with the other ladies and tell them all about it. I bet they'll be jealous.

The Hundred Hen March

2010-08-25T15:28:00.000-07:00

This week at our town's big celebration and parade, one parade entry will be the Hundred Hen March. They may well have more than a hundred hens as it seems every other house in our area of town now has chickens. Asa is planning on going, towing a couple of hens along (caged of course) in our bike trailer.

The purpose of the Hundred Hen March is to increase awareness of backyard chickens and the growing food sustainability movement. Sounds like a good cause and a fun time to me. I may have to make some kind of clever sign to march along with. What do you think of "Feeling Clucky Punk?"

Okay, I Take It Back About the Snap Peas!

2010-08-12T00:21:00.000-07:00

You might remember I posted awhile back that my attempt to stagger my snap pea plantings looked to be a failure. As it turns out, it wasn't at all! My snap peas that I planted later have continued to produce as the first ones burnt out, with the result that I still have bunches of snap peas every day, and we're eating fresh veggies from the garden like I had hoped. In past years, we've just had a burst of snap peas and then they were gone, but this year the staggered plantings worked like magic and we've got a sustained harvest that so far is not letting up. I love it when things go right!

Since my kids really love raw veggies and aren't so keen on canned or preserved stuff, it's one of my goals to move towards a year-round harvest. This means staggering how I plant things, and using our sun room and cold frames to try and extend the season as much as I can. I'm still learning as I go, but I count this as a victory along the way.

Encouraging Bike Commute

2010-08-04T18:30:00.000-07:00

I'd consider my new bike commute as a report card on how well our city accomodates bicycles. I'm working at a new job, teaching kickboxing at our karate dojo which is in the next town over, about 11 miles from here. So far I've been commuting by bike most days. It's really a terrific commute, which takes about 45 minutes each way on my around-town commuter bike. There is not a single block of the journey that I'm on a street without some sort of cycling accomodation, which is very encouraging as a bike commuter.

First, I start out on a street that's marked as a bike-friendly street. Around town they're delineated by green destination signs and these painted symbols on the street. They're generally low-traffic streets in which biking is encouraged and driving discouraged. In some cases, they have restricted entry to cars or speed bumps to discourage through-travel by cars.

After three miles on that street, I enter the riverfront bike path. Most of my commute is along this path, which winds along the Willamette river for miles on either side. This path connects the two cities of Eugene and Springfield.

Five miles down the bike path, I turn north onto a series of low-traffic streets with designated bike lanes. A new roundabout on one of the streets has a terrific bike accommodation to make it safer for cyclists. Eventually I end up on a new bike path that parallels I-5, and crossing over the freeway on a new cycling-only suspension bridge. This is one of two bike-and-pedestrian-only bridges that I cross on my commute. Our city has invested heavily in making sure cyclists and pedestrians can cross rivers and freeways easily and safely, and this makes my commute much more enjoyable.

The last part of my commute is about one mile on a high traffic street. It's the least enjoyable bit of the whole trip, but I have a good bike lane to travel in, and all of the drivers so far have been exceedingly courteous, yielding to me even when they have the right of way.

All in all, you can see how over the years the accommodations that my city has put into place to make cycling safer, easier, and more convenient have all added up to make it possible for me to commute to my job by bike. All of these changes did not occur overnight, or even in the same decade. It might be a bike lane here, a path there, a bridge here, a traffic change there. But when a city commits to making cycling a priority, you eventually end up with a network of paths, lanes, and streets that make commuting by bike an option that more and more people will choose. And that's to all of our benefit.

Getting Clucky in NYC!

2010-07-31T11:44:00.000-07:00

On CNN Money, urban chickens in NYC!

Better Biking Ahead

2010-07-30T16:23:00.000-07:00

I'm very excited that a major intersection near our house that was extremely dangerous for cyclists has been completely revamped this summer when they repaved it. I think there are regulations in place now that when they re-design an intersection it is mandatory that they have to include bicycle and pedestrian accommodations. This intersection lays in between our house and the public pool, so my teenager has been biking through it by himself and I am SO grateful that there are now bike lanes and that he doesn't have to ride up onto the sidewalk and risk getting nailed by cars coming in and out of the business parking lots that front the road.

Essentially, the intersection used to have two lanes of traffic in each direction, and they removed one lane and put in a nice wide bike lane and a wider sidewalk as well. You can see clearly here how the pedestrian and bike access has been vastly improved and made much safer by these improvements. To the people planning them, it might just seem like paint striping and pavement, but to a mom whose children are on bikes next to one-ton vehicles, it means that I breathe a lot easier when they want to bike someplace by themselves.

As a society, we want our children to be healthy and fit. Childhood obesity and inactivity are huge health problems, yet we often don't put the necessary systems in place to make sure that kids can navigate safely around town using their own two feet. I'm happy to say that my city is making this possible!

Bale Fail

2010-07-14T22:15:00.000-07:00

Sorry to say, the straw bale planting experiment so far has been a total failure. And I thought maybe it was just me, but my other friends who tried the bale experiment haven't had much luck either. At first, all the plants looked like they were doing fine, but then they just withered away. Meanwhile, the stuff in my garden is thriving and growing like crazy. I know there's lots of great photos on the internet of straw bale gardens just bursting forth, but I wonder if maybe they are using some kind of fertilizer on them? I was under the impression that the composting bale would have enough nutrition for the plants to grow in (in addition to the dirt I put into each hole in the bale that I planted in.) but it doesn't look like it was enough for my poor little plants.

If anyone has bale garden tips and techniques or success storied, I'd love to hear them!

So Much for Staggering Snap Peas

2010-07-08T21:12:00.000-07:00

In years past, I've only planted one batch of snap peas. They've produced a good amount of peas, but in a short period of time and then they're done. So we gorge on snap peas and then they're just gone for good. I though this year I would do something really clever - I'd stagger my snap pea plantings by several weeks and then we'd have peas for a much longer time period. So in the first garden box I planted some snap pea starts that I bought at a plant sale to benefit our local food bank. In the second box I planted seeds at the same time. In the 3rd and 4th boxes I staggered more pea plantings at 2 - 3 week intervals. Hah, I would have an unending supply of snap peas!

Except that it was cold and rainy through May and most of June, so almost nothing grew. Then a couple of weeks ago when it suddenly got really warm, they all exploded with growth and blossoms. Now all of the snap peas look identical in size, no matter when they were planted, and they're all bursting at the seams with pea pods. So guess what? I'm picking a colander a day of snap peas and we're all turning green from eating them. And I guess they'll all be done about the same time since the weather is in the mid-nineties and not falling anytime soon. Snap peas don't really care for the heat.

I guess we'll just have to enjoy them while they're here. We're definitely eating very locavore right now!

Last Year's Tomatoes, This Year's Sauce

2010-06-25T23:24:00.000-07:00

I have to admit, I never got around to canning last year's tomatoes. Oh, I had the best of intentions, but September's siren song of the last of summer's sun called me away. So I stuck the tomatoes in one gallon freezer bags to can in the late fall. Of course late fall means kids' activities and preparing for the holidays, so it just never got done. But all was not lost. Whenever I've wanted to cook up some tomato sauce, I just take a big baggie of tomatoes out of the freezer and pop them in a saucepan with some water. After they've cooked down for awhile, I fish out the skins and stems, add spices, some onions and garlic, and reduce it down to a yummy pasta or pizza sauce. The kids swear they've never tasted a better sauce, so you can't beat that! Sometimes laziness pays off.

Mystery Chicken Death

2010-06-12T21:47:00.000-07:00

A couple of days ago, one of our chickens went missing. Just gone from the coop. No tell-tale pile of feathers from a raccoon or raptor attack, just no chicken. Today she wandered back into the chicken pen in the middle of the day and promptly squawked twice loudly and fell over dead. I have no idea what was wrong with her, a mystery chicken death. I am wondering if she ate a mushroom of some sort since the recent massive rains have caused a large sprouting of many varieties of mushrooms in the woods and even in my raised garden boxes! We have had another chicken die like this a couple of years ago and I just don't have a clue.

RIP Bingo, this is a photo of her about three years ago, happily foraging through our leaf piles. She was a bit of a mystery chicken from the get-go, she was supposed to be an Americauna chicken, but never developed the fluffy face feathers that our other Americaunas did. She had her own unique look to her, but was a very pretty girl. Here she is in her awkward teenage days, next to Saphire, our Blue Andalusian:

Garden Updates

2010-06-08T13:42:00.000-07:00

It's been hard to get much gardening in the last couple of weeks. The rains have been absolutely torrential, in the fullest sense of that word. We got more rain in the first four days of June than we usually get all month (and June is not particularly dry here). The weather seemed to have a perverse ability to clear up when I had to be someplace away from the house, and just as I was thinking "at last, I can do some gardening when I get home", the dark clouds gathered and began to dump water from the sky.

Many of my plants are not doing well, especially melons, squash, and cucumbers. They're just not liking the combination of cold and wet when they're supposed to be growing. The snap peas on the other hand are ecstatic.

Still, in the couple of nice days we did manage to have, I got the whole front garden weeded out (weeds don't seem to care about less-than-ideal growing conditions) as you can see above, it actually resembles a garden plot now! To the left of the fence, you can barely make out the newly-fenced addition where I've got a double-row of corn planted.

Lucky for me, I didn't transplant out any of the tomatoes from the cold frames, because the tomatoes that are out in the open air look puny and unhappy. The ones in my cold frames look quite good, especially since they were grown from seed! They're having a happy time, and I'm not sure yet when or even if I'm going to transplant them out of there.

Good News For Chicken Fans in My Town

2010-05-26T18:04:00.000-07:00

On the heels of posting the Chicken Rap, here's some great news from our own city. Our council suspended our city's two-chicken-per-household limit! You can read more about it here. It will be interesting to see what they come up with for a future chicken rule.

Some options are:

- No limits (let current nuisance laws regarding noise, odors, etc. stand in cases where there are complaints)
- Four chickens per household plus one extra chicken for each 1,000 square feet of land (this is the law of our neighboring town)
- Revert to two-chicken law (not really very helpful since chickens are flock animals, trying to keep two is crazy)

I'm obviously hoping for one of the first two. In order to have eggs for a family of four, you really need 5 - 6 chickens.

The Chicken Revolution Rap

2010-05-25T19:08:00.000-07:00

Residents in Salem, a town just an hour up the I-5 corridor from here, are fighting for their right to keep backyard chickens. Here in my town, the city council just discussed increasing the flock size on urban lots from the three that the law currently allows (as most chicken owners know, there's virtually no way to keep only three chickens - what if one dies, you can't just get one baby chicken and introduce it, they're flock animals for pete's sake!). This rap video pokes some fun at the more outlandish concerns that people have about urban chickens (leading to meth labs in the neighborhood? really people!).

Strangely, folks are so concerned about harmless chickens. Yet did you know that dogs bit nearly 2% of the U.S. population - more than 4.7 million people annually? That over 800,000 of those bites are serious enough to require medical attention? That 1,000 people A DAY are treated in Emergency rooms for dog bites? And about 25 - 35 a year are FATAL? That most of the victims are children, half of whom are bitten in the face? That dog bite losses exceed $1 billion per year with over $300 million paid by homeowner's insurance?

So after reading all of that, how on earth residents can be opposed to chickens amazes me! Quieter than a dog, less destructive than a cat, and safer to humans and other animals than either! Now don't get me wrong, I'm a dog owner and a cat owner and I would hate to give up either. But in a city like Salem where you can keep up to a 100 pound pig as a pet, what is wrong with a couple of chickens?

Bales of Fun

2010-05-23T22:45:00.000-07:00

The straw bales are definitely doing their job, composting away and become another vegetable garden. When I went to plant in them, I dug a hole in each to fill with dirt/compost. Inside the bales it is definitely HOT! So they are composting on the inside, and the plants I've put in them so far are doing very well. I used the double-high bale fence around the garden to plant cucumbers, squash, zucchini, and pumpkins, hoping that they'll just spill over the side into the garden area. In the area with just single bales, I put some more tomatoes, artichokes, and some mystery plants (stuff I started from seed but the labels got too wet, so now I don't know what they are!)

In the front garden, I've got all of my pole beans planted, a week earlier than last year. And Wayne fenced off a new area to transplant all of the tomatoes from our cold frames. It's funny, but they took so long to germinate that I thought it was a bust to try to grow them from seed, so I went out and bought some tomato starts. No sooner did I have those installed in the back garden than my cold frame tomato seeds took off like wildfire. Now the tomatoes in the cold frames are almost as big as the starts I bought! So the bottom line is that I have 12 more tomato plants than I bargained for, which means I guess I'll be canning a lot of salsa this year.

Speaking of bonuses, a friend salvaged a TON of little blueberry plants from the yard waste recycling center, so now I need to find places around the yard to transplant a bunch of baby blueberries. Not that I'm complaining or anything...

Sadly, A Ride of Silence Reminder

2010-05-14T22:34:00.000-07:00

You can read my post on my Ironmom blog about why this Ride is so important and cyclist safety continues to be an issue taken far too lightly by far too many motorists with far too many fatal outcomes for cyclists.

The annual Ride of Silence is May 19 at 7:00 pm. You can find a location near you at their website.

Turning Straw Into Gold

2010-05-10T10:52:00.000-07:00

Strawbale gardening: it's not something I'd heard of until this year. My friend loaned me the book Food Not Lawns, an excellent resource for yard transformation which I'm reading, and we've been thinking on how we can restructure our massively sloped north-facing back yard to be more of a food producing zone in the "paradise garden" style that the author discusses in that book. But that's a multi-year project to say the least. In the meanwhile, we had some pressing problems like how to effectively fence off our raised beds from the pups that joined our family this year, what to do with the big dirt patch in the middle of the lawn where the trampoline was until recently, where to put the blueberries and raspberry starts (hopefully in a dedicated berry patch) and how to keep some lawn for the dogs while beginning to transform the rest.

Enter the strawbale! Did you know you can grow things right in a strawbale? You basically put the bale where you want it, get it wet to start the decomposition process, wait a few days, make a hole in the top and put in your plants. So our new fence around the raised beds is now going to be a double-high strawbale garden, thus giving us even more growing room with no extra digging or planning for the year. We've mulched in between the raised beds with straw, in the eventual plan to turn the beds into a more free-flowing design with water channels to reduce water needs. For the next couple of years, the strawbale mulch will begin this process by turning the paths to more usable ground.

And that big dirt hole where the trampoline was located? Now covered with straw bales which will house even more plants. The new berry patch is fenced off with twine in the upper right corner of the yard. Stay tuned for how the big strawbale experiment turns out!

Mother's Day For Peace and Activism, Not Commercialism

2010-05-09T10:20:00.000-07:00

Motherhood, a transformation from a life in which it's easy to only think of yourself to a life when by necessity and by the overwhelming power of love you think of others first. Mother's Day, a day to rightfully celebrate all that is wonderful about mothers.

When you look at the fuzzy little head of your newborn and hold them to your breast, the concept of war is unthinkable. When you bounce your toddler boy on your lap, the idea of him being drafted to go kill other human beings is unimaginable. Now my baby boy is a teenager, the reality of the day he has to register for the draft looms closer. I think it's worth taking a moment to contemplate the origins of Mother's Day, before it was co-opted by the forces of commercialism.

In 1872, Juulia Ward Howe, the woman who wrote "Battle Hymn of the Republic", proposed an annual Mother's Day for Peace. On the heels of the horrible carnage that was the Civil War (over half a million dead, the costliest war in our history), Howe was committed to idea of abolishing war. In her Mother's Day Proclamation, Howe wrote: "Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience. We women of one country will be too tender of those of another country to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs".

For 40 years, Americans celebrated Mother's Day for Peace. Then, our memories of the horrors of war grew long, and the powerful forces of commercialism grew stronger. Mother's Day was moved from June into May, and businesses quickly saw the opportunity to co-opt a day of activism and turn it to a day of moneymaking. As a Florists' trade journal stated bluntly, "This was a holiday that could be exploited". And exploited it has been. Mother's day is now a billion dollar "industry" and the political activism of our great-great grandmothers is all but forgotten.

For myself, I've always asked that my family not buy me anything for Mother's Day. I don't need flowers or Hallmark cards. If they want to cook me breakfast or make me something handmade of course I am always grateful. My own Mother's Day tradition has always been to head out to a lake for my first open water swim of the year, and so yesterday we went over to the coast to a small inland lake and enjoyed the day as a family and with friends and I got to swim. But while our Mother's Day is not commercial, I've also discovered it's not really honoring the original intent of the day, so I am putting a note on my calendar for next April, I am pledging that I will find a way to celebrate Mother's Day by activism for peace, justice, and the good health of our land and our children.

Read the original Mother's Day Proclamation and more history of Mother's Day here, and pledge to take back Mother's Day for Peace!

Look for the Blue Skies in Urban Farm Magazine

2010-05-02T10:45:00.000-07:00

You may not know it, but as of last fall, there's a magazine aimed at those of us who are urban gardeners and keepers of chickens and the like. Not surprisingly, it's called Urban Farm and is from the Hobby Farms magazine group. The Summer 2010 edition has a whole section on the positive mental aspects of farming in the city limits and our family and this blog is featured (look for the photo of Asa holding a chick). The magazine itself is gorgeous and touches on the areas that those of us interested in sustainability, local food webs, and urban farming are into. This edition has articles on food storage, making your own wine, watering techniques and water-wise gardening, container gardens, the yard-sharing movement, backyard goats, chickens, rabbits, etc. fruit gleaning and more. Highly recommended from yours truly to enjoy over a cup of mint tea (easy to grow your own mint in containers by the way!)

Using Available Home Space

2010-04-28T00:02:00.000-07:00

Back when I was still working at Microsoft, I got an opportunity to work on a CD-ROM project (Remember, children, back before the web could do things like stream multimedia content, there was this brief period in history where people got their content on CD-ROMS! thus ends your history lesson for the day).

This project happened to be on Frank Lloyd Wright (I can't believe it, but I actually found the link to several used copies on Amazon.com!), and included a biography and photos and text on most of his structures, as well as cutting-edge (for the day) three-dimensional walkthroughs of some of his most famous houses, like the Ennis House , which by the way has appeared in the culturally iconic Karate Kid movies (number III, I believe) as well as in Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

While Frank Lloyd Wright didn't design homes in the time of "Green Building" and "Sustainable Development", which are hot topics now in the architectural world, he did often make very good use of small spaces and natural heating and cooling, especially in his series of Usonian Houses , which were made to be modular, partially constructed by the owner themselves, and employed natural cooling (no air conditioning) and radiant floor heating under a tinted-concrete slab (something newer green homes are emulating). If you want to take a look at the way he used very small spaces with efficient built-in furniture and unique features like pull-out kitchen countertops (much like the roll-out breadboards), the book Wright-Sized Houses has some beautiful photos and inspirational ideas to incorporate.

During the time that I worked on this project, we got the opportunity to take a tour of the Brandes house in Sammamish, Washington. and were able to see first-hand some of the innovative ways that Wright used small spaces and inexpensive construction as well as his signature connection to the environment in which the house was situated. That style of home was brought to mind when I saw the following video. This young architect has taken the notion of using small spaces and built-in functionality to an incredible extreme, and we could all learn something from his ability to think outside the box when it comes to space and design!

Okay, and since I'm a Lego Geek, I can't pass up on the opportunity to drool over these sets. Who can resist the Guggenheim and Falling Water in LEGO!!!

Just Plant a Seed!

2010-04-23T14:34:00.000-07:00

I'm all caught up right now in long-range gardening plans, especially for the backyard (most of which we have just let be for quite awhile now). We're really looking into multi-level contoured gardening for the backyard and moving away from the notion of having specific raised beds and areas set aside for food production separate from the landscaping. These are very long-range goals of course and sometimes I feel overwhelmed with trying to plan out where everything will go.

But that brings me to the simplest of all joys of gardening: putting a seed in the ground. Whenever I feel like gardening is just too tough or complex or overwhelming, I just go out to some dirt and put a seed in the ground. It doesn't really take much more than that. A little dirt, a little sun, a little water, a seed, and voila! The miracle happens. Even for a apprehensive gardener like me, I can make things grow!

So today I weeded out all of the raised beds, transplanted most of the remainder of the starts, and just put some seeds in the ground: more snap peas, some lettuce, more carrots. I'm trying to do more phased gardening where instead of just planting seeds once, letting them all grow up, and harvesting the food, I'm remembering to keep planting. Plant some snap pea seeds in March, get a few snap pea starts that are bigger, and plant more snap peas in April. That should keep us in snap peas for more than just the usual week or two.

As years have come and gone and I've just done the simple act of planting seeds, I've grown in my intuitive knowledge of our own land, what grows where, how long things take to sprout, and how many different crops I can grow in one season. Some of the seeds I sow today will not sprout. But that's okay, because others will, and my gardening will keep on growing.

So even if you're nervous about gardening, about getting it right, don't let that stop you. Just get out and throw some seeds in the ground and see what happens.

Four and a Half Eggs? The Chickens Oblige

2010-04-21T20:14:00.000-07:00

I recently had to cut a recipe in half, and that brought the number of eggs required to 4 1/2. How to do that? No problem, one of our chickens recently started laying again and obliged me with a half-sized egg!

Sunroom Starts

2010-04-16T00:03:00.000-07:00

Last year, we enclosed our front deck to make a sunny room/covered entry into the house. Although it's not finished off yet, it has already shown to be extremely useful at mitigating climate (providing a warmer entryway than the cold outdoors in the winter, and shading our front door from the hot western sun in the afternoon of the summer). The deciduous tree right outside the windows ensures that it stays cooler in the summer but lets the sunlight in during the winter months. This time of year when the sun can be shining but still chilly outside, it has proved to be about 15 - 20 degrees warmer than the outside air during the daytime hours.

We also used it this year to start some veggies for the garden, and it has proved to be a nice little greenhouse growing room. Now that last week's frost, sleet, and pounding hail are (hopefully) all done with, it's time to plant all of these little guys out!

And speaking of veggie starts, these radishes are coming right out of our cold frames and into our salads. Yum! The cold frames did not provide enough heat to germinate the tomatoes I planted, but the basil, cilantro, lettuce, and radishes are all in good form. This radish variety produces a variety of colors, it's the Easter Egg II from Territorial Seed

Cooking from scratch. Cooking From RAW Ingredients!

2010-04-07T11:30:00.000-07:00

Recently I was involved in a bit of a Facebook kerfluffle about cooking from scratch. The gist of the discussion was whether or not it was part of a homemaker's job to cook for the family. My personal take on this is that there's not much that comes in a box or package that passes muster for nutritious living in our family's book, so cooking from scratch is more or less a necessity if my family is going to eat in a way that I feel is healthy. I understand that the time constraints that many families face make cooking a very difficult time trade-off to fit in on a regular basis, especially if both parents are working full time. But if one parent is home, and their job is as the "Home-Maker" then in my book, cooking is part and parcel of the deal.

As you can imagine, the notion that a homemaker should cook for the family caused a bit of a brouhaha in this day and age of "Don't put me in a box and tell me what I should do" feminism. In reaction to the June Cleaverism of the 1950s, we have swung so far in the other direction that no woman wants to be told that she should be in the kitchen (and far be it for me to tell anyone what they should be doing). But to me, it's not really an issue of feminism or not. My husband is often the at-home parent and when he is, he cooks. End of story.

In the midst of all of the hubbub (anyone notice that there are so many great synonyms for a Blogging Brouhaha?), was this simply astonishing quote:

"i think that we don't all understand cook from scratch the same way - for the ones who supposedly cook from scratch at every meal every day, you wouldn't be on facebook if you understood "from scratch" the way some others do. My sister in law cooks "from scratch" every meal and she is never out of the kitchen, unless it's to go buy some raw ingredients - RAW ingredients"

Which I think is worth addressing in depth. There are several parts to this myth that bear some serious discussion. The first is that cooking from scratch, or using "RAW ingredients" is some sort of terrifying bugaboo that modern homemakers just can't face. To debunk this, I'm here to tell you that I started out as a lousy homemaker. I was going to be the career gal: you know the one who has it all and comes home from her mentally stimulating and fulfilling job to kiss her lovely well-scrubbed kiddos hello and sit down to a family meal together. Except that I really couldn't make that one work. Kid #1 more or less demanded that I set the career path aside and become a full-time mother (which of course meant that I needed to start homemaking as well). Not having been much of a cook to start with, I had to learn from scratch to cook from scratch. Which is all to say that if I can do it, anyone can.

Myth number two is that it takes some insanely inordinate amount of time to buy and cook with RAW ingredients (I'm going to just keep capitalizing that one because the effect is so epic, as teen son would say). So much time in fact that you would never be out of the kitchen unless you're leaving to go buy those RAW ingredients. Now on account of my children's food allergies, I'm required to cook from scratch even more than the average homemaker. I can't simply go buy a bag of Bisquick and whip up some pancakes, nor can I buy the already made and pre-frozen waffley thingies. I have to start with some RAW goat's milk, RAW eggs, and add in the flour etc. until a pancake batter appears. To confront this sisyphean task, I simply bought a copy of Betty Crocker's cookbook and I go to the store once or twice a week. If I'm feeling especially organized, I whip up a triple batch of the pancake batter in the evening after dinner and store it in a handy lidded container in the fridge so we can pour a few spoonfuls on a hot griddle whenever POOF we want a pancake to appear. Time to make pancake batter from scratch: About 15 minutes.

Again, I'll make the point that I utterly and totally started out as the suckiest cook ever (my hubby can attest to this), not unlike Julia Child. So if I can do it (even if I have never risen to the level of a souffle-maker but have just mastered the basic pancake), anyone can. Heck, cowboys on the trail of a cattle drive managed to make flapjacks from scratch, and they were certainly no gourmet chefs, so I'm fairly confident that most folks can master it.

Myth number three: If you buy into the enforced slavery of the cooking-from-scratch mentality, you won't even have the time to update your Facebook account.

So here's a typical menu and time breakdown:

Breakfast: Omelette with sausage, onions, zucchini, and mushrooms: 15 minutes
Lunch: BigAss Salad with chicken breast, dried cranberries, pecans, and goat cheese: 35 minutes including cooking the chicken breasts and making the dressing
Dinner: Turkey with Portofino sauce over steamed cauliflower (I'm eating Paleo right now and not doing any breads or pastas): 45 minutes

Shopping: Two one-hour Costco trips a month amortized on a daily basis = 4 minutes per day
Three Weekly trips to the grocery store by foot = 2.5 hours = 22 minutes per day
One weekly trip to get our raw goat's milk = one hour = 8 minutes per day
Caring for chickens (where we get our eggs) = one hour = 8 minutes per day

Total Shopping time: 42 minutes per day
Total Cooking time: 1:35

Total Kitchen Slavery Time: 2:17

As you can see, I don't spend anywhere near my entire day cooking and shopping, and I even have time once in a while to update my Facebook status and get in these crazy discussions! Also, three of our grocery shopping trips double as dog-walking time, so they really should get some time deducted for that, and most people don't have to go out of their way to buy raw goat's milk or raise chickens for eggs. I'd say for most folks it could be 1.5 hours or less to cook from scratch with RAW ingredients, including shopping time.

Robin's Cooking From SCRATCH with RAW Ingredients Time Saving Tips:

- When you can, prepare ingredients for more than one meal at a time. If you're chopping onions, peppers, zucchini, etc., chop two or three instead of just one. Store the others in tight-lid glass containers in the fridge. Now when you want to whip up a salad or a stir-fry, it's quick and easy.

- If you have a batch of time available, mix up batters ahead of time as well. Making a double or triple batch of pancake, waffle, or muffin batter to have available in the fridge makes quick work of nutritious breakfasts. The kids like to bake teeny muffins in a cute little pan I got that fits in our toaster oven. It's almost like those fun "easy bake ovens" that you can buy for kids except that it works really well and the food is nutritious. Having batter on hand for them to make themselves a breakfast muffin also saves money from the endless boxed-cereal grocery bills.

- Plan meals from menus (I'm just now getting the hang of this one!) and shop from a grocery list made from those menus. Then you're guaranteed to have the ingredients on hand to cook what you want when you want to. If you don't have to do last-minute trips to the store, you save on gas, time, and frustration.

Quote and Image of the day

2010-03-30T23:10:00.000-07:00

"Obama is not a brown-skinned anti-war socialist who gives away free healthcare. You're thinking of Jesus." - John Fugelsang

Matthew 25:

35For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, 36I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.'

37"Then the righteous will answer him, 'Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? 38When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? 39When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?'

40"The King will reply, 'I tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.'

Those are some radical words right there.

Hitchhiking for Peace

2010-03-29T10:38:00.000-07:00

Normally I'm not driving down Jefferson street on a Saturday morning, so perhaps that's why I've never seen her before, but there she was, a woman somewhere around her mid-50s standing near the curb with her thumb out. I slowed and stopped and she climbed in, I asked if she had missed a bus and where she was headed. Her answer was not something I was expecting to hear:

"I'm a hitchhiker for peace".

She told me that she started hitchhiking after 9/11, and that her mission was to spread the idea that war solves nothing and that we all need to embrace and embody peacefulness in our words and our actions. That was it, five minutes later I let her out downtown. Her words stayed with me throughout the day, her words and the fact that she took the time to share them in such an interesting way.

This morning with my cup of tea and my eggs, I read this passage from the book God Sleeps in Rwanda:

"As I stood there with [my wife] in my arms, I did not know what the future held...I did not fully understand the havoc that war wreaks on communities. Yes, war kills--I knew that--but that is only part of its destructive path. War makes widows and orphans. War cuts off arms and legs and rips emotional wounds that never fully heal. War drives people from their homes--in this case hundreds of thousands--and dooms them to lives of poverty and displacement. John F. Kennedy once said, "Mankind must put an end to war, or war will put an end to mankind.". As I held Liberata in the gas station, I did not yet know what this meant.

One knows how war begins, but no one knows how it will end. Countries rush to war thinking it is the quickest, easiest solution to conflict, only to find themselves still entrenched years later, suffering more losses than they expected and asking themselves, bewildered, "How did we get here?" There is no "winning" a war.

From the hitchhiker to me to you: what can we do for peace today?

Chickiepoos!

2010-03-26T00:08:00.000-07:00

Meet Annabelle, she's one of our two new Rhode Island Reds. The other is named "Nugget" (Asa named Annabelle, Wayne named Nugget). We also have Spreckles, a Speckled Sussex, and Mackenzie has Voodoo, a Barred Rock.

Back To The Bike

2010-03-22T22:54:00.000-07:00

Wow, I can't believe how much more we've spent on gas since I broke my arm. Not being able to ride a bike just has made such a huge difference. The number of miles isn't all that enormous, but the little driving trips around town - just to the store or to take the kids somewhere - that all adds up and the car gets much worse mileage on such trips. Normally I only take the car if we're going a substantial number of miles, but until this week I've had to drive everywhere.

Finally I've been able to start riding my bike, I rode to work tonight for the first time, but I'll have to say that my arm was so exhausted that I had to ride part of the way home with just one hand on the handlebars. It's still not quite all the way good for riding, but it's getting there! And I know it will be a few more weeks before I can even think of riding the tandem with the kids. Luckily, I think I will be all healed by the time the good weather really rolls around!

And to piggyback on that good news, here's something even better. From the League of American Bicyclists Blog, an article about Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood's address at the National Bike Summit. There may be some things I don't like about the way the President is doing his job, but one thing is for sure is that everywhere behind the scenes, changes like this are taking place. They might not make the news like the big Health Care Debate, but they are positive steps that will affect all of us.

I am very excited about this! Read on (quotes from the League of American Cyclists Blog)

When the Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood stood on a table at the National Bike Summit to thank the crowd and show his support for bicycling and walking, he was just getting started.

Today, he announced his new Policy Statement on Bicycle and Pedestrian Accommodation Regulations and Recommendations. It is simply the strongest statement of support for prioritizing bicycling and walking ever to come from a sitting secretary of transportation.

On his blog, he writes:

Today, I want to announce a sea change. People across America who value bicycling should have a voice when it comes to transportation planning. This is the end of favoring motorized transportation at the expense of non-motorized.

We are integrating the needs of bicyclists in federally-funded road projects. We are discouraging transportation investments that negatively affect cyclists and pedestrians. And we are encouraging investments that go beyond the minimum requirements and provide facilities for bicyclists and pedestrians of all ages and abilities.

To set this approach in motion, we have formulated key recommendations for state DOTs and communities:

Treat walking and bicycling as equals with other transportation modes.
Ensure convenient access for people of all ages and abilities.
Go beyond minimum design standards.
Collect data on walking and biking trips.
Set a mode share target for walking and bicycling.
Protect sidewalks and shared-use paths the same way roadways are protected (for example, snow removal)
Improve nonmotorized facilities during maintenance projects.
Now, this is a start, but it’s an important start. These initial steps forward will help us move forward even further.

Extending the Gardening Season

2010-03-10T22:33:00.000-08:00

Last year Wayne picked up some windows at a garage sale, and we also replaced our shower door so he had the old glass door to work with. He took those plus some reclaimed lumber and some newer wood and hammered up three lovely cold frames. There's already lettuce, radishes, basil, and some other stuff cropping up in them. I'm excited to be able to extend our growing season into the cooler months of spring and fall with these. It will be a learning process this year, so we'll see how they work out. In the 3rd one, I planted a couple of different types of tomatoes from seed. I've always grown tomatoes from starts before so that's another new gardening adventure!

Who Wins the Stupid Award??

2010-03-03T22:22:00.001-08:00

Does it go to the guy out there in the pouring-down pissing-down rain today going at the sodden sidewalk with a leaf blower??

Or does it go to the city officials in Orange, California who are suing a couple for removing their lawn and replacing it with landscape bark and drought-tolerant plants, even though they have reduced their water usage from 299,221 gallons in 2007 to 58,348 gallons in 2009.

You be the judge.

Captivity: Not Good For Man Nor Beast

2010-02-27T11:58:00.000-08:00

A couple of years ago, I blogged about the increasing violence among disenfranchised elephants. Growing up being removed from the company of older, wiser adult animals, potentially seeing members of their families slaughtered for tusks or for sport, and driven off of lands taken over for farming, elephants are increasingly turning to violence against humans, other animals, and each other.

Now this week we have yet another case of intelligent animals with strong communication skills and close relationships who have taken to fighting back. With the Orca attack at SeaWorld this week, we are confronted with the issues around capturing sentient beings in their natural habitat and forcing them into a life of slavery and confinement for our entertainment purposes. I have to admit I've been to more than a couple of marine mammal shows at zoos, aquariums, and SeaWorld itself. This excellent article by Alexander Cockburn is making me think I will not ever be doing that again. These types of attacks are far from rare, and often are even coordinated between the animals in the tank. It's possible they are not so much random as deliberate acts of retribution. Having swum in the wild with cetaceans on more than one occasion, I have always been struck by the very feeling of intelligence you get from them. It's hard to believe that they don't feel much the same way we would if pressed into a life of servitude and enforced performance.

I will be interested to read the book mentioned in the article as well: Fear of the Animal Planet: The Hidden Story of Animal Resistance by Jason Hribal

Whoops

2010-02-15T21:08:00.001-08:00

I put the lid up on our new cold frames today because it's been so nice and sunny. But then later I forgot and let the chickens out to forage. Of course they found the cold frame and all of the tasty little teeny plant shoots within. So there goes my veggie starts. Wah!

Chalk that one up to experience, I guess.

Mad Love for Re-usable Bags

2010-02-13T22:12:00.000-08:00

My favorite re-usable bags are Chico Bags, I've probably raved about them here before because they're so lightweight and fold up into teeny-tiny stuff sacks just like little sleeping bags that dolls might use. They hold even heavy stuff and unlike canvas bags I don't forget them because of the nifty carabiner clips they come with that let me clip them onto everything in sight. I wish I'd seen their new Valentine's bags before today, aren't they cute??

So today I'm at a store across town and I tell the checker I don't need a bag because I brought my own, but she had already started putting things in a bag, so she takes the two items out and then throws that bag in the garbage. Like two self-contained rolls of masking tape are going to contaminate the bag. Sometimes I wonder if there's a little "Piss off the environmentalist" board game that they secretly play where you get points for something like that. Maybe the lady who almost ran me over in the crosswalk today with her 80-ton SUV talking (now illegally) on her phone was playing too. Or maybe it's just that they don't really think anything of just taking a perfectly good plastic bag and throwing it away for no reason whatsoever.

But while the checker was wasting the bag, it occurred to me how much the culture of where we live plays into our actions. Strangely, although I was just across town from where I live, the culture of this side of town is very different from the culture on that side of town. They could really be two separate cities (which is evident every time we have elections here and the votes are split 50/50 conservative/progressive.) In my side of town, where I shop for groceries the checker just sits there expecting you to pull out your cloth bags and start putting the food in them. If you don't do that in a reasonable amount of time, they say "Oh, do you need a bag?" and pull one out for you. On the other side of town, the goods are whipped into a plastic bag so fast you can't even get the words out to tell them you don't need it before they're ripping it off of the little rack and handing it to you. Sometimes if you're really lucky, they'll put one item per bag and even double-bag the heavy things so that by the time you get home you realize you've consumed not one or two but seven or eight bags. I guess no one blinks an eye at this over there.

Where the culture expects you to bring your own bags, you actually feel kind of bad when you don't have one. No one actually makes you feel bad, but it's clear that you're not following expectations when you don't have them. You feel keenly that you're out of the ordinary if they have to pull a bag from the small stack under the counter. Where the culture expects that you'll just consume endless bags, you might not think twice about what that really means to the world.

I know bags are a relatively small issue in the grand scheme of things (compared to say global climate change or peak oil) but they're just one indicator of how the culture around you can influence everyone's actions. If locker rooms or showers are provided at work, the message is clear that arriving by bicycle or on foot is not only acceptable but encouraged. If people scowl at you when you carry your helmet into the building or poke fun at your two-wheeled transport, it can change the way you feel about it. The only way a culture changes is by individual action, so while our actions might feel like drops in a bucket, eventually that bucket fills up and tips things in another direction entirely. Our actions are more than the sum of their individual parts, they're creating a culture in which everyone feels more comfortable acting that way as well.

By the way, if you love frogs, you can get this cool custom Chico bag by becoming a member of Save the Frogs.

One More Reason to Not Use Toxins

2010-02-10T10:00:00.000-08:00

This is just so sad. A family lost two little girls (ages 4 and 15 months old) after hiring a company to use chemicals to eliminate voles from their lawn. The pellets used mixed with water to release deadly phosphine gas. It's pretty unthinkable to me that this sort of thing is even allowed under law. As it happened, the gas entered their home, possibly through cracks in the foundation. However, as soon as this kind of poison is laid down in a suburban area, there's no telling what it could kill (pets, other kids that might venture onto the lawn, other wild animals, fish in streams that the water drains to). I can't imagine what this family is going through, don't want to think about what it would be like to lose two of your children in a week. My heart goes out to them.

At the same time, we simply can't put poison into the environment and think that it's okay.

Veggies From the Sunroom

2010-02-07T22:10:00.000-08:00

We enclosed our little front deck this year, turning it into a much-needed entrance to the house (formerly you had to stand out in the rain trying to get the front door unlocked since our door didn't even have a little roof or awning over it). The side-benefit is that, since it is south-facing, it's a nice little passive solar room. In the winter, it heats up nicely (and will do even better once we get finished putting tile in there), and in the summer it keeps our front door shaded from the blistering afternoon Western sun. All in all, it does a great job of passively heating and cooling the entrance to our house.

A little side-benefit is that it functions as a bit of a greenhouse as well. I brought in the last of the pepper plants from the garden in the fall and just picked the last fresh red peppers this week (that's them in the photo!). The last few were a bit small but still delicious. I think the sunroom will be a great spot to put some garden starts as well, and it's about time to get thinking about that now.

Also on the current docket: hubby is pruning the fruit trees, and just started building our cold frames with some glass doors he picked up at a garage sale last summer. Looking forward to expanding our growing season even more!

A New Danger From Facebook

2010-01-25T10:46:00.001-08:00

I admit it: I shelter myself from the news. Not the really big news - I read up on politics, what's happening in congress, the war, the earthquake in Haiti. But I shelter myself from the horrifying, meant-to-be-shocking stuff that they fill the evening news with. The cruelties that people inflict on each other, on animals, on the earth. I know my own heart and reading these kinds of things just makes me feel sick inside, torn up like someone ran a rototiller through my heart. I figure I'm better off doing my best to make the world a better place in politics, the environment, etc., but not knowing about all of the people working to make it worse on a personal level.

I believe that some of us are just born with a more sensitive heart than others. Just like some people have more tastebuds and can taste the nuances of food and wine more intensely, others of us just feel more intensely. There are literally things I've read or seen that disturb me for years. There are books, like Sophie's Choice, that I wish I had never ever read. If I allow myself to think of the pivotal scene in that book I almost throw up. It's that visceral. My son cried for weeks after he saw some kids pulling the legs off of a bug at the park. He kept sobbing "the bug couldn't get away". This kind of sensitivity isn't learned, it's burned into the very makeup of our soul.

So it is that I face a quandary when it comes to Facebook. You see, people freely repost news articles there, some of which fall into the horrifying category, the things I really really don't want to ever read. I won't recap them here just in case you're like me, but lately there have been a couple of things posted (one today) that are just tearing at my heart. They will come back to haunt me multiple times through the days and weeks that follow a reading, each time bringing me to my mental knees and stabbing my spirit.

If you're reading this and you're my friend on Facebook, I would ask you to think long and hard about reposting some bit of news flotsam about extreme cruelty for all to see. To some of us, it's cruelty just to have to see that headline, and it reverberates out through the rest of our daily lives. If you feel that you absolutely can't keep from posting it to Facebook, I am asking that you not put the headline as part of the post. Don't attach the link so that it automatically shows up, but instead manually paste the link and give some sort of warning in your post that lets those of us who will be sensitive to this to not open the link.

Maybe you think I'm "overly sensitive" (I've heard that one more than a few times in my life), but like the fact that I can taste the sage, the basil, and the coriander all separately in a sauce, I can't help it.

Probably the Coolest Article About Energy Usage Ever

2010-01-12T22:32:00.000-08:00

Okay, you've just got to read this article:

How many cyclists does it take to power a hairdryer? The answer's 18, as one family discovered in a unique TV experiment

If everyone could see the impact of their energy usage so clearly, I think peoples' behavior would change so much more easily! Very Very Cool!

More on Resolve

2010-01-09T19:55:00.001-08:00

This time of year the media has a field day with New Year's resolutions. First, articles about resolutions, then articles about how to keep the resolutions you made. It seems that most of these are personal: lose weight, sleep more, be a better spouse/parent/friend. Often, they are ambiguous in nature, and have proven for many to be difficult to keep (as witnessed by the fact that the gym where I work will be busy for, oh, the next 6 - 8 weeks, after which it will return to normal).

I don't really do resolutions, but at various times in various years, I have set a goal to make a change and to make it stick. In an era of increasingly bad news (the war isn't going away, the economy isn't getting any better, the health care plan looks like it's flushing down the toilet in bits and pieces), it can be easy to lose sight of the way that small changes that we take can change the whole pathway that we're walking on, both individually and collectively. While a nebulous resolution may just be an occasion for future guilt, a well-elucidated goal can help you move in the direction you would like to see your life taking.

So, though they're not resolutions, here are some small things that I resolved to do this year that stuck.

I decided to always drive the speed limit. I'll raise my hand here, I'm a lifetime speeder. I think only the fact that I was young and had long blonde hair kept me from about 30 more tickets than I actually got pulled over for in those earlier years. Now that I'm a mom with kids old enough to take notice, and now that I have realized the environmental implications in speeding when we do drive (worse gas mileage for one), I figured it was time to make a change. How I did it: I started putting the car on cruise control for the exact speed limit. Leadfoot Be Gone!

This Christmas I only shopped locally. No orders from Borders, Amazon.com, no trucks pulling in the driveway from UPS or FedEx. Mackenzie's Santa gift came from a local toy store that has been here for 40 years. Asa's gift came from a local sports store, not Dicks or one of the big chains. Mackenzie shopped for Asa in a local bead store, and Asa bought Mackenzie's present at a small gaming store. The Christmas books I always buy for the kids came from a small local bookstore. I did not set foot in Target or Wal-Mart.

Every time I go in the grocery store, I pick up a coupon for a local food bank and scan it at the register.. Our town has a high homeless population, and I feel bad driving past the panhandlers at every intersection. At the same time, I'm not comfortable when kids are in the car to stop or roll down the window (remembering, I guess, a carjacking near where I used to work where a lady did this and the guy opened the door, pulled her out, and drove off with her child in the back). This is one way that I know of to support a place where people can go and get at least some of their needs met, in a way that feels safe for my family.

For me, it works best if what I decide to do is very black and white. The word "Always" works well. It removes that grey area where you're running a little late and well, you could just speed this once. Or a few things ordered online isn't bad (except that's a few more dollars that our struggling local stores don't get, and isn't it sad that our only locally-owned outdoors store is going out of business this year after decades and decades of thriving). To remove that grey area is to remove the opportunity for failure in accomplishing my goal.

Sometimes I forget this when goal-setting. For a few years, I've had a goal to call and write more to my congresspersons, because while it's easy to complain about politics, it really doesn't mean much if you don't let your elected officials know what it is that you support. I keep not accomplishing this, I think because I haven't really made it concrete. So I think this year I will try for one letter or call a month (even if it happens on the 31st at midnight!).

And I definitely have a long-term goal of expanding our family's growing season. Our first year it was just a summer garden. This last year we extended it into spring and fall. Next year I hope for a true winter garden! Oh yeah, and I'll mulch my perennials too for good measure :-)

What do you want to be doing? And how are you going to get there?

Resolve to Do This BEFORE the New Year

2009-12-29T10:57:00.000-08:00

Here's one important way you can make a contribution to the safety of our nation's food supply and the health of our people (if you happen to live in the U.S.)

The U.S. Government is asking for comments on how corporate control of our food supply affects you. It's easy to speak against what's going on, it's harder to take action but this is one action that's simple and quick. Let them know how you feel about local farms, regulation of small farmers, letting corporations get away with unsafe, unsanitary, and inhumane practices. This is being undertaken by the Department of Justice anti-trust folks, not the usual USDA people who have been turning a blind eye for decades, so it might just be worthwhile to chip in your two cents.

You can email comments to: agriculturalworkshops@usdoj.gov BY DECEMBER 31st!!!!

or

Find out more details on Slow Food USA's blog post There are links to sample letters and summaries of the issues at stake.

Fostering Community: A Progressive Dinner

2009-12-21T10:25:00.000-08:00

For a couple of years now, we've been celebrating the Solstice (both summer and winter) by having a progressive dinner with several families from our neighborhood. If you've never done one, a progressive dinner is so much fun! You start at one house for appetizers, proceed to the next house for salad, the next house for soup, and so on. This year we ended up at our house for desserts. Each family hosts everyone for about 45 minutes to an hour, and the walk between the houses is just as much fun as the dinner part.

This year, at about the salad course, we also started singing. We started out with rounds and went to carols and solstice songs (with several glasses of wine by that time, it took all of our collective brains to remember the right order for everything in the 12 Days of Christmas), and ended up at our house with me accompanying on the piano and singing more carols. This is a great way to reconnect with neighbors that you may not see as often as you'd like throughout the daily busyness of our lives. We stop and chat while walking the dogs, or our kids are running in and out of each others' houses, but we don't always get the time to really catch up. This gives us a chance to really talk and listen to what's going on in each others' lives.

Shopping Local for the Holidays

2009-12-14T15:59:00.000-08:00

A letter in our weekly newspaper made a very good point this week. One of our town's big topics is downtown revitalization, with fingers being pointed at Walmart and all of the big box stores as culprits in stealing away vigor from our downtown stores. We have many open spaces and empty pits where stores once stood. This failed attempt at covering up with a mural obscures the pit where the downtown Woolworth's once stood. The letter writer just pointed out that if everyone who wanted a more vital downtown just took their Christmas shopping there instead of to the box stores, downtown stores would be more than vital.

So today, Mackenzie and I went on a little holiday shopping trip downtown and he bought his sister a really cool present for Christmas (can't reveal it here, I know she reads these posts on Facebook - hi Asa! No, I'm not telling!). We don't do a ton of Christmas shopping, but this year I'm vowing that what we do (other than my perennial Heifer Project gifts for family) will not be done online. No UPS trucks pulling up in the driveway, we're going downtown!

Lying Fallow

2009-12-09T23:46:00.000-08:00

This is the time of year where things start to slide - the last few apples I socked away in the cold maybe start going bad before I get around to making them into applesauce, and I forgot to go out and pick the peppers before the first frost so I didn't get the last few good ones in. Now that it's so dang crazy cold, everything even in the winter garden is listless. My time is eaten up with the craziness that seems to hit all at once at this time of the year. I guess it's time to lie fallow and regenerate for spring. Starting next Monday (when the karate tests, Nutcracker performances and robotics competition is all over and done with) that's exactly what I'm going to do.

Happy Buy Nothing Day!

2009-11-27T17:50:00.000-08:00

The sooner we, as a culture, realize that we can't spend our way out of our current problems the better. We live in a closed-loop system. In such a non-infinite system, we cannot continue consuming ever-increasing amounts of resources. It simply cannot happen. We must, like Americans with over-burdened credit cards simply learn to live within our global means. Toward that end, Buy Nothing Day is a small drop in the bucket. But its real value lies in realizing that we don't really need to buy much on other days either. Of course, we need food, we need clothes, we need toothpaste and toilet paper (well, my neighbor who has invented a hand-held bidet would say we don't even need that!), and we occasionally need fun splurgy things too. But do we need so much stuff, the avalanche of stuff that the average consumer buys in these holiday weeks? Does Aunt Martha really need yet another pair of Dearfoams slippers? Does Uncle Joe need another mug with a fishing joke printed on it?

One of the best things we did when our kids were very little was to tell them that Santa brought each child one present. And we give them each a Christmas book that they open on Christmas Eve and we read together (and then read many of the previous years' books as well). That's it. No expectations of piles and piles of stuff, just a simple family-filled holiday. Thus, I don't need to be standing in lines today for that mountain of gifts. One click to Heifer Project will take care of the rest of the presents for family.

Happy Buy Nothing Day.

Autumn Memories

2009-11-24T20:32:00.000-08:00

Rainy days in the kitchen with the smell of applesauce all around just can't be beat. All too often it feels like I don't have the time to do everything I want to, so I'm glad when I can at least do a bit here and there, like make up a batch of applesauce or a homemade pumpkin pie. Here's a view out of my autumn kitchen window. The white crockery canister behind my sink was from my grandfather's restaurant. He died when I was six, and I only have one very strong memory of him: Once when we were visiting, I woke up scared in the middle of the night. Instead of sending me right back to bed. he sat on the stairs with me and read me my favorite book, The Little Gingerbread Man. I still think of that whenever I get a tea bag out of the canister. If you only had one memory to give to someone in your life, wouldn't it be awesome to make it as loving as that one?

Nice Website for Local Foods and Prep

2009-11-12T23:12:00.000-08:00

I was looking online for a recipe for fresh pumpkin pie (since all the Betty Crockerish cookbooks carry is recipes with canned pumpkin) and stumbled across this nifty little site: http://www.pickyourown.org/

From the website description:

This website provides local listings of pick your own (also called U-pick or PYO) farms in the United States, Canada, Britain, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and other countries. There are crop calendars for each local area to tell you what is available to pick throughout the year, local weather forecasts and really easy illustrated directions to show you how to make jam, jelly, salsa, pickles, spaghetti sauce, applesauce, apple butter and 150 other recipes with step-by-step directions to can, freeze, dry or preserve the harvest.

So far, our family can vouch for their pumpkin pie recipe. This is a great time to get deals on pie pumpkins at local farms, with the Halloween rush over and the Thanksgiving rush not quite yet starting. I'm really enjoying the roasted pumpkin seeds too. There's nothing commercially available that even comes close to my home-roasted seeds, which is a bummer because they usually go fast around here!

One More Reason Not to Shop At Wal-Mart

2009-11-08T20:04:00.000-08:00

If it's not enough that Wal-Mart is a union-busting, employee-screwing detriment to communities and the environment,, or that its Chinese imports have displaced hundreds of thousands of U.S. jobs, and if it's not enough that you might run into folks like these shopping there, here's one more reason not to shop at Wal-Mart: open discrimination against gays.

As a side note, I have only been in a Wal-Mart once in the last decade. Coincidentally, this was the only time I was ever harassed for breastfeeding in public. Asa was then an infant, in a sling where she was nursing very discreetly. A greasy-haired bulk-buyer of CPC (that's Cheap Plastic Crap if you know my family's lingo) and a shopping-cart full of junk food said very loudly to my face "That's disgusting!". I would've laughed if I hadn't been so stunned. Haven't been back since.

Summer Garden Lessons Learned

2009-10-31T15:33:00.000-07:00

I took advantage of yesterday's warm weather and lack of rain to bring in the rest of the produce from the summer garden. I couldn't believe we got over two pounds of green beans this week, in the last week of October. And tons of tomatoes, too, including all of the green ones to store up in the cool basement. I'm going to do like I did last year and wrap them individually in newspaper. That gave us tomatoes through December and part of January last year, ripened a few at a time.

This week's haul alone was 22.5 pounds of produce. I think I've been averaging at least that for most of the summer. I meant to diligently weigh all of the veggies we brought in from the garden this year and get a good idea of how much we were growing, but of course most of the time we just go out and pluck some lettuce or a cucumber or the kids go grab some snap peas and it never gets weighed.

Lessons learned from this year's summer garden:

The yellow Taxi heirloom tomatoes were not a very good producer. They were supposed to be large, but ended up much smaller than the red ones, they split easily in the moister fall air, and produced about half as many as my romas and bigger red tomatoes.

I planted two types of green beans, Blue Lakes and Kentucky Wonders. One of them produced nice thin green beans that the kids like to eat, and the other had pods that quickly got fat and woody and not very edible. But I didn't write down which variety I planted where! So now I don't know which ones to order for next year. Anyone knowledgeable about green beans can help me out on this one?

Planting the peppers much earlier (March instead of May) produced a much bigger crop, even though it took them a long time to get going.

You can only eat so many cherry-size tomatoes. Next year I'll only plant one or two instead of three or four bushes!

Now it's on to the fall garden, I've got loads of kale and chard still going strong. Yum!

How Everything Transportation Ties Together

2009-10-28T12:37:00.000-07:00

I've found myself frustrated this year with the kids' activity schedule and locations. It seems like everything has conspired to keep us from being able to bike to anything. Many of the locations we have to go to are either on the far fringes of town (7 - 10 miles from our house) and/or on the opposite side of town from the next activity that we need to get to.

I can't help thinking how in the future fuel prices may affect businesses that choose to locate on the outskirts of town, forcing them to reconsider closer-in locations. I'm sure it's economically more feasible right now for them to rent or buy on the fringes, but as more of their customers simply can't make the drive, perhaps that will change. One bright note is that our karate dojo, where we spend an awful lot of time these days, will be getting a direct bus route. They're building a big bus stop for the "EMX" (express) bus right in front of the dojo. That's good news because since they relocated last year they moved from a 3.5 mile easy bicycling trip for us to get to the dojo to an 11 mile difficult and much more hazardous ride.

As the kids get older, the old location would've been something they could've biked to themselves, largely on bike-friendly streets and bike paths. The new location involves riding through some of the most bike-unfriendly streets in our area. Sadly, though they put in a beautiful new bike bridge crossing the interstate (making the bike commute easier and safer), they chose to end the path in the back of a big shopping mall, along streets with tons of people zipping in and out of parking lots. So although we could get most of the way there on bikes, the last mile would be something I wouldn't want the kids to be navigating on bikes (the last time I rode down that road on my own bike, I was almost struck twice). So the bus will be a good alternative once the line is completed.

I do worry though because so much of our bus funding is tied to gas taxes. While that sounds like a terrific way to fund public transport, the reality is that when gas prices go up and people can afford to drive less (and some people can't afford to drive at all), the funding for public transportation takes a dramatic nosedive. The last time gas hit $4 a gallon here, they started cutting bus routes! Clearly, we need a different approach to funding public transport so that as we begin our transition from a 1-car-per-person approach to a conservation-minded approach, people have options.

Get Lit!

2009-10-20T22:26:00.000-07:00

One of these photos is a cyclist (me) with an adequate light for night riding. The other photo is approximately what the cyclist looked like that I almost ran into on my bike last night. Sheesh people, I'm all for cycling but buy a light for heck's sake! I mean, these days you can buy a $1 LED keychain light that's brighter than my first cycling lights and duct-tape it to your handlebars!

When I started out commuting by bike (in college), I had an old-fashioned dynamo generator light on my sweet red single-speed Schwinn 40 pound fat-tired cruiser (can you tell I wish I'd never sold that bike??). The light caused a heck of a lot of friction while engaged, and put out a fairly feeble amount of light, but that was more or less what was available in those good ol' days.

Next, I moved on up while bike commuting to Microsoft. Since part of my 22 mile RT commute was on an unlighted powerline trail, I needed an optimum bike and lighting system. I upgraded my ride to a Specialized Rockhopper and my light to one of the new Niteriders, which came with this heavy duty battery that fit in your water bottle cage. It was cumbersome and I had to haul it in from the garage to plug it in every night, but it put out some good wattage and stood up to Seattle's rainy climate for years.

Now of course with the miracle that LEDS bring to our lives (let's all take a moment and truly appreciate the genius that is an LED folks), my bike light takes two rechargeable double-A batteries that last FOREVER. I can't remember the last time I had to recharge them, come to think of it. It fits in the palm of my hand, weighs a few ounces, and puts out a great beam (see photo above). The blinky on the back, also armed with LEDS and rechargeable batteries can probably be seen by sattelites orbiting the earth.

All of this to say, if you're out there and you're riding without a light, you're endangering yourself and everyone around you, and there really is NO EXCUSE. No cumbersome dynamo, no expensive gadget-laden professional lighting system, all you need is an el-cheapo LED and BINGO you're visible!

Myself, being the bike geek that I am, I really want some of THESE. They have internal micro-generators so they don't need any batteries and recharge themselves fully after 30 seconds of pedaling.
Made by DOSUN, I'm eagerly awaiting seeing them in stores.

Cool Product: Bamboo Clothespins

2009-10-16T09:40:00.000-07:00

One thing my son inherited from me is a distaste for the feel of unfinished wood. I don't know how to explain it, other than that feeling unfinished wood gives me that fingernails-on-chalkboard feeling. I remember as a kid that one thing I hated about cooking was touching the wooden spoons or the cutting boards. Fortunately, they know make plastic stirring spoons and cutting boards. However, when it comes to clothespins, plastic is vastly inferior as we discovered.

I've been looking for a clothespin that isn't rough wood but the plastic ones just don't seem to grip well, plus after one season of being out in the sun they are cracking and falling apart. Bamboo clothespins to the rescue! Whitney Designs makes a nice bamboo clothespin that's exactly the same size and gripping strength as our regular wood clothespins. Better yet, they're environmentally friendly and smooth to the touch.

No Time For Talking, Just Doing

2009-10-07T22:32:00.000-07:00

There's probably a nationwide trend right now among the farming/urban gardening blogs - a trend of silence. Maybe other folks can keep up with the harvest and blog about it too, but I always find this time of year a little bit overwhelming. It makes you realize why harvest festivals like Halloween were such a big celebration over the centuries. When you're done getting in the fall veggies and all of the fruit is preserved and the apples and potatoes packed away in the root cellar, well I imagine that would be when you'd be ready to have a really big party and just relax! I've got at least 5 more days of good weather, and I'm going to try to make the best out of this fall harvest season while I can.

Talking to Strangers

2009-09-20T21:54:00.000-07:00

For awhile now our family has been signed up as hosts on the Warmshowers website, a place where touring cyclists can connect with families willing to host them. Some day, we hope to take off a-touring on the tandems again and maybe we'll get to experience the other side of the deal, staying with a local person or family somewhere on the road. But for now, we get to live vicariously by hosting touring cyclists and hearing a little bit about their journeys and plans. Since our town sits squarely on two major cycle touring routes (Canada to Mexico and coast to coast), we've gotten a fair number of emails from the warmshowers website. But because our town is also extremely cyclist-friendly, many of the cyclists end up having more than one host family to choose from here (isn't that cool? I love our town!).

In any case, last month we got to host two different coast-to-coast cyclists. One is an Englishman living in the Netherlands who according to his blog has now made it to Nebraska in the 35 days since he arrived here from the coast. And the other is Ryan, pictured above with his cool touring setup who is heading back to his home state of North Carolina. Along the way he is raising awareness and money for the Wounded Warrior Project. For people who love cycling as much as we do, it was both inspiring and a little jealousy-inducing to get to hear about all of his plans for his cross-country journey. More than anything, it has definitely nudged us toward making plans for more cycle touring next year with the kids. I've been following Ryan's blog as he makes his way across the country.
More than anything, I'm always grateful for an opportunity to connect with truly amazing people doing incredible things. If you watch the news, or even become inundated with the inevitable flashing ads and links as you try to connect to your email you might begin to think that the entire earth is populated with people like Jon and Kate feuding about whatever they feud about, or killers who stalk young women at Universities, or greedy executives trying to shoot down any possibility of health care coverage for everyone. It's always good to be reminded of the essential fact that there are many many good and wonderful people on this earth, all around us, even if we don't know them. And a simple website like Warmshowers that can connect one of these people seeking shelter for the night with another person who has shelter to offer shows us that our basic humanity is indeed where it should be and that we can continue to reach out to others and not shrink back into our own little shells.

When our first guest was going to arrive, the kids were a little nervous. Why were we inviting a stranger to stay in our home? But as they have gotten to know these adventurers, it's also been a great way to show them that "stranger danger" isn't always the best approach to life. Sometimes it IS good to talk to strangers, or even invite them in.

Thank Heavens For My Freezer

2009-09-09T21:40:00.001-07:00

This time of the year is NUTS. In centuries past, I'm sure folks just had the harvest to worry about (and it meant a lot more to them as well without the supermarkets a few blocks away). The original school year was designed so that kids were not going back to classes until after harvest time, but it seems that most school districts around the country keep creeping the back-to-school date ever earlier. It seems like that shouldn't matter to us homeschoolers (hey, I could be cracking the whip over my enslaved children and no one would even know! but shhhhhh... don't tell anyone) but it does because every other thing in the universe is tied to the school schedule - dance classes, robotics challenge, etc. all starts when the schools do. Sigh. What's a harvesting urban farmer to do?

Thank heavens for that big freezer we bought a few years ago. So far I've taken stuff and just thrown it into gallon bags in the freezer to be dealt with later. Wayne already dried an entire batch of our freestone plums in the food dryer, and I think I can pack away the apples in our cool basement until I'm ready to start making applesauce in earnest.

The other day I noticed an entire hazelnut orchard lying fallow with nuts falling everywhere, so now I'm wondering if I can squeeze some hazelnut gleaning time in this week. The photo above is all stuff I picked in one afternoon from the garden. NUTS I tell you! Nuts is what I'll be in another couple of weeks.

Your Tax Dollars At Work

2009-09-06T09:11:00.000-07:00

From the Connecticut State Legislature. I'd like to think I'd see something different in my own state's House while they're voting on a budget bill (for Pete's sake!) but given what comes out in the budgets, maybe not.....

see more Fail Blog

Nature's Cruel Joke

2009-09-01T23:16:00.001-07:00

Out the bedroom window at night, the crickets sing the melancholy song of summer's ending. We spent our last lazy afternoon at the pool today, and will leave for possibly the last camping trip tomorrow. Just as the warm weather lingers and you want to be out grasping every last bit of summer's glory, your garden goes nuts and there's picking and preserving to be done.

A week or so ago, we were going plum crazy, with our yellow plum tree laden with little golden beauties. They aren't freestones so they don't dry well, just good for eating and jam. Fortunately my mom was visiting and helped me can some plum jam for the winter. Now the purple plum tree is bending down and I need to get picking those because we can dry those in the food dehydrator for wintertime snacking.

The Tomato Forest has been busy, I've picked 50 lbs of tomatoes so far and there's no stopping it. Fortunately, we have freezer space so I'm just throwing them all into gallon freezer bags and I will deal with them later when it's drizzly and yukky outside and I can stand to be in the kitchen all day. These variegated heirloom beauties were too gorgeous to make into a sauce though, so they became part of this 20-mile breakfast.

Everything on the plate comes from less than 20 miles away. Chard and tomatoes from garden, eggs from chickens, goat's milk from our local connection, feta cheese from the farmer's market, and sausage from a locally and humanely raised pig. Beautiful, sustainable, and YUM. P.S. I've eaten so much chard I think my eyes are turning green!

The Partying Onions Unmasked

2009-08-29T22:56:00.001-07:00

Hey, so remember those funny little flowering "onions" that looked like they were wearing party hats, that I posted about before? I accidentally dug one up the other day and found at the bottome of all of that stem and flower was really a big ol' bulb of extremely tasty garlic! So the "onions" have been unmasked as the marauding garlic that they really are. Which is cool because I love garlic and we have these things all over the place. I just cooked some up with some of the last of our pork chops and a ton of peppers sauteed with some wine and olive oil... yummmmm....

On the docket for this week: making pesto with some fresh basil from a friend.

Keeping Our Local Businesses Around

2009-08-26T23:17:00.001-07:00

I've been meaning to pass on this link to the 3/50 Project for awhile. It's a very simple concept - just remembering to patronize our local businesses, keep them around, and keep our money helping out our local economies. What businesses in your area could you not live without?

For me, it's our little corner grocery store/cafe, our great local bike stores, and the local bookstore down the road that stocks stuff you don't see on the endcaps in Borders. A couple of years ago we lost our awesome local video store. We could walk down there in the evening and the folks that worked there knew every movie ever made. You could ask them "Hey, you remember that movie, the one that had Edward Norton and that other guy ...you know, the one who played Capote...and Norton talks to himself in a mirror?" and they'd pull out 25th Hour and that would be the movie you were thinking of. Well, it's gone because I guess too many folks went to Hollywood video so now that's all we've got left around here.

So if you don't want your favorite coffee shop or bookstore or whatever going the way of my video store, make sure you go there, even to buy a bagel or a paperback every now and then.

Have Bike, Will Travel (With Pig)

2009-08-15T23:19:00.000-07:00

Asa was over at a friend's house yesterday and was going to stay for a sleepover. She called to ask if I could bring over a sleeping bag and her toothbrush and pajamas. Sure, no problem. Slip the clothes and toothbrush into my bike bag and bungee-cord the sleeping bag on top.

I was ready to head up the driveway when the request came to add the pig. Arnold the Snoring Pig to be exact. Unzip the pannier, stuff the pig in one (fortunately not snoring), and away I was going when...

Another call, they needed cookie sheets for making pizzas, could I bring some over? Sure. Unzip the other pannier and slide the cookie sheets in. Ring, ring...could I bring two pillows and a birthday present in a bag? A towel because they're having a squirt gun fight too. And maybe some dry clothes...I'm starting to wonder if I should just give up and take the car. After all, I have two errands to run on the way over and I'm starting to look like I'm taking a world tour instead of a cross-town trip.

But I didn't have to, it all fit and barely. A few bungee cords go a long way, as well as those convenient zip-out panniers. When I got everything unloaded and kissed the wet daughter and wrapped her in the towel, I turned and headed for home with a much lighter bike.

Oh Give Me A Home, Where the Bicyclists Roam...

2009-08-06T22:19:00.000-07:00

We just got back from our Washington trip yesterday (more on that later), but one thing I did while we were visiting my sis and BIL in Bellevue was to take a little bike ride down memory lane. At least it would've been down memory lane if anything there looked even vaguely like I remembered it.

Of course, I didn't expect Redmond to look like my first memories of the place. In 1988 when I arrived at the Microsoft campus on my first day of work (OMG, could that really have been 21 years ago this month?????), there were four buildings. Yep, four. Surrounded by a whole lot of trees (that's number four with the red arrow on the map above, now buried in the middle of the campus). Across the street was this place with a shingle hanging outside that said "Little Bit O' Heaven", you could go there and fish in a creek that they stocked with trout. No kidding! Bill Gates had a party for all of the new hires that month at his house, in his living room. It was a small place, back then. Fast forward to now, as I'm bicycling through the campus I see signs for Building 127. Holy Cow.

But the good news is that City of Redmond has been adding some bike commuting options lately (or should I say finally). Part of my ride was along the new commuter bike path that parallels Hwy 520, connecting Redmond to the Microsoft campus. When I used to commute by bike, I had to take a circuitous route through town, risking my life daily on streets with no bike lanes, hostile drivers, and big tire-eating grates, so it was no wonder that even on Bike to Work Day, I never saw another bike commuter on my journey. Now though with the addition of the bike path, bike commuters were fairly numerous on my evening ride, which is great news for this traffic-overloaded area in general, and I think in general illustrates the principle of "build it and they will come" when it comes to creating safe commuting options for cyclists.

On the minus side of the equation, the city is still extremely lacking in actual bike lanes on any surface streets, so once you leave the relative safety of the bike path, you're stuck fighting for sidewalk space with the pedestrians, or lane space with the aggressive rush-hour drivers. So clearly what's needed for real encouragement of the average bike commuter is not only to build paths but to connect them with work/shopping/home via bike lanes on major through streets. It's good to see Redmond taking a first step toward bike connectivity, but when the freeway is topped by large signs promising four new freeway lanes to the tune of $86.1 million dollars, it would be nice if even a fraction of that went toward greater bike connectivity. After all, building more freeway lanes won't reduce traffic, but building bike paths does.

Tomato Forest

2009-07-27T14:13:00.000-07:00

We haven't planted tomatoes in the garden this year. No, we've planted a veritable tomato forest. We had the idea that since we use a lot of tomato sauce throughout the year, it would be a good idea to just plant bunches of tomatoes and then can a whole ton of sauce, pasta sauce, salsa, etc.

It sounded like a good idea at the time.

Now, looking at the tomato forest, I have to admit I'm a bit daunted by the entire prospect. I've talked with a couple of friends about having "Food Preservation Fridays". As soon as harvesting time starts, maybe we'll have all of the kids over to play in the back yard with the sprinkler and trampoline and us moms can go down to the basement kitchen where its cool and just take turns canning like crazy. It sounds like a lot more fun than trying to do it all myself, while running the three-ring circus of kids, pets, and household stuff. That's the idea anyway, I'll let you know how it works out once the forest starts bearing fruit.

AAA To Extend Roadside Assistance to Cyclists in Oregon

2009-07-15T22:57:00.000-07:00

Our local newspaper carried this story a few days back, about how AAA will now be extending its Roadside Assistance services to members on bikes. I think this is really exciting news and I'm going to optimistically take it as more evidence of that bicycle tipping point thing I was mentioning recently. As AAA members, our family is ecstatic to know that if we're out on our bikes somewhere on a back road and we get a mechanical problem that we can't fix, we can call up AAA and get a ride home. This is especially invaluable when we've got the kids on the tandems, a situation that's much more difficult than just being a lone stranded cyclist (especially when the kiddos get tired, or hungry, or you really don't feel like flagging down just anyone to give you a lift back with the kids along.)

To be honest though, I was really disappointed to read the responses from local cyclists that they printed along within the article. I'm going to hope that these comments were taken out of context or something, but I think sometimes people get so focused on narrow goals (stop everyone from driving cars, protect the environment) that they can lose sight of the fact that we (as in the human race) rarely do anything in one giant leap. Even that famous leap for mankind on the moon was preceded by unmanned flights, flights that orbited earth, and many many other smaller steps. So yeah, if a cyclist gets stranded it doesn't make much environmental sense to send a big diesel towtruck out to rescue them. But what if the very presence of that diesel towtruck means that 500 more people feel comfortable enough to get out on their bicycles, knowing that if they DO break down by the side of the road they will have assistance? And what if those 500 people are part of a tipping process that then snowballs into their friends and their co-workers and their relatives feeling like the roads are safe enough now to cycle on? Then the presence of that towtruck and its gallon or two of gas might just start to seem kind of trivial.

I said as much in a letter to the editor that was published. I had to hack it down to 250 words to meet the guidelines for print, but here it is in its entirety:

As an avid cyclist and AAA member, I was extremely happy to hear that AAA will now be extending its services to cyclists. I was disappointed though to read the lukewarm response from area cyclists quoted in the article. If we truly want cycling to move out of the arena of the specialist hardcore commuters and road racers, then regular people need to feel comfortable getting out on their bikes. Having to know how to fix their own broken spokes or a frayed brake cable while stranded at the side of the road could be an obstacle to many new would-be cyclists. After all, car drivers don’t need to know how to mend a fan belt with duct tape from their fanny pack, they simply call a tow truck and get their car to a garage. Extending the same kind of service to cyclists could bring many new riders to Oregon’s roads.

I can especially see the availability of AAA as a boon to cycle touring, a form of eco-friendly travel that Oregon businesses and Chambers of Commerce are working to promote in our area. Perhaps some cyclists have never biked past the point that a simple phone call home was enough to get a ride back, but I can tell you that when something goes wrong with your bike a hundred or a thousand miles from home and you’ve got a couple of tired and hungry kids on the backs of your touring tandems and all your gear in a trailer behind you, the AAA truck (big diesel or not) would be a very welcome sight.

Between our road bikes, triathlon bikes, commuting bikes, kids’ bikes and tandems, our family puts on more than a few two-wheeled miles on Oregon’s roads. We’ll be grateful to have AAA’s assistance should we ever need it. Anything that promotes cycling is AAA-OK in my book. So hats off to AAA for jumping in to support Oregon’s cyclists.

Tipping Points

2009-07-10T22:57:00.000-07:00

I just finished reading The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell. Ironically, the book has been out since 2002 and I've had a couple of people recommend it to me over the years, but in the last few weeks several people have said I should read it. I guess I hit a tipping point of friend recommendations and so I went and checked it out from the library.

The book itself is excellent reading, and covers a wide variety of subjects from fashion trends to crimewaves to cigarette addiction. For anyone interested in taking sustainable actions and helping them to become trends in the general populace, I think The Tipping Point has a lot to say as well. As you know, I've posted updates occasionally here on the number of cyclists that I see on my evening commute. Well, I seem to have reached some sort of tipping point there because the other night there were simply too many to count. Just as one was zooming by in one direction, another was passing or going by in another. I had to think "did I already count the lady in the red hat?" and when it gets to that point really, what's the point of counting? I lost it somewhere after 65, which I think means the number of cyclists in my commute has gone from "a few" to "a lot" to "too numerous to count individuals". In other words, it's a trend that has tipped.

It seems as if the initial spike in gas prices (you all remember when gas was over $4 a gallon, right?) set the trend in motion, and it was given a boost by the economic crisis. Once there is a critical mass of cyclists on the road, then people who might otherwise feel it's "too dangerous" to cycle begin to feel that it's a safe and reasonable thing to do. Or perhaps they see another parent toting their kids, or another businessman in a suit, or another person who is older than they are riding a bicycle and they realize that they can do it too. Whatever the numerous causes, at least in my town it has tipped and there are cyclists zipping here, there, and everywhere. I think the urban gardens are approaching that tipping point here as well. Last summer I had a few to choose from to take photos of for this blog, and now they're simply everywhere - in front of expensive homes and apartment blocks and duplexes, at least in my end of town. Now when the truly suburban lawns start getting torn up in subdivisions with CC&Rs, then I'll say for sure that urban gardening has truly tipped.

In the meanwhile, if you're already tired of your fluffy summer reads, let me be one of perhaps the many friends who will recommend that you read The Tipping Point.

The Chard That Ate New York and the Onions in Party Hats

2009-07-01T23:56:00.000-07:00

It's that time of year, when the garden just explodes with produce. Our rainbow chard plants are approaching four feet tall! As you can see here, just eight gigantic leaves supplied our family's veggie needs for dinner and weighed almost two pounds. I remember when we moved here our neighbors grew these amazing plants like this and I wondered how they did it. The first few years my chards and spinaches were just puny little things, but little by little as I mulched more and composted more and learned about cover crops and all of that stuff, our yields have gotten better and better and now it is I that has The Chard That Ate New York (cue corny B-movie music...)

To celebrate our bounteous harvest, our flowering onions have all decided to put on party hats for the occasion. It just cracked me up to see them all wearing their cute little hats. I have to admit that as proficient as I have become at growing chard, I'm still pretty clueless about the onions. They keep cropping up, and I keep not knowing what to do with them and when to harvest them. One of these days I'll figure that out too. The great thing about gardening is that you can really just keep muddling along and as you gain experience things just fall into place a little at a time. For now, the onions have gone to seed and are just sitting there looking festive. By next year, they may be gracing our hamburgers.

One more thing to celebrate this week is Food Independence Day, where we can show our patriotism by eating locally sourced meats, fruits, grains, and veggies. I know that our 4th of July steaks grew up eating the grass of our own valley, and that the lettuce on our burgers comes from 10 yards away. What better way to remain independent than to support our local farmers, ranchers, butchers, dairy farmers, and markets, eating American food!

Front Yard Gardens Explode All Over Town

2009-06-24T23:31:00.000-07:00

Our town is just bursting with gardens, many of them new conversions of yards and previously unused strips of bare land. It's inspiring to see the many ways people have found to grow their veggies in their landscaping. I'm seeing gardens in front of rentals, duplexes, and apartment buildings too. Here's just a few photos to inspire!

These curbside veggie boxes are already bursting with salad makings:

Growing your own food is both patriotic AND stylish in this flag-bearing garden with nice block walls:

These duplex-dwellers aren't missing out on the opportunity to grow some veggies on their lawn:

An eclectic garden full of onions, borage, and greens, mulched with straw paths:

And this beauty, nicely landscaped with flowers, paths, and a raised veggie bed in the middle of what was probably once a boring old lawn:

Couldn't Have Said It Better

2009-06-03T12:20:00.000-07:00

It's very seldom that I wholeheartedly agree with Michael Moore. Sensationalist journalism of any kind sort of makes me grit my teeth, and I've only gotten a few pages into a couple of his books before turning them face down. He has some potent stuff to say, but the hype it's wrapped up in generally makes it unpalatable to me.

That being said, I agree 100% with everything he says in this article about shutting down GM. Doesn't it just make you see red that Japan and Europe have terrific high speed rail (and have for decades) and we have.... NOTHING. This fall, we got on a Eurostar bullet train in Florence and arrived in Rome less than 2 hours later, traveling in comfort and style, completely on time and for a very reasonable price. The fact that we can't do that here in "technologically advanced" America simply boggles the mind. Boggles it completely.

I'm forwarding this to my congressman, my president, my mayor, my neighbor, what the heck. We need to demand that OUR money is invested in ways that will bring US a better future with real transportation options for everyone.

Words of Wisdom

2009-06-02T09:40:00.000-07:00

We are continually faced with a series of great opportunities brilliantly disguised as insoluble problems.
- John W. Gardner

I thought of this quote as I biked to work last night. My bike count reached a new all-time high of 64. Basically, in any direction that I looked, I saw cyclists. Some of them parents toting kids on tag-a-longs or trailers, some of them workers returning home with messenger bags and ties, some college students, some kids on BMX bikes, but everywhere bicycles going this way and that.

To my left and right, new front and side-lawn gardens were popping up right and left. I'll try and add some photos soon of all the new creative food-growing landscaping I'm seeing. Clotheslines (or "solar clothes dryers" as right-to-dry activists are now creatively calling them) are flapping in the breeze, and neighbors sit on newly constructed front porches or stand by their garden fence talking. All of these people in ways small and large are taking the insoluble problems we now face and turning them into challenges to be met. Sure, it's a challenge to hang out your clothes when you could just throw them into the dryer in 1/8 of the time (though I would argue that the smell of line-dried laundry more than makes up for that one!) or to get out your helmet and rain jacket and bike off to work. The great thing is that almost everything that benefits the planet really benefits us even more. We get more exercise, more fresh air, we eat better, we know more of our neighbors when we engage in sustainable living. We're not saving the earth, we're saving ourselves.

Blast From the Solar Past

2009-05-26T09:53:00.000-07:00

Just thought I'd share this little gem. It's a poster I made in 1978 when I was twelve, apparently for a contest sponsored by our local utility company. This was in the wake of Jimmy Carter's speech of 1977 in which he announced his intent to begin a wave of solar energy, including a goal to "use solar energy in more than two and one-half million houses." Ah, we were so enthusiastically naive back then, believing that this was the road we'd be traveling down - a path toward a future of renewable energy. Carter laid it all out in that speech, which is well worth reading in its entirety. Conservation, reductions in consumption, strategic oil reserves, reduction in dependence on foreign oil. But less than a few years later it was all derailed with the disastrous consequences we're seeing today.

We have a new chance to take a walk down this path toward sustainability. Will our leaders hold the course this time? I hope our own children's posters and dreams have a better chance of coming true.

Ride of Silence Reminder

2009-05-19T00:10:00.001-07:00

Just a reminder that the annual Ride of Silence is this Wednesday all across the U.S. and in many other countries as well. You can find rides in your area at: http://www.rideofsilence.org/

DATE: May 20, 2009
TIME: 7:00 pm
WHERE: Hundreds of locations world wide
Join cyclists worldwide in a silent slow-paced ride (max. 12 mph/20 kph) in honor of those who have been injured or killed while cycling on public roadways.

All Time High Bike Count

2009-05-18T23:13:00.000-07:00

When I biked in to work tonight I passed 60 cyclists in 2.5 miles, or a bit over 2 per block. That's a new record for my unofficial commuter bike count at 5:15 on Monday evenings. The warm weather is partially responsible, but I noticed that even on rainer darker evenings this spring there were more commuter cyclists than in previous years. With so many cyclists on the road, it actually makes it safer for all of us, since cars have to be aware of the bikes and vice versa. It's so cool to wait at a traffic light with 2, 3, 4, or more other cyclists.

In other news, I've been meaning to post updates on gardening, cycling, and our new sunroom, our new chickens, etc. forever but life is so crazy right now! Between the new dog, the new chickens, building the sunroom, the cat that became partially paralyzed last week, the other cat that had some kind of bad reaction (to poison oak maybe?) it's just been nuts around here. I'm posting way late at night, but most nights I'm just too darned tired.

In any case, this news was too good to pass up on passing on. Envision a future with more and more bikes!

Wow, A Politician Says The Magic Words

2009-05-04T13:05:00.001-07:00

Check this out, Oregon Governor Kulongoski says the magic words - we must reduce consumption. These are words guaranteed to make any politician unpopular in these tough economic times, especially in a state where the unemployment rate is 2nd worse in the entire nation.

Kudos to Governor Ted for speaking out. Even if I don't always agree with all of his politics, these are things that need to be said. Every parent knows that we can't always say the things that make our kids happy. Sometimes we have to be the bearers of bad news: no, you can't buy that, you don't have any allowance money left. No, I'm not going to give you more money just because you already spent yours. Well guess what, us earthlings have used up our earth allowance of consumables, and we shouldn't be borrowing more from our future and our children's futures. Those in positions of power and responsibility need to be like the good but tough parents, saying the hard things and helping people wake up and take responsibility for living within our energy means.

Swine Flu: As If We Needed One More Reason To Buy Local & Organic

2009-05-03T23:17:00.000-07:00

As if there weren't enough reasons to buy local, humanely-raised, sustainably-farmed, locally-butchered organic meats, now there's the swine flu. Evolved from a strain that emerged in 1998 on factory farms in the U.S. and forged in the pathetic conditions of over-crowded, immune-stressed hogs shipped across the country from farm to slaughterhouse, we now have a highly-transmissable and dangerous flu jumping to humans.

For more reading on this subject, Wired Science has an article about the evolution of the latest swine flu from its 1998 origins, and the Humane Society's Factory Farming Campaign has more information as well.

What can we do to prevent future outbreaks? Either don't eat meat, or refuse to eat factory-farmed meat. Seek out local sources for meat, milk, and eggs. Look your food and food-producers in the eye and see the conditions in which they live. What's good for them is good for us. Remember that being green isn't just about saving the Earth, it's about saving us humans on it too.

Toasting Earth Day in an Earth Day Mug?

2009-04-22T07:04:00.000-07:00

Searching for "Earth Day Merchandise" brought up thousands of commercial hits on Google: t-shirts, hats, mugs, etc. Some of this is arguably for the better - if you replace your throwaway cup with a mug you bring to your favorite coffee shop each and every time, you will undoubtably be helping the planet. Americans throw away a staggering 25,000,000,000 Styrofoam cups every ear. Even 500 years from now, a foam coffee cup used this morning will be sitting in a landfill somewhere. And Earth Day cloth bags, if used regularly, will keep tons of plastic or paper bags out of our resource use and waste stream. But a lot of the Earth Day merchandise is simply more stuff we don't need (and don't need to manufacture, ship, advertise, etc.), and it promotes the idea that for any occasion we should be buying stuff. The folks at the Huffington Post have a great article about Earth Day Marketing to kids. Check it out!

Our Garden Featured on Local TV News

2009-04-21T09:59:00.001-07:00

After the People magazine article came out, our local news station came and did a piece about it. I think they did a really nice job. It's great to see lawns-to-gardens getting so much coverage! Although I don't consider myself any kind of gardening expert in any way, it's nice to think that our experience might somehow inspire others to also give it a try.

I especially love the first line: "A Eugene family is featured in this week's People Magazine, not for red carpet fashion or celebrity scandal, but for their vegetable garden." Here's the link to the story.

Dealing With Chicken Butts

2009-04-14T23:30:00.000-07:00

Hah, I got a kick out of John K's post about Chick Butts over on The Outdoor Journey. I simply love his blog because there's so few people out there who combine my love of triathlon with a nerd's eye to the nitty-gritty science of sports, along with urban gardening and urban sustainability.

I was sure I had a post about chick butts somewhere here on my own blog, and I found it, from May of 2006. Fortunately, we've somehow been doing something right with the last couple of batches of chicks because none of them have pasted up like the first batch. We don't get our chicks from mail order, and maybe that helps with the whole issue. I also make sure to really change out their water so that they all drink a lot, and we feed them chick starter instead of the layer pellets that the mature hens are eating. Whatever it is, it seems to be working since I haven't wiped a chick bottom in a couple of years.

Our newest couple of chicks are getting along towards full-grown and we're about to move their outdoor pen into the bigger chicken enclosure to start getting them used to the full-grown hens and vice versa.

Gardening Article Not Online (Yet?)

2009-04-13T14:37:00.001-07:00

For those who have asked, I haven't been able to find the gardening article online at People magazine's website. Maybe it's just not up yet, but the site is different from the magazine by a fair bit.

Urban Gardening in People Magazine

2009-04-11T23:05:00.000-07:00

Yes, it's officially hit the big mainstream, People magazine has an article on urban gardens, showcasing folks who have turned their lawns into veggie gardens and of course including Michelle Obama's new garden on the Whitehouse lawn. It's very exciting to see this trend not just in the latest issue of Permaculture Magazine but somewhere that it has the potential to be seen by (and influence) millions more mainstream Americans that might not otherwise be thinking about urban gardening.

And of course, I might just be mentioning this because our raised beds and my two cute kiddos are in the article! On newstands everywhere, today... the Blue Skies Urban Farm (no kidding, April Fool's Day is long past). Even one of our chickens, in People magazine, rubbing feathers with the celebs.

Earth Hour: Candle in the Wind???

2009-04-01T22:30:00.000-07:00

I remember my first experience with Earth Day, in the early 1980s, only a decade after its inception. Although Ronald Reagan was president, and James Watt, the U.S. Secretary of the Interior, was busy selling off public lands to private corporations and decreasing funding for environmental programs, there was still an atmosphere of hopefulness about those earlier Earth Days. Many people knew the problems that were emerging from energy use and overconsumption of resources, but we still had plenty of time to raise awareness and turn things around. Earth Day was a symbol of that hope and change.

Fast-forward to 2009 and the time for symbols is long past. The iceberg is in sight and we're desperately trying to slew the Titanic into a 180 degree turn, but it ain't happening and there aren't enough lifeboats. Gentleman, don your tuxedoes and be prepared to play chamber music...

So shoot me, my family didn't celebrate Earth Hour. We didn't turn out light switches off, only to burn candles or oil lamps for our light instead. I know it's supposed to be symbolic and all that, but even the symbolism is flawed. After all, that candle still consumes resources. It was made somewhere, shipped in a truck, people undoubtably drove to stores to buy them especially for Earth hour. Call me jaded and cynical, but I just can't buy into it anymore.

Instead, I did something thoroughly constructive - watched Daniel Craig in the latest 007 flick. After biking home from work. After eating a mostly locally grown meal. After bringing my laundry in from the line. I think the time has come to reach beyond the symbolism, beyond the notion that simply doing something for an hour makes a difference. It's time to turn most of those lights off every night. Does every office building and soccer field really need those lights burning? It's time to look for every possible way to save energy so that our big power plants can really start powering down (they weren't even affected by Earth Hour)

It's time to make every hour Earth Hour. Either that, or rosin up your bow.

Worm Heaven

2009-03-28T13:46:00.000-07:00

The weather has been extremely dicey for the last few weeks, making it difficult to get the gardening started. The last two days cleared up enough for me to get out there and start clearing away the leaf mulch. The good news is that mulching deeply with the leaves turned our garden plot into an earthworm factory! Those leaves were full of worms, and what looked to my untrained eye like a ton of earthworm eggs. They look like red wrigglers, the same time of worms used in vermiculture (otherwise known as worm composting).

I have been letting the baby chickens come into the garden plot with me, since it gets them outside and they're still too small to go in with the big chickens yet. They're having a good time learning to scratch, and eating small weeds and bugs. Thankfully they aren't big enough to eat my nice composting worms yet, so I'm fine with them roaming around the garden with me.

A couple of years ago, we removed a pile of gravel from near our current garden plot only to find the biggest earthworms I'd ever seen under there. They were easily a foot long, and though they don't come anywhere near approaching the size of the possibly-extinct Oregon Giant Earthworm, they were huge enough to impress the heck out of the kids and adults alike. I am always happy to have a thriving earthworm population in and near my garden, and though it drives me husband nuts when he goes running with me I have been known to save them from the pavement in rainstorms or when they get dried out and dehydrated in the summer. On a recent jog together, he had to give me a cutoff point of worm saving, since a recent rain had brought up so many of them that my rescue efforts were slowing us to...well... a worm's pace.

Still, it's hard to ignore the value of these lowly creatures. Charles Darwin once measured the quantity of worm castings produced in a year in a field near his home, and found an astonishing eighteen tons per acre. Now don't ask me exactly how he did that (the measuring part), but it's a testament to the productive helpfulness of worms for us gardeners. Darwin studied worms for almost 40 years and helped bring them to light as garden allies instead of the pests they had been assumed to be.

And if you don't think worms can get really cool, check out Australia's Giant Blue Earthworm. Up to six feet long, with luminescent mucin, and very very bright blue, worms just don't get much cooler than this.

Peeping Around the Corner to Spring

2009-03-17T12:05:00.000-07:00

We're all loving the return of daylight savings time here, more hours in the evening to be outside. The weather has been stormy/rainy/windy/hail/sleet/cold though so I have to admit I've gotten absolutely nothing done in the garden. Somehow I'm just not motivated to go out in all of that!

Our little peepers are growing like weeds, and our older lady hens are starting to ramp up egg production again. It's easy to see why both pagan and religious holidays tend to center around the spring equinox with everything budding, blooming, growing, and being born.

Around Casa Blue Skies, Wayne has become King DIY. He has added to his homemade bread-baking repertoir with brewing beer and this week he started some kombucha. I've been making yogurt, and just got the supplies to make hummous (a family staple) out of the dried local transitional organic garbanzo beans I bought last fall. Making that at home would save us money and save the environment from all those little plastic containers.

The economic woes still feel like the sword of Damocles (which has given us a couple of good pokes but hasn't fallen yet), but so far we're just trying to ignore that and focus on the things we can be doing, moving forward.

Jeepers, Where'd You Get Those Peepers??

2009-03-05T19:58:00.000-08:00

So my hubby likes to think he's really the harcore parent, the tough guy, the got-it-all-under-control dude. But every now and then something happens that shows the real softie that's lurking underneath that tough exterior. Such as going to the feed and seed store with Asa the other day to get some chicken food. Of course, it's Cute Little Fluffy Peeping Chick season at the Feed-n-Seed in March, so Asa loves to go in and look at the little fluffballs. But this time there was only one lonely chick left in the place. One terribly lonely chick. Peeping its little heart out in its sad sad state. So of course, being the animal lover that she is, she couldn't just leave it there. And hubby, being the softie that he really truly is, couldn't let that happen either. So home came the chick and out came the heat lamp, the watering dish, and the small cage. Meet Gloria Peeper, the not-so-lonely chick.
But the problem with getting one little chick is that it was still terribly lonely. It stopped its plaintive peeping only when Asa was sitting right next to the cage talking to it. She lobbied to sleep in the garage next to the cage, but we finally hit on the idea of putting the cage out in the chicken coop where Gloria could hear and see the big chickens. This seemed to comfort her immensely and she finally calmed down. Still, it's not a good idea to try to introduce one new chicken into an established flock, not to mention the fact that big brother Mackenzie was now lobbying for a spring chick of his own so on Wednesday we went off to the Feed-n-Seed again (knowing that Wednesday is when they get the shipment of new chicks in).

So meet Shadow, Mackenzie new baby. She's much smaller than Gloria since she was born a week later, but they seem to have hit it off and are snuggling up together under the heat lamp. All is well at the Blue Skies Ranch, and although we didn't mean to add any new chicks to the flock this year, everyone is enjoying having the spring chicks around. Shadow is mellow and quiet, likely to go to sleep in your hands. She'll be an all-black chicken. We believe that Gloria is a Delaware, so she should turn out white with some barred markings, but we won't know for sure until she gets bigger since it was a mixed bunch in there and she was the only one left.

REALLY Know Your Farmer

2009-03-02T08:51:00.001-08:00

For the last couple of years, we've been getting goat's milk from a local couple who live in the farmland around town and keep a few goats. With our kids both allergic to cow's milk, and a belief that raw milk is much healthier than the pasteurized, homogenized stuff in grocery stores, we've been really grateful to have a weekly supply of fresh and tasty real milk straight from the goat!

Two weeks ago Asa asked if she could start learning how to milk the goats, so Wayne has taken her out to their farm on the last couple of Saturday mornings and she's been doing some milking. This Saturday they got one whole goat milked between the two of them. Wayne had a head start being as he worked on a cow dairy in his teenage years, but Asa has the advantage of being a quick learner and absolutely adoring every animal she meets.

I think it's awesome that they took the time to show her how to do this - talk about knowing where your food comes from! And also that in case they ever need to leave town, they've got one more backup milker they can call on to cover the goats. And Asa has a head start on the skills she'll need when she eventually lives on the farm/menagerie of her dreams that she's planning.

To me, it's one more reason to build those vital connections between the food on your table and the places it comes from - whether its your own garden, a CSA box from a local farm, going out to pick berries locally and chatting with the owners, or milking a goat. Making those connections brings our world a little closer, let's us understand the food web that we are a part of and how our actions relate to the availability of fresh and wholesome food. Also, it's nice to make new friends and bridge the gap between the towns we may live in and the countryside around us.

The Right To Dry

2009-02-24T10:10:00.000-08:00

Project Laundry List needs your help to bring the "Right To Dry" to Virginia. A bill has been introduced into the legislature: SB 1065 Wind energy drying devices; no community association shall prohibit an owner from installing, etc.. You can help promote the success of this bill at Changents.com by registering and becoming a backer of this bill.

New Life Arrives in a Packet

2009-02-21T23:41:00.000-08:00

When you're a kid, you anticipate Christmas by looking through toy catalogs and making your lists. I remember vividly sitting on the couch with my little sister dreaming of the Fisher-Price Castle set pictured on a catalog page. It had knights and princesses, king, queen, horses, carriage, a page with a smart green feather in his cap, and a dragon. A moat, a drawbridge, a dungeon. To our amazement, it arrived from Santa on Christmas morning, and we played with it for years (fighting over who got to play with that pink dragon every single time). Now my kids play with the set (and my son has surrendered the cool dragon permanently to my daughter for reasons of its pinkness).

For gardeners, the only thing that comes close to this childhood joy is The Seed Catalog, with its full-color pictures and promises of wonderful things in small bright packages. So with great joy I greeted the arrival of my seeds today. This year I bought them as a fundraiser for a friend's local charter school. What a great fundraiser - I got to buy something I need to support something that benefit's a neighbor's family. And the seeds were from Territorial Seed Company, a local favorite.

Being smarter than in years past, I first did an inventory of seeds left over from last year and only bought what I didn't already have. I am most excited about the new things I've never planted before. I want to set aside some space for an asparagus patch, and for rhubarb. I'm getting some cool UFO-like squashes in assorted colors, and rainbow chard instead of just plain chard. And of course we'll have all the old favorites - beans and peas, lettuces and sugar pie pumpkins. This year's garden project is to expand the front garden and add some cold-frames for more year-round gardening. Just like Christmas morning, I can't wait!

Join the Laundry Revolution

2009-02-08T00:16:00.000-08:00

Line-drying your laundry has hit the LA Times, with this article today about "right-to-dry activists and blogging eco-moms... forming an alliance" to make line-drying acceptable and legal everywhere. You can join the fray yourself at Laundrylist.org

I love that there is a catch-phrase for both "right-to-dry activists" and "eco-blogging moms". That means there's enough of us out there to generate some change in this world. And really change, at least in the realm of laundry, is fairly easy to come by. We could cut energy consumption in our country by 6% or more, simply with a string and a few wooden clothespins, or a drying rack or two. It's astonishing in its simplicity.

So go on, be subversive today: Hang your laundry!!!

Bike Commuters Hangin' On in the Cold

2009-02-03T10:17:00.000-08:00

My tally for last night was 28 commuters on my ride in to work at 5:15. That's about one per block, not bad for a week when temperatures are plunging into the low 20's (I know that's not cold for a lot of the country, but it is here!) and ice is hanging around on the shaded parts of the roads. I don't mind riding in the evening because most of the ice has melted from the roadways, but I didn't bike in when I had to work in the early morning the other day, it was way too frosty.

Book Review: You Are Here

2009-01-27T09:07:00.000-08:00

I wanted to take a moment to review a book I just read called You Are Here: Exposing the Vital Link Between What We Do and What That Does to Our Planet

I am of mixed feelings about this book. On the one hand, I think the message is a vital one. The author, Thomas M. Kostigen takes journeys to some of the most environmental fragile and ravaged places on the planet. He shows us directly the outcomes of our actions, the actions we take on a daily basis. It's depressing as all hell. If you want to feel like you should just drown yourself in your Yerba Mate', by all means pick up this book. I know the author means really really well, and his most urgent hope is that by reading this we will feel called to act. Unfortunately, he doesn't tie what he's seeing and experience to direct and very real things that each of us can do. He tries to, but this is where the book falls completely flat.

In some places, he makes sweeping pronouncements that most anyone who would buy this book probably already knows, like "We've yet to realize that the global village people have talked about is for so long is here. Now the question is, how do we all live together and make the best of it?"

In other places, he offers us vague and unachievable aims like "With an oil palm sustainability label on products, consumers could make informed choices about the products they eat and/or buy at the supermarket. It's these types of solutions that will make the difference" So, how exactly am I supposed to get such a label on products, how does that "expose the vital link" between my actions and the outcome (deforestation in Borneo due to palm oil plantations).

But my biggest beef with this book is the shoddy quality of the writing. God, are there no book editors left on this planet?

Check out this "paragraph" for an example:

From an environmental perspective, the past is the best measure of things to come. It always has been. Certain weather cycles exist as they have for centuries. Certain wind patterns occur at the same time each year. On a very basic level, the change of seasons informs us of temperature changes because we've experienced those seasons before. Think about the first time someone lived through winter. I bet the next year they buttoned up.

I dare you to give me the author's theme for that paragraph! What the heck is he trying to say? is something I asked myself frequently while reading this book. Sometimes I had to go back and read a paragraph over to make sense out of it.

Here's another example:

Still, exaggeration and alarmism are too frequent in environmental writings. Like everything, the conditions that plague Mumbai are complicated and consist of many factors, not just one or a few. We are, after all, talking about a society that has existed for five thousands years. But there are parallels and there are consequences, which are very real. We can take preventative steps -- even little ones count.

If not for the political slant of this book, I would wonder if it was ghost written by George W. Bush, so convoluted and confusticating is the prose. And after that last little homily about little steps counting, the author fails to name even one that we could take, to avoid whatever he's talking about in Mumbai. Instead, he jumps right on to another subject.

All in all, this book shows some interesting things. The author has taken bold steps to visit logging camps in Borneo or remote villages in Alaska that are sliding into the sea. But aside from making us all want to slit our wrists in depression, he accomplishes nothing whatsoever with this journey that he takes us on. What I would love to see is real actions tied to the horrific environmental catastrophes that he takes us to.

Bottom line: not recommended. Treehugging, spotted-owl-saving, recycling liberals will be depressed and non-liberals will just be confused.

A Day To Celebrate

2009-01-21T10:58:00.000-08:00

The buzz in the air was unmistakable, we ate a hurried breakfast and then walked down the street to our neighbor's house. She had baked coffee cake, my husband brought the french press down to make some more caffeine, and my friend next door had some yummy smelling banana bread. The younger kids played on the floor as we listened to the pre-speech festivities. Another neighbor rushed in breathlessly at 9:00 am to tell us that Obama was already president, since it was noon in D.C., even though he hadn't been sworn in yet. Tears and hugs, and then there it was - Obama saying the words and becoming the next president of the United States. Along with Aretha's hat and scat, Yo Yo Ma, and the touching image of Rev. Lowry seeing the completion of a dream he shared with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. not so many years ago.

Wow.

That called for an impromptu inaugural parade of our own, so with pots and pans and a joyful noise being made, we headed around the neighborhood, stopping at friend's houses and whooping it up.

Late that night I walked down to our neighborhood market and there was a veritable hugfest going on. People still in shock, still smiling from ear to ear. I gave and received a few more hugs for this awesome day. We all worked hard to make it so, and as President Obama didn't fail to point out, we have much more work to be done. For today though, we celebrate.

The Out-Of-Time Laundry Approach

2009-01-15T23:55:00.000-08:00

We're crazy-busy right now with our robotics team going to the State Championships this weekend in Hillsboro. I'm probably the crazy-busiest of all, given that I'm
A) The Mom
and
B) The Coach.

Poor Wayne just had hernia surgery, so he's not really able to be helpful in any meaningful sense, except for offering suggestions about things that I could be doing. And...um...that's not really helpful. So everything falls on me right now - dishes, food, sweeping, laundry, yadda yadda yadda. The nice thing about having kids this age is that they can pitch in a lot and really help out. There's nothing like being able to say "Could you please go clean the bathroom" and actually having it look clean afterwards (even the toilet!)

Laundry is perhaps the biggest time-killer, especially if you're trying to hang it all out to dry, especially in this damp and cold season when it can take a couple of days to do so. These are the times I'm especially tempted to just fall back on technology and fossil fuels and throw it all in the dryer for an hour or two of spinning heat. But I hit upon a solution that's a good compromise between this and laundry martyrdom. I run a load of laundry, then I take the heaviest slowest-to-dry items and put them in the dryer, but I don't run it yet. I get another load started in the washer and hang the quickest-to-dry items (like my polypro running gear) in the bathroom over the heater vent. The rest goes on the drying racks in the garage. I repeat this with load two and perhaps even a load three. By the time the last load is done, I have a full dryer and I run it with the heavy stuff. So I do use the dryer, but for one load out of three. My laundry work-time is cut at least by 30%, and that lands it in the "manageable" category. That's my out-of-time tip for the day.

Trash Talk

2009-01-12T07:47:00.000-08:00

I've been reading this book You Are Here, which I'll write a review of later this week. In each chapter, the author visits a different place on the planet, and ties it into our personal habits and practices. Right now I'm on the chapter on garbage. A quick search of the EPA website reveals this fact about Americans and garbage:

Municipal solid waste (MSW) generation in 2007 declined to 4.62 pounds per person per day. This is a decrease of 0.6 percent from 2006 to 2007. The recycling rate in 2007 was 1.54 pounds per person per day (an increase of 2.7 percent over 2006). Discards sent for combustion with energy recovery remained steady at 0.58 pounds per person per day. Discards sent to landfills after recycling and combustion with energy recovery declined to 2.50 pounds per person per day in 2007. This is a decrease of 2.7 percent from 2006 to 2007

They also noted that:

The tons recovered for composting rose to 21.7 million tons in 2007, up from 20.8 million tons in 2006.

This is all good news - Americans are recyliing more, decreasing the solid waste stream, composting more.

The scary fact really in that whole paragraph is that we still send 2.50 pounds of garbage per person per day to landfills, after composting, recycling, and trash taken out for combustion. 2.5 Pounds. Per person. Per day!!!

So I set out to discover this week how our family stacks up, so maybe we can find more ways to reduce our waste. This week I weighed every piece of compost, recycling, and garbage that went out of the house.

Here's what I found for our family of four for the week:

Garbage: 5.2 Pounds
Recycling: 7.5 pounds
Glass Recycling: 7 pounds
Compost and food scraps to chickens: 15 pounds

For our family, that brings it to

Garbage: .18 pounds per person per day
Combined recycling (glass and other): .5 pounds per person per day
Compost and chicken scraps: .53 pounds per person per day

Not bad compared to the national averages, but I know we can do better. For one thing, if we start making our own kombucha, a lot of that glass will go away because we currently buy it from the store in glass bottles.

Frankly, when I look at the amount of garbage and recycling that our household generates, it seems like a lot sitting there. I'm astonished that the national average is 13 times more garbage per person per day. That's really an incredibly huge mountain of trash per person. Surely we as a nation can do better than that.

So pass the word: weigh your garbage, start a compost bin, reduce the amount of stuff in packaging coming in to your house, recycle more. Let's see if we can get that number down, way down.

Eeeeewwww, You're Drinking Fermented FUNGUS??

2009-01-11T09:41:00.000-08:00

I've been scanning the internet this morning for instructions on brewing our own kombucha. I'd long heard about its probiotic properties and decided to try it for myself. Like many people I imagine, my first response was more or less "ick!". But it's an acquired taste and I guess I acquired it. Then I really got to like it. It's kind of like drinking a soda, but without the sweetness, and it's great for digestion and overall health.

Now of course Wayne and Mackenzie also became addicted to the stuff, so we're buying several expensive glass bottles of the stuff a week now. We especially like the Gingerberry flavor from Synergy. Time to make our own! I think I'm going to order this kombucha starter kit from The Happy Herbalist to get us started. You can't complain when your kids beg to drink something this healthy. Even if your daughter has been heard to say "Eeeeewwww, You're Drinking Fermented FUNGUS again???"

Some Great Reading

2009-01-06T09:13:00.000-08:00

Here's an excellent post on the No Impact Man blog about heating houses, sustainability, choices, and what it means to "Gaman" ("endure," or "tolerate") in Japanese culture.

Gardening Fashion Tips

2009-01-05T15:19:00.000-08:00

So I told my daughter to put on some clothes appropriate for gardening, and this is what she comes up with... in January mind you! Luckily it's not as cold outside as it has been, but I'm still not sure its miniskirt weather, let alone leopard-print miniskirt with cowboy boots weather.

You can rest assured that I was wearing jeans, a thick sweatshirt, and sensible Wellies!