How the intracontinental packing is going

People keep asking me how the packing is going. I confess, I haven’t been doing a lot. What I have been doing a lot of is finishing up work projects, working out logistics for the move (two families, 5 people – moving company booked, flights booked, hotel booked for arrival night, rental car booked, etc.) and looking for a place to live once we get to Eugene.

I’m also going through old files and getting rid of everything we can so that we have less to move across the country. Plus searching for jobs, enjoying the summer weather and spending time with the kiddos — I’m certainly not bored.

Looking through my old files that I have, for some reason, kept for the last 15+ years brings back old memories. Handwritten letters from my Dad that I cried while re-reading (and dried my eyes to e-mail the latest about our plans), old work contacts, pay stubs from my first full-time job as a journalist (I got a $0.65/hour raise. Woo hoo!).

It doesn’t bring back all the memories, though. Who was Ed Fink and why did I write him a check for $20 in the summer of 2000? And what did I spend all that money on at Target?

Those old checks go in the shredder. Along with piles of other papers.

My shredding policy is that anything that has my social security number, bank accounts, financial information or anything that could be used to steal my identity goes in the shredder. This creates reams of shredding. I am now on my second shredder, having burned out the first one. While I do recycle the paper, I’m not sure how environmentally friendly this practice is turning out to be.

My preferred double-top-secret identity protecting method is to then put the shredded paper in one of the compost bins behind the garage. Generally we have enough “green” compost matter to make adding some paper OK. But not enough for all that I’m generating at the moment. Plus I worry about the ink in the compost. My old checks “printed on recycled paper with soy-based inks” will be OK, but all the bank statements?

We did a lot of packing before we put the house on the market, but there’s definitely more to do. Plus we still have a bunch of furniture items to sell or give away. And then there’s that house to rent, job to find, school to enroll the kids in….*sigh* better get back to it. The shredder should have cooled down by now.

A plastic bag shortage

I’ve been working hard on doing the simple earth-friendly things — taking my own canvas bags to the store and composting our kitchen scraps.

At first, it was hard to get in the rhythm of taking my own bags to the store. Then I read about a challenge to not use any new plastic products for a week and, while that seemed too much for me right now, I did start re-using plastic produce bags. I admit, I do it on the sly, so that people don’t think I’m crazy. I’ve always disliked those flimsy produce bags that people take without thinking. Most of the time, I don’t bag my produce in plastic and, when Kevin shops and everything comes home plastic covered, I take it all out before I put it in the fridge (unless containing the vegetables makes sense, such as green beans).

Now, I have become quite accustomed to grabbing the reusable bags along with the shopping list before I leave the house. And I’ve found a lot of satisfaction in seeing a whole cart load of groceries finding their place in a half-dozen bags, rather than 20+ plastic grocery bags. You can fill resuable bags right up, making it easier to unload the car and get the groceries in the house. And then there are no crinkly bags to deal with. I’ve never liked the sound plastic bags make. It grates on me.

However, I have become so good at this that we are experiencing a dire shortage of plastic bags. We’ve been reusing them in the house for years — mostly as garbage bin liners, but also for cleaning the cat’s litter box and using as lightweight packing materials. I haven’t bought a box of garbage bags in years. But now, apparently, I need to, as we have no grocery bags left!

I’ve decided the thing to do here is not to get plastic grocery bags from the store. The thing to do is to find biodegradable plastic bags and buy those instead. I might have to do some hunting around.

So far, I’ve found BioBags which come in both 3-gallon and tall kitchen bag varieties. That would be great for lining the compost bin so I don’t have to trek out into the cold, snowy backyard every time it’s full. Now I just have to find a local store that carries them — perhaps when I go to pick up our winter shares from the CSA tomorrow or refill our supply of kiddie multivitamins.

Composting food = less methane in the atmosphere

I’m taking a course on Global Climate Change this semester (one more week to go!). It’s been eye opening in some ways, depressing in many ways and all around confirms so many things I’ve known for what seems like my entire life.

By confirmation, I mean that the things I’ve taken for granted that we all should do — like recycling, using less, producing less waste, growing some of our own food, investing in alternative energy, etc. — really are the things we ALL need to be doing.

It’s been a tad depressing in that, once you learn about the various climate tipping points — melting land-based glaciers, rising sea levels (due to melting glaciers and thermal expansion from increased air temperature), release of methane from thawing permafrost — you wonder if we can have enough of an impact quickly enough to prevent our world from becoming a very different, and less hospitable, place.

The eye-opening-ness of the course has comes in realizing just where we are, how far things have come already and how much scientists have known for so long.

Reducing my carbon footprint

One of my exercises has been to reduce my own carbon footprint by 20 percent. Some of the ways I chose to do this are by buying more local and organic food, taking my reusable shopping bags to the grocery store (which I’m really bad at remembering to do) and composting all our fruit and vegetable scraps. Plus, I switched the house (and office) to an ESCO that provides 100 percent renewable energy. I think that brought down my carbon footprint by 43 percent overall.

Composting food scraps

I’m blathering on about this because I didn’t realize how important even some of the simple things I do are. For instance, composting our organic waste. I’ve always hated to put vegetable peels in the trash. I’d prefer even to put them in our garbage disposal. But, when the compost bucket I keep in the kitchen is full and there’s snow outside, I don’t want to make the (albeit very short) trek to the back of the garage to empty it. So I end up putting things in the sink disposal for a few days.

However, our disposal seems to be a bit backed up right now, which means that veggie peelings go in the garbage can. Very very bad. Not only does that increase the amount of garbage going into landfills (and our taxes, as municipalities pay per ton of waste they need to get rid of), but it doesn’t just naturally decompose like you’d think. Garbage gets compacted to as small a size a possible (so you can fit more in the lanfill). This produces an anaerobic (without oxygen) environment — a compost pile needs oxygen to decompose. And, instead of not even decomposing, it produces methane — a greenhouse gas that’s five times as destructive as carbon dioxide.

So, even with enough snow that Kevin had to shovel our driveway and sidewalk, I’m going to make it out behind the garage today to empty my compost bucket. Eye-opening isn’t so bad.

Hugging trees makes children sleepy

The kids have been making us a little crazy lately, so we decided to try doing something new today. We went to visit the Cumming Nature Center in Honeoye Falls.

Our plan was several-fold:

• It’s an hour drive away — farther than we’d usually go for a hike in the woods, but this ate up 2 hours of our morning while our children were safely strapped into their car seats
• It would tire them out, so they’d nap (this has been an issue since the Binky Fairy visited Duncan 10 days ago)
• It’s outdoors — and we all could use more nature and tree hugging.

Speaking of tree hugging, when I see my children voluntarily go up to a tree and literally hug it — with no prompting or demonstration on my part — I know I’m doing something right as a parent. They do get outdoors to enjoy the natural world (as much as is natural in a city) a lot more than I do and I know that’s so important for them. At least if they’re on a playground or playing in our tiny backyard, they’re outside, and children can find the beauty and wonder of nature in anything. Often it seems to be in the rocks they insist on bringing home. Or the mulch they must repeatedly put on the bottom of the slides.

In any case, we managed to all get in the car and drive there without incident. Duncan actually fell asleep a few minutes before we got there. That’s what happens when you insist on waking up befor 6 a.m. We wandered around for a while, looked at a pioneer log cabin and read some signs about how the native Irondequoit used to live and then carried the crying, dragging little ones back to the car.

We found a diner for lunch. It was the first time I sent food back to the kitchen. I ordered a roast beef sandwich and my beef was green. Yes, green. Beef is not a vegetable. It shouldn’t be green. Amazingly, we finished lunch and packed everyone back into the car — where they fell asleep on the way home. We ran errands while they slept (Kevin stayed in the car with them, don’t worry! But we were out already and just used up 2 hours’ of gas) and got home with them still sleeping. I hung out with them and read in the car for a while until they each woke up.

It doesn’t seem like much of a fascinating day, and it was a lot of driving for a walk in the woods. Next time, we’ll pick somewhere closer to home and keep the hiking short. I’m glad that Berry is finally getting old enough to take on a walk like that, as I’ve always envisioned spending so much more time outdoors with the kids than I tend to actually do. It gives me hope for future weekend activities.

At lunch, we talked about our favorite part of the walk. Kevin saw a knarly tree that he liked, Duncan liked stepping on the tree roots. Berry — well, she’s 18 months old, she doesn’t give us much in the way of descriptive sentences yet. Me? I liked the part where we walked along a stream and all stopped and got quiet enough to hear the water flowing below us. There was stillness, suddenly, finally. I closed my eyes and could feel the woods around me and hear my own thoughts, finally given the space in my head.

Even after we got home and I was trying to decipher the TV show that Berry was asking me to put on, I looked in her eyes and she seemed different to me, somehow. Maybe we’d just spent some good time together. Maybe tromping around in the woods and hearing some stillness was good for her, too.

Getting the yard work done — with kiddo help

I’ll admit that sometimes I don’t know how best to entertain two lively little ones once naptime (or school) is over. Berry often wakes up grumpy and Duncan doesn’t always nap at pre-school, so he’s on the road to meltdown city some afternoons.

I’ll also admit that we tend to turn to the TV a bit too much. But, in mid-meltdown, as one child hands you the remote and the other grunts something about Little Einsteins, it’s easy to click it on and play something from the DVR just for some peace (and a chance to drink a cup of tea while it’s still warm).

Today, however, after only one episode of the intrepid foursome and their friend, Rocket, we went outside. Kevin was finishing painting the garage, and today was apparently the last nice day of the year. It’s already much colder now.

I don’t know what inspired me to climb into the back of the garage and grab the rakes. It certainly wasn’t Berry fussing and whining at the garden gate the moment I disappeared. Or maybe it was. In any case, I faithfully reappeared, as promised multiple times in the 45 seconds I was gone, and started raking.

I wasn’t allowed to rake alone. Of course not. Mummy was doing something. Let’s do it too! “Mummy, I want a rake,” Duncan demanded. After getting him to ask for it nicely (“Please may I have a rake, Mummy?”), I consented, gave the other one to Berry, too, and let them get to work.

They did quite nicely — for at least 4 minutes. Inevitably, of course, the pile of leaves was too tempting and had to be plundered. Berry was very entertained wading through it, leaving a trail of leaves in her wake. Duncan preferred throwing his leaves, scattering them across the garden. I dutifully piled them back up again. It was part of the fun (and exercise – I wonder how many points 25 minutes of leaf raking gets me?).

After a bit, I got some totes out of the garage that we normally use to catch rainwater (we have no gutters at the moment, due to the garage painting) and got the kids to fill them full of leaves. That also worked well for a few minutes, but once I’d emptied them into the compost pile they didn’t want to refill them again. Oh well, at that point, Kevin was just about done with painting, so he took over and I went inside to make Berry’s half-birthday cake and cook dinner.

My garden helpers

It’s not easy to find time to tend the garden with two little ones. Or do any singular activity, for that matter. They like to be involved.

Our backyard, tiny as it is, is now strewn with kids toys. The turtle sand box, basketball hoop, water table, little slide and see-saw. I love it, honestly. It makes me happy to look out the back window and see all those things for them to play with. We can’t fit a swing set back there, so we do what we can with what we have.

Even with the toys, the lure of What Mummy’s Doing is too strong. Inevitably, I get interrupted with “help,” often in the form of digging in inappropriate places — such as where things are growing. Duncan, at least, has learned the boundaries of the vegetable garden and walks along the pavers, but not in the soil. Berry caught on quickly this year, but occasionally manages to somehow fall into my garden beds and took out a pepper plant earlier this summer.

One form of “help” we’ve found that they both enthusiastically get into is watering the garden. We collect rainwater from our garage roof in plastic tubs. Kevin has grand ideas about building a water barrel, but so far we’re just using totes with lids and it’s working well.

The kids love filling up watering cans (or at least pretending to in Berry’s case) and watering the vegetables. Duncan likes watering one particular square foot of the garden which quickly turns into a mud puddle. It doesn’t seem to matter how many times I tell him it’s had enough water already, sooner or later he returns to that spot and sploshes some more on.

Explaining that the garden doesn’t need watering when it’s just rained – and everything is clearly still wet – also falls on deaf ears. It’s just too much fun. Why wouldn’t the plants want another drink? It tickles them, after all. I love him.

So here’s some shots (with my cell phone) of the two of them helping out. I will say that their participation is helpful when getting them to eat veggies at dinner. By watering them, Duncan has buy in. I mean, they’re HIS veggies. Why not eat them. I even got him to eat a raw green bean the other day – and he liked it!

What do I do with the worms in my compost?

I love my compost bins, tucked away behind the garage. It’s so quiet and private back there (a big thing in a city backyard) and smells of leaves and rain and the forest.

I finally got around to screening my compost. Oh, what beautiful stuff. It’s not such good work for my back, but good for the rest of me (thigh muscles, spirit, etc.).

This was the best batch of compost I’ve made yet. Full of worm castings, hummus and rich black stuff. And worms. I’ve never seen so many worms (except maybe on RIT’s sidewalks after a heavy rain).

What am I supposed to do with the worms in the compost? Put them back into the pile? Put them in the garden? Eat them for dinner?

I tried hard to sift the compost lightly, to reduce the likelihood of grinding any worms on the hardware cloth. I probably cut a few in half as they desperately tried to wriggle through the holes into the lovely black screened compost beneath. Most of my worms went into the screened compost and then into the garden. I figure the garden can always use them. And, since I didn’t put any worms in the bin to begin with, they migrated from somewhere on their own and more worms will find the bin again for the next batch.

In order to answer my question — so I know what to do next time — I turned, as always to the Internet. Not, say, the Cornell Cooperative Extension, a reliable source of knowledgeable information. Why do that when you have Google at your fingertips?

What I found? Not much.

In worm composting (where you have a couple of pounds of worms in a bin!), you put the worms back in the bin. Gives me the heebies just thinking about it. I can touch worms, with gloves on. But I don’t want 2 lbs of the them in a container, thanks.

According to compostinfo.com:

Screening Compost

Your composting system may not break down all the larger materials, such as corncobs or wood chips, in the first batch of compost that you make. When you screen your compost, any material larger than your screen size can be removed. These materials are called “overs” which can go back into the compost system the next time that you build a pile. The overs provide bulk for aeration and microbes attached to these pieces will help jumpstart the new composting process.

Yes, nothing about worms.

The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection has directions on how to build a free-standing compost screen, but, again, no worm info.

Surely I can’t be the only person with this question? I guess I’ll have to ask the Co-operative Extension folks at the South Wedge Farmer’s Market this week after all.

Putting a number on the earth

We (finally) hear and talk a lot about global warming and carbon footprints. But it all seems very vague and nebulous. I know my impact on the earth is larger than I’d like it to be. I know, as a society, we’re living way out of balance. But what exactly do we need to do to get back into balance?

350.org puts it into perspective:

The most recent science tells us that unless we can reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to 350 parts per million, we will cause huge and irreversible damage to the earth.

There are three numbers you need to really understand global warming, none of them very complicated. For all of human history until about 200 years ago, our atmosphere contained 275 parts per million of carbon dioxide (that’s the first number).

Beginning in the 18th century, we started to burn coal and gas and oil to produce energy and goods. … By now—and this is the second number—the planet has 387 parts per million CO2 – and this number is rising by about 2 parts per million every year.

In the past year, some of the world’s leading climate scientists have told us what the highest safe level of CO2 is: 350 parts per million. That’s the last number you need to know, and the most important. It’s the safety zone for planet earth.

Wow. Seems like we have some work to do.

Growing herbs and supporting community

My herb garden is growing.

The blog article I posted a link to the other day reminded me that I do like growing herbs. They’re very satisfying – easy to grow and offering an almost immediate harvest.

So far, we’ve eaten asparagus and rhubarb from our garden this year. Maybe I should make a side bar widget with what we’ve harvested. I expected to get more asparagus than I got, but what I got was good. Even Duncan ate some. And knowing that I grew it and that it was full of fresh organic goodness made me smile inside.

I’ve had chives, thyme and oregano growing in the herb garden for a while. The oregano always does great, even though it’s swamped by the rhubarb plant. I need to figure out if I can separate the rhubarb and, if so, when. The thing is monstrous and it gets bigger every year.

The thyme…I think I’ve replaced it a couple of times. The winter seems to do it in and I’m not sure if it’ll come back this year. I saw a pot of it at Wegmans yesterday and got one for my windowsill herb garden. I find I don’t actually go out into the yard when I’m cooking to cut fresh herbs. So I decided to grow basil, thyme and garlic chives in a pot on the front porch. I can bring it inside in the winter, too.

Cooking dinner is hard enough sometimes, with a one-year-old clinging to my legs and fussing for me to pick her up. Getting outside in the yard to snip herbs becomes almost impossible. Because then the almost-three-year-old will want to come out too. Which means putting on shoes, bring various favorite items and never wanting to come back inside again. One day I’ll be able to send him out by himself with a pair of kitchen scissors.

I also got some purple sage at Wegmans and put that out in the outside herb garden.

The latest addition to the herb bed came from the South Wedge Farmer’s Market today. Plain leaf Italian parsley. I don’t usually cook with parsley, but I have a secret plan for it and the sage. I can’t reveal what it is yet, though.

I love the farmer’s market — especially when it’s about organic, local, sustainable food. I know the “About Me” section of this blog says I’m getting “greener one environmentally safe product at a time,” but I’m really more about the food than the products. I need to change that. Knowing where my food is coming from — and what’s in it and not in it — is very important. Plus, sustaining the local economy is just a common sense good idea.

After a long day at work, getting outside and hanging out with the kiddos (Berry LOVED the music and made the whole stroller dance with her) was refreshing.

Grow it anyway

You know that poem, Anyway, usually attributed to Mother Theresa?

People are often unreasonable, illogical and self centered;
Forgive them anyway.

If you are kind, people may accuse you of selfish, ulterior motives;
Be kind anyway.

If you are successful, you will win some false friends and some true enemies;
Succeed anyway.

If you are honest and frank, people may cheat you;
Be honest and frank anyway.

What you spend years building, someone could destroy overnight;
Build anyway.

If you find serenity and happiness, they may be jealous;
Be happy anyway.

The good you do today, people will often forget tomorrow;
Do good anyway.

Give the world the best you have, and it may never be enough;
Give the world the best you’ve got anyway.

You see, in the final analysis, it is between you and your God;
It was never between you and them anyway.

[Reportedly inscribed on the wall of Mother Teresa's children's home in Calcutta, and attributed to her. However, an article in the New York Times has since reported (March 8, 2002) that the original version of this poem was written by Kent M. Keith.]That poem makes me think of my garden. (I’ve only had 2 cups of tea today, it may take a while to get to my point. Bear with me.)

We’ve lived in this house for 5 years. We’ve been wanting to move to somewhere larger for probably the last 3. Until recently, we had plans to move to Oregon before the end of the year — but that’s now on hold indefinitely. Duncan will be going to a really good school in the fall, somewhere we can envision him staying until he graduates high school (with Berry following in a couple of years). Kevin is still in school. We’re staying put for the time being.

My point with all of that is that it’s hard to think about long term plans for your current location and invest lots of time and energy into it when you think you may not be there for the next growing season. I think I have an issue with the emotional commitment and my visions not being fulfilled.

Anyway. That’s where the poem comes in. I need to do it anyway.

Gardening organically, doing what I can to live a little more lightly on the earth, teaching my children to respect and appreciate the wonder of the natural world…those are things I’m passionate about. They’re part of who I am in my core as a person. I knew that when I lived on a mountain in North Carolina, off-grid and with no running water. I embraced it then. (I also wanted to move and live in a house, instead of an Airstream.)

I think the difficulties we went through during that time — probably mostly due to the extreme poverty we experienced — made me run into the arms of commerce and hot running water. At least for a while. You can never get away from who you really are, though. And I’m a composting, veggie-growing, recycling, organic-food-eating girl at heart. I need to feel my connection with the earth to be grounded and happy.

I’d really love to live in a bigger house with more land around us. We could have a greenhouse and extend our growing season. We could get into greywater systems. Build an earthship. I still have all the dreams I ever did — back when being green wasn’t cool or popular.

But I can do a lot with what we have right now. Make compost. Grow food in our little garden. Catch rain water from the garage roof. Teach my children to tend the earth. Go for walks in the woods.

If we move next year, we move and start again somewhere else. If we don’t, I’ll have more asparagus to eat.

I started this post with the intention of linking to a blog I just discovered and a good post about getting into gardening. So here that is.