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.

Our paper family

An except from our dinner conversation tonight:

Duncan: I’ve got a job to do!

Daddy: What’s your job, buddy?

Duncan: My job is to cut paper.

Mummy: Oh, is Berry’s job to color on paper?

Duncan: Yes.

(This seems about right to me. After all, isn’t what each of us in the family does somehow related to paper?)

Mummy: Then it’s my job to write on paper. What’s Daddy’s job?

(Kevin says something totally unrelated to paper here — like it being Daddy’s job to water plants or eat bacon)

Mummy: I think it’s Daddy’s job to read paper! (I.e. the newspaper, textbooks for school, etc.)

Duncan: Yes. Now we can all like our jobs.

Then he asked me how my cut finger was healing and if it still hurt me. What a great kid. Especially compared to the meltdown monster we dealt with trying to leave a fun activity before lunch today. How does he go from one extreme to another so readily? And how did he know that one of his friends from school would be there, too?

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.

Back on the Weight Watchers track

I knew this time was coming. Pants becoming progressively tighter aren’t very subtle. And, even though I avoided stepping on the scale for as long as I could, one day I did it. It wasn’t pretty. And why did we ever teach Duncan to read letters and numbers, anyway?

I still don’t know what caused it. I was staying pretty stable at my body’s set-point (which is, of course, at least 10 lbs more than I’d like it to be). I don’t think I got less active. I don’t think that’s possible. I conserve as much energy as possible, all of the time. Did I manage to conseve even more somehow without realizing it? Probably not.

But, for some reason, things started shifting upward (my weight — on my body it shifted outward). Maybe it was reducing Duncan’s nursing before his 3rd birthday with that valiant aim of weaning him come late July. The boy likes his milk. He was probably drinking a lot.

In any case, no matter what caused it, it happened. And now I have to deal with it. I’ve been waiting for “the right time” when things aren’t too stressful. That time will never come. But, school is well underway for both Duncan and me and our recent lead hazard reduction home makeover efforts are (almost) over. So I figured it’s time.

Last Sunday, weighing in at 170.8 lbs, I signed up for Weight Watchers online. I weighed myself mid-week — and to my horror, I’d gained weight. Apparently, I may still be nursing, but not enough to warrant an extra 10 points in my daily food allowance. Once I realized that, I altered things a bit and ended up weighing 2.2 lbs less this morning.

I also switched to the CORE plan this week (as opposed to the FLEX plan where every food is given a point value). On the core plan, there are certain foods you can eat as much as you want of. They’re mostly vegetables, fruit and fat-free, sugar-free stuff. Since I don’t eat artificial sweetner, that limits my options.

Just to complicate things, you get some FLEX points to use each day/week and you also earn activity (or nursing) points. I use those to “buy” sugar. Seriously, I can’t live totally sugar-free. My sugar choices aren’t that bad, either — honey, maple syrup and raw brown sugar. No corn syrup here.

So we’ll see how it goes. I dream of dieting without feeling hungry — the only time that happened was when I did high-fiber, high-protein (ala Atkins), but that was such a pain in its own way. This way, presumably, I can eat all the fat-free cottage cheese I want — should I want to, of course.

Laboring over the weekend

My blogging friend, Christa on Vocational Duality, often writes about balancing work life with mothering life. I’ve been fortunate in managing the two somewhat separately most of the time. But not this last week.

When Duncan was a baby and I leapt into the freelance life, I could put him in a playpen next to my desk and get work done. That lasted until he was a year old. Then I started taking him to an at-home daycare a few afternoons a week. Daddy looked after him some mornings, I worked during naptime and those three afternoons when he went to Kayden’s house.

Then Berry came along. Working with 2 kids is next to impossible. One of them always wants something – usually both of them want something, at the same time, in the loudest possible manner.

Because of this, when I went back to work shortly after Berry’s birth (too soon, I now realize, but that’s another story), I found someone (a wonderful someone) to come to our house to look after the kids. This keeps them close, yet I still get to escape to my office in the attic. I’m around, yet not. We eat lunch together, I put them down for naps, then I go back to work until dinner time. Really, it’s ideal.

I get to enjoy the flexibility of working from home, while maintaining working hours. Generally, I refuse to work evenings or weekends. I’m not a machine, after all. However, every so often, there comes a project with a looming deadline, that requires some after-hours work. I had one this past Labor Day weekend.

Oh boy. It would have gone OK if things had been “normal.” But we were all sick. I was sick. The kids were sick. Even Kevin was sick, although he did a fabulous job of not complaining about it.

So there I sat, one sick kid on my lap, the other sitting in a chair next to me or playing with trains on the floor, working away at the dining room table. We must have been a sight. They watched so much TV I think their brains may have melted and dribbled out their ears (at least they’ve been acting like it). But I kept plugging away and we somehow got through the weekend. My project got finished (finally, yesterday) and we will all eventually feel better. I can’t tell you how glad I was to see the sitter on Tuesday morning.

It’s interesting how we all manage to balance our lives one way or another. If I didn’t have a pressing deadline and I didn’t adore the client, I would have packed work away for the weekend and got on with it on Tuesday. Family and health tend to come before work in my balancing act. Time may be money, but time is also life. Somehow it’s important to find the equilibrium between the two.

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!

Feasting from my garden

There’s something so satisfying about cooking dinner with food from my garden.

Dinner tonight – currently bubbling away on the stove — features tilapia (from who knows where) cooked in a tomato and pepper sauce. The tomatoes, red pepper and herbs all come from the garden. The green pepper comes from our CSA (I love getting organic peppers in my bag each week!) and the garlic is from Seven Bridges Farm from the South Wedge Farmer’s Market. The only other seasonings are salt and pepper — I brought back the salt from a trip to France and the pepper is freshly ground from organic black peppercorns.

It will be accompanied by brown rice and broccoli (conventional, both – but at least broccoli is now on the “12 Foods You Don’t Have to Buy Organic” list.)

I’d better get back to dinner, but I snapped a couple of pics with my camera phone.

Here’s dessert – home made peach pie. The pastry is an oil pastry recipe and the peaches, while conventionally grown are at least from a local farmer, bought on Saturday morning at Gro-Moore Farms in Henrietta.

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.