The prolific pear tree
This is the first week of the eco-my-flat competition, and my flatmates and I are excited to be participating. Perhaps I should start with an explanation of our flat name, “The sunflowers ate my potatoes”. Last spring we had some self seeding potatoes growing beautifully in our garden, which I spent hours and hours mounding up (I hadn’t yet learned to put car tires around them as they grow to make things easier). Christmas came, and we all trooped off for holidays, and when we came back, the potatoes were gone. Gone were my lovely little mounds, my leafy spuds, and all my hard work. In their place were 2.5m tall jerusalem artichokes (a kind of sunflower with an edible root). We can eat the artichokes in the winter time, so all is not lost, but hence the name, “The sunflowers ate my potatoes”.
We are already very eco-conscious and do a lot of little things around our garden and during our shopping trips that together make a big difference. I post them here not to brag, but to give you some ideas for things you can do too.
In the garden:
- compost food scraps, garden waste, old natural fibre clothing (if it is too damaged for the city mission stores), cardboard, newspaper, tissues, the contents of your vacuum cleaner bag, basically, anything that was once alive.
- Plant some veggies. We started small but now have lettuce, onions, carrots, endive, silverbeet, beans, pears, peaches, apples, grapes, parsley, basil, celery spice, potatoes, jerusalem artichokes, leeks, raspberries, mint and crab apples. We were really lucky to move into a flat where the previous tenant was an avid gardener so it was relatively easy for us to get started.
- Plant your seeds in containers in the window in the early spring.
- Even if you don’t have a veggies garden, learn what weeds you can eat. We eat our puha, chickweed and yarrow
- There are lots of natives on the lot. We have a bottlebrush, hebe, fern, and 2 other large ones whose names I don’t know
- Fertilize the garden with compost tea
- Fertilize your fruit trees or compost heap by peeing on them (if your yard is private enough and you’re not squeamish). Pee is especially good for lemon trees, and if you pee outside you don’t have to use water to flush the toilet
- Trade your excess produce. We traded a bag of pears and got a bag of walnuts!
- When the garden is dry we collect the waste water from the house to water it
o Put a bucket in shower to catch water while it warms up
o Put a bowl in sink to collect water from washing/cooking veggies
o If you can, hang your washing machine hose out the window (but use an eco-friendly soap only).
In the kitchen:
- use very few prepared foods, cook most things from scratch at home using mostly local, seasonable veggies (including home made soups and stews). When I need a recipe or some inspiration I visit www.recipezarr.com. They have a huge selection of recipes that are searchable by name, ingredient or category.
- Save the bones from your meat, freeze them and when you have enough make soup broth, then compost or burn the bones (just don’t let the rats at them). Put the cold ashes in your compost.
- Try to use fruits and veggies from your own or a friend’s garden. If you don’t have a garden or a friend’s garden to play in, come visit the community garden on campus on Fridays from 2-5 pm (or part thereof), do some gardening and take home some produce.
- Make your own yoghurt (with a yoghurt maker). Packets of yoghurt mix are cheaper, use less packaging, and need less petrol to transport (per packet) than prepared yoghurt.
- Make your own bread (with a bread maker or in the oven). No plastic bags for packaging, and it’s fresher, better for you, and tastes oh so good!
- make your own granola/muesli. There is a good recipe in the Edmonds cook book. Less packaging
- Dry some of your own herbs. Pick them from the stem, tie a string round the bunch of stems, and hang in your kitchen window. They smell good, taste better, and don’t have to be transported long distances like most store bought spices.
- Bottle or dry fruits from your trees, or if you notice a neighbour has a tree they’re not picking, knock on their door. You’ll get to meet your neighbours, and chances are good they’ll let you take their unused fruit.
- Make your own salad dressing in a reusable container. It’s cheaper than buying it pre-made and tastier too.
- Use smaller amounts of meat in your cooking, and use beans, lentils, tofu, and other alternate sources of protein more often.
This week’s theme is food and gardening, which is especially apt, since we cannot walk past the pear tree without risking brain injury from the bombardment of falling pears. We have more pears than we know what to do with. We have eaten them raw, baked crumbles, bottled, dried, poached, traded and given them away, and we still have more. Maybe we can post them on freecycle… We have successfully given away several bags of fresh pears, and this week we preserved 6 more jars (we already preserved about 15).
We are all meat eaters, and though we have drastically reduced our meat consumption, we decided to go vegetarian for one day per week. This is where I admit we are all human. One of our flatmates forgot and had meat on his sandwich. Whoops! Oh well, we’ll try again next week. We did manage a vegetarian dinner though, and had a delicious spicy bean, barley pasta bake for dinner. I must say that this dish did not leave that “I’m still hungry but my belly feels full” feeling that I often get from vegetarian dishes. I think it might have been the barley and all the cheese. It was so good, that here is the approximate recipe. Adjust amounts, add and omit ingredients according to how many people you have in your flat, how hungry they are, and how much you have of each item. The point is to use what is in your flat and what is in season, not to run out and buy special ingredients for the recipe.
3-4 cups dried mixed beans
1 cup pot barley
2-3 cloves garlic
1-2 onions
Olive oil
2-6 cups water
3-4 tbsp tomato paste
3-4 tbsp soup broth powder
Fresh parsley
Fresh basil
Fresh celery herb
Black pepper
Chile powder
1 tbsp corn starch mixed with a few tbsp water
3 cups cooked pasta (optional)
3 large silverbeet leaves
Lots of cheese
Breadcrumbs
This recipe is easy, but requires a little forethought.
1. Soak beans and barley overnight (in separate containers). In the morning drain, rinse, and continue soaking. When ready to cook drain and rinse again. The longer they soak the faster they cook, but don’t allow them to ferment, so if it is warm, put them in the fridge.
2. In a pot simmer beans for about 45 minutes, add barley, and continue to simmer until everything is tender (about another 45 minutes). Drain, rinse, and dump the beans and barley into a baking (casserole) dish.
3. Heat olive oil in a pan and add onions and garlic. Sauté (cook) until onions turn clear. Stir often so the garlic does not burn. Add onions and garlic to casserole dish
4. In the same saucepan as you used for the onions bring to a boil 2 cups water, tomato paste, soup broth powder, basil, parsley, celery herb, black pepper and chilli powder. Adjust seasoning as desired. Remove from heat, add corn starch and water (substitute flour mixed with oil if you have no corn starch, and mix very carefully so you don’t get clumps). Add to casserole dish.
5. Chop the silverbeet and add to the casserole dish.
6. Add some cheese and stir everything together.
7. Sprinkle a very thin layer of breadcrumbs on top, cover with more cheese, and bake for 30-40 minutes.
Ecological notes on the ingredients
- It is best to use dried beans because they are lighter than canned beans and therefore use less fossil fuel to get them to the store. They are very easy to rehydrate yourself, and just require a little forethought. They are also a lot cheaper! Some of the beans we used were from our garden.
- Pot barley is less refined than pear barley and therefore requires less energy to produce because the husk hasn’t been mechanically removed. It is also better for you because it still has all its vitamins, minerals and fibre (like wholemeal vs. white flour)
- Soaking the beans and barley greatly reduces their cooking time (less energy) and removes an anti-fungal coating that produces gas when ingested. Save the soaking and cooking water and pour it on your garden.
- The cooked pasta was leftover. Whenever possible use up your leftovers to produce less waste.
- The silverbeet, parsley, basil and celery herb came from our garden. Silverbeet requires no work to grow and reseeds itself from year to year. I’m not sure if celery herb is the right word for the spice that looks and tastes like strong celery. It is just as easy to grow as silverbeet and replaces the celery flavouring in anything I cook.
- We bought the tomato paste and soup powder in bulk. Just put the leftover tomato paste in a clean jam jar in the fridge so it doesn’t go off until you need it again.
- I believe the onions and garlic were local. The cheese was not organic, sorry. I dream of the day when I can afford lovely organic cheese… Mmmm my mouth waters just thinking about it. The dairy industry is a very large polluter of Canterbury’s rivers, so organic dairy products are well worth while if you can afford them.
Right, so what else did we do? While out shopping we found a brand of rice crackers (Trident?) with completely recyclable packaging. Not as good as no packaging, but better than nothing. We splurged on organic milk this week (see last note of recipe above), and will continue to do so every other week. We also bought beef in bulk packages, divided them up into individual meal sizes and froze them in reused plastic bags (bread bags last a long time if you wash and reuse them). We asked the butcher if he had free range chicken and pork but he did not. So until we can find a retailer of free range chicken and pork (that we can afford) we will just skip the pork and maybe the chicken too. I use chicken bones to make really yummy soup broth then compost or burn them so the whole chicken gets used, and I’m not sure I’m ready to give up roast chicken and home made chicken soup. We also bought some toilet paper from Piko’s that was made from unbleached recycled paper and comes in a recycled paper package.
We have a bike trailer that we normally use to go shopping, but the bike with the trailer hitch got stolen last week, so on our way to shopping we went to our trailer builder to buy a new one. Check out http://www.cycletrailers.co.nz/ for ordering and pricing info. The trailers are made locally in Christchurch. Hopefully we’ll have the trailer up and running again for next week’s shopping trip. The guys in the flat did bike to the bottle store with their backpacks this week.
We made a greater effort this week to ensure all our computers (and other appliances) were turned off at the wall when not in use. We also sold our old washing machine on trademe and freed some more space in the garden for another veggie bed. I went to the New Harvest Trust store and bought insulating curtain panels for $2 each. I measured the windows in preparation for some PVC sheets that when taped on will act as double glazing.
Week 2 – Shopping and waste
Just like last week there are some things that we already do in relation to shopping and waste:
Cleaning Products
- We use home made laundry soap (½ cup washing soda, ½ cup sodium borate (borax), and a bar of laundry soap or leftover bits of soap, grated and allowed to dry out for a few days. Crumble the soap (or put it in the blender), mix all ingredients together and use 1-2 tbsp per load) it does have a lot of sodium in it, but only the borax comes packaged (in a cardboard box), it has no palm oil, and it works as well as Persil.
- We buy eco friendly dish soap (though we’re currently using budget brand dish soap until it is gone, then no more)
- anything else gets cleaned with baking soda and/or vinegar
- we open windows to air out house, and prevent mould, and don’t use air fresheners
- no sprays, insecticides, or deodorizers
- We try to avoid bleach. Stained laundry gets hung in the sun until the stain is gone, and we spray vinegar on the mould in the shower.
Personal Hygiene
- I (Laura) use a diva cup instead of tampons. Dave and Steve use the diva cup as an egg cup. I haven’t told them yet… (kidding)
- When I do use disposables I compost or burn them (I don’t use big plastic pads, just thin cottony ones)
- I use an epilator on my legs and bikini line instead of disposable razors
- We use bar soaps, not shower gel or liquid soap
- Use solid antiperspirant, not spray on
Other
- Dave put a jar in the toilet so it uses less water with each flush
- We wash and reuse plastic bags
- Dave uses hankies instead of tissues
- We use second hand wool blankets and a duvet
- I am currently recovering our couches since they are made with solid wood and the foam just needs a little layer added to it to be comfortable again.
- We don’t take bags and try not to take disposable cups or cutlery at takeaways. When we do end up with cups and cutlery we wash and reuse them until they break.
- I carry an insulated mug with me in my backpack for cups of tea.
- We wash and save glass jars, plastic jars and plastic containers for use later
- I use one sided paper from the uni recycle bins to take notes in class
In honour of this week’s theme I went through the house to try and find products that I could replace with more ecologically friendly options. This is what I came up with:
- Other meats – buy in bulk packages. I checked to see if the foam trays are recyclable, but they are not.
- Eggs – now free range only
- Milk – organic milk is expensive, so we buy 1 organic, 1 non organic. Better than nothing.
- Gravy packets – buy the powder from Binn Inn with reusable container
- Soup packets – as above
- Flour, oats, chocolate chips, beans, lentils, chick peas, seeds, spices, oil, vinegar, peanut butter, etc – bottom line, Binn Inn is now our first stop for groceries, and we bring our own packaging
- Maggi instant noodles – bought a bulk package and sprinkle cooked noodles with soup broth powder bought in bulk.
- Feminine hygiene products – replaced with reusable diva cup and organic cotton moon cloths (available at Piko’s)
- Soap – Knights Castile brand has no palm oil and not too much sodium
- Rice crackers – found a brand with a fully recyclable package
- Snickers bars – a large block of chocolate has less packaging, so I bought that instead
- Shampoo and conditioner – when I run out I will switch to eco friendly shampoo and conditioner (maybe cider vinegar).
- Tissues – I followed Dave’s lead and swapped them out for handkerchiefs
We also found some waste free food sources. We preserved, dried, baked, ate fresh and gave away bags and bags full of pears and peaches… We tried to make a solar dehydrator but it failed, then it rained and made a really stinky mess. We did discover though that the leftover juice from preserving peaches tastes really good when mixed with orange juice. We also found some of the chestnut trees on campus and collected and roasted some chestnuts. They have a bit of a bitter aftertaste, but I’ll try putting them in soup or something. A friend happened to tell me he likes making crab-apple jelly, so he got all our crab-apples, jam jars (I knew they would come in handy eventually), and some fresh and some preserved pears and peaches. I’m looking forward to the crab-apple jelly! We also traded some pears for some of our neighbour’s tomatoes. Next we’ll try dehydrating our grapes to make raisins.
I made our own toasted muesli this week with dehydrated peaches and pears from our yard, walnuts that we traded for pears, and oats and oil bought in bulk. Then I left it in the oven too long and burnt it. Oh well, most of it was salvageable.
My favourite sweat pants finally got a hole that I couldn’t repair, so I cut them up and used them as dish cloths. They work really well! I also wrote “no circulars” on our mailbox and started saving cardboard egg trays for planting seeds in the window over the winter.
I run 2 lab streams every week for psyc105 and asked them all to hand in their report printed on both sides of the paper. Even if only half of my 75 students print on both sides, that’s a lot of paper saved off their 7 page reports.
Week 3 – energy and waste
I will start again with the things we already do:
Transport
- bike whenever possible, including to uni
- carpool to uni when it rains
- often use the bike trailer to get groceries/transport larger items
Power Use
- Our wood stove heats the house and the hot water cylinder
- We cook on the wood stove when it is already burning
- We burn wood that is already on the lot, we don’t buy it from elsewhere and have it trucked in
- We burn animal bones and small amounts of fat when the fire is very hot. These burn very hot, and will be consumed in a hot fire. If they are not fully consumed they will turn very brittle and will fall apart when you touch them, then you can just put them in the compost with the rest of your (cold) ashes, and not worry about vermin smelling the meat.
- We wear thermals, sweaters and even beanies inside when cold so we don’t need to heat as much
- We throw blanket on couch to cuddle under instead of heater
- We sit with hot water bottle when cold
- We use the electric heater only when absolutely necessary
- When not using the wood stove to heat the water cylinder, we turn it on a couple hours before we shower, then turn it off again. By the time we have all showered the water is cold again.
- We wrapped a second hand wool blanket around the cylinder when CEA told us they would not sell us a cheap wrap because there wasn’t enough room to get it around the cylinder
- We turn off lights when not in the room
- The most frequently used bulbs were all eco bulbs (but since we got some more, now all are eco bulbs)
- We turn off appliances, laptops and the TV at the wall when not in use
- We use an old real-estate sign to block afternoon sun from the west-facing door so the lounge does not get too hot in the summer.
- We close curtains at night
- We use laptops, not desktops
- We wash full loads of clothes only in cold water (and only dirty things)
- We boil only as much water in the jug as we need
- We dry washing outside
- We boil water for dishes
- We reuse mugs and glasses to create fewer dishes
- We hand wash dishes only (no dishwasher), and wash full loads
- There is a mat at entrance of house and we remove our shoes at door so less dirt is tracked inside (less vacuuming)
- When baking and cooking at the same time we use the element that is also the exhaust from the oven and turn the element down very low. It will still boil food and not use as much power
These last 2 weeks I have been really busy. We are all members of the Kakariki environment club, but last week I got elected to the post of secretary, took over the weekly eco-bulletin and have been working on a submission to the city council for more money for cycle lanes in their long term budget. We are also trying to work out a challenge for the city counsellors to bike to work for one week, but we are not sure yet how to put it to them so that they can not refuse without substantial embarrassment☺. The other Kakariki project I’m working on is a new weekly eco-challenge that may appear in our eco-bulletin and our upcoming Canta articles. This would feature a new easy to do eco challenge every week, for example, to reuse old grocery bags for this week’s shopping. I also sent an email to a web site that suggested cleaning counter tops with bleach to disinfect them. The email and response are below:
Hi
I really liked your article on how to get rid of house flies, thank you, it was very informative. I am concerned however that you suggested using bleach to disinfect counters and drains. Yes, it works very well, is cheap and is readily available, but it is toxic to the environment (and us), especially if you pour it straight into drains. Would you be able to suggest instead a 5% natural white vinegar solution or 1 tsp tea tree oil (available in most pharmacies, health food stores, and even some grocery stores) in a gallon of warm water? These are both effective disinfectants and much easier on our fragile planet. Use them as you would a bleach solution and spray or scrub on the surface you wish to disinfect. Thank you again for your otherwise excellent article. I now have an excuse to plant basil in my bedroom window, yumm.
Cheers
Laura Scrimgeour
Hi Laura,
You’re right. Bleach isn’t good. The substitutes you mention are indeed
better than alternatives, they’re what people should be using without
question. Alas, you happened upon an article that is actually being
revised. Nils Hoyum recently rewrote the topic, and I’ll pass this info on
to him.
Thank you for the kind words and the information. Readers like you are the
reason we keep doing this.
Let me know what you think of the new article. It should be posted by next
week.
-J
So alas my own eco efforts were slightly curbed by my proactive efforts.
The guys, however, went at it with style. A friend who works at the hospital scavenged up a very large clear plastic bag and some wooden pallets, so the guys built a small, movable greenhouse to put over our winter garden plot! If our landlord wins the rain barrel we will route the water down to automatically water the plants in the greenhouse. Now we just have to plant out our winter veggies. I’m excited to be able to eat fresh veggies during the winter. Being Canadian, this is a totally new experience for me!
This week we learned that our log burner produces a lot more smoke if it is packed full and damped down, so the one night we had a fire this week we kept the vents open full and didn’t overload the firebox.
I tried to turn down the thermostat on our water heater but I could not find it, so I made sure the blanket was wrapped tight around it, and that the airing cupboard doors were closed tight.
Last weekend the guys left to go rock climbing, and I was left home alone in the cold. I would previously have lit a fire, but this time I grabbed Dave’s big nalgene, filled it with boiling water and sat under a blanket.
The last of our inefficient light bulbs got replaced this week, we now have 100% eco friendly bulbs in our flat. While changing the bulbs I noticed that a glass lamp shade was cracked, but if turned upside down and placed on a saucer it will make a good self-watering planter.
According to last week’s workshop, cling film will decompose, so the cling film from our meat trays now go in the compost.
I had been trying to find a duvet cover and driving around to different stores to try to find exactly what I wanted with no success. Tom suggested I look online, so I did, but still no luck. Oh well, at least now I’ve learned to look online before I go driving around.
I also wanted to find a source for free range poultry (to eat) that we could afford, so I had a look on trademe, buy sell and exchange, and sella, but all I could find were 2 male quails in Timaru for $10 each, so I decided they were not worth it. So I’m still on the hunt (literally) for a poultry source within the city. Since we are prepared to eat meat we are also prepared to kill and pluck our own.
This week I was cooking a roasted chicken (bought before I knew it was probably caged) when I realized the bread had gone stale, so I buttered it, sprinkled some garlic powder over it, cut it into cubes and made croutons while the chicken was roasting. When the croutons were done there was still lots of time until the roast finished so I whipped up another batch of muesli and toasted it in the oven as well.
The trailer hitch is back in business so we took the bikes (and trailer) shopping this week. We also made sure the list was complete so that we didn’t have repeat trips throughout the week. The guys also biked to the bottle store, and I biked to a doctor’s appointment (and back again later to pick up my wallet). This was all on top of our regular bike trips to uni and work.
We normally eat very little meat, but last night we had a roast of beef. We were going to cover it with tinfoil to keep the moisture in, but then I had a brain wave. I went out to our grape vine and grabbed a bunch of large vine leaves. I washed them, cut off the stems and laid them over the meat and veggies. They worked really well! Everything was moist and tender, but the leaves did shrink a bit as they dried out, so next time I will use at least 2 layers of leaves. I wonder if it would work with silverbeet?
And, our final and biggest bit of news, I emailed our landlord this week and it turns out he’s onto it! We should be getting insulation some time in April, and he has already sent around a guy from the clean heat project to get an estimate for a heat pump! I’m really looking forward to a toasty winter. He also sent around a repairman to try to fix the washing machine so I don’t have to wash the same item several times to get it clean, but there was nothing he could do. We already have a large veggie garden several large fruit trees and a compost bin, so I asked if we could have chickens, he said yes! As it turns out we will not be able to get chickens at the moment because we are too busy to care for them properly, but it is nice to know that we can do it in the future. He will also let us put up plastic double glazing, and because he is so relaxed we felt completely free to build a small greenhouse against the back wall of the house. I think he definitely qualifies for the best landlord award.
Total rubbish count for the entire duration of the competition?? 1 rubbish bag. We’re not as good as Waveney and Matthew, but we’ll get there.
So that is all from us at the Sunflowers ate my Potatoes. This has been a really fun step in our continued quest to live more sustainably. We’ll see you next year at eco-my-flat 2010!
