Got Milk?

 
A while back I heard an interview on NPR that prompted me to put a book on my wish list.  I started reading that book earlier this week and it just seems to make good sense.  I am about half way through with it and just finished an extensive section on milk.  When I went to the grocery store this morning I made a small change.  I purchased Organic Valley whole milk from grass fed cows.  The nutritional benefits range from better digestion and more effective absorption of nutrients to anti-inflammatory. This particular brand was one of the ones suggested if you couldn't get raw milk.  Raw milk is currently illegal in Wisconsin, though I know there are ways to find it, there is ongoing debate about it and legislation is pending.

The book is:  Real Food What to Eat and Why,  By:  Nina Planck.   

Have you read it?  

What do you think of raw milk?

practicing everyday sustainability

we garden to live more sustainably

i have "liked" several facebook groups which concern themselves with sustainable living - homesteading/survivalism, frugally sustainable and several that focus on foraging (which i also see as an aspect of sustainable living): wild food girl, edible wild plants and first ways. it was through one or the other of these groups that i found myself reading lists of ten things not to spend money on. i totally agree that less consumption is a big part of sustainable living, but some of the items on these lists were real doozies:

~ newspaper subscriptions. and the reason provided wasn't because "i get my news online" or from t.v. or the radio. no, it was because the blogger didn't have to time to go through them for the coupons anyway.

~ obstetrics - home birth all the way.

~ birth control (ostensibly by the homebirthing, homeschooling blogger who had four children and was expecting number 5).

~ then there was the helpful suggestion that it's more economical to buy blocks of cheese and grate them yourself, rather than buying pre-grated cheese.

~ i'm a little shocked at how often some aspect of making your own food appears on the lists i read: bread, tortillas, yogurt. making these things yourself just seems like ordinary common sense.

~ don't buy sodas, alcohol or coffee. sodas, i can appreciate, we buy very little soda, but alcohol and coffee? that's just crazy talk.

~ don't buy extended warranties on computer equipment. (really? wtf? as one who spilled a small glass of water into her macbook pro, i can highly recommend buying the extended warranty when you make the investment in such a computer. if you don't and something happens, you will lose that computer. i make the mistakes so you don't have to.)

but probably the most disturbing item i read:

~ "Toilet paper. I keep some on hand for guests, but our family generally uses the family cloth." (emphasis mine. note the use of THE SINGULAR.) [we'll just pause here for a moment while you visualize this.]

many of the lists i read (there were links, so one just kept leading to another) seemed to be aimed at cheapness frugality rather than sustainable living, as there were few mentions of fresh produce, gardening and forget about any mentions of organic. many of them were just about saving money. which i can also appreciate, but i don't think that focusing only on that aspect necessarily makes one particularly sustainable. especially not when a number of the sites advocated stocking up in bulk at sales in the big box stores and filling up your freezer - that's definitely not how i want to live and feed my family. (and don't even get me started on the evils of wal-mart.)

i find it especially worrying that this narrow view as to what sustainability is will be passed on to the next generation by these people, as most of them are also homeschooling their children. what kind of a world will we live in?

to top it all off, i just heard on the radio a story about some movement in the US (one million mothers) where a bunch of christian mothers are banding together to try to keep marvel comics from having one of their superheroes (batman, methinks) come out of the closet. i could imagine many of the bloggers whose lists i read this morning are part of that movement.

but, as always, there was a silver lining - the whole thing did make me think about what my list of things not to spend money on would be:

1. grocery store sushi - it disappoints every time (and has nothing to do with sustainability, i realize, i just think it's good advice.)
2. those herb-pots they have the grocery store - the ones still "growing" in a little pot of dirt, that last about 5 minutes because they were forced to grow too fast in a greenhouse and can't survive outside of that controlled environment. plant your own in a pot on your kitchen windowsill - while you can't use it for making your dinner immediately this evening, you'll be surprised how soon you will be able to use it. and you'll have the additional satisfaction of having grown it yourself. (the exception to this is a nice rosemary plant - i think they do better because they are more tree-like.)
3. cheap shoes/boots - buy good quality, they'll last you much longer and while they may cost more initially, they'll save you money in the long run. and buying one pair of shoes instead of eight is much more sustainable.
4. commercial chicken feed - buy oats, wheat, barley, perhaps some corn (i like to get the kind that's been crushed into flakes, to make it easier for the chickens) and rye, mix it yourself in equal portions of each, then add a handful of shells as scratch. this mix, plus free ranging all the bugs and greenery they can eat, has given us healthy, happy chickens who lay plenty of eggs.
5. perfume-filled cleaning products, soaps, shampoos, lotions - studies show that there is a big increase in allergies due to all kinds of additives and perfumes in our products. buy perfume-free cleaning products. or better yet, make your own and scent them with essential oils. (i've only just begun doing this, so i've not got expert advice to share on it yet, but some of the good stuff i've found in the facebook groups has been about making your own cleaning products.)
6. margarine - if it's worth you baking from scratch, it's worth using real butter.
7. specials which force you to buy more than you need - if i'm having guests and need three packages of meat, then i go for the special, but if it's just a normal night, i don't let the grocery store decide for me that i should have way more meat than i actually need.  

what about you guys? how do you practice everyday sustainability?

Sweet peas

First sweet peas of the season!

Elizabeth

vintage steam juicer

the rhubarb is going a little crazy in my garden. i took this photo today after i picked about ten kilos. and you can't even tell i've picked any. i believe i can safely tell you that horse poo is a fantastic fertilizer. i've been making a couple of rhubarb crumbles a week and i've made a couple of batches of cordial (rhubarb and ginger). it's such a gorgeous salmony pink and so refreshingly tart - we definitely want to lay in a supply of it for next winter.

today, i decided to try this wonderful vintage juicer that husband got me for christmas. it works on a steam principle. you place water in the bottom pan. in the top one, which is a strainer, you place your fruit and your sugar, then you let it boil and it steams all of the goodness from the fruit into the middle plan at the same time as it cooks the juice with your sugar, so you can decant the hot liquid directly into your prepared bottles. quite ingenius. i got 3 liters of rhubarb-vanilla juice today and had quite a lot of fun playing with it.  it's more a juice than a cordial and i'm not sure how long it's going to keep, as i think it maybe should have had a bit more sugar than the directions said. i actually have the original little folder of directions and i followed them this first time, to get a feel for it.

i think that next time, will add more sugar and make it more like my other cordials. it's a great method and it enables you to get more out of your fruit than you can get just cooking it up and straining it through a sieve with cheesecloth. i think i got nearly a liter more of juice doing it this way - and that's pretty significant!

can't wait to try it on the elderflowers. i suspect it's going to distill them very nicely!

moving our greenhouse

if you recall, last year at about this time, we put up a temporary greenhouse. temporary as in we used plastic instead of glass and made it of a rather light construction. well, today, we decided to move that greenhouse to another spot - on more of a foundation.

we thought it would be a matter of loosening it, picking it up and moving it, but it turned out to be a little bit more complicated than that. and one branch of the mirabella tree was sacrificed. because that thing was a whole lot heavier than we thought.

husband got to use all of his inner engineering skills and we were thankful that the big girls were here this weekend, because we definitely needed some extra muscles.

we only moved it about 10-12 meters, but we had to go precisely between the mirabella and the currant bushes before we could turn it onto the new foundation. as you can see, some of the plastic didn't fare that well over the winter, but we've got a couple of new rolls, so we'll get that on in the next few days.

for the new foundation, husband repurposed some bricks from a wall we no longer want to have. i love when he does stuff like that. it feels a little bit modern-day little house on the prairie - making do with what you have.

we had tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers and eggplants in the greenhouse last year, but it felt a little bit like it never really got going. i think the dirt we got to fill into the boxes wasn't that great (it can be hit or miss down at the dirt guy) and we didn't fertilize it enough.

it also felt surprisingly cramped for being 5 meters long and 3 meters wide. we hope having it up on a foundation helps that - it already feels more spacious.

eventually, we are still going to be building a "real" greenhouse - brick foundation, glass windows. and when that comes, this one will become the cucumber greenhouse. another thing we learned last year was that tomatoes and cucumbers don't really like the same climate, so neither one did stunningly well, tho' we had both cucumbers and tomatoes - they never really came on properly and really produced. i don't know if moving it will help that, but it will help when we get the real greenhouse built.

we got a load of really good, rich compost soil from our local recycling station and we hope that it helps to have better soil this year. we're going to configure the beds a bit differently, to make it easier to weed and get to the plants.

this gardening thing is a process. and i don't always know what to learn from it, but it feels positive to be tweaking what we did and trying to improve it. i want to utilize the greenhouse longer into the autumn and early winter this year for salads and such. that i didn't try at all last year - it seemed like it was so hard to keep it going that i gave up rather early. i'll keep you posted.

Jenna Spevack

Just found the most amazing art-exhibition. Yes, an art-exhibition about growing greens. The ideas behind this concept and the exhibition are made by Jenna Spevack. The easiest to explain all of this is to show you a video.

If you would like to know more about the project or about the artist than you just click here.

Enjoy.

Elizabeth

chicken lessons

i've mentioned our chickens before. it's not too long before we'll have had them for a whole year! and what a lot we've learned. i've learned to keep the terrace door closed so that they can't come in and make themselves at home (they also tend to eat the cat food while they're there).

we've not had to buy eggs for months, except for a couple of weeks during the coldest part of the winter when they crossed their little chicken legs and held those eggs inside.

we've had broody hens and tho' we had our doubts, it has resulted in an actual, live chick!  the chick is one of the little black swedish ones (no idea yet if it's a boy or a girl), tho' the mama is a brown danish hen. one of the black hens must have slipped it in under her when she was off the nest. we've noticed that they like to do that. in the end, she was sitting on 4 eggs, but only 1 hatched.

tho' our chickens live in a palace of a chicken coop called chez poulet, they run around wherever they want during the day, totally free range. and with three hens currently broody and taking up 3 of our 5 nest boxes, this has meant stashes of eggs here and there, since the laying hens find it too crowded in there. i found one stash of 12 and another one today of 5, but i'm sure there are other locations i haven't found.

husband decided on the weekend to remedy that by building a brooding addition onto the back of chez poulet. when i got home this evening, it was nearly dark and he was putting the finishing touches on it. tomorrow, i will fill it with straw and move the three laying hens and whatever eggs they're sitting on out there. it will also be a good place for them to be with their little ones once they hatch, as our mama above needed to be separated from the others for about a week and they needed a heat lamp. interestingly, she chose herself when to move back into the main coop. those hens are smarter than they look.

and that's probably been the biggest lesson we've learned. chickens aren't as dumb as we thought they were. they're actually quite organized, have a huge vocabulary, take care of their babies and are a great help spreading out horse and rabbit poo in the garden. i don't know how we ever got along with them.