Reasons to feel Optimistic

I was chatting with a friend the other day about the food industry, and all I’ve learned about it in the last few months. Trying to fit all those factoids into a short telephone conversation was not easy, and I worried that it sounded so overwhelming when piling it all on at once that my friend might end up just too overwhelmed to consider pursuing the matter any further. With all we’re bombarded with in the media these days: climate change, species extinction, shrinking biodiversity, oceanic plastic waste zones, industrial waste, food shortages…it’s easy to become paralyzed by the sheer magnitude of the problem.

It’s easy to say “what good can one person do?” but the more people do something the more the word spreads, the more it catches on…until the tipping point is reached and it suddenly becomes mainstream. This is how many social behavioural changes are made. Whether it is shopping organic, bringing reusable grocery bags to the store, or patronizing fair-trade coffee shops, when enough people start doing it that it becomes noticeable there is the power to make real changes for the better. And, while I am generally moving towards a stance of disgust towards the pervasive consumerism in our society, there are times when consumers can use that Dark Power for Good and prompt real changes in the way things are done.

I myself started on the path of Simple Living as a way to attain better financial health and move closer to our Dream of owning a small acreage. What I found was a way to live a richer and more rewarding life that included a heavy emphasis on living sustainably and developing a relationship with my food and my community. By joining the blog community and finding other inspiring writers who were following similar paths, I began to feel a part of something. But then I would venture out into the Real World and hear stories that make me despair and wonder if things will ever truly change for the better.

Lately, however, I’m finding reasons to feel more optimistic. First, there was this article from a well-respected online independant newspaper. It seems that more and more people are starting to grow their own vegetables at home and developing an interest in local eating. Perhaps the rising cost of food and reports of global food shortages, not to mention the increasing cost of fuel, are causing people to rethink the way they do things. Then there was this inspiring post from Green Bean and the article it referred to naming a new generation out of those who are slowing down and using money more wisely.

This and other things I’m hearing and seeing around me are all bringing focus to the positive change around me, change I’m seeing right now. Around here the CSA’s (community supported agriculture groups) are sold to full capacity. We are, after all, the home of the 100 Mile Diet. Our municipality has recently outlawed throwing any recyclables into the garbage stream; instead of just encouraging people to recycle, they are now mandating it. I’m seeing a significant number of shoppers bringing bags to the store, and most retailers actually ask me if I’d like a bag or not.

So while reading book after book telling me how much we’ve screwed up the planet, I can still look around me and take notice of all the folks doing their little bit toward making things better. And I’m not the only one noticing that word seems to be spreading…It feels good to be a part of that, however small.

 

Veggie Tales - FIRST HARVEST!

On Sunday I ventured into my garden and plucked the very first fruit of my labour from the soil…in case you missed the sneak preview in my last post, here it is in all its vegetable glory:

It was one of a few that were poking up from the soil a bit. After I picked this one I dug around gently and found more that seemed ready to pick:

Then I decided that I would harvest the whole plot so I could replant something else in there. Turns out some of them were a bit…well, stunted:

I’m not sure if this is just seed variability or what…Anyways, here is the whole gang of 16; 11 were of edible size:

I couldn’t resist having a taste right there in the garden, so I plucked off the top and bottom of my first picked radish, rinsed it in a bucket of water I’d poured for watering, and ate it. It was….well, it tasted like a radish!

Seriously though, having read so much about how amazing home-grown food is, how much brighter and bolder the taste is compared to grocery-store fare, I suppose I was expecting something big. In fact, if anything I’d say the radish tasted a bit mild and watery, though with the characteristic “kick” at the end. Later I read that the faster the radish grows, the sweeter and more flavourful it is. With our late, cold spring these guys were in the ground twice as long as they should have been. So I planted a new plot of radishes. I didn’t put them in the same plot as the one I’d just harvested - the idea with SFG is to rotate crops - instead I planted them in the old garlic plot (which I saw had not been growing at all after my attempts at salvaging them).

I also plucked my very first and only weed thus far:

Seems Mel was right about SFG requiring very little weeding!

On to the onions…I admit I didn’t search too long on the ‘Net because dinner was in the works, but I wanted to harvest a green onion and I tried to find out how. See, the Internet said that you just pluck the whole thing from the ground, but that’s assuming you’ve got little spring onion bulbs in there. I don’t. I have “multiplier onions”. My bunches of scallions all appear to be attached to the same big onion bulb (I dug around gently to check). So I decided to just wing it - I took a pair of sharp scissors and cut off one at the stem. Unfortunately I don’t have a photo, but it just looked like your basic green onion and I have to say I did enjoy the flavour. I’m curious to see what will happen with the cut part - will it grow back? Will the remaining stalks have to feed the growing onion bulb themselves? (in which case I’d better be careful not to harvest too many from any one bulb) And I’m still not clear on how I’m going to get more than one onion from the one bulb I planted in each spot. So far underneath the lush green tops all I’m seeing is a single bulb.

I have a feeling there’s going to be a lot more learning to come!

 

Something old, something new

On Sunday I went to pick up my latest and greatest thrift find. A friend’s mother is moving into an independent living facility and thus majorly downsizing. I scored myself this baby, and I’ve named her Martha:

If you are wondering why the background is crooked it’s because the table into which the sewing machine is built has a broken leg on one side. I managed to find a temporary solution later on. The machine itself is marked with the Woodwards brand, a department store that was very popular when I was a kid but went bankrupt in the 80’s. I’m guessing this machine is at least 30 years old. But it does seem to work! Great for a beginner like me to learn on, right?

And to go with my newfound friend I scored this find at the thrift store the week before:

It was $5.99. Woo Hoo!

So now I’m going to learn how to sew. First I need to sit down and read the Owner’s Manual. Yes, it was in one of the drawers. Then I’ll have to have my Mum give me a quick lesson while I learn to do some straight stitches. I did learn how to sew in Home Ec class, back in Grade 10. That was about 25 years ago, so I’m a bit rusty. I don’t even know what I’m planning on making just yet, although Daughter has some pajama pants that are about 6 inches too long in the legs, so perhaps I’ll hem something. She also has some pants with holes in the crotch seams. I’d like to sew those up. And then, of course, I’m going to make some pads to send to Goods4girls!

Oh, and the something new? A preview into my next Veggie Tales post:

My very first ever harvest, my very first ever homegrown vegetable. I picked it (and ate it) not long after the sewing machine arrived. Never thought I could get so excited about a radish!

 

Veggie Tales - okay…now what do I do?

In my last installment of Veggie Tales I described some of the learning I was being forced to take in with regards to my garlic, for example. Now it’s time to move into a new learning phase. I’ve got the stuff planted, it’s growing….so now what do I do?

The other day I added two new residents to my veggie garden, purchased from the farmer’s market and grown locally:

That’s Gai Lan on the left and broccoli on the right. While checking on the other residents I noticed that some earth had been brushed aside from one of my radish plants and there was a bright, round, radish-red THING in the soil! And my multiplier onions are looking like….like scallions! Here they are:

And it made me wonder….how do I know when these things are ready? The radish leaves are still rather small, and they don’t look anything like the radishes I buy in the store with their long leaves and big bunches….And my salad isn’t ready to harvest quite yet, so what am I going to do with all these radishes? It was yet another example of how ignorant a city-girl can be when it comes to her food. I had to consult a book to figure out how to proceed here.

According to my Square Foot Gardening book (full of great information for us beginners!), radishes are ready for harvest about 4 weeks after planting. I planted my first batch of radishes on February 28. It has been fairly cold up until recently, but even so that was nine weeks ago. So I guess it’s no surpise that my first batch may be ready. It also suggests you plant them every few weeks to get a continuous harvest. Swiss chard and lettuce are also harvestable only 4 weeks after planting. Already it’s starting to look like salad in there, so that’s encouraging!

Carrots take much longer, about 10 weeks, so that explains why I’m only just now seeing tiny shoots coming up.

With regard to my onions, they are “multiplier onions” which means I’m supposed to get both scallions (green onions) from them AND onions. This website says that scallions can be harvested when they look ready. Well, mine look ready! And those I don’t harvest will apparently continue to grow into onions.

So, this afternoon I am going to dig up one radish plant and one spring onion plant! This is going to be a momentous occasion and I will definitely take lots of pictures. Stay tuned!!

 

World Food Crisis: say NO to more GMO

Lately on the news (I get mine almost exclusively from our public radio station) I’ve been hearing alot about the growing food crisis. People in poor countries are committing violence in order to obtain food for their families. There are huge lineups for basic staple such as rice. It feels like we’re seeing only the start of something that hasn’t yet reached its full effect.

I was shocked to hear that some are advocating for relaxing of standards with regards to GMO foods. They claim that we can’t afford to be “picky” when people are starving, and that we should take advantage of the “high yields” that GMOs can produce in order to feed all the poor starving people.

This infuriates me. The reason people are starving is not because there isn’t enough food. It’s because we are choosing to use vast amounts of corn to produce “biofuels”; we’d rather feed our cars and watch other people starve. And because our system of food, growing it and distributing it and marketing it, has robbed people of the ability to provide for themselves. We’re killing them at both ends.

GMO crops surely contribute to farmer poverty (felt worst in the developing world). First, they price out local farmers by offering artificially cheap (i.e. heavily subsidized) products with high growth yields. These farmers then convert to GMO food production, for which they have to buy seeds every year (since the inventors of the seed decided to make them sterile, a great trick if you are the sole supplier) AND they have to buy the pesticides that the crops are modified to resist (which not only pollute the environment but destroy the soil in which the crops are grown), which they have to buy more of each year due to the development of resistance. Then they have to buy fertilizers because their soil didn’t evolve to support this particular kind of food, and growing the food in big monoculture plots without the benefits of fallowing (can’t afford to let land sit empty) drains the soil of nutrients. Finally, they have to buy tractors and harvesters and other big machines. All these costs put farmers in debt, crushing them until they can no longer feed their own families.

In the old days farmers grew the crops that were best suited to their region, and selected those crops for taste which GMO producers do not (ability to withstand long distance travel is high up on their list; taste is not even on the list). They rotated their crops, fallowed their fields, nourished them with organic matter. They saved a small amount of seed each harvest for next year. It was basically free food (labour notwithstanding). Most people today believe that these traditional farmers were simply unable to supply food for the growing populations of their countries, but I think Joel Salatin would have something to say about that. Then there’s the fact that humans existed in most regions on Earth for hundreds, if not thousands, of years before industrial farming techniques came along. They were able to sustain themselves with what was available in their region. Due to conventional farming techniques we’ve lost that knowledge in just a generation or two. People are starving because we destroyed their food-production (or reduced it to a monoculture crop they can’t survive on - coffee for example) and then destroyed all cultural knowledge about how to live off the earth in their region.

The suggestion that somehow we can turn to GMO foods to solve this crisis is ludicrous. Michael Pollan, in an article written 1.5 years ago, summed up the situation perfectly:

“This has always been the genius of industrial capitalism–to take its failings and turn them into exciting new business opportunities.”

I think what really bothers me is the ignorance of people regarding this issue. I should know, because about six months ago I was ignorant myself. I thought the only concerns people had about GMO foods were that they might be unhealthy for humans. I couldn’t quite figure that out; since DNA is fully digestible, surely eating a GMO apple isn’t going to pose an acute health risk. Now I understand what people were talking about: the nutritional value of GMO foods is far below that of the same foods produced 50 years ago. And the effects of these practices on the environment are unhealthy for all living organisms. I used to hear the argument that GMO foods are just supersized versions of the hybrids man has been coaxing out of plant species via artificial selection for centuries. Yes, in a way one could argue that splicing a gene into a tomato plant is not much different than crossing two different tomato varieties, but it’s the way GMO crops are planted, nourished, harvested, and distributed that is the bigger problem. The issue with the new genes has to do with creating a dependence on buying seeds, pesticides and fertilizers.

I’m not sure what to do about all this. Perhaps I should take some inspiration from Theresa at Pondering the Myriad Things and write a letter to my federal representative (different topic, same motivation). Perhaps I should join my local farmers market society. And while starting my first vegetable garden makes me feel less dependent on the global food system, two facts stand out: 1) the amount of food I’m providing is very small relative to what we eat - though I hope to improve with each year, and 2) my family, living in this rich part of the world, will not go hungry due to higher food prices. Meanwhile, I hear about people fighting over food, and I shake my head at our nation’s folly.

 

Fessing Up: the Buy Nothing Challenge tally

So yesterday marked the end of April and the end of Crunchy Chicken’s Buy Nothing Challenge. How did I do? Well, here is a list of all non-food, non-educational, non-necessity purchases made in the past month:

$24.81 at Lush in New York (hubby’s gift for me after a business trip to NYC, though technically he didn’t sign up for the challenge so it may be exempt)

$31 kids haircuts (I could have just waited until May, but that didn’t really seem in keeping with the challenge)

$45 birthday present for a friend (it’s not like you can put that off when there’s a party!)

And here is the big baddy: I had to fork out $70 for a parking ticket I got months ago and forgot to pay!

The challenge was pretty easy for me because I don’t do “shopping as a hobby” and I rarely buy things for myself that aren’t necessary. I’ve been living frugally for four months now (and in past years I’ve had to do so not by choice but by circumstance) so it’s getting to be habit to look for alternatives to buying (libraries, thrift stores, etc). On the other hand, since my kids are homeschooled alot of our purchases get written off as educational. We visited Science World and had to pay for parking there, saw a movie there that was extra admission, bought a cool history book, etc. But even though it wasn’t so “challenging” for me, I wholeheartedly support the Challenge as a way of bringing attention to how much unnecessary spending we do as a society, and how consumer-based our collective values are. Hopefully there are some people who signed up for the challenge who have discovered the simple joys of not spending. And it was a nice reaffirmation for others like myself. Thanks, Crunchy!

 

Resurfacing: A newbie hangs her laundry

It’s been a crazy week. I’m already working twice a week for one client and then I got a rush job from another client, which left me spending every spare moment this past week at my computer (yet neglecting my blog). The state of our home was rather disastrous, laundry piling up in huge heaps at the bottom of the stairs, toys and books scattered everywhere…it’s a true testament to what I do around here on a daily basis to see what happens when I’m otherwise occupied! So first a big thank you for coming back after I abandoned without explanation. And now that the report is finished I was able to get back to a more normal day today. I’d like to tell you about my adventures with laundry…

It was a warm and sunny day and I was washing bed linens when it dawned upon me that now would be a good time to start using my clothesline. For the record, I have never used one before. Though I do have memories of my grandmother’s house and the apron she kept loaded with clothespins (it’s amazing how many of my activities lately bring back memories of my grandparents). I’m not sure whether the clothesline here is just old and decrepit or whether I have a bit of a learning curve ahead of me, but the first thing I noticed when I started hanging sheets is that they sagged the line quite a bit. Okay, actually I have to back up because several weeks ago I hung a large tarp off the clothesline (the one I had used for mixing SFG soil, and which I had then rinsed clean). I made the mistake of pinning it to the top line, which of course caused the whole thing to twist around. Yes, this is how much knowledge our culture has lost that a woman with a PhD can’t figure out how to hang laundry! So today at least I pinned the stuff on the bottom, but then I encountered another problem:

This little doohickey is supposed to keep the bottom line from sagging way below the top line. Ideally it should end up about halfway along your clothesline once everything is hung. So I tried that, and when most of the laundry was hung I ran into another problem:

This other doohicky is a crank that you can apparently use to tighten the clothesline. Well, the red stacking thingy in the picture above will not travel past this cranking doohickey. I ended up creating a snag in the line which started to bunch up my laundry. So I had to take the laundry down and line the clothesline up so that the red stacking thingy didn’t encounter the cranking thingy until I had all my laundry up. ‘Course then I had the sagging problem again, but by this point I was willing to call it a day and hope the learning curve is steep. Here’s the final result:

I’m sure if I play around with the line I’ll figure out where the cranky thingy should be when I started hanging so that it won’t get in the way, but will also allow me to put the red stacking thingy in the middle of the clothesline to prevent sagging. Fortunately the clothesline is high enough up that the kids can play and not touch the laundry.

I will say that I was very impressed with how quickly everything dried, even though it wasn’t in direct sunlight by the time I got around to hanging it. I’d say the temperature was at least 15 C, maybe a bit higher. That’s quite impressive to a newbie clothesline user such as myself.

At this point I am not sure that I’m going to use it for all my laundry. With four people in this family, two of them young children, I do a lot of laundry and it’s all I can do these days to get it put away let alone find time to hang and remove. And we are still far and away from the dry season here. But I will definitely be doing it for sheets and I may experiment with towels, too. My goal is to one day have a setup like Rhonda’s over at Down-to-Earth with clotheslines under a verandah, so that rain won’t be a deterrant. But it’s all about Baby Steps, right?

 

Bookworm Challenge

Another month (well, almost) and another cool challenge. This one is put out by Green Bean Dreams, and is something I can definitely Get Behind (anybody remember that album by William Shatner, and the song “I can’t get behind that”?). Anyways, it’s called Be a Bookworm May 08 and this challenge is going to be easy-peasy for me since I am an avid reader. I’ve been pouring through relevent books on sustainable living, simple living, and related topics since we came up with The Dream and The Plan. You might wonder how a full-time mum to two young homeschooled kids and part-time businesswoman finds time to read anything. Well, I am a fast reader. And I am currently working a job contract that has me commuting 1.5 hours each way, twice a week, by public transit and I have a bad habit of staying up way too late reading in bed after everybody else has fallen asleep.

I maintain a Book List on this blog. Whenever I hear about a book I think I should read, I add it to the On Hold list at my library and when I’m done I review it and add it to my List. There are so many books that have profoundly moved me, but as far as this Simple Living thing goes I’d have to credit Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma as being the first to inspire me to significant change and action. The next was David Wann’s Affluenza and from there it was just a snowball effect for me.

I’ll see which of the big ‘On Hold’ books (listed on my sidebar) come in first and that will be my Bookworm Challenge novel. Currently I’m voraciously devouring The 100 Mile Diet, which is a particularly wonderful read since I live within the same one hundred miles that the authors relied on for their sustenance. The tidbits of local history have been especially poignant. I’ve also got The World Without Us by Alan Weisman which, coincidentally, features a photo of my city’s skyline on the front cover (though the author himself does not live here, nor is from here). I’m looking forward to participating in Green Bean’s Challenge and perhaps discovering some more great reads to add to my list. Happy Reading everyone!

 

Simple Living and Environmentalism: connected

I’ve been writing a few posts about environmental issues lately, like the mass of plastic waste floating in the North Pacific and the problem of exporting our disposable lifestyle to the developing world. When I think about the quintessential Simple Living blogs like Down-to-Earth I wonder sometimes if I’m veering off on tangents that are increasingly removed from the main topic of this blog, which is focussed on our family’s plan to leave the big city and buy a small acreage.

The commitment to curb spending and save money in order to make our dream a reality was the beginning of a journey for me, one that soon led me to discover and adopt the principles of Simple Living. We needed to spend less, to be frugal. This meant recognizing and resisting the forces of consumerism and educating ourselves about money (particularly the perils of consumer debt). As my journey progressed, the connection between consumption and environmental damage became more apparent to me.

Crunchy Chicken posted today about the upcoming Earth Day events. Her words sum up my feelings about the connection between Simple Living and sustainable living. She writes:

It is extremely easy to get sucked into buying into a new lifestyle and there are tons of products and companies out there to help you purchase your way into greener living…If you really want to do something for the environment, stop consuming.

Trying to live a Greener lifestyle while still holding to the consumerist lifestyle of our modern culture runs you the risk of becoming just another consumer, albeit one with a Green label. Yes, recycled plastic garbage bags are better than those made from 100% raw materials, but it’s still another plastic bag that was manufactured, distributed, and will sit in a landfill (or worse) for years. Green shampoos and household cleansers still come in plastic bottles. Biodegradable corn-based containers and so-called biofuels are dependent on an already dysfunctional and destructive corn-growing industry.

Here’s a humourous look at the concept of Buying Green:

Our environmental problems are not going to be solved simply by switching from the purchase of one kind of product to the purchase of another. Crunchy Chicken said:

“…over the last year, I’ve matured from focusing on doing green things that tend to be product based, to really focusing on the necessity of products in achieving a greener lifestyle.”

I feel the same way. This journey I’m on has taken me to the same point. And it goes back to something I wrote early on, that it’s all connected: frugality, consumerism, environmentalism. Since then I’ve found more connections. The desire to grow my own vegetables was partly based on frugality, but has since opened my eyes to the destruction wrought by industrial agribusiness on the environment and our health. It has lead to a growing interest (which is fast becoming a passion) in local and sustainable farming.

I hope this blog provides witness to that connection. I hope our journey can inspire others to question the status quo and make even small changes in their lives for the better. Mostly, though, I hope that I can join with the voices of others who have similarly inspired me and continue to do so on a daily basis (see the Blogroll on my sidebar). I’ll end with this quote from Michael Pollen (which I grabbed from No Impact Man today) about why we should bother to do our tiny little bit:

“If you do bother, you will set an example for other people. If enough other people bother, each one influencing yet another in a chain reaction of behavioral change…Consciousness will be raised, perhaps even changed: new moral imperatives and new taboos might take root in the culture…Not having things might become cooler than having them. And those who did change the way they live would acquire the moral standing to demand changes in behavior from others — from other people, other corporations, even other countries.”

 

Life without TV

When our family moved back to Canada from the US 3.5 years ago, we decided not to get cable in our new home. Part of it was a due to the fact that finances were very tight back then, but we also felt that Daughter was being exposed to too much TV. She hadn’t watched any when she was a baby and we didn’t want soon-to-be-born Son to end up parked in front of it with his sister. We didn’t even miss it until hockey playoff season when Husband finally caved in and bought a set of rabbit ears (a TV antenna). We now get about 3 channels and the kids watch CBC Kids on weekday mornings for about an hour after they wake up while I enjoy a cup of tea at my computer. The kids come out to play (the TV is in the bedroom) long before the shows are over, without any prompting from me, which is why they are allowed free access to it each morning.

This past week Husband has watching hockey games in the evening and Daughter has been enjoying watching them while we snuggle before bedtime. We saw some commercials last night and had our usual discussion about how they are specifically geared to make us want to spend money on their products. She listens and agrees but cannot seem to fight the lure of advertising. After each commercial she’ll exclaim “Oh, we should get that!”. I am so glad that my kid is rarely exposed to this stuff, because it’s obvious that my lectures cannot match the power of advertising!

My own reaction to the commercials and to mainstream TV in general has become similarly innocent. I am so out of the loop when it comes to the latest TV shows. I’ve never seen Lost or Desperate Housewives, and the only American Idol I can name is that Ruben guy. I don’t know who Lindsay Lohan is or why she is famous. And you know what? It doesn’t impact my life in the slightest.

Watching TV the other night I was also struck by the lifestyle that it portrays and how much it differs from my own real life experience. I’m not trying to suggest that most people live like those on TV, but I think subconsciously we accept the lifestyle TV portrays as normal, we get acclimatized to it.

I was struck by how plastic the people seemed, all shiny teeth and perfectly coiffed hair. The women wear gobs of makeup and are all thin, whereas the men exhibit a much wider range of attractiveness and fitness level (you’ll often see less attractive males paired up with attractive females, but never the other way around). I find the people on TV so fake that I am finding it hard to achieve the “suspension of disbelief” required to get really immersed in a show. I used to watch a lot of TV and I don’t think it has changed all that much in the last four years, but I find that even the really popular series seem contrived to me. We got a hold of a few episodes of The Tudors and Rome (the latter was so violent and disturbing I couldn’t even be in the room while Husband watched).

And then there are the commercials - busy modern women extolling the virtues of disposable cleaning cloths (”Just wipe and toss!”), or shoe sales that suggest no woman can be happy with just one or two pairs. The combination of consumption and waste just screamed out at me in a way I never noticed years ago. I don’t think it’s just because I’m learning about sustainable living and frugality. I think a good part of it is that I just don’t visit that world anymore - I don’t do TV and I don’t do malls and it has lost its familiarity and become very foreign to me.

We’re not a Screen-Free household. We have a DVD player, and an account at Zip online movie rentals. The kids borrow DVDs from our library each week (they’re really into The Magic School Bus these days). And there are some wonderful video podcasts out there: some of our favorites are Sesame Street, Ask an Astronomer, Discovery Channel, and my personal fave TEDtalks.

The point of going TV free is to remove commercialism from our home as much as possible, to reduce exposure of the kids to commercials, to free up more time for family and other pursuits, to better control what shows the kids are watching, and to save money. I highly encourage anybody who is looking to live more simply and protect their children (and even themselves) from the forces of advertising to consider going TV-free themselves. It really isn’t that hard!