Rural Aspirations

Seven months ago when Husband and I came up with The Dream and The Plan we knew we had to get serious with our budget. We wanted to maximize the amount of money we put towards our goal each month, and so we began to pare down our expenses. The two biggest categories after rent were groceries and miscellaneous spending (everything other than rent, bills, food, and gas). 

Slowing down on spending was pretty easy. I’m not much of a shopper to start with, and after educating myself about consumerism via books such as Affluenza and films such as Maxed Out on Debt and The Story of Stuff it was easy to get into a No-Spend frame of mind. I fell in love with our local thrift stores and began to take full advantage of an excellent library system. 

The grocery budget also seemed an easy target for trimming. We’d recently moved from a neighbourhood where the nearest grocery store was a Whole Foods market, to a where it was a Big Box supermarket. We cut out the expensive foods and I stopped eating organic (The Omnivore’s Dilemma left me feeling jaded about industrial organic) and went for low cost items instead. We managed to cut our food budget almost in half, but my journey to learn more about our food would soon lead me to feel that we were paying for this in ways other than that measured by money.

Over the last few months I have educated myself about modern industrial food production and have found it seriously lacking in both value and morality. The costs the Earth is paying for our methods of cheap, mass food production are too high, the poor quality of the product and its interdependence with the processed food industry is compromising our health, and the suffering of meat animals is too much for my comfort zone. I have come to appreciate the value of eating locally and seasonally. I stopped buying unethical meat, and now seek out suppliers whose animals are allowed to live as they are designed to live (thank you, Joel Salatin). I planted a vegetable garden. 

As this summer of local eating progresses I am falling into a new mindset. Each visit to the farmer’s market reveals the next stage of this cycle of growth, yield, and harvest. Yesterday I discovered boxes bursting with zucchinis green and gold, nugget potatoes of all colours and sizes, sweet local corn!, broccoli and beans. Who needs salad now?

The ethical fowl lady finally had chickens and I spent $26 on a 3 pound roaster. I’d waited weeks for this bird, and the value it holds for me is significant. This will be roasted for a family Sunday dinner, leftovers eaten in sandwiches and reheated for the next day’s meal. We’ll pick it clean and then the bones will make a large pot of stock. Nothing will be wasted, and maximum value will be gleaned from it’s carcass. That is what happens when you spend money on quality items and appreciate how much has gone into it. I have never, ever felt that way after buying a Family Pack of boneless, skinless mass-produced chicken breasts.

And so yesterday Husband and I reviewed our food budget. Now that we are sharing household duties, he’s been doing more of the grocery shopping and I haven’t been too happy with what he’s bringing home. For me, the priority has shifted. It’s no longer about eating as cheaply as possible. In his latest book, In Defense of Food, Michael Pollan notes that North Americans used to spend almost twice as much on food, as a percentage of income, as we do now. Even despite the current “food crisis” and soaring prices. Over the same period of time, spending on health care (at least in the US where it is not universal)  has more than doubled. Yes, I want to save money. But not at the cost of our health and my own moral values. I simply cannot in good conscience continue to support an industry that I feel is so destructive.

To my relief, Husband agreed: reduce consumption of processed foods (hot dogs are now reserved solely for camping trips and special occasions), buy only ethical meat and seafood, eat meat or seafood only twice a week at max. I’ll continue to top up the harvest from my meagre garden with produce from the Farmer’s Market. We’ll do this for one month, keep track of our spending, and determine how much this way of eating will cost. I know it will be more than the 8% of our monthly income it was in the original budget, but I’m certain it will be less than 12-15%. The price, as far as I’m concerned, will be well worth it.

I want to apologize for not keeping up with the blog much lately. And I’ve barely had time to visit all my favorite blogs, too. So I’m sorry if I seem to have disappeared!

There have been some big changes around our household lately. My husband got laid off; but it was a Good Thing. He got a nice severance package which made up for the fact that he wasn’t planning on leaving until January of next year: we ended up with the same amount of savings but sooner, and without him having to slave away at a job he didn’t like for six more months! The best part is that he ended up getting a new job with the guy he was hoping to work with next year, so he’s very happy.

This new job has him working mostly from home and setting his own hours (this is why we thought it would be a good job to have when we move – it doesn’t require us to stay in the city). There will be busy periods interspersed between slow periods and that works out perfectly for us. My business has suddenly picked up speed so we find ourselves in the happy position of sharing child care and work duties pretty equally. It was what we’d wanted all along but we didn’t expect it to happen this soon. We’re still shaking our heads and smiling at the way it just sort of landed in our laps!

So, with two case deadlines looming I’ve been spending a lot of time working and not much time on my blog. Things will slow down a little bit after those cases are done, and I plan to get back into more regular blogging then. I hope you’ll bear with me through these adjustments, as Husband and I try to settle on a schedule of housework, cooking, and grocery shopping. It’s great having him home, but we need to completely rework our routine and that part is challenging!

I’m combining these two because the meal for week 7 was pretty lame. I was out of ideas, and out of food, so I threw together this lunch:

Homemade bread (with locally milled, organic unbleached flour), home-grown carrots (rainbow variety, two colours of which are shown here), and a bowl of salad greens from the garden. 

The week 8 meal was much better. It was an exciting meal because it contained several kinds of vegetable, all harvested from my garden:

Local new potatoes (bought from the supermarket but grown in Delta, BC). Broccoli, carrots, and sugar snap peas from the garden (I accidentally burnt the onions so they were left out!). Tossed with olive oil, balsamic vinegar, and salt. Very tasty. And I discovered that stir-fried sugar snap peas taste AMAZING!

There are days when I forget I have a garden – the maintenance is easy and I can leave for a few days and not worry about it. Lately it has been hot with no rainfall so I’ve been going out to water it now and then. Sometimes I go out just to take a look, munching on sugar snap peas while I explore what’s growing. I enjoy that part very much. Just a few days ago I was delighted to discover these little babies:

They are Sun Gold tomatoes, a variety that is positively thriving in my garden right now and will produce golden cherry tomatoes when ripe. 

But some days I go out there just intending to “munch and peek” and end up getting my hands dirty. Last week I took out all the lettuce plants as they had bolted and our last salad was definitely on the bitter side of fresh. I also removed the gai lan, which I’d not pruned and had therefore missed harvesting. The flowers were pretty but as they turned to little seed pods I realized it was just a giant plant taking up space and crowding out other things. 

Today was another such day. My compost bin was finally filled to the top after the last visit from the lawnmowing guys (hired by our landlord), who started putting the clippings in my bin at my request. I decided that, ready or not, it was time to start harvesting my compost. So I opened up the lid, stuck in a trowel, and pulled out some Black Gold.

I actually wasn’t sure what to expect, or how to know it was ready. But I figured after almost 8 months of adding things to this bin I had to have *something*. I had sort of imagined it would look like potting soil – rich, dark, crumbly. It wasn’t quite like that. It was dark…it was also lumpy and I could see egg shells throughout. It didn’t smell like garbage, which I thought was a good sign. And it was clearly different from the grass clippings added more recently so I dug out some more and hoped for the best.

 I closed the door, mixed up the compost, and gained a fair bit of room at the top again. Then I grabbed my bucket and spade and went to the garden.

I recalled Mel saying in the Square Foot Gardening book that one should add a scoop of compost after harvesting a plot to replenish the soil. I began doing this and slowly gained confidence in my compost as I dumped shovelfuls onto the dry soil of the garden. Using my hand rake I blended it until it resembled “normal soil”, but with a darker hue (in fact, it looked alot like what I started with back in February). As I worked the earth I imagined all that had gone into the compost: organic local eggshells, tons of veggie and fruit bits, tea bags and coffee grinds, grass clippings and dry leaves…all these things going back into my garden just seemed so…right. Like a circle had been closed.

I ended up putting a little bit of compost in every empty plot and even put a bit around my chard and pole beans. I know I’m going to have to sit down very soon and decide what crops to plant for the next season. At least the soil is ready!

This is way late, but we went on holiday and life has just been really hectic lately! 

The meal came together in a most delightful way after a visit to the farmer’s market. My favorite tomato grower was out of yummy cherry and grape varieties, but had a couple of scrumptious-looking beefsteak varieties. We grabbed two of those and decided to have stuffed mushrooms. The local mushroom grower picked out some smaller criminis for me and voila, a meal was born.

Here are the ingredients:

Beefsteak tomatoes from Gipaanda Greenhouses, Surrey, BC.

Mushrooms from Richmond Specialty Mushrooms, Aldergrove, BC

Herbs from our garden.

Buns from the local bakery.

Salad from the garden. 

I confess there was a bit of shredded parmigiano reggiano, which is definitely not local, in the tomato stuffing. It was a pretty yummy dinner except I forgot to place a wedge of Little Qualicum Cheeseworks brie on the top to melt before serving!

We have some friends in the hydroponics business (seriously, it’s a legitimate business). They are crunchy organic types and I’ve been picking their brains lately about the environmental benefits of hydroponics technology. Yesterday one of them showed me this. It’s an article in New York magazine about a future technology called SkyFarming that, according to the inventors, could be ready to go in about 10 years.

I admit there is much to love about this type of farming. Water is recycled and contained in closed systems. Power is provide by solar panels and wind spires. There is no loss of topsoil or depletion of the nutrient content of soil…in fact, there isn’t any soil involved at all. 

And that’s where I start to feel a little strange about the whole thing. There’s something about digging in the earth that just feels so good. It’s hard to imagine gardening in the absence of dirt. But while folks like Joel Salatin have shown that one can produce large quantities of food from a relatively small operation and still treat the animals humanely, avoid pesticides and fertilizers, and maintain a healthy local ecosystem…with the world’s population growing exponentially, and urban populations swelling the most, I think it is inevitable that eventually we’ll have to come up with an alternative to land-based agriculture. 

The other issue I have is one of nutrient composition. We know that food grown industrially is deficient in nutrient content compared to food grown fifty years ago, i.e. before the development of modern industrial agriculture (see The End of Food; reviewed in my Book List). I’ve written before about the idea that an individual fruit or vegetable is nothing more or less than the sum of the ingredients that went into it. When those ingredients come from rich, organic, nutrient-dense soil you end up with a very healthy snack. When the soil has been depleted by overuse and artificial fertilizers are providing the main source of nutrients you end up with something that may look the same (though with industrial practices being what they are, likely not) but which contains far less in terms of nutritional value. 

With hydroponics, given that there is no soil, all nutrients must be provided artificially. How complete are these formulas? Can they provide all the macro- and micronutrients that a particular region of soil contains for that particular local edible plant? Michael Pollan pointed out the fallacy of nutritionism when it comes to the food we eat. So….can hydroponic fertilizers compare to good, old fashioned, compost-rich soil?

According to my friend there are amazing advances being made in this area. The fertilizers her company sells are made from such ingredients as kelp and other plants. Other ingredients are bioengineered by fungus and other micro-organisms that can provide usable, organic nitrogen from waste materials without the need for petroleum byproducts (see here; scroll down to “ET Products”). Still, I can’t help but wonder just how well we can duplicate Mother Nature. Will a tomato grown in a SkyFarm be the same nutritionally compared to one grown in good, healthy soil? 

Despite my beliefs that, even should SkyFarming become the major source of food production in the future, there will always be a core group that holds out for “the real thing” (the APLS of the future?)…I do think that there are enough great ideas in this system (recycling wastewater, capturing water moisture from the plants) that it represents a positive option for feeding our hungry planet in a sustainable way. What do you think of this idea?

This weekend our family headed up to Lake Country in the Okanagan region of BC to do a little camping and a little exploration of the area (it’s one of our choices for the future homestead). It was our first real camping trip of the summer (as in, we slept in a tent and cooked on a portable grill).

When I was growing up, my father took us camping and hiking in the backcountry. No sissy car camping for us kids; we hauled in our food and water and stayed for several days. Dairy was out, as was anything else perishable. A can of condensed milk was available for tea or coffee (I hated the stuff), and dinner was often dehydrated meals from the camping supply store. The lack of fresh choices in my childhood camping experiences may explain why I have to think hard about packing anything other than convenience foods when we embark on our travels. Despite the healthy eating going on at home, when it comes to packing for a camping trip my brain seems to shut off and revert to old (bad) habits. Hot dogs and marshmallows are de rigeur, the car ride almost always involves at least one drive-thru experience, snacks are obtained from the gas station…you get the drift. 

This last trip was mostly an on-the-fly affair when it came to planning, and I was working the day previous. Since I am the one in our family who plans and packs (Husband is the driver) I was really unprepared this time. My attitude towards food has changed considerably over the last several months, and while I did make a few pit stops at fruit stands along the way (the Okanagan region is bursting with orchards) we still ate way too much junk food. The only thing local at our camp table (besides some fruit) was the beer. Oh the shame!

We’re planning another trip in a couple of weeks and I’m challenging myself to provide better fare this time. We have a big honkin’ cooler and we’re never far from a bag of ice so there really is no excuse not to provide fresh, wholesome snacks and food for my family. Even on the road. A bag packed with sandwiches, fresh fruit, and some homemade granola bars is far better than anything you can get by talking into a speaker while the car is running. Meals can be planned ahead of time, condiments and essential seasonings (like olive oil) can come along for the ride. And of course there’s all the fresh fruit and produce at the roadside stands. We have a Coleman stove and a portable grill so really, I have no excuse. I hereby pledge to ditch the junk food on our next road trip before my children decide that “travel” is synonymous with “Happy Meal”.

Husband told me the news today as we were dancing around each other in the tiny U-shaped working space in our kitchen (he grinding and brewing his coffee, me putting the kettle on for tea): Canada’s Department of Finance has announced an end to the 40 year mortgage and zero-down financing. As of October 15 the most damage you can do to yourself will be 5% down and 35 years amortization.

It happens less than a month since I last mentioned how dangerous I felt these lending products to be. We are a generation of consumers raised to be more or less financially illiterate, and what this results in is people becoming slaves to their debt. Simple Living is about freeing up one’s time for the truly important things in life, and a major component of this is spending the money you have wisely. Money spent on repaying consumer debt is almost always a drain on one’s time and freedom, not to mention emotional energy. 

But surely real estate is the exception right? Well, it’s true that real estate is probably one of the safest long-term investments you can make. We all need a roof over our heads and paying into a mortgage is one way of storing equity for the future. But home-buying is no less susceptible to the forces of marketing and consumerism than any other product and, like with many other large purchases in life, people seem to easily get convinced to buy more house than they need or can afford. I believe this happens because of our aforementioned lack of basic financial skills and because the people we turn to for advice are the very ones who profit from maximizing our debt loads. 

The last person to be telling you how much mortgage you can afford is the bank. When forty year mortgages became available the PR surrounding it was along these lines: “Making it more affordable to buy a home in today’s real estate markets”. They acted like they were doing US a favour. Forty years of debt and the accompanying massive interest payments is no favour to anybody except the institution to whom you pay interest. This type of lending is, IMHO, nothing short of predatory.

What CAN you afford? A payment that doesn’t stretch your budget already, so that you can weather changes in interest rates, income, and circumstance. An amortization term whereby you have a real chance of paying off your mortgage before you are dead. A debt ratio (downpayment versus loan) that doesn’t put you at risk of an upside-down mortgage should the markets turn (and they always do). And for goodness sakes, unless it’s a matter of life and death, do NOT borrow money on your home. It isn’t “real” money in the sense that you have it in the bank. It’s a virtual savings account that can disappear with the whims of the market; unfortunately the same cannot be said for your payments when you draw on that virtual account. This kind of debt is no different than any other form of consumer debt except that you have placed your home on the line. 

In Simple Living terms, debt robs us of the freedom to make our life priorities a reality. Freedom to stay home with your children, to move should circumstances warrant it, to grow your own food and preserve your harvest, to create healthy homemade meals from whole foods, to be mindful in all that you do. Freedom to travel, to learn new skills, to pursue hobbies and interests, to volunteer in your community and participate in worthwhile projects. Freedom to spend more time doing what you love and less time doing what you must. I don’t think our society has really grasped this concept, and I’m under no illusion that the government had this in mind when they made this announcement. Nevertheless I think this is ultimately a good thing for Canadians.

We’ve been enjoying fresh salad from the garden for weeks, and lately I was wondering when the bounty would come to an end. I recalled reading that when lettuce bolts it becomes bitter and is best sent to the composter. The last couple of salads we’ve had have been a tad bitter, but I didn’t actually know what bolted lettuce looked like. So I Googled it. Here is a picture of bolted lettuce:

Instead of a roundish clump of lettuce the plant begins to grow upwards on a thick stalk so that it becomes more conical in shape, like a Christmas tree. 

With this image in mind I headed out to the garden and found one plant that definitely fit the bill, another that was pretty close. It is kind of sad because there is just so much lettuce growing in my garden right now, all different kinds of greens. I can’t possibly eat it all and some of it is not that tasty anymore. But I know it will all go into the composter and thus contribute to the next crop of food. It’s not a waste (yet one more wonderful thing about organic gardening). 

So what’s up next? Well, I started harvesting carrots. These are a rainbow variety and they sure look pretty on the plate, don’t they?

And these aren’t even the nicest – the next batch (for which I sadly do not have a photo) had some really dark purple ones. They aren’t very big – a limitation of having only 6″ of soil in which to grow. Some of them were tasty, a few were rather woody. I can’t say the flavour was all that impressive, but I prefer my carrots sweet. Of course, I savoured each one thinking about what went into getting them here on the table, and how long I’d waited for them. I think next year I’ll plant carrots in either a deeper box or perhaps I’ll try a regular flower bed (i.e. not a container). Or I might try the short, thick variety.

Those bulbs in the photo above are my red onions. The tops have browned and fallen over but they aren’t much bigger than when I planted them (that plate is not a dinner plate, it’s a dessert plate). They aren’t really usable, but I left a few in the ground to see if they get any bigger. Meanwhile my multiplier onions are very tall and have burst out of their ‘capsules’ to produce tiny flowers. Some have already started to brown and fall over, and they are bursting up out of the soil. I won’t really know until I dig them up but they are looking more promising than the reds.

The greatest joy, however, has come from the Sugar Snap Peas. I plucked my first few pods off the VERY tall vines (my trellis was just under 6 feet and the plants are easily getting close to 8!) and I swear, I am not just exaggerating because they are my plants: they were hands down the BEST sugar snap peas I have ever had! Everybody who has sampled them has commented on how sweet they are. They are fat and crisp and delicious!! I could snack on them all day. Next year I am going to build a bigger trellis with smaller holes in the mesh* and plant a ton of these suckers! Does anybody know what I can do to preserve some of this harvest? Should I shell them and freeze them? Or just enjoy them while I can?

So I’m bidding farewell to the salad days of spring, and hello to the sweet crunchy goodness of a sugar snap pea summer!

In my next post we’ll talk about plans for fall and winter plantings (yes, apparently it’s that time already).

* you may recall the efforts I went through to find the trellis netting that Mel specified in his book. Well, my peas obviously would have preferred more to grab onto in the growing stages – they got tangled around each other alot as the curly feelers reached out and didn’t find anything except a neighbouring stalk

I’ve been thinking lately about the effect of aesthetics on our sense of well-being. Is money spent on making a place “look nice” an investment in mental peace? Or is it just another excuse to go shopping?

I started my interest in the aesthetics of environment back in my twenties when home improvement shows began cropping up all over TV. I loved Bob Vila’s Home Again series, and Home Time with JoAnne Liebeler and Dean Johnson. I didn’t have a home to decorate, but I did share a rental home with three roommates. Our modern tastes and tiny budgets were perfectly suited to Ikea and every now and then we’d go blow our money on furniture and spend the rest of the day with the music cranked, assembling stuff and moving it around to give our home a fresher look. After a while the melamine would show its age and the cycle of shopping would repeat itself. I constantly dreamed of having a house of my own one day to paint and decorate and renovate to my heart’s content. 

But later I began to question my values on this: many people around the world live in poverty and/or face far greater challenges in life than coordinating paint colours throughout their home. I began to wonder if my desire to create an aesthetically pleasing environment in my home was a reflection of being born and raised in a wealthy country where basic survival requires little thought, leaving plenty of time to reflect on more esoteric pursuits. Is it really necessary to live/work in an attractive environment to be truly happy? Or was I just a victim of marketing?

Then I read some articles that described the effects of colour, orderliness, and natural light on human emotional states. I learned that the state of one’s environment does affect mood and mental state, and that the optimal combination of these elements is dictated by both innate and cultural tastes. This information also prompted me to view the notion of aesthetics beyond the realm of home decor to encompass many aspects of our surroundings: work, play, our neighbourhoods. For example, the addition of flowers, decorative lampposts, exterior paint and architectural design can transform a bleak and depressing streetscape into an uplifting and hopeful experience even in the poorest neighbourhoods. The choice of colour and light source can actually affect work performance and productivity.  

So if there is a rational, scientific basis for clean aesthetics that involve certain colours, certain kinds of lighting, certain architectural elements (which may vary widely from one culture to the next but retain basic principles of design) then how do those of us wishing to live frugally and avoid senseless consumerism find a balance? Where do we draw the line between creating a peaceful, uplifting, spiritually nourishing environment and simply getting caught up in trends and marketing forces that pushed us to spend money on peach stucco and white tubular railings in the eighties, and granite countertops and stainless steel appliances the 00’s? (sideline: how DO we refer to this first decade of the new century anyhow?) 

Almost twenty years after watching my first Bob Vila show I still don’t own a house, but we’re definitely getting close to that goal. Ideally we’d like to build our own, based on the principles of the Not So Big House. Considering the different elements of a house – the interior, the exterior, and the land around it – drives me to the sort of questions I’ve posed here. I’d be interested to hear others’ thoughts on the importance of design and aesthetics and how (or if) they play a role in the Simple and Frugal life.