Thursday, April 30, 2015

Flushable in Name Only

I'm sure many parents are like us. When your child finally gets to the age where they can use a toilet by themselves, you do your own kind of Potty Dance. Unfortunately it takes a while for true self-sufficiency. When "flushable wipes" came along, we bought them. We bought a lot of them. They seemed to be the answer between wads of toilet paper and a stinky 3 yr old. They were even easier for our child, and wonderful for camping. Big name toilet paper companies even started making some aimed at adults, and there were similar products in the feminine hygiene aisle. Wipes for everyone!

Unfortunately, the marketing was a bit misleading. They have become the bane of water treatment plants. They'll flush and not back up your pipes, but that's the end of the truth in advertising. The issue starts when they leave your house. When I realized they were such a problem, we stopped flushing them and then stopped using them altogether. The companies that make the wipes blame the consumers, saying that people are flushing regular baby wipes and not just the wipes that are intended to be flushed. While I don't doubt intelligence is a bell curve, I find it hard to believe that it's all baby wipes.

I ran across this video that illustrates the enormity of the problem. This is just one treatment plant in New York City. It's disgusting. It also makes me think what other products are causing problems I don't see because I'm blessed to live where my trash gets picked up in blue trucks and I never see it again. In this case, good old toilet paper is the way to go (no puns intended) because it breaks up and it's biodegradable. It's a natural product, unlike the plastics used in wipes. It doesn't end up in huge bins, being trucked to landfills.

Moms and dads - I hear you. Those wipes are calling your name. Just don't flush them. Or, consider a moist paper towel if your kid needs a little help. Think of the poor guy in the Bronx whose job is to use a rake to get them out of the treatment plant. Ew....

Tuesday, April 21, 2015

Dear Garden, I'm sorry. Love, Bitsy

I’m going to be completely honest and admit that I’ve let my  vegetable garden go to hell.  I’ve spent the majority of the past three years pregnant or dealing with a newborn and neglected it horribly.  This year I am determined to reclaim it and give it the love and attention it desperately needs.  Where I live I get six months of winter and two months of the other seasons if I’m lucky. The year I tried to establish my raised beds we had a long spring with two weeks of summer and an early fall. Everything rotted where it grew because it never got hot and dried out. Thankfully this year seems to be following the usual pattern. I was able to start my bed prep in April like I prefer.  I did most of it in a single afternoon with help from my husband and a good friend.  

The first thing was to rake out all the dead and pull anything left to winter over.  I had left all my roots in to winter over and thought I would find quite a few things nicely preserved under the freshly thawed surface.  I found six partially eaten carrots.  Unbeknownst to me a rabbit had gotten inside the fence and made herself quite a nest between two of my raised beds.  She lived high on the hog all winter off my veggies protected from predators by my fence.  The hole she was using to get in and out has since been mended.  

Raking the debris was fairly straight forward.  Since I neglected my beds I had disease issues last year so instead of composting the leaves and dead plants like I would normally recommend doing my husband and I burned them on our dirty burn pile.  Then I had him and one of our friends use a weed torch and burn off the surface of all the beds to kill any remaining disease causing microbes and germs before they were turned into the soil to wreck havoc with this year’s crop.  My husband loves any excuse to get the weed torch out so it was not hard to get him to help at all.  

Turning beds is very hard for me.  Last year my husband bought me a two handled broad fork to use.  He had seen one when we went to the Mother Earth News Fair in PA the fall before and felt it would be big help.  He was right, the broad fork allows me to use my body weight to turn the ground as opposed to relying on strength and stamina both of which I struggle with.  With a broad fork I just have to step up on to it and rock back, the tool does the rest of the work.  It did not take the 3 of us long to get the six big raised beds and four small ones turned like this.   

After the beds were turned I had the guys burn the beds again.  This time they were going after old root material and the worst thing that has resulted from my neglect, an infestation of  Japanese Beetle grubs.  I hate Japanese Beetles.  As grubs they destroy the roots of plants and any root vegetables.  Once they become adults they feed on the leaves and fruit of the plants and can kill full grown hardwood trees if there are enough of them.  They are also highly annoying buzzing around crashing into everything including windows, the dog, cars and people.  They seem especially adept at locating and bouncing off my glasses and falling in my drink. Only mine, never my husbands or one of the kids.  It has to be personal. They are huge pests and a big problem.  Burning the larvae and eggs in the soil is a big step towards reducing their numbers this year.  I have other organic pest control methods I’m going to implement as the season progresses but this was attack one in my war against them.  

Here is another confession:  I haven’t amended my raised beds in years.  I knew that I would have  to do that this spring and shopped around for organic solutions. I found a four part system from Arbico organics that I decided to try out.  It’s called Bob and John’s soil prep kit.  It promises not to burn any existing plants and is all natural.  I bought the small kit because I don’t have a great deal of soil to cover.  I found it very easy to use and I am optimistic about the results.  The first three parts were easy enough to broadcast by hand and the last just required a hose sprayer.  No complicated mixing and measuring just toss it, spray it, and water it in.  The forecast is  calling for three days of rain which should help the amendments work their way in nicely before I put any seeds or plants in.  


That is how I spent my Sunday.  Hopefully It was a big step towards reclaiming my vegetable patch and undoing the damage caused by neglect.  Maybe my poor garden will even forgive me and I’ll get a decent crop this year. 


Monday, April 20, 2015

Suburban Gardening, Metro DC style



A few weeks back, we got a freak snowstorm here, and now it is bright and sunny and about 47F, which to my husband means t-shirt weather. Welcome to springtime in DC.
We are suburban gardeners. (I use the royal We here, as it is mostly him.) Several years ago, he and a friend built a raised garden bed in the low point of the backyard, where it was spongy anyway, and he covered it with chicken wire above and below to keep out the deer and rabbits. That is where we contain most of our gardening. Leaving it open would just be a deer snack bar. The garden in back in mostly squash, tomatoes of all kinds, beans, lettuce and basil.

Last year, Husband dumped some of our compost into the front yard, in a sunny spot between the azaleas, where I hadn’t managed to keep a flower garden growing. Our 6 yr old is the co-gardener and on this day, she is supervising the building of  new beds in the front yard. Part of the prep has been to take old wood from a previous project, and make about a 5ft by 2ft box and a smaller 3ft x 16 in box for the plants. The boxes were filled with compost from our backyard tumbler and old leaves. He ran drip lines from the rain barrels. The rest will have to wait for a trip to a nursery for seeds, unless we get more volunteer plants. One of the benefits of composting is that you sometimes get more of what you already eat when seeds survive in the compost. We would love to have the room to do what Sara does but that will take more land and probably fewer deer.

Kiddo wants to be a farmer. She's gardened with her dad since she could toddle up to the side of the garden bed and eat the basil straight off the plant. I enjoy watching them do "their thing". It brings back memories of my own childhood when my mother had a garden behind our garage. I also think it is good for kids to see food, to watch it grow from seeds or sprouts, and care about the soil. My role is pretty much to eat All The Things. Tomato sandwiches, anyone? Hopefully in a few weeks I can update with how our garden grows.

Tuesday, April 14, 2015

Corralling my Compostables


(Or more honestly, ‘Tidying that Garden $h!t Up’)






In between random downpours and snow flurries, and when the temperature gets up above 5C, I have been engaging in ‘productive procrastination’ in the garden.  Weeding – yup, love that one. Cutting odd stuff with secateurs – yup, love that one too. Rounding up all the branches, sticks and twigs that were either lopped last October and have been hidden under snow for 6 months, or have dropped off my trees due to weight of said snow – yeah, not so much. But with the weather limiting my options for more exciting things like pouring the concrete foundations of my new tool-shed, or ripping the roof off an old outbuilding, tidying that $h!t up is about as good as it has got recently.


Wood, wood & more wood


With a hungry wood burning stove that powers my homes’ central heating, you’d think I’d be revelling in so much free fuel, right? Well the OCD freak in me has of course devised a system for dealing with all this – as thick as a finger gets stripped, cut and bagged for kindling (8 sacks and counting), 1-2 inches thick gets stood up to dry (if it’s straight it’ll become tomato canes, otherwise it’s bigger kindling), and fat branches or trunks get stacked for burning. But the whole twiggy mess of a snail trail this has been leaving behind, Hmmm. Compost heap?







As you can see, my main heap didn’t fair too well over winter (build new heap already added to ‘must do’ list) and with my gut instinct telling me that adding a pile of twigs twice its size probably wouldn’t help it along, I researched alternative uses for my twigs (oh yes, that’s another top productive procrastination tool for indoor days when I should really be cleaning or building my kitchen). And then I found the mother of all valid excuses to dump that wood in a single place and call it meaningful – Hugelkultur.


Literally meaning ‘hill culture’, Hugelkultur is basically creating mounded raised gardening beds starting with a base of decomposing wood. YAY! As I am already growing in raised beds using the ‘lasagne’ method of building my soil, Hugelkultur seems not that much of a stretch. To boot, I also happened to have the perfect spot for my new bed - a long south facing trench behind my big barn that wasn’t doing much other than getting waterlogged every time it rained. Talk about serendipity!







I’m currently about half way through clearing the myriad piles of wood in the garden but so far my new Hugelkultur bed is looking pretty good …OK, maybe not good but it looks intentional at least. Once I’m done with the woody layer, I’m supposed to cover it with layers of composty stuff but as the contents of my existing compost heaps are bound for my current raised beds, I’m thinking it might have to be some concoction of cardboard, ground cover moss, chicken coop cleanings out, and grass clippings (the latter two begged from a friend in the village). Er – sounds just like a new compost heap to me. Oh well, if it gives me some place new to compost while I empty and rebuild my other heap, that’s great.


**There is a science to Hugelkultur BTW. If you want to know more, Permaculture magazine has a great intro HERE

Saturday, April 11, 2015

Our First Sugaring Season



Late winter is maple sugaring time. In the woods all over Vermont, blue plastic tubing zigzags through the trees, directing gallons of sweet, clear sap from taps to collection tanks. At twilight, steam rolls out the tops of sugar houses where the wood-fired evaporators are boiling down the day’s run into sweet, dark syrup. It’s our first winter here on our new property, an 1836 farmhouse with almost 3.5 acres. Starting a maple sugaring operation was one of our major goals for this year and since J grew up sugaring with his family, he was eager to jump into the process.

As the season winds down, we’ve collected around 500 gallons of sap from fifty maple trees on our property. Preparation started in the Fall, marking the largest maples with bright tape so we could easily identify them during winter when they are without leaves. After Christmas, we purchased and prepared the equipment-- taps, tubing, connectors, and collection tanks--and began setting up the lines. People who sugar as a business increasingly use vacuum pumps to extract the sap and propel it efficiently toward the collection sites, and then reverse osmosis to remove the water from the sap and speed up boiling time. But this is a small scale family hobby for us so we are keeping it old-school and inexpensive. We even used metal buckets on a few trees where tubing didn’t make sense. Buckets are more labor intensive but they certainly have a nostalgic charm to people who grew up around maple sugaring. 


It takes about 40 gallons of sap to make a gallon of syrup and the success of any year’s crop is highly dependent upon weather conditions. Warm days and cool nights are the best combination and typically the sap does not begin running until late February or early March. An exceptionally cold winter this year delayed the season a couple of weeks. It’s the second week of April and we have been collecting thirty to sixty gallons of sap a day. J’s brother boils it down nightly in his sugar house and has made 28 gallons of syrup from sap collected on three different properties. As daytime temperatures begin to reach the 50s, the season is winding down. Eventually the sap turns yellowish and less sweet, a sign that the tree is turning its energy into new leaves and sugaring is over for another year. 




Wednesday, April 8, 2015

Earth Hour









It always seems a bit odd and unfair that Earth only officially takes center stage for a single day in April (April 22nd), and a grand total of 60 minutes in March. This year, Earth Hour felt sort of like an afterthought, as I only remembered it the day before. But we are currently doing some renovations to the house, and we were lucky enough to have a good friend lend a hand (you know, that one reliable friend with the equally reliable pick-up truck?) so we kept him for dinner.  At some point, we sprung on him that we would turn the lights off for Earth Hour after dinner, bust out the candles and play cribbage or something.

As usual, I was afraid of being perceived as silly or weird (that’s another post altogether...) but our friend didn’t bat an eye and we settled at the table with a few candles, a cribbage board and a deck of cards. We have this old gramophone in the dining room, a shabby thing that my parents bought to furnish their house in the 70’s when antiques were cheap, and at some point during the evening, my husband decided to give it a spin. The poor thing hadn’t been used in years, we had to crank it some and fiddle with the speed a bit, but it soon filled the room with the wonderful crackling sound of old records. What felt positively silly at first turned out to be such an enjoyable evening! The phones were off, the conversations were on, and we had a lovely, quiet and relaxing time. It was great. 



But I realized how ingrained technology is in us, because one of my first thoughts was to reach for my phone, snap a picture or take a video of the gramophone, and post it on social media. The pull of “likes” and the instant gratification of appreciative comments did not win just yet, but it made me so much more aware of this underlying notion that things don’t really exist or matter until they are posted online anymore. That an event or experience somehow needs to be validated through Facebook or Instagram... A “thumbs up” often feels like a stamp of approval, officializing a moment... 



Regardless, all through the evening conversations flowed, about slowing down, about sustainability, about climate change, and the pervasive presence of technology in our daily lives, and how used to it we all are. We talked about needs and wants, about the value and satisfaction of putting extra effort in a task instead of constantly buying the next thing supposed to make it easier. How much easier, exactly, does everything need to be? How much faster do things need to go? When and what is enough? We talked about gardening, hunting, and just enjoyed playing cards and being present. I enjoyed being in a warm home, my belly full, our son sleeping soundly upstairs through the noise music of the old gramophone, my husband and our friend around a few candles. At that moment, I truly felt like what I had was enough. 



Clearly, the purpose of Earth Hour is not to radically reduce our electricity usage for a single hour in a year. The “event” itself may have lasted only an hour or so, but the conversations we had and the ideas it sparked still linger in my mind today. I am considering unplugging like that more often. We will crank up the gramophone and light the candles again. We will chat about the big stuff and the small things, we will enjoy simple pleasures and solid friendships (with or without pick-up trucks).

In my case, it drove home the point that no matter how cynical we get, we can always do a little more towards living a life that is a bit more connected, a bit more sustainable, a tiny bit greener. Earth Hour could become a regular thing in this household, allowing us to unwind, connect with our loved ones, our friends, and just be. It could be a time to assess where we are, what we do, how we feel about it all and share ideas and tips. Which is a bit my goal by contributing to this collective blog: to continue the conversation, to connect with others who cannot sit at our table and feel the glow of the candles. Welcome home!