Category Archives: Garden

Carbon Fast — Day 5

Remember your baptism today, and the power of water.  Try to conserve: Leave a bucket in the shower or kitchen sink, and collect “grey water” to water the plants.  Have a lawn?  Consider a rain barrel so you can water the lawn with rain.

If you visit the bathroom in our apartment, you will be greeted by an array of plastic jugs.  We use these to collect the cold water that comes out when we’re waiting for our pipes to warm up before showering.  Technically, this is not grey water, since it’s fresh out of the tap and perfectly potable, but that’s all the more reason not to let it run down the drain.  We share our apartment with a decent number of houseplants that happily drink this water.

I’ve toyed with the idea of using grey water to flush the toilet, but we haven’t taken that step yet.

While the tip suggests using a rain barrel to water a lawn, I recommend using that water for a vegetable garden — much tastier than all of that grass that leads to so much wasted water and oil (in the form of fertilizers and gas mowers).

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Daily action from http://www.lcwr.org/lcwrsocialjustice/eoclentcalendar2010.pdf

Never too early

Think gardening only happens a few months out of the year?  Think again!  We (and by “we,” I mean my husband) planted seeds starting at the beginning of January.  That timing means that we had, at most, two months without garden-related activities (assuming you don’t count eating garden produce).  We now have little seedlings sprouting and growing under the grow lights in our kitchen.  These include the usual cool weather crops, such as broccoli, cabbage, and cauliflower, as well as spinach and onions.

In addition to providing moral support, I contributed by reading part of a book on bio-intensive gardening.  Ecology Action developed this high-yield, environmentally sound method, and it sounds pretty cool.  Consistent with last year, I wish that the garden could be in our backyard — that would increase my excitement level considerably.  Some day, right?

Weekend update

Once again, we made it from Sunday through Friday without the car, but it made an appearance again on Saturday.  I think that habit will be hard to break as long as we are commuter gardeners, but it does make me think crazy thoughts like, “Do we need to own a car at all?  For as seldom as we use it, couldn’t we just rent a car once a week?”  Perhaps . . . .

Saturday was full of gardening and food preservation.  I canned pear preserves (to be discussed in a future post) and prepped more fresh basil for freezing.  We will be enjoying lots of pesto in the coming months — no complaints here!

Sunday dawned rainy, great for all the little seeds we planted yesterday, not so great for biking to church.  I resolved to bike in spite of the rain and ended up staying relatively dry, due to convenient breaks in the rain that corresponded with my travels (and due to my fenders).  In the afternoon, we needed to run an errand that involved exchanging a long handle of a tool with interchangeable heads.  When I say “run” an errand, I do mean literally.  The store is 1.25 miles from our apartment, but we weren’t sure how to safely and securely attach a seven foot pole to a bike.  I was highly opposed to driving, so I suggested walking, which became running (well, jogging actually) to save time.  No doubt we looked highly ridiculous, running through residential neighborhoods carrying a seven foot long red pole.

Mission complete, we returned to begin a cooking/baking extravaganza, including roasted beets*, vegetable pot pie, and apple pie**.  This was our first time making the vegetable pot pie with all local vegetables: potatoes*, butternut squash*, carrots*, green beans*, sunchokes**, and onions**.  We love this pot pie recipe, but before you are fooled into thinking that this is a super healthy dish, in the interest of full disclosure, this recipe has 3 sticks of butter in the crust and filling.  Three sticks in a recipe that’s meant to serve four people!  We stretched it into six servings — this means I consumed a half stick of butter in one meal.  Oops!  Maybe we’ll go with even smaller serving sizes in the future.

We now return to our regularly scheduled posting

Now that I’ve gotten all of the blogging about vacation out of my system, we can return to daily life.

Daily life returned in full force this past weekend with an exhausting barrage of gardening, attempted car sales, food preservation, and cooking.  The yield of our labors:

9 quart bags of green beans in the freezer
9 bags of basil (each with 4 packed cups) in the freezer
3 quart bags of shredded zucchini in the freezer
4 quarts of tomato sauce, each with ~1/2 cup of garlic, canned (started with 18 pounds of tomatoes)
1 big pot of vegetarian gumbo
2 loaves of zucchini bread
4 people who saw the car in the freezer
20 pounds of peaches purchased — waiting to be sliced, sugared, and frozen

This was our first attempt at canning, necessitated by our over-stuffed freezer.  All four jars sealed in the water bath, so I guess we did something correctly.  Extra canning jars in hand, we are now ready for future canning experiments.

The vegetarian gumbo, featuring almost all home-grown and local ingredients, came out pretty well.

And no, I do not really have the bodies of the people who came to see the car in the freezer.  That is not why the freezer is over-stuffed.  I promise.