We also dug up the sweet potato and what do you know, there were actually potatoes there! They were no bigger than my thumb, but I am emboldened to try again next year. I need to locate the plant in a warmer part of the garden I think, and not necessarily next to the regular potatoes. Since the Dashwoods love potatoes, we thought we would let them have the little sweet potatoes but they couldn’t care less. They eyed them suspiciously, took a peck, and then ignored them. Very likely a lucky squirrel came along and ate them.
When the rain and snow move out after Sunday and the ground dries a little, we will be able to dig sunchokes and horseradish. There are also still carrots to pull. And, we managed to save three pepita pumpkins from the squirrels! They are not ripe yet, but we can pick them and bring them inside where they will be safe until they ripen.
Last weekend I planted garlic. The Dashwoods were their usual helpful selves. They did not care about the garlic, they were interested in what my trowel might uncover when I dug a hole to put a clove in. There were a few surprised earthworms and some other critters I couldn’t determine because a quick and hungry chicken obscured my view. I very quickly covered over the dug ground with row cover fabric and anchored it down well. The Dashwoods walk across the fabric but don’t try to scratch on it, and it managed to keep the curious squirrels at bay. Last year we weren’t so careful and had to replant many of the cloves more than once, which might explain why the garlic didn’t do that well this year.
We watched a fantastic movie last night, The Need to Grow. It has won a number of film festival awards and is currently free online for another day or two. It follows three different people. One is an urban farmer in Los Angeles who has discovered a method for growing organic food in vertical containers and in “socks” using less water and fewer resources than regular farming on “scrap” land.
Another is seven-year-old Alicia, a Girl Scout, who lobbied the Girl Scout organization for years to make GMO-free cookies. She collected 45,000 signatures and went to New York to deliver them to the Girl Scout president. She got the royal run around and was only able to give the petition to the unlucky admin person who was sent down to the lobby to face a tearful little girl. Three years later, the Girls Scouts did begin producing GMO-free cookies but never acknowledged Alicia’s efforts. In the mean time, Alicia had gone on to start seed libraries at her school and another nearby school.
The third person, a genius physicist, developed a closed-loop energy creation and carbon capture process in Montana. In partnership with a lumber company, the Green Power House is fueled by waste lumber. The lumber is turned into biochar and the heat from the process is used in algae aqua-culture. The algae is then combined with the biochar to create an incredibly nutrient dense soil amendment. The excess heat from the process is used to power 100 nearby homes. And the methane created by the algae is used to power the the biochar creation process. It is one of the most beautiful and amazing things I have ever seen!
Watch the movie if you get the chance! It will make you feel good.
On the zero waste front, James and I continue to do really well. We have plucked all the low hanging fruit so to speak and have ventured deeper into creating a zero waste life rather than solely zero waste grocery shopping. A couple weekends ago we finally had time to go to Tare Market, a zero waste store that opened near our house in the spring. It’s a small store but they have a lot of things in there!
James didn’t like my homemade lip balm and he discovered a vegan lip balm in a cardboard tube the size of a roll of quarters. He really likes it. It is made by a company called Meow Meow Tweet who will likely be the solution to my non-mineral, plastic tubed sunscreen come spring. I like my homemade version so I’l be staying with that.
I did, however, walk out with a two-tiered stainless steel tiffin. I have been taking salads to work in a pyrex bowl that had a plastic lid. But the lid is breaking on the edges and upon arriving by bike to work one morning I found part of my salad in the bottom of my backpack. The tiffin has turned out to be amazing! I only need one tier for a salad and it is lightweight, easy to carry, and leak-proof. It will pretty much last forever. I love it!
We didn’t need anything else, but we discovered they carry our bamboo toilet paper as well as the bamboo toothbrushes we have started buying. They have bulk lotions and laundry soap, some dry goods like beans, whole grains, spices and teas, along with bags and brushes and all sorts of other things that don’t come wrapped in plastic, are not themselves plastic, and are either 100% compostable or recyclable. And For a rainy Sunday afternoon, the place was busy!
One more exciting thing to tell you about. Because we have so much less trash, our under the kitchen sink 20-gallon sized garbage bin was too big. We downsized and up-cycled a one-gallon plant pot that belonged to a shrub we bought for the garden in the spring. It takes us about 1 1/2 to 2 weeks to fill it with enough trash to take out for pick up by the city garbage collectors.
And yes, sometimes it is hard to pass up the convenience offered by plastic and things encased in plastic packaging. We are not perfect and now and then we give in or don’t do our research and buy something online to discover when it is delivered that is its wrapped in layers of plastic. But we keep trying and we keep learning. And it feels pretty great because I know there are others out there learning and trying too and it adds up. Together we make a difference.
Your low to zero waste life style is amazing and inspirational. In addition to the work you have put into it you have come up with some very creative alternatives.
I cannot believe that you got snow already. We seem far from that so far in New York.
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Thanks Brian Joseph! I can’t claim that everything I am doing are my own ideas. There are lots of books and websites dedicate to zero waste that I have gotten some great ideas from!
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That store sounds amazing! What a find. It’s kinda neat you got snow already. It hasn’t rained here much for a long time… we’re so dry. I’m desperate for a good steady rain. I think when it final comes I’ll go out and do a little dance in it!
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It is a pretty amazing store Laila and I am so lucky that it is in my neighborhood. I hope you h ave gotten some rain!
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I love everything about the tiffin, including the name. Do you feel a little like a WWI-era soldier marching off to defend King and country every morning?
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I have to admit Jeanne that I love saying “tiffin” probably more than I should 🙂 Oh, I hadn’t thought about WWI! I was thinking Little House on the Prairie but now that I really think about it, they had metal lunch pails. Similar concept though!
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I’m continually in awe of your dedication to the cause of zero waste. It’s also influencing me so there are ripples from you guys. Thanks for all the ideas!!
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Oh Liz! This makes me so happy to hear! ❤
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Cheering you on, and a bit jealous of your zero waste store which sounds truly wonderful.
We have a number of those tiffin tins for lunches and storage generally, they are brilliant.
I’m off to watch the film you shared, and thank you for the reminder to put the garden to bed for the winter (with garlic).
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Thanks Maggie! The zero waste store is fantastic! You have tiffins too? What do you store in them? I hope you liked the film and I hope you got some garlic planted 🙂
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We don’t have any sign of snow yet, but it is finally cold enough to turn the heat on (for part of the day). You are so inspiring with the zero waste efforts. I used to feel good about the fact that I put only one full trash bin out every other week- when a lot of my neighbors put out one or two full bins twice a week! but I try to reduce more still. I was pleased a few weeks ago to find laundry soap packaged in cardboard, so I bought that even though I didn’t know the brand. It does have a plastic cap but I often save those to use as scoops for other things. I’m slowly starting to tuck my garden in for winter with shredded leaf mulch and compost, but I still have a surprising amount of peppers, collards, chard, leeks and turnips out there!
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Thanks Jeane! Nice find of the laundry soap in cardboard. I hope it worked out since you had never tried that brand before. It sounds like you had an amazing garden this year!
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Hoping your unripe veggies worked out 🙂 And glad to hear about your potatoes. I tried autumn-planting garlic in pots a couple of years ago and the weather was awful, but it was good to at least have had little cloves at the end of it.
Well done on reducing your waste. We’ve got a fair number of recycling options over here now, though they vary depending on where you live, and it just makes you see all the more how much wrapping there is to get rid of. Some of it is understandable but certainly the layers get annoying.
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Hi Charlie! The pumpkins are slowly getting ripe. The green tomatoes got cooked up with something–my husband is the cook so I am not sure what. Planting garlic in pots is a great idea. Are you going to try it again, do you think? And thanks! There are lots of options here too, we even has organics pickup. But most definitely, when you have to sort it all out, it’s astonishing how much true waste there is.
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