Sleeping

I don’t actually know what happens to time. It’s now almost late May and I haven’t put anything up here for months.

I don’t know where those months have gone, but I do know that that at least part of me seems to have gone to sleep in that time. I don’t mean that I’ve been depressed or had issues or that anything has gone wrong. I haven’t taken catatonic drugs, become a Valium fiend or had a lobotomy. I’ve caught no African sleeping sickness and no one has had to call in Dr Gregory House to explain my strange lethargy.

No, I actually can’t really remember what I’ve been doing. Working, yes. Eating (too much), sleeping (never enough), talking, meeting friends, having the odd working weekend, trying to remember birthdays and failing. I’ve thought about the blog, I’ve planted veges, avoided plastic packaging and eaten no meat. But writing anything has seemed too hard. Basically I’ve been in survival mode.

At least part of the above paragraph is a load of crap. Fact: I wouldn’t recognise a survival situation if it leaped out of a clear plastic bag in broad daylight, was 90 feet tall and yelled ‘Boo! I’m a survival situation!’

Nope. I’m experiencing middle class survival mode.  This means that you still have enough to eat, still wear sufficient clothing and still make exhausting choices about which shampoo to buy.  You’re just busy. And tired. And you have enough bullshit language at your disposal to coin a term like ‘survival mode’ to describe the situation. My survival has never been in question.

I am going to stop this sleepwalking state. I’ve suddenly found a lot more energy. Funnily enough the lack of energy appeared about the time I gave up meat, and disappeared about the time I began wondering why I kept having such long naps on weekends and began taking iron pills to counter this.

Who would have thought?

The problem is that I’m now behind on everything I meant to do this year. We’re coming up to winter and I haven’t yet thought about a whole heap of changes I should have made. And as far as the not shopping thing goes … well, I’ve done better than previously by not buying any cheap, easily disposable, made in China items. The NZ fashion industry (those members of it that still make garments here) has benefited a little from my lack of self control. Shhhhh! Don’t tell the boyfriend.

Well, I did make my own washing powder a few weeks back. I can’t remember how many weeks.

All you need is Borax, soap flakes and washing soda. It actually works a treat as well. Borax is hard to get hold of, but you can buy on Trade Me or get it at Bin Inn. Washing soda comes from the supermarket and so do soap flakes. If you want to be especially industrious buy an old fashioned bar of sunlight and grate it.

According to some reading I’ve been doing on the net though, you shouldn’t use Borax if your waste water goes onto your garden. Too much boron will kill plants. And too much exposure to Borax can affect your fertility. Read all about it here:

http://chemistry.about.com/od/howthingsworkfaqs/a/howboraxworks.htm

But it does seem to be the lesser of many evils … and the resulting washing powder is not expensive at all.

Shopping and trying to think about Organics

I don’t shop the way I did a two months ago. I used to bolt to the supermarket after work on a Tuesday or Wednesday and get everything there. I’d get all my produce from the fruit and vegetable section, all my grains and legumes from the aisle with the tins or the packets. I used to buy meat in polystyrene trays, cereal in boxes, bread in a plastic bag and cleaning products for every purpose imaginable.

I still buy a number of these things, but certain things have changed; and in a way that I hope will be more sustainable. Here’s how:

 

·         I no longer buy lettuce in a bag (or otherwise). The lettuce plants in the pot garden have grown large and gorgeous and when we want to use them we just go outside with a bowl and take as much as we want off the plant. And it tastes so much better

·         We buy far less produce at the supermarket. We have an Oooby box of fresh, local and often organic produce delivered to our house once a week (and in a recycled cardboard box, so no plastic).

·         Before going to the supermarket on a Sunday, I stop in at Huckleberry Farms, an organic supermarket in Green Lane where I top up on fruit and often buy rice, flour, rolled oats, seeds, spices and organic tinned products.

·         I don’t buy breakfast cereal any more, I make my own granola with organic rolled oats and bush honey (both from Huckleberry farms). Many of the nuts and fruit in it are supermarket products, but this still creates less packaging a lot of the time.

·         I don’t buy yoghurt anymore, I make my own (also out of a packets, but I get more yoghurt and a smaller quantity of the eternal wrapping).

·         I bake bread at home so buy fewer packaged loaves. I also try to use organic flour.

·         I’m vegetarian now, but the Boyfriend is not, which means that we buy far less meat. He is also eating a number of vegetarian meals with me so we have cut our meat consumption by more than half.

·         The herb garden is getting healthier every day so we don’t need to buy supermarket packaged herbs anymore. I’ve even started drying out herbs we have large crops of.

·         My tomatoes will be ready to harvest soon and the broccoli isn’t far behind.

·         I’m also discovering the joys of farmer’s markets. There is a French Market in Parnell with amazing bread, dips, cider, produce, cheese which I all locally made. We try to go there where we can.

·         I’m phasing out commercial cleaning products where possible. For instance, I just made a spray cleaner out of washing soda and water. It works a dream and it probably cost me about 30c to make.

Some of this is time consuming, for sure. My shopping trips are longer. I have to stop whatever I’m doing about once a week and make a batch of granola and a loaf of bread but I did buy a bread maker. Gardening takes time, watering the garden takes time, especially in this hot weather, but I usually water the garden after I’ve had a run so both me and the plants get to cool down at the same time. Making cleaning products also takes time and so does sourcing some of the things you need to make them. I spent at least ten minutes walking up and down the supermarket aisle looking for washing soda the other week.

All in all, I think I’m starting to do OK. Well, sort of.
My decisions on how to best protect the environment are not necessarily based on stringent research and an extensive knowledge of such things. I try, but frankly I don’t have time to do a PhD on the subject and even if I did I wouldn’t necessarily be right in my final conclusions, I’d be one more voice adding to the academic fray on sustainability. It’s a scientific minefield because no one seems to agree on very much at all. Of course when you think about it that’s not surprising. The rapid and irreparable destruction of the environment is a fairly recent thing and modern farming practices are always evolving. We don’t know what human-induced climate change will do to us because it hasn’t happened before and we don’t really know at what point the total destruction of the planet will have been achieved – it might have happened already. We are still coming to terms with what sustainable practices really work the best.

One thing I’ve found considerable debate around is the environmental benefits of organic farming. It seems logical that it should be better for the environment. In New Zealand, for instance, we know that our rivers are being polluted by nitrogen-based fertilisers. I even remember having it explained to me when I was very young: nitrogen is washed into a body of water, water weeds start to grow prolifically and they strangle oxygen out of the water making life often impossible for creatures that live there. If you want to see just how bad things can get, I recommend watching Restoring the Mauri of Lake Omapere. It’s brilliant and very sad. If organic farming is kinder to our bodies of water then I think it had to be a good thing.

The chairman of Organics Aotearoa, Dereck Broadmore agrees, as one would expect. This link on his name will take you to an interesting piece of writing arguing for organics and it certainly is not kind to nitrogen-based fertilisers. I do find the idea that fossil fuels are behind modern soil enriching a frightening thought.

But then, this article in the Independent gave me something to think about too. Rob Johnson comments that ‘A litre of organic milk requires 80 per cent more land than conventional milk to produce, has 20 per cent greater global warming potential, releases 60 per cent more nutrients to water sources, and contributes 70 per cent more to acid rain.’  

I’m sure he’s not making it all up. Unless he has some hidden agenda. I think the more rational explanation is that organic farming, like most things, has its pros and cons.

It would seem sensible to me if some things were best to buy organic and maybe some things weren’t. If you try to look up ‘most important organic foods’ on Google, however, you’ll get a long list foods that are more likely to infect you with pesticides because we eat the skin. I don’t actually give a rat’s arse about what I consume. I want to know what works best for the planet. Well, not completely true. I care a bit about what I consume – but it does seem that organic produce isn’t a way to avoid pesticide because it uses it. Just different ones. A University of Guleph study even found out that some organic pesticides are more harmful than conventional ones.

So could the organics industry be a way to make consumers part with more money for the same products? I don’t believe that and I think there are many compelling cases for organic farming. For instance, look at the article on this Trinity College Dublin research. Increased insect diversity has got to be good.

I think I can only make up my mind after more research. In the meantime I’ll continue to mix my organic shopping with the regular. If you can’t decide you might as well cover all your bases.

I do want to read this book: http://www.dw.de/dw/article/0,,15393108,00.html

And articles like this are very interesting: http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-national/tp-andhrapradesh/article2922493.ece

You know what I’ve learned from this? We don’t actually know very much. We are always being caught between differing opinions, media hype and even very qualified people who may or may not have a marketing agenda  whether they even know it or not. It happened with smoking so why not one side or another of the organics debate?

But until I learn differently I’m going to persist with buying organic where I can afford to. Some things aren’t that much more expensive and the apples definitely taste better.

I’m sorry if this hasn’t been a well-informed or decisive commentary on organic products. I'm not qualified to make one of those and I know that. I’ve wanted to try to find out about it as a regular person without much knowledge using research tools that most people have access too – like Google. I personally think the organics debate might work best if we avoided talking about it as a whole and started looking more at individual crops and individual practices. It actually doesn’t make sense if an entire type of agriculture is all good or all bad like a character in a Hollywood movie. This is Earth, not Middle Earth and it's a land of ambiguity not orcs and elves and black and white.

Sick, grumpy Aucklander complains about public transport

Today I have a sore throat and a runny nose. I feel peeved and grumpy and all sorts of things hurt. I blame public transport. I’m sick, which means I’m in a vindictive mood, but despite that I still think I owe some of my present discomfort to Auckland’s public transport system. Here’s why: stress.

I live in a part of the city called Grafton. It’s near the central city and one of the reasons we live here is that it means the Boyfriend can walk to work, which is good because he’s a poor student. But I usually drive. I drive onto the motorway, I roll over the harbour bridge, north, until I get to a place called Albany where I shimmy around a couple of blocks, drive up a bit of a winding street and voila! I’m at work. It takes only 15-20 minutes getting there in the morning and about 30-40 minutes getting home. The homewards trip always takes longer, but I’m lucky because I usually go against the main flow of traffic. It’s easy getting to work in my car. And it’s warm – all the way there.

Unfortunately my car burns a lot of petrol. And this is not good for the world, which is why on Monday I turned to the bus. Busses also burn a lot of petrol. But you can squeeze a lot of people into one, so theoretically they are all making fewer carbon emissions each by sharing the burden.

I have to take three busses to get to work. The first one is easy. I walk down the road, maybe 150 metres and I stand under a little platform, which I know is where busses come. One rolls along, I pay $1.80 (when I used to catch the bus all the time it was much cheaper than this) and the bus takes me to Britomart, which sounds like a place where you buy cheap English people but it’s actually a transport depot.

Once I get to Britomart the fun starts. I know that to ride the bus for less than $1.80 a pop you need a thing called a Hop Card, so I wait in a queue of people and buy one. I know from the last time that I caught the express bus to the Shore,  that it didn’t take a Hop card, but I did my research last night and apparently they do now. Just to make double sure I ask ‘Does the Northern Star go to the Shore?’

‘Yes,’ says the smiling man.

So I walk to the bus stop. But then I realise that I don’t actually want a bus called the Northern Star, I want a bus called the Northern Express. So I thought stars sounded speedy, shoot me. And the Northern Express does NOT accept Hop cards, so I have to run to an ATM and get out $20.

Apparently it costs $4.50 to get to Albany. OK. A five day weeks’ pass will make it less expensive per trip, but I just want to catch the bus one day a week, not a whole week, so I settle on a Northen Express day pass. This costs $9, but at least I won’t have to buy another ticket on the way home.

THIS is the bit that gets to me: I don’t mind paying more for organic food, I don’t mind paying more for some special all natural pretentious face cream that will turn my skin into a better cluster of wholesome minerals, and I even expect to pay through the nose for organic cotton underthings, but paying more money to catch the bus?

I've still got three busses to pay for and I don’t get through $10.80 in petrol a day going to and from Albany, even with fuel prices what they are. Maybe over the course of a year it will cost more with registrations and warrants and any maintenance and insurance, but this is still an expensive bus. And it doesn’t even take me all the way to work.

It’s a super quick drive to the Constellation Station, I’ll give them that – maybe only 15 minutes from town – (I didn’t time it, I was learning irregular Italian verbs, this is another advantage of public transport, you can read) but when I got there I either had to wait another ten minutes for another overpriced bus or walk. I was so fed up with the whole idea of the system by this point that I just walked. Someone from work picked me up.

It was an hour and a half getting home (that’s partly because once I got to Britomart I hopped on the wrong bus which took me home but in a really roundabout way) and by the time I did I was beginning to understand why busses in Auckland are unpopular and why when you drive along the motorway you see car after car after car with just one lonely occupant.

I walked home from the bus stop, put my key in the door and staggered inside, yelling things like, ‘I’ve been defeated by busses!  Auckland public transport is worse than trekking through the Sahara on a camel! It would be faster to catch a racing snail than take a bus in Auckland’ and ‘Aaaaaaaahhhhhh!’
I blame today’s cold on all the stress. And standing in the wind at the Albany bus station.

So, once a week to work on the bus? I’m going to keep trying it, but I don’t promise to enjoy it.

Today I clean Oven. Domestic victory!

I usually treat cleaning the oven a bit like I’d treat a visit to Chernobyl. I cover up everything. I put on long rubber gloves, I wear my oldest long-sleeved top and long pants, I put on a pair of enormous industrial safety glasses and I even put my hair up under a scarf like a good Soviet era babushka. I open the oven, I turn my face away while I spray the toxic sludge around and then I close the oven and rush out our open back door to gasp some fresh air and try and get the fumes out of my lungs. I do not like cleaning the oven; it always makes me feel a bit like I’m working in some old mine tailings slush heap or in an old-wold Welsh coal mine. You know, up to your elbows in toxic batter, breathing in chemicals and covered in filth.

Once I’ve finished with the oven I strip next to the washing machine, put everything in it, put it straight on and then I hop in the shower. Obsessive compulsive much? Probably.

But you know what? All these years and I could have avoided the chemical wretchedness of the whole process by using some simple non-toxic products. And the same actually goes for a lot of household cleaners. Companies want to sell them to you, you believe the companies’ slick advertising and nice packaging (although I’ve never bought Easy-off Bam because the TV ads make the man look like he has two wives, both busily cleaning ), and hey! the products do work. But in a number of cases so do baking soda and vinegar.

The fact is that a lot of what you clean your house with, you will also end up washing down the sink, out of the pipes, into the world. Not that I actually know what’s in most of my household cleaners. My Ajax lemon floor cleaner, for example, tells me that it ‘Contains cleaning and sudsing agents and solvent to dissolve grease. Ajax contains no phosphorus.’ Well, I’m glad a cleaning product contains cleaning agents, I’m really happy for it, and I’m sure sudsing agents are very useful, as is solvent. But it’s not exactly a specific list of what’s in the damn bottle. I'm glad there isn't phosphorous too – for me it just conjures images of chemical-ridden hollow-cheeked match girls going on strike in Victorian London:



But what has got phosphorous in it these days?

My Mr Muscle proudly declares on the front that there is NO AMMONIA in it, but it fails to mention anything that is and the Jif lists ‘surfactants’, polishing particles’, ‘alkalis’ and ‘perfume’, so really there could be anything in there. Does arsenic work as a surfactant?

Eco-products seem to be a bit more candid about what goes into them and my Greenworks glass and surface cleaner lists: ‘filtered water, coconut-based cleaning agest (non-ionic surfactant: alkyl polyglucoside), soda ash, corn-based ethanol, glycerine and fragrance with essential lemon oil. Contains no phosphorous. Contains no bleach’.

I’d rather use the product that actually tells me what’s in it, for sure, but it seems to me that even better than that is the product you make yourself from things you have at home.

There are a number of websites with information on how to do this:

http://eartheasy.com/live_nontoxic_solutions.htm

http://www.wendylsgreengoddess.co.nz/Cleaning_Recipes.php

http://www.bininn.co.nz/cleaning.htm

Binn Inn even has a cleaning forum:

http://bin-inn.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=14&sid=56a78285a35eed98cd77a15dcbf84e3f

Of course my house is full of things it would be wasteful to just throw away, so I decided to start with the oven because I didn’t have oven cleaner and I’ve always hated it anyway. I followed Wendyl Nissen’s instructions at:

http://www.wendylsgreengoddess.co.nz/Cleaning_Recipes.php

 and, waddaya know? It worked a treat.

I sprinkled my washing soda (you can get washing soda crystals from the supermarket, although I did have to walk up and down the cleaning aisle about three times before I found them) and baking soda mix on the oven last night and turned it into a sort of lumpy white slurry with water as instructed.

During cleaning

When I came back this morning (OK, early afternoon by the time I’d got myself organised) I added some vinegar on the really revolting bits, and there were a few of these) and I scrubbed all the black paste away. It was still messy, it was still a grimy greasy job, but I didn’t feel like I was about to be asphyxiated on poisonous gasses or suffer from chemical burns if a square centimetre of the stuff got on my skin.

After shot: I really should have got a before shot. I need to point out here that the oven looked FAR worse before I cleaned it, but I didn't think to take a before shot. Also the oven isprobably about as old as I am, so for it this is clean. 

 

It wasn’t perfect in the end. There were some patches that were just too stubborn for me to get off, but to be honest I don’t think that matters. What’s the point of a perfect oven if the stuff you use to make it that way makes you feel like an employee in a P lab?

I think I’ll be making more of my own cleaning products in future. The air in my lungs is fresh! The oven is clean (ish)! I'm looking forward to using the last of my commercial cleaners and never needing many of them again.

I renounce meat and shopping

Have you ever said blithely to yourself, oh yes, I can do that, even when you know that the thing you think you can do will take up vast quantities of your already stretched time? Yes? No? I’m a repeat offender.

This year for instance. Although I’m working full time and often more than that, I decided in November last year that I was going to study extramurally and do one stage three paper over summer school and another in the first semester just because I wanted to (about to finish the first one, decided to pull out of the second). Then I thought that I should probably continue learning Italian, so I enrolled for that too. Obviously I want to keep fit, so I run or go to Yoga 3-4 times a week and since I don’t want to abandon my friends or my partner I do social things too. I also read a great deal – half for work half for pleasure these days – plan to start a playgoing group, want to watch more films, go to more concerts and keep up to date with politics and current affairs. (Oh, and I don’t have children. Did anyone guess?) And then, just to keep myself extra busy I decided to start a blog about reducing my environmental footprint. Which I’m discovering is probably going to be one of my most time consuming activities of the year.

Why is that? I usually only write about 800 words once a week. That's not even a stage one essay. Ah, but this is not just writing this is living. And the style of life I want to achieve requires a lot of research.  And a lot of work. Since starting this I’ve begun a vegetable garden, started making my own bread,  muesli, preserves, pizza dough . . . more on DIY in a later post.

But the research is doing my head in. How am I going to know, for instance, what my most environmentally detrimental activities are? How am I going to know which products to avoid? How much can I trust the barrage of information I’ve heard all my life through the media? And how can I change when every single thing I do has some environmental impact?

Take today for instance. Today I worked from home. (tick – saved on petrol because no commute). I read some work material that was printed on paper. (cross – paper usage). But it was double sided (small tick – reduced paper usage). I bought a coffee (cross – I think – depends how and where it was grown. Do I know? No. Cross. Did I use my recyclable reusable cup - No, it was at work Huge black cross). I ate salad for lunch (tick – it was made from all locally grown and mostly organic ingredients). Then I felt hungry and walked to the dairy (walking – tick). I bought a packet of horribly cheesy corny things, which is not usually a habit of mine (big cross – they were made in Malaysia so energy expending on importing. AND they contained palm oil – huge cross – since I’ve potentially already contributed to deforestation twice today with my coffee slurping habits).

I didn’t go out much today, I didn’t use much electricity or petrol but already  I’ve flagged enough potential environmental issues to give me a thumping headache.

I’ve worked on enough large projects to know that the only way to make a long, large and potentially messy project manageable is to break it down into chunks and to then focus on the overall general picture and laying the foundations before you do too much work on the details.

So, to help me work out what I need to change the most urgently, I took a few surveys.

Here is one from the Earth Day website:

 http://www.earthday.org/footprint-calculator?gclid=CMWo9viFmK4CFQFLpgodYFHvJg

(I recommend you do it too, I'd be interested in the number of earths you need!)

Once I had finished the quiz, this is what it told me:

If everyone lived like me it would apparently take up 2.3 Earths. OK, too many.

The majority of my footprint comes from food so I tried being vegetarian.

This is what happened:

 So, one big change to my dietary habits and I’m suddenly needing 0.3 fewer earths.

Then I tried changing my clothing consumption from always buying new clothes to buying very few.

This is what happened:

OK, so I’m using up 0.5 fewer earths than when I started. That's big.

The next question of course, is why the removal of meat consumption and clothing products would have such a big impact.

A quick Google search shows me that I’ve started to move into controversial waters.

The National Geographic Website seems to have some good basic information:
http://greenliving.nationalgeographic.com/green-diet-2773.html

And reputable citations. This from the Food and Agriculture Department of the UN is intereting:

http://www.fao.org/ag/magazine/0612sp1.htm

On a more local level, the New Zealand Vegetarian Society says this:

http://www.vegetarian.org.nz/content/being-vegetarian/environmental-reasons/

Which is useful because it has some interesting comments on the local impact of livestock farming – including its detrimental effect on water quality here.

Meanwhile a Daily Telegraph article (I know, I know, never trust the media) raises points about the type of vegetarian diet you adopt:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/climatechange/7219223/Becoming-vegetarian-can-harm-the-environment.html

I think I’m convinced that I should halt my carnivorous ways, but that has taken me 30 minutes of researching and reading. I think I might ask an expert about the meat thing too – watch this space!

To me the reasons for avoiding too much consumption of clothing seem logical:

• More consumption of anything means more waste
• Materials for fabrics such as cotton, wool and silk on the natural side and synthetic materials on the other are obtained through intensive farming/processing and dying
• Most clothing in NZ is imported so that means more energy consumed in bringing goods into the country

I seem to be more or less on the right track. Here is a great article called Waste Couture: Environmental Impact of the Clothing Industry. It also raises great issues about clothing recycling and I love the term Fast fashion. It’s very apt. How long do you really expectt o have that tshirt you just bought?

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1964887/

When I read this article I think of the contrast between today and life in Victorian London where small children, dubbed ‘mud larks’, scrabbled on the edge of the Thames to collect rag and bone scraps. Nothing was wasted then – but salvaging was done in such abject poverty I’m not surprised the generations that followed have embraced a disposable society so warmly.

On the basis of what I’ve looked at tonight, I’m going to make two quite big changes right away:

1.     From this Sunday I am going to be meat free. (since I still plan on eating dairy and eggs I believe ‘vegetarian’ is not the correct term, although I’m just a girl with an arts degree so what do I know?) From Sunday no more meat. That’s it. Let’s see how I go, but according to the Earth Day website it’s a positive step!

2.    I’m only going to buy an article of clothing when I need to replace something that has worn out. This means that it’s time to give up shopping as a recreational activity. Except maybe vintage shopping. But when you think about it, shopping is a ridiculous recreational activity. It's just consuming as an organised sport.

     Of course, I’m not planning to descend into abject frumpery any time soon. My wardrobe is so full it’s bursting. When I do need to replace an item of clothing I will go somewhere with quality goods, preferably made from organic fibres that will last a long time and which are classic pieces. If you go for the classics they don’t go out of fashion nearly as quickly (look at Audrey Hepburn ).

Once I've completed steps one and two I’m going to write a schedule outlining what I think I can possibly achieve in one year. A realistic schedule. I know I need to look at these things to start with:

·         Transport – for me the most dreaded

·         Food origins – what to buy and what to avoid. And where to buy it,

·         Organic vs. non organic

·         Household energy consumption

·         Make or grow your own vs. buy your own

·         Continuing to find ways to reduce household waste

And there will be more and more  . . . and more. And they will all divide into smaller categories and smaller and smaller.

I don’t think this project is a job I will ever completely finish.

The beauty of compost

I’ve just been out the back of the house on the concrete pad I am trying to turn into a garden and I’ve been stirring the organic material in Darth Vader the compost bin. That’s right. There is now a rotting pile of vegetable matter sitting out back. All week it’s been attracting insects and other unseemly activities like decomposing with all the sticky, sweaty, messy rot that that entails.

That’s one way to look at it.

On the other hand . . .

I’ve just been out the back of the house on the concrete pad I am trying to turn into a garden and I’ve been stirring the organic material in Darth Vader the compost bin. That’s right. There is a finely balanced and infinitely fascinating micro ecosystem sitting out the back of my house and it’s decomposing. And I am beginning to realise that this is a complicated and wonderful process.

Imagine that you are looking at the rainforest 65 million years ago. This is approximately the time the dinosaurs died out and by now rainforests were the most common forest type on earth (http://www.rainforestconservation.org/rainforest-primer/rainforest-primer-table-of-contents/c-age-of-tropical-rainforests ).

Above your head is the translucent green of the forest canopy stretches it arms to the sky and below that, draping down from tree trunks are ribbons of vines brightened by splashes of green trunk-hugging parasites. Further down and ‘strangers’ clench their woody fingers to tree bark, ferns tickle the rooty ankles of trunks and moss holding pearls of moisture creeps over earth and wood alike.

Everything in this verdant world lives and dies. When it dies it falls and it rots and when it rots this is because insects and even tinier life forms are eating and emitting gasses, creating heat. Turning the old forest into a blanket of rich nutrients to feed the new.

This ancient and complex system has continued on forest floors to this day. And it’s very similar to what I am doing at the back of my apartment in the belly of Darth Vader, champion of compost.

When plant and vegetable matter containing carbon and nitrogen is put in an atmosphere where is has plenty of oxygen and water, something amazing happens. Bacteria find food, actinomycetes munch on cellulose, fungi and yeast set to work on the lignin in woody material and protozoan and rotifers in turn eat the bacteria. Don’t know what half those things are? Nor did I thirty minutes ago. Go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compost#Micro-organisms and click the links. Earthworms and insects help along the way and after not very much time at all a dark, rich crumbling substance is achieved.

When a compost pile is watered and turned, it decomposes especially quickly. The centre of a compost heap can be 60–70 degrees Celsius, due to the furious energy of the microorganisms breaking it down (I will have to remember not to burn myself).

Here are a few pointers that most internet compost writing seems to agree on:

• Setting up the compost pile on bare earth is preferable to concrete. I don’t have bare earth so I put quite a large pile of old potting mix at the bottom to line the bin. This had an added advantage because I knew that the material in the pot was full of worms.
• Make sure your compost pile has adequate drainage.
• It helps if you monitor the carbon to nitrogen ratio by mixing ‘brown waste’, containing high carbon, (usually woody material although also fruit waste) with ‘green’ waste (usually leafy material), containing high nitrogen (for more info check out http://www.composting101.com/c-n-ratio.html ).
• Turning and watering the pile regularly speeds up the process by making sure all material in the pile is getting oxygen.
• Don’t compost human or animal faeces, noxious weeds diseased plant matter. And I won’t be composting meat or dairy since it can attract rodents and other unwelcome visitors.
• Also, apparently urinating on the compost pile is quite good for it.

The thing I love about my compost pile is the smell. It doesn’t smell rotten, it smells of earth and wood and it’s very rich. It’s as if something primitive inside me knows that it’s good stuff.
For more info check out:
http://www.aucklandcity.govt.nz/council/services/garden/compost.asp

 And I quite liked this too:

http://home.howstuffworks.com/composting.htm

 The Auckland City Council are even offering free composting courses. I might even go to one . . . if I can ever find the time.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Compost, preserves and I have a feminist dilemma

My favourite shops used to be State of Grace ( http://www.stateofgrace.co.nz/ ) or Karen Walker (http://www.karenwalker.com/ ). Voon was also a favourite ( http://www.voon.co.nz/ ) and occasionally I indulge in the guilty pleasure that is Juliette Hogan (http://www.juliettehogan.com/ ). After all, what could be better than New Zealand designers producing beautiful New Zealand made clothes in stunning fabrics and at prices that I can’t really afford but sometimes pay anyway?

Well, I have a new favourite shop. And it has nothing to do with clothing, shoes, jewellery or anything to do with the decoration of my person. My new favourite show is Bunnings ( http://www.bunnings.co.nz/ ). This is a surprising discovery for a city girl without much idea how to hold a hoe and who doesn’t own a pair of gumboots.

Today I decided to fix another of my major refuse problems. I was never going to take a hammer and some nails and a few planks of four by two and make a compost bin. It never will happen. The four by two would have been split by my ineptitude with a hammer, nails would have made their way into my hands, splinters would have flown out of the wreckage and burrowed their way into my eyes. I can’t catch a ball, let alone build a wooden barricade for my garden waste.

Thanks to the small miracle that is Bunnings Warehouse I did not need to. I breezed into the hardware and gardening megamart and I followed the helpful signs. Finally after scurrying away from many oh-so-solicitous young men in red aprons (I said I liked it, I never said it was my comfort zone, okay? Yes I’m a bit scared of the shop assistants – or is shop assistant only a term for a boutique? I don’t know!) I arrived at a whole aisle of compost bins. I could have bought a seven tier worm farm, I could have purchased a 500 litre mega compost ornamental pyramid. It was like standing in compost bin fairyland looking at kitset compost bin palaces.

After a great pain of indecision I settled on a 250 litre plastic, well-ventilated, assemble it yourself sort of deal. I took it home, added the twelve nuts and bolts to the side and voila! I had this:

It looks like Darth Vadar's helmet, but it actually is a compost bin.

Now all the items marked in green on last week’s refuse chart will go in this. We will make healthy, fertile compost. Some of it will go in my potplants and the rest . . . I’m not sure yet. But I think we can find some sensible use for it and it’s got to be better than sending all that kitchen waste to landfill. Maybe that garden I’m hoping for will come to be.

The compost bin and the reusable produce bags are all very well, but really in terms of eco-friendly living they are a couple of wobbly steps by a child learning to walk. I don’t want to remain an eighteen-month-old with wobbly legs, I want to become an eco-athlete. I want to leap buildings!

When I was doing the supermarket shopping today I was thinking about everything in a new light and I noticed for the first time, and I mean really noticed, how packaged everything is. I’m congratulating myself for no longer needing produce bags, but they seems to be the only plastic I can properly avoid unless I shop elsewhere. And I think it might come to that.

Today I bought ham (free range). It came in a pair of matching plastic basins with plastic peel-back tops. I got pasta, each packet neatly sealed in plastic, I got shampoo in elaborate plastic bottles. Each bag of bread was in plastic, the Boyfriend’s muesli bars were in plastic and then in cardboard and the meat sat on a polystyrene tray with plastic over the top. I imagined all this packaging taken off the products and blowing down the street and I thought I might drown.

When I got to the tinned tomato section I stopped. Oh sure, I can recycle the tins, but surely if you don’t need to it’s better not to. Recycling requires energy, after all. Tomatoes are not too expensive at the moment, so I went back to the produce aisle and I got two and half kilos of tomatoes.
When I got home I boiled and simmered and pureed and I ended up with six jars of homemade Tomato passata ( using this recipe http://easygreenliving.co.nz/pc/tomato-passata-recipe-8067/ ). I also stewed and bottled a couple of kilograms of plums (using this recipe http://davstott.me.uk/index.php/2009/09/27/plums-bottled-in-syrup/ ) that I got from the boyfriend’s mother’s place.

The very orange looking ones are the tomatoes and the red the plums.

But while I was mighty pleased with myself for my efforts, I also started to develop a niggling concern. Does living green have to mean becoming a housewife? I can bottle vegetables and fruit to recycle jars and enjoy a less processed product. I can start a garden, I can make my own bread to get away from the plastic packaging, I can sew bags . . . I can probably even start making my own cleaning products, baking homemade muesli bars, shopping at second hand clothing shops and altering things . . . idyllic, eh?

I could also tie myself to the kitchen bench, put on a floral apron, take a couple of valium and go back to the days before Betty Friedan.

The fact is that sometimes I work 60 hour weeks. Sometimes I get home and am too damn tired to cook dinner, let alone whip up a batch of eco-friendly preserved vegetables picked from my own garden. To be perfectly honest the only way I’ve been so productive today is because I was listening to the audio book of Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh, and it was amazingly good. Perhaps this is the solution.
So I’ve set up my compost today, preserved things and I even planted some lettuces . . . had I not had the audio book I would not have enjoyed myself so much. I’m not going to pretend that doing this sort of thing could ever be all I wanted to do with my free time. Right now it is 9.30 p.m. and I still have quite a bit of work to do before I go to sleep tonight.

The whole point is to do this and live my life too. I wonder how many compromises I’ll have to make . . . and I guess that’s the question for everyone, isn’t it? How much can you do? I might have to make more compromises than I thought. For now I see myself consuming a lot more audio books.