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.
No comments:
Post a Comment