But, but that little knobby thingy on the wall is so much nicer! I know, I know. It’s nice to be able to just turn the knob and get a little extra heat – especially when the temp is dipping below 0. But at $3 a gallon for heating oil – can you afford to ignore your environmental conscience any longer?
In addition to being inexpensive (free if you can cut it yourself), wood is a renewable energy source. From Hearth.com: “Burning fossil fuels sends carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, on a one-way trip. It pumps million-year-old carbon from inside the earth into the atmosphere, where the concentration of carbon dioxide is increasing. Burning oil, gas and coal is like spending the earth’s savings, and scientists say it is changing the global climate. Wood fuel is different. As trees grow, they absorb carbon dioxide from the air in a process powered by the sun. Indeed, about half the weight of dry wood is this absorbed carbon. A tree destroyed in a forest fire or one that falls and decays in the for est gives up its carbon once again to the air as carbon dioxide. So continues the earth’s carbon/carbon dioxide cycle.”
While most people think of heating with wood as an “old-fashioned” technology, let me say that new woodstoves are more and more efficient. With many, you can go all night without having to get up to feed it.
Wood pellet stoves are great – and I highly recommend them as well, but a woodstove has one advantage a pellet stove doesn’t – it can be lit when the lights are out. When the electricity is out, a pellet stove (and most other forms of heat) are out too – not so a woodstove! A woodstove can keep you warm when the electricity is out – and it can cook food, and melt snow for water (if your power is out, the water won’t flow for long!).
Burning wood is also a very safe proposition these days. With a little practice and a little help from those who know (feel free to email your questions to me, if you need to), burning a wood fire is as safe as lighting a pilot light – or turning up the thermostat.
And remember, if you don’t cut the wood yourself, ask your firewood supplier where the wood came from – make sure it’s sustainable!
Great resources for learning about burning wood:
Posted in family, farming, frugal, frugality, gardening, global warming, green living, money, organic, saving money, simple living
Tagged , frugal, frugality, green living, heat, heating oil, money, pellet stoves, wood
“The time has come,” the Walrus said…
It is time to start stocking up! Here on the Hogan farm, we have been picking, canning and freezing the daylights out of everything. Blueberries, blackberries, peppers, zucchini and yellow squash, you name it. The tomatoes appear to be getting close to picking – it was a cool June here in Vermont and they didn’t like it for quite a while.
Even if you don’t have a garden, you can still put food up. Just go to a few of your local farms and ask if they extra. Sometimes, a farm inundated with cukes and zukes that didn’t sell well will let you pick your fill for a flat price.
Don’t have the time to can 24/7? Do what I do. Some days are just too hot for canning and I’ve been ordered not to let my 8 months pregnant ankles get too big from standing! So, on really hot days, I slice and freeze veggies or lay berries on a cookie sheet to freeze individually and then bag them up. That way, the food is available for anyday I feel like making up salsa, tomato sauce or jam – and if I don’t get to it, I didn’t let the food go to waste.
I won’t go into the ways to preserve food right here – many have written very well on that topic. I would suggest you check out Jackie Clay’s articles at Backwoods Home Magazine
A great book on the topic is Stocking Up, by the Editors of Organic Gardening and published by Rodale. Used copies are always popping up on eBay.
Also, heading to the local hardware store can yield supplies and all kinds of info. Ball, the maker of the jars, has produced a very handy booklet on how to can your produce.
There are some great recipes for canning at RecipeZaar.com
And regardless of what many say, you can freeze almost anything. I have frozen whole tomatoes and peppers and used them on a January afternoon in a wonderful tomato sauce. They may night slice well for a sandwich, but they will cook beautifully.
Oh – and if you can up something truly wonderful, what frugal gifts you have, ready-made, for the holidays!
Posted in christmas, eating local, family, farming, food, frugal, gardening, green living, money, organics, simple living
OK – now, I try to be as green as possible, but I will admit, that there are times when either I’ve forgotten my big tote bag, I’ve already filled it, or suddenly I am handed something in one of those dreaded plastic bags before I’ve had the chance to refuse.
It’s alright, you too, can admit to the large bag full of bags in your pantry or closet. Now, since we’ve turned over a completely green leaf, I have been much better about refusing these bags, but I still have a ton leftover from my previous life.
Here are a few things you can do with those bags, without putting them in a landfill.
1. Use them to stuff a valance. I thought this idea was genius! If you have one of those puffy valances, or are planning on getting one, just use the plastic bags to make it puffy.
2. If you buy bread – which I occasionally do – use the bag it came in to keep your own bread or muffins when you make some. If your bread came with a tag on the end – you can keep those as stitch savers on your next knitting project!
3. Use them as packing material instead of peanuts. Granted, this just passes the problem on to someone else, but if you’re sending them to someone who sends you packages once in a while (a grandparent, for example) just encourage them to send the same box and bags onto someone else, or back to you when the time comes.
4. Use them as gloves. This does doom them eventually to a death in the trash can, I’m afraid, but at least you’ve gotten several uses out of it. I’ve used plastic bags as gloves to pick up all kinds of gross things – from doggie doo to cleaning up, well, let’s just say, other messes.
5. Cloth diaper receptacles. These bags are perfect to keep in the car – or your diaper bag – and will hold a number of wet diapers in your bag until it’s time to head home.
What do you use plastic bags for? Please comment and tell us!
Posted in cloth diapers, family, farming, frugal, green living, money
Many of our milk jugs go to the recycling center. However, with five kids, we go through about a gallon of milk a day – and until I decide whether or not I am going to buy a cow (I’m just not sure I’m ready for the commitment!) we have a lot of jugs piling up in the bin. Milk jugs are sturdy and are useful for many things, so if you have a few extra lying around, try these ideas:
1. We use milk jugs as cloches in the garden. Just cut off the bottom and place over small plants that need extra warmth, particularly overnight. As the day heats up, you don’t have to remove them – you just pop off the cap. Milk jugs also serve as excellent protection in the wee stages of a plant when the weather calls for a downpour – or even hail!
2. Make maple syrup! I’m serious. We ran out of buckets one year and I remembered a picture I saw in an old maple sugaring book of a guy who hung milk jugs from his spouts. It works! Just a little hole cut above the handle will secure the jug over the tap – and voila – a sap bucket. Leave the lid in and it’s also easy to pour when it’s full. And just a sidenote – because they are so light and only hold, well, a gallon, little kids don’t have as much trouble emptying them and helping with the sap gathering chores.
3. Wall of Water. I often see ads for portable irrigation systems in catalogs and magazines. I realized that I had the perfect vessel for such a system right in my recycling bin. Just fill your jugs with water and place them strategically throughout your garden. Poke some very small holes in the bottom – not much bigger than pin size. Your plants will be watered without as much evaporation. This method saves water – and also ensures that the right plants are getting the water they need – particularly helpful in dry years.
4. The scoop. Grain scoop, poop scoop, dog food scoop, flour bin scoop. Just cut the bottom off at an angle and you have a scoop for any need! Save yourself the $5-$10 at the store.
5. The last minute dust pan! If I had thought of this years ago, I would never have bought a dustpan and brush. Just cut the bottom off – like the scooper – and you’re in business.
6. Fill a jug with water and place in your toilet tank. Instant low-flow toilet!
7. Fill a jug with water and freeze it (leave a little headroom) – then use in the cooler on your next trip. Because it’s a solid ice block – it will last a very long time. And when it melts, you can either refreeze it – or drink it!
8. Fill jugs with sand or kitty litter and place in the back of your car during the winter. This will add weight to the back of your vehicle – and – if you do get stuck, you can use the sand or litter for traction!
9. Start seed in jugs with the tops cut off.
10. Seed tags. I have cut up plastic jugs into “popsicle” stick shapes for a waterproof row tag and then I write the name of whatever I planted on it. If you use a ballpoint pen – the name of the plant is “engraved” into the plastic and it won’t wash away.
Real Living – the ezine, turned blog, is now becoming Organically Inclined. I had such an overwhelming response to that little bumper sticker I put out, that I’ve decided it’s a much better name! So – from now on, Real Living will be known as Organically Inclined and is becoming a print/pdf zine in August!
Inside the first issue will be a few reprints of popular articles as well as some great new stuff…including poetry, tips for the frugal, essays on the good – or simple life, birth stories, parenting stories and a new swap it section.
If you have a writer lurking somewhere inside you or you just have a great story to tell – or even a pretty good story that you tell really well – I’d love to hear it. In particular, I’d love to see some articles on practical things – like your lazy gardening tips or how you keep the diaper pail smelling fresh!
So, please email me at misha@mishakennedy.com and hopefully you’ll see your name in print. We are happy to offer contributions a one year subscription to the zine – as well as that super cool bumper sticker…
I know – it sounds crazy. why would I buy my own cow? But after reading this article from Salon.com about organic milk (which costs almost $10 a gallon even here in dairy-friendly VT): http://dir.salon.com/story/news/feature/2005/04/13/milk/index.html?pn=3
Did you know that large dairy farms – non-organic ones – feed their calves chicken manure? I have chickens and that’s just disgusting.
Not to mention rBGH and the whole Monsanto business – http://www.organicconsumers.org/monlink.cfm
So – I did a little basic math. I have enough pasture for a cow to eat along with my sheep and llama for five good months out of the year. So I’ll need seven months worth of hay at $3/bale. That’s $650. Plus I’ll need about $500-$750 worth of grain a year – $10-$15 bag per 50lb bag per week. So far I’m at $1400. If a heifer costs me $1000 and I have her for 10 years, that’s about $100 per year. I’m not including the cost of vet care – yet. So – about $1500 a year for a cow – and we get all the milk, butter and cheese we can eat (I’ll have to figure in the cost of rennet at some point).
I spend $1820 a year in milk alone. $1300 in butter and about that much in cheese. Wow. That’s almost $4500 a year in dairy products- and that doesn’t include yogurt, sour cream or whipped cream on occasion.
I think I’ve made my decision…we’ll have to see what the rest of the fam thinks…
Posted in eating local, family, farming, food, money, organics, simple living
Hi!
I have tried on a number of occasions to write a blog. Unfortunately, I have not, as of yet, been very successful because, well, I have a lot on my mind and I have been unable to just reduce my ramblings to one area. For example, I like a lot of mothering-type blogs, but while I have been known to write some mothering rant stuff, I can’t reduce all of my writings to that one area. I also can’t just write a “gardening” blog or one on attachment parenting, homeschooling, being a shepherd, having a large family, cooking, being a writer or any of the other things I do.
So, I have decided that I am just going to take this blog and write about it all. Hopefully, there will be a few people who are interested. If not, I guess that’s OK too. If you want to contribute something – let me know. If you have a comment, please be kind – I may have gotten a lot of rejection letters in my life, but I still have a relatively thin skin when it comes to “constructive criticism.”
Slante,
Mish
Posted in childbirth, cloth diapers, eating local, family, farming, food, gardening, homelessness, knitting, michelle kennedy, money, news, organics, poverty, simple living, social issues, writing
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