Archive for June, 2008

Getting down and dirty…

June 4, 2008 at 9:40 am · Filed under Grow

I have a friend who related a conversation he had with a Chinese friend, the conversation went like this.

“I don’t understand you Americans”

“Why?”

“You have big yards, every weekend you put down fertilizer and weed killer, mow the grass, bag it up and throw it away.”

“So?”

“In China, we would have a vegetable garden, and keep chickens and pigs. That yard would feed 10 - 12 people.”

I’m probably paraphrasing the conversation, but the guy makes a good point.

When I was much younger, my parents always had a garden in the backyard, probably 200 to 300 square feet, we always had green beans, tomatoes, lettuce, radishes, squashes, onions, pumpkins, watermelons and other assorted vegetables. Whenever we stayed at my grandmothers house in the summer we’d go to the local produce farms and orchards, to pick bushels of green beans and peaches. Whatever we didn’t eat right away, my grandmother canned and put away for later, it seemed like she had endless amounts of those in the fall and winter. I later learned that the peach orchards were killed when the oil companies started injecting salt water into the wells which contaminated the ground water, and the produce farms were later turned into housing developments.

I have a big yard, 1/3 of an acre, and I probably spend 6 or so hours a week maintaining it. I don’t use fertilizer and weed killer, my mower mulches the cuttings, any leaves that I rake up usually go into the compost pile, but I still spend time mowing and watering to have a good looking yard. We usually have a small vegetable garden, a couple of tomato plants, peppers and maybe onions.

With the rise in food prices, mainly due to fuel prices, we’ve started looking at expanding our garden to include other fruits and vegetables. I look at it this way, every square foot of garden is one less square foot of mowing. And if the garden gets big enough to start canning things, we’ll move in that direction too. So for our reference here are a couple of sites.

Square Foot Gardening

Texas A & M Vegetable Gardening

If you have any other links that you’d like to share, please do so in the comments, along with any gardening successes or tips.

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Rediscovery

June 3, 2008 at 8:59 am · Filed under Re-Use, Uncategorized

Reading, who would of thought that paperback books would be $7.95 and up? That gets to be expensive when you go through 2-3 a month, and, if you are like me you can’t wait for the book to move from hardcover to paperback so you buy the hardcover for $24.95 and up. So you end up with a bookshelf full of books that you’ve read once and some that you want to keep for awhile.

A couple of years ago my family and I visited Seattle, and the Pacific Northwest, specifically the Olympic Peninsula. While driving around the peninsula we got to see the effects of clear cutting first hand. It was like someone took a big razor and just ran it up the hillside, we vowed right then and there to reduce our paper usage.

For a while we used our Palm Pilots with e-reader software and downloaded our books. But there is just something about having a book in your hands, the feel and smell of the paper just cannot be replaced.

Back to the present, my daughter is just learning how to read, my wife and I still enjoy books but it is getting too expensive, and we have piles of books on the bookshelf. We’ve started sharing books among friends, and we trade our books in at a second hand bookstore. The second hand bookstore is a sham, we found out that they buy every book everyone brings them for pennies each. If they need the book they’ll put it on their shelves, if not, they rip the cover off and throw them in the dumpster. That’s not our idea of reusing something.

So Saturday we decided to do something different, we went to the library and got our library cards. I haven’t had one of those since I was in college and I had forgotten what it is like just to browse around, find the book you want and check it out for a couple of weeks. The library is no more of a hassle than running down to the local bookstore, and best of all it’s free and we don’t have to find a way to exchange or gift our old books.

So save some money and some trees, and take yourself to the library.

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It’s Hot…

June 2, 2008 at 9:15 am · Filed under Maintenance

It’s only the start of June and it’s hot here in Austin. In the last couple of weeks we have already had a couple of 100 degree days, and the hot part of the year isn’t here yet. Thankfully we have a couple of ways of beating the heat around our house. The best one is the pool in the backyard, nothing is better than going out and splashing around in the water for an hour or two during the heat of the day. Unfortunately our pool is a little sick right now, we’ve had an outbreak of mustard algae, so the chemical treatments to get rid of it preclude swimming at times, but we can usually schedule the chemicals for an off use period. What’s this have to do with being “green”, aside from having to run the filter more than I’d like, not much except it is a great way to cool down.

Speaking of cooling down, have you changed your A/C filter recently? It is the first of the month, and it is recommended that you change the filter on your A/C every month or two. You see as the filter traps more and more dust, it allows less and less air to pass through, causing your A/C to work harder and longer to cool your house, wasting electricity. So go change that dirty filter, while you’re at it, check your smoke detectors too.

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Procrastination?

June 2, 2008 at 8:58 am · Filed under Asides ·Tagged

I know, it’s been a while since I’ve posted, there is just so much on my list of stuff to do that this blog falls to the end.  I have a list of things that I want and need to do here, but I can’t seem to make the time to do it.  I’ll try to be better, I promise.

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