The potatoes are in!

But first... we got another of those incredibly huge onions from the CSA today! John doesn't like them because they have more hair than he does! (HE said it, not me!)

So, the potatoes.

The potato harvest is in at Cochran's Produce. I picked up our 50# bag of red potatoes today, for $16. We did this for the first time last year. I know, I know. This sounds totally crazy. But we actually ate 'em all. We stuck them in the root cellar under the front porch, and every week we'd pull a few out, and make oven-roasted fries, or use them in soup or stew. These potatoes make, hands down, the BEST oven-roasted fries. We ate most of them that way! But you can get potatoes at the store, any time, right? So it seems kind of crazy to buy them in 50# sacks. So let me try to explain why I'm so happy about them.

a) the entire bag only cost $16. That's $0.32/pound. This is probably not the absolute cheapest that you can find potatoes, but it's a pretty good price for really good potatoes.

b) they come from Grace, ID, which is 139 miles from here, according to MapQuest. We are buying local, and in season, and supporting a small farm just up the road from here. We buy the red potatoes, so we are, in a small way, casting a vote for farmers to grow more than russets.

c) when we get snowed in, we just don't worry about it. Anyone (especially us, apparently!) can live on potatoes for several days, no matter how long it takes to shovel out the driveway, where the plow plowed us in!

d) there's something really fun about buying 50# of potatoes. It's like saying, 'Yep. I'm planning ahead.', and 'I'm going to be here long enough that I won't be swearing about having to move these potatoes.' Heck, I like just carrying them to the car, and having all these men wondering why I don't need any help.

e) there's also something really fun about looking at John, and saying, 'If you run downstairs and grab some potatoes, we can have fries for a snack.' Or, alternatively, having him look at me and say the same thing.

f) come springtime, there will be a couple of them left. The eyes will have started to sprout, and we'll cut them up, and go plant them in the garden. Later in the year, we'll dig up the tiny baby potatoes and roast them with garlic and onion and herbs, all out of the garden. And that will be dinner, because it will be so fresh, so sweet, so flavorful, so packed with pure goodness that it makes your toes curl.

g) finally, I guess it just makes me feel really, really competent. I have now lived long enough that I can buy a 50# bag of potatoes, and know what I'm going to do with it. I know about how long it will last, and how to keep them from sprouting, and how to ensure that they don't just rot in the basement. And that helps me with my version of the nerves that everyone is suffering from just at the moment. The economy might go to hell, but I'm going to have enough potatoes for the winter. And that's not nothing. That's something.

Isn't that funny? That a bag of potatoes can mean so much on so many levels?

But I have to say that the temptation to buy ten pounds of local peaches, grown not more than 10 miles from here, was almost more than I could bear. Next year. Next year, I'll try my hand at homemade peach preserves, to go in the homemade yogurt, alongside the toast made from home-baked bread, and spread with homemade jam from homegrown grapes, and maybe even a home-laid egg from our home-raised chickens.

Do I really HAVE to go to Socorro and live in a studio apartment for six months? I'm homesick already, and I haven't even left yet.

There are not enough tears to fix this.

The Amazon.

I wanted to go there before it was gone. I wanted to stand in the lungs of the planet, and in the most biodiverse place on the planet. (The Amazon produces 20% of the world's oxygen. That's why they call it the 'lungs of the earth'.) When I got there, I was overwhelmed by the realization that I was already too late. Peru is working really hard to preserve the Amazon, but it is far from pristine.

In the news today, the BBC reports that the Amazon is disappearing faster than last year. After three years of decreasing deforestation, at least 750 square kilometers* were lost last month. The is more than three times as fast as last year (last year 2.7% of Brazil's portion of the rain forest was lost). 20% of the rainforest is already gone.

I know what you are thinking. You are thinking, so what? Can't we just plant it back again? I mean it's the RAINFOREST, right? It will grow back! But look at this picture:




The wealth of the rainforest is the trees, not the land. The land is poor. Hardly any organic material. Mostly clay. Mostly, it washes away. In this second picture, you can SEE the erosion happening. Where the leaves have fallen onto the red clay soil, it is protected from washing away in the eternal rain. But in between the leaves, the soil is washing down to the river. It doesn't belong there, and creates problems far out to sea. Look at this picture, from satellite images via googlemaps:


View Larger Map

See that yellow? All that yellow, at the mouth of the Amazon? That's the soil that supports the trees that support the oxygen level of the atmosphere that supports you. It's un-recoverable on human time scales. It has now been washed out to sea.

Why is this happening? It's thought that it's because food prices are rising. And the rising demand for cheap soy and beef is convincing farmers and ranchers to raze trees.

So, I wondered. Soy and beef for whom? For Brazilians? Or for me? Naturally, I dread hearing that it's because of me.

So I looked up Brazilian exports. Brazil is the world's leading exporter of sugar, coffee, beef and orange juice. Soybeans are the fastest-growing export, and mostly go to China. The top ten countries buying exports from Brazil?

US: 18.9%
Argentina: 8.4%
China: 5.7%
Netherlands: 4.5%
Germany: 4.2%
Mexico: 3.5%
Chile: 3.1%
Japan: 3.0%
Italy: 2.7%
Russia: 2.5%

Are you eating Amazon rain forest beef? You can't know until tomorrow. WHAT? you say? Well, Country Of Origin Labeling (COOL) has not yet been implemented, even though it was approved by Congress in 2002. Due to food industry lobbying, implementation has been delayed. It is finally supposed to go into effect tomorrow. (Literally---September 30th, 2008!) Meat sold in supermarkets WILL be labeled, but not meat in butcher shops. That's usually ok, since you can ask the butcher at Snider's where the beef came from, and there's some reason to think that this person knows what they are talking about and will tell the truth.

COOL labeling is not required in restaurants. Snopes tells me that McDonald's and Burger King use beef imported from Australia and New Zealand, but not South America. (I remember a big flak about this when I was in high school. I seem to remember that at that time, these companies were importing beef raised on rain forest land. This practice seems to have stopped. Hooray for the big flak! Kind of. I still can't get over the fact that meat comes all the way from N.Z. to make a Big Mac, of all things.)

So I am of two minds about that. The beef is probably not coming here. While this is a rare occasion of us not being responsible for messing something up completely (hooray!), at the same time, if we are not responsible, we can't fix it (boo!).

Average residential usage?!

(first posted Friday, September 26, 2008)

So I ran across this little tidbit on the Energy Information Administration website, which posts official energy statistics from the U. S. Government:

Average Residential Monthly Use 920 kwh (kilowatthour)
Average Residential Monthly Bill $95.66

Dude! 920 KWh per month on AVERAGE?! That’s 11,040 kwh/year! We sit at 1670 kwh/year, down by nearly a factor of 7! And we even live in a place that gets hot in the summer! (But we can do better. I bet we can get down to 1100 kwh/year, 1/10 the average. I’m making that my goal!)

We have TV. We still have central air. We still have lights, and laptops, and cell phones, and electric guitars, and a Wii. We have a nice big refrigerator, and an electric clothes dryer and an electric range and a coffee maker. I don’t think we’re deprived. What are all these people DOING with all that electricity?

Imagine. A world in which everyone used 1/10 the electricity they do now. Wow. That’s the same as imagining a world in which we generate electricity without a) coal (49% of electricity generation), b) nuclear (19.4%), c) oil (1.6%), and d) natural gas (20%). We could get by on Hydro (7%), and Other (3.1%). Even if we only cut down to 1/7, we’d just need to add back a little bit of natural gas (say about 1/4 of what we use now), while we ramped up ‘Other’ to double the current ‘Other’ generation.

All of the sudden, this seems like a totally reasonable goal. I would dearly love to eat fish again without thinking of methylmercury. Anybody else out there feel the same way? Anybody else willing to cut down to 1100 kwh/month? You’ll save money... I promise!

All they’d have to do is live like we do at nerd central. Hmmm... that might be too much to ask.

A Dispute!

My friend Julianne taught me this great saying: ‘We could continue to argue without ANY data, or we could get some, and talk about it more later.’ What a great way to keep discussions from becoming arguments.

So, in my last post, I claimed that the winter peak in energy usage is due primarily to the clothes dryer. John thinks it’s due to the television. We tend to watch more television in winter than summer because, well, it’s dark outside! (Still, it’s only something like 6 hours/week.) We didn’t actually have an argument about this, because that’s just not the way we interact, but we did talk about it.

We could do it the computational physicist way. We could go around and find how much energy is used by the TV, and the DVD player, and the dryer, and make a model of usage, including all kinds of estimates. This would probably be fun. It would be a good excuse to get one of those Kill-A-Watt devices...

Or, we could do it the observational astronomer way. I will be gone this winter, so the dryer should get used approximately half as much, since there will be approximately half as many pounds of dirty clothes. (Note that this is probably not precisely true, since some things, like sheets get used by both of us. Also the minimum number of loads is usually two---whites and colors.) But the TV, etc. will get used the same amount, since it doesn’t care how many people watch it. So. In May of next year, we can plot up the 2007-2008 numbers next to the 2008-2009 numbers, and see who’s right.

If neither of these is conclusive, we could do it the experimental physicist way, and put cumulative power meters on every appliance, and actually measure it for a year. But we’ll try the other two options first. Why? Because they are easier! And if they are conclusive, there’s no point in going into this kind of detail.

Aren’t you glad you don’t live here? This is nerd central.

Updated Electricity Plot

So, here’s an updated plot of our electricity usage since Sept, 2002. You can see that we’ve been working hard!

But here’s the interesting thing. That last dot is 2008, the first year that we had central air all summer. We still dropped in electricity usage, but not as quickly. So, in the second derivative, it’s flattening out.




Here’s another view, which helps explain what’s going on. I’m plotting average KWh/day for each month of the year. The blue bars are the six year average, and the red bars are this year. You can easily see that while July and August of this year are substantially above the prior average, and September of 2007 is a little bit above the average, the other months are down. In some cases, way down.

The winter peak is interesting. That’s the electric clothes dryer.

But check out May. It’s the lowest usage month, and so in a sense gives our baseline usage, for critical things like the refrigerator and lights.

In May, we averaged about 4 KWh/day. That’s a rate of 0.17 KW, or 170 Watts. That means we’d have to generate at a rate of around 950 Watts to power our house entirely by solar panels in May. That means I’d need, say, five 200-Watt panels. According to my online research, that would come to less than $5000 for the panels. A little further looking around reveals a cost of about $8633 for a complete grid-tied 1050 Watt system (approx 5.9 KWh/day, or 176 KWh/month). That’s totally affordable, especially with rebates and tax breaks, which can sum to several thousand dollars.

Now, that’s for our best month. And I’ll need to look up all the tax breaks and rebates. And, we need another year or two of pushing the numbers down, to see how low we can go. But our baseline usage is now within shooting range of an affordable solar system! I’m really proud of that.

The future’s so bright...

I gotta wear shades. Oh, that was a good song. Ok. Not really. But it was a really fun song.

Long ago, we put an exterior, roll-down shade on the big front window. That’s it, in the picture above. So this summer, we installed one on each of the other two enormous plate-glass windows. These close-up pictures make them look really obvious, but when you are farther away, or when they are rolled up, you barely notice them.






Do they work? Yup. It was about 85d degrees out today, with bright sunshine, and the house only got up to 73, even though I made no effort to run around and close windows to keep the heat out, like I usually do when I know it’s going to be warm. I just had the shades down.

How much did they cost? Well, the cost of procrastination is really, really high. The first one cost us a little over $1000, about three years ago. These two, which are smaller, cost over $3000. D’oh. But in the end, it’s going to save us money, both on our electric bills, and on the grid-tied solar system we are eventually going to install.

Why does it matter? In my next post, I’ll include the latest graphs of electricity usage. While installing the central air conditioning ran up the electricity usage in the summer, our annual usage is still down from last year. But the summer usage of the air conditioning definitely stands out. These shades should help keep that usage at a minimum, even on the hottest days.

New raised beds!

Last year, when we took down the old fence, which was really, really old, and probably made of wood from the orchard that used to be here, we burned most of it in the fireplace. But some of it we repurposed into raised beds, as seen above. We filled them with compost and turned over sod, mulched ‘em, and left them for more than a year. Then, this year, we planted them with tomatoes and potatoes, and cucumber and squash and pumpkins and so on. That worked out so well that this fall, John has decided to try the square-foot gardening thing that we hear so much about! So he put in the three beds you see in the picture below. We’ve since planted them with some root crops, just to see what happens. They have sprouted, but we don’t think they will actually mature before winter sets in. It doesn’t matter really. It’s an experiment. It’s hardly ‘waste’ to put a couple of seeds in the ground!







Other things you can see in the photos: At the back of the right-hand photo, you can see a little roofed patio, that actually has a fireplace in it, which is totally sweet. The riot of foliage at the front of that is a grape vine that I wrote about in a previous post. At the back of the beds are two gray trash cans (one tipped over on it’s side). This is our active compost system. There’s a bat box on the utility pole, which has not attracted any bats, unfortunately. We think maybe there are too many other great places to live. And finally, an old satellite dish mount sticks up to the right of the utility pole. I have designs on that as a mount for a solar oven, if’n I ever get around to it. It’s already set up on an equatorial mount, and so it would be trivial to put a little tracking motor on to track the Sun.

We’ve tried lots of different path-making materials, and you can see one of them in the top picture---pea gravel. The jury is still out on whether we like it more, less, or the same as other options.

New fences, and a new pump ‘house’

One of the things we’ve been meaning to do since we moved in is fully fence the back yard. Above, you see a picture of the piece of fence we designed and built to go at the north end of the house. I built the fence, and John built the gate. After last year, I was tired of plain old vertical fence slats. This is much more interesting, don’t you think?

So we built another one at the south side, between the house and the cottage, as shown below. Our back yard is now fully fenced, which means sometimes we can let the chickens out, and when Tycho comes to visit, we can just open the back door and let him out!








So that left me with a lot of scraps, so I built a little cover for the pump that runs the secondary water for the irrigation system, which is gradually coming back on-line. I’m not happy with my current solution for the ridge line, so I stopped in the middle, before I got too far along. I’ll keep looking during my travels to Lowe’s, etc., until I find something I like.







Why all this activity? Well, we’ve finally gotten all the basic, hidden things, like insulation, electrical panels, a new furnace, etc. out of the way. So now we get to do fun things, like plant trees, build fences, and, in my next post... build new raised beds!

If you know what you are looking for, you can see the three new trees in the ‘field’ behind the pump house. Currently, we are reading a book titled ‘Small Scale Grain Raising’. Next year, that ‘field’ might be planted in wheat!

Preserving the harvest: sage and rosemary

I just love living in Utah.

Herbs practically dry themselves here. Sage grows like a weed, which is ok, because I really love it, especially in browned butter sauce over gnocchi or other pasta, or sizzled in olive oil with chickpeas and shells, or...

Anyway. the easiest thing I’ve found to do with large-ish herbs around here is to take a needle and thread, and cut a bunch of branches of whatever you’ve got---sage or rosemary, say. Thread the needle through the stem of the herb, and hang them up out of the sun, but somewhere that air can circulate around. The back of our kitchen works fine. They’ll just dry, with no further attention from you. (Note: this would almost certainly NOT have worked in Seattle!) Usually, I just pull off the bottom as I need herbs for cooking, but sometimes I go to the trouble to pull the dried leaves off and pack them in a bottle or jar.

I love to give the ropes of fresh herbs as gifts, although I’m not sure people like to receive them. Lots of people don’t really cook from scratch, and don’t know what to do with a rope of fresh sage...

Preserving the harvest: zucchini

Who knew?

Zucchini chips are awesome!

Here’s what I did:

Sliced them thin. I used the cheese slicer, which was probably a little too thin. I’ll leave them thicker next time I make them.

Lay them out on racks. Next time, I’ll probably spray the racks with olive oil, and may use screens instead, to keep them from falling through between the slats.

Put them in the sun, a dehydrator, solar dryer, or in the oven. I have a ‘dry’ setting on my oven that really speeds things up. It turns on the convection fan, and lets you use really low temperatures. So I set the temp at 150, and left them alone for a couple of hours. They shrank up to practically nothing, but the flavor was so amazingly concentrated that I’ve been nibbling on them for days!

Next time, in addition to the above changes, I’ll also try salting some. That can’t be bad. Seriously. These are good snack food!

Preserving the harvest: cucumbers

See those five jars in front? Yup, dill pickles.

This is so ridiculously easy, I can’t even believe it. I got the recipe on-line:

4 lbs cucumbers
3 cups white vinegar
3 cups water
1/3 cup pickling salt

for each pint jar:
2 T dill seed
3 peppercorns
1 or 2 dried cayenne peppers (optional)

Wash, cut cucumbers.
Combine vinegar, water, salt. Heat to the boiling point.
Pack cukes into hot, clean jars.
Add spices.
Seal, process 10 minutes.
Makes 6-8 pints.

It took me about an hour. I didn’t have any dried cayenne peppers, so I included one hot red pepper fresh from the garden. And I didn’t have quite enough dill seed to go around (this took a whole tin from the grocery store). And I dropped one of the jars pulling it out of the water bath. It didn’t break, but the lid came off, and there was dill vinegar everywhere. So that was kind of a pain. But in the end, I had five jars of totally delicious pickles. I will probably make more, if we have more cucumbers.

Preserving the harvest: grapes

See all those luscious grapes? That’s a fraction of the grape harvest here. We have three grapevines on the property, two of which we are trying to retrain onto a new arbor. But the third yielded the above grapes, and plenty more. They have seeds, so don’t make good raisins (at least I don’t think they do, but I just had an idea... I’ll try it, and let you know if it works!). But what you CAN do is make jam! So I did.

First, I used my fingers to get the skins off. I put all of that in a pan with about a cup of water, and boiled for five minutes. That made it possible to pass them through the food mill to get the seeds out. Then I ran the skins through the blender, and added them to the pulp, along with a packet of pectin, and boiled the tar out of ‘em. I packed it into eight jars, and processed in a boiling water bath for 10 minutes. Ta-da! Enough grape jam to last the year, for sure. Total time: about 2 hours.

Daryl is laying!

We have three laying hens, acquired in May. Two of them are ‘silver-laced Wyandottes’, and we don’t know what the third one is. She’s all black. We used to call them ‘the black one’, ‘the stupid one’, and ‘the other one’. But then my mom found names that stuck: Larry, Daryl and Daryl. (From the Bob Newhart show, for all you young’uns that don’t get the reference. “Howdy. I’m Larry, and this is my brother Daryl and my other brother Daryl.”) There they are at right. Larry is the black one, who’s looking at you, as if she’s saying ‘Are you lookin’ at me?!’. Daryl and Daryl are the Wyandottes, and look almost identical.



Anyway. One of the Daryls is now laying. The eggs are small still. We are getting one every other day or so for the last week. I expect that soon the other Daryl will catch up, and then the black one (Larry) will come along a little later. Larry was definitely younger than Daryl and Daryl.

What fun! I keep running back to the coop a dozen times a day to see if we have any new eggs! They don’t mind, because I usually bring a little cracked corn scratch or a grasshopper when I check on them.



Speaking of the coop, here’s a picture of it. I built it inside the foundation of an old shed. The white part is the ‘chicken tractor’, that we they lived in all summer. We can, in principle, move around on the grass. I built that last spring. But it’s very heavy, and we’ll probably make something different for next year, and this one will stay where it is, and function as the actual coop, weather-tight with nesting boxes. The top lifts up, so that you can reach in and grab the eggs without ever having to get your feet dirty!

The big structure to the right is the run. The two things are attached via a very simple hole in the fencing! The girls have free rein in there, and we put in all kinds of things for them to peck at and turn into compost. Mostly we add cut weeds and straw, but also kitchen scraps (our mostly meatless diet means most scraps can go right in---they love the cucumber ends, and ends of greens!), and sometimes grasshoppers and other bugs. They are working all of that into compost faster than you’d ever think possible, and are enriching it at the same time. There is absolutely zero odor. But with 3 chickens in 120 square feet, you wouldn’t expect any.

I will probably add a shade-tarp roof before winter comes. The roof slope is about 45 degrees, so we shouldn’t have much trouble with snow collecting on it!

We are so enamored of the ‘ladies’ that we keep putting in new things to see if they will ‘play’ with them. So you can see we slid some boards across so they could play ‘Queen of the roost’, and they do, knocking each other off, and jumping from roost to roost. We also gave them an old wooden ladder, that they have learned to climb on. The latest addition is a wooden feeder, with a cover. They love to jump up there when they hear us coming, and squawk at us for goodies.

Note also the cedar fence in the background. That’s new since last year. Gradually the old homestead is being made new again!

Conference update

So, remember, two posts ago, when I mentioned that I was forcing my eco-freak on the hapless conference goers? Well, everyone had a terrific time!

When they first heard they were taking the bus from the hotel, pretty much all of them had a look on their faces. You know the one, the ‘Ohboy, what have I gotten myself into?’ look. The one that says, ‘I wonder if I can get out of this.

But then they got on our beautiful buses. And they were impressed. And then I took them to Salt Lake on the Front Runner, and they were amazed. And all of them said in their evaluations that it was a good idea to do public transit, and several of them said they wished they had something half as good!

All were happy with their WSU water bottles, and the delivered water. I got to send a whole lot of bottled water and soda back to catering.

One problem was that catering did not pick up their china and silverware right away. The Friday delivery was still sitting there on TUESDAY of the following week. Ew. But that would have happened anyway, with the bowls and serving utensils, so I don’t count it as a mark against ‘green’, but rather a mark against catering...

As for the event on Antelope Island, in the end, most everyone was too tired to go! I had to go, because I was the speaker, but only one other person wanted to come with me, so I cancelled the bus, and took my Prius.

End result: Success! Everyone seemed to really enjoy themselves, and while initial reactions were a little mixed, after a day or two, everyone was pretty excited about the experiment. The public transit in particular saved big money, and made everyone jealous of my town. Way to go, UTA!

Enormous Onion french onion soup...

Ok. I have to get this down, because I just invented it today. Pretty much the best soup ever. Deep, rich, like restaurant soup but less salty, and completely meatless. What’s the trick? Homebrewed beer, and Miso.

We had an ENORMOUS onion delivered from our CSA, and I was inspired. So here’s what I did:

1 enormous onion (about 5 cups of chopped onion, no joke!)
2 T olive oil
1 T butter
4 cloves garlic, pressed
6-8 cups vegetable broth (see below!!)
1 T soy sauce
1 t sugar
day old crusty bread
mozzarella cheese

Put 2 T olive oil and 1 T butter in a large saucepan over med heat.
Chopped the onion and threw it in there. I let it sweat for about 15 minutes.
Added 4 cloves of garlic, pressed.
Cooked for another 4 minutes or so, until it started to smell yummy and garlicky.
Covered, and reduced heat to low, and simmered for 1 hour.

Meanwhile, I made pretty much the best vegetable broth ever.

1 onion, chopped
3 carrots, peeled and sliced thin
1 celery heart, including leaves, chopped
2 large cremini mushrooms, diced fine
3 garlic cloves, pressed
1 bottle homemade stout,
8 cups of water,
2 bay leaves,
2 t dried thyme,
shake of red pepper flakes,
salt and pepper,
1 T olive oil
1 T red Miso

Saute onion in olive oil over medium heat until soft. Add carrots, celery, mushrooms, bay leaves, thyme, red pepper flakes. Saute until they start to color and produce ‘fond’ on the bottom of the pot.

Deglaze the pan with the entire bottle of beer. Simmer until nearly all the fluid is gone. Add the water, stir. Add the miso, stir. Season to taste. Let simmer a few minutes so the flavors can blend.
_________________________

Add the broth to the onions. I did this by setting a sieve over the pan, and slowly pouring the broth through. Only a couple of carrots ‘escaped’. I fished ‘em out with a spoon.

It was a little flat, so I added 1 T soy sauce, and 1 t sugar to brighten up the flavors.

Add some day-old french bread slices, some thinly sliced mozzarella cheese, and broil, if you have the patience, or just eat the gooey goodness without browning the cheese.

There you have it. One of my favorite foods of all time. Authentic richness and flavor, no beef required.