We've recently learned that we've become infected with a disease. It started as a mild case, early on-set you might call it, however our symptoms have become progressively worse and no longer something we can ignore. I also fear that it may be highly contagious.
Though we cannot trace the exact source of our infection I do believe it struck me first and after months of direct contact I passed it along to Mike. I think it's something I picked up in South America, although I have most likely been a carrier of the disease all my life. Maybe I should have been vaccinated, but I do not believe that even toxic vaccinations could have prevented this infection.
It's called Barnheart. I know, it sounds serious. And it is. It is a sharp depression and feeling of longing, coupled by irrational thoughts and the desire to tread softly on the soil, rather than pound the pavement. Though it is just starting to receive notice from the medical community I urge you to read more about our illness, diagnoses, and treatment. Sadly, no research has been conducted on the cause or prevention of Barnheart.
Thursday, January 28, 2010
Thursday, January 14, 2010
How to buy organic produce...and afford it!
We all want to eat more organic produce. We can cite many reasons to want to make the switch; personal health, environmental preservation, better taste and nutrition rank among some of the most popular. But even we struggle when we find ourselves wandering the grocery aisles. Trying to rationalize the gross price discrepancies between organic and not is a tough task.
Mike and I often find ourselves in the produce section staring down a chemically sprayed pepper grown in a mono-crop system for $1.99/lb and an organic pepper, grown using sustainable methods for $5.99/lb. It's a glaring financial difference, and while we definitely understand that organic produce takes more time and care to plant, maintain, grow, and harvest sometimes money wins.
So, we stick to a few little strategies that makes the purchase of organic produce affordable AND make us feel much better after a trip to the grocery store:
First, stop using plastic bags. Seriously. I think that this above all the other 'green' changes you can make is one of the most important. I could write another whole post about the evils of plastic, but that's a topic for another day. In the meantime, consider a personal ban on plastic bags. We bring our reusable grocery bags with us which are fine for transporting our food from store to car (bike, bus, train) to house. But what about bagging individual produce like brussel sprouts, beans, etc. that are tough to carry loose in the cart?
We need to give up that waste too. Use reusable grocery bags or just learn to deal with a "messy" cart. When the clerk stares at your loose potatoes rolling down the conveyor belt, stare back at him. If you feel you must, explain that you don't use plastic bags. The clerk and the people waiting in line behind you might be a little annoyed, but they'll deal with it. Now I know you don't directly save any money by choosing to purchase these items loose, but without plastic bags and pre-weighed and printed price stickers (like they use at Wegmans) we're one step closer to discovering organic affordability.
This leads us to our next step, which we discovered totally by mistake but now make a practice. Of course, pick the organic vegetable that looks best, but make sure it doesn't have a sticker. You know, the little stickers with the 4-digit product code that the clerk uses to ring in the price at the register. We've never had a hard time finding sticker-free food, and haven't yet gone so far as to peel the stickers off. It may take a little extra time and work, but in that pile of organic sweet potatoes you will most certainly be able to paw through until you find all the potatoes you need without stickers.
Without the aid of a coded sticker when the clerk goes to weigh your produce, he will never think to ask whether it's an organic potato or a caustic one. In our experience, they will almost always use the cheaper, non-organic code to calculate the price. Now pile all those veggies back into your reusable bags and you've not only saved money, you've also reduced waste. If you then compost your food scraps from these veggies (hopefully for use in your home garden in the spring) then you're completing the life cycle of those vegetables as beneficially as you possibly can. And that's really our goal here--to reshape the commercial, industrial systems at work in the grocery store and return them to a more natural, wholesome system.
I'm sure this topic could raise all kind of ethical debates on the merits of 'stealing' from Danny Wegman or whoever owns Whole Foods. But as far as I'm concerned, the organic farmers are still getting paid and Danny Wegman isn't hard up for cash. Until our garden thaws and can offer up fresh produce at an affordable price we will keep up my little routine and now you can too.
So, we stick to a few little strategies that makes the purchase of organic produce affordable AND make us feel much better after a trip to the grocery store:
First, stop using plastic bags. Seriously. I think that this above all the other 'green' changes you can make is one of the most important. I could write another whole post about the evils of plastic, but that's a topic for another day. In the meantime, consider a personal ban on plastic bags. We bring our reusable grocery bags with us which are fine for transporting our food from store to car (bike, bus, train) to house. But what about bagging individual produce like brussel sprouts, beans, etc. that are tough to carry loose in the cart?
We need to give up that waste too. Use reusable grocery bags or just learn to deal with a "messy" cart. When the clerk stares at your loose potatoes rolling down the conveyor belt, stare back at him. If you feel you must, explain that you don't use plastic bags. The clerk and the people waiting in line behind you might be a little annoyed, but they'll deal with it. Now I know you don't directly save any money by choosing to purchase these items loose, but without plastic bags and pre-weighed and printed price stickers (like they use at Wegmans) we're one step closer to discovering organic affordability.
This leads us to our next step, which we discovered totally by mistake but now make a practice. Of course, pick the organic vegetable that looks best, but make sure it doesn't have a sticker. You know, the little stickers with the 4-digit product code that the clerk uses to ring in the price at the register. We've never had a hard time finding sticker-free food, and haven't yet gone so far as to peel the stickers off. It may take a little extra time and work, but in that pile of organic sweet potatoes you will most certainly be able to paw through until you find all the potatoes you need without stickers.
Without the aid of a coded sticker when the clerk goes to weigh your produce, he will never think to ask whether it's an organic potato or a caustic one. In our experience, they will almost always use the cheaper, non-organic code to calculate the price. Now pile all those veggies back into your reusable bags and you've not only saved money, you've also reduced waste. If you then compost your food scraps from these veggies (hopefully for use in your home garden in the spring) then you're completing the life cycle of those vegetables as beneficially as you possibly can. And that's really our goal here--to reshape the commercial, industrial systems at work in the grocery store and return them to a more natural, wholesome system.
I'm sure this topic could raise all kind of ethical debates on the merits of 'stealing' from Danny Wegman or whoever owns Whole Foods. But as far as I'm concerned, the organic farmers are still getting paid and Danny Wegman isn't hard up for cash. Until our garden thaws and can offer up fresh produce at an affordable price we will keep up my little routine and now you can too.
Wednesday, January 6, 2010
Fall Recap
Time to play catch-up on a couple exciting projects, tough choices and tasty treats we neglected to mention in the blog over the past few months.
La Rusa - "In Soviet Russia, car drives you!"
Buying a new car is always a tough, long, stressful process. But buying a new, used car can be even tougher and more stressful. So when Watson, our trusty old man of a minivan failed NY State Inspection two times over, we knew we were in for a challenge. We had to buy a car, and we had to do it quickly. As much as we would love to avoid owning a car, as we had for the last several years living in the city, bikes and feet were no longer going to cut it. When you live 13 miles outside the nearest town and 30 miles outside the nearest city, a car is an inevitable necessity. Pile on a few inches (or feet!) of snow and you've really got no choice. We needed a car, and more than likely we needed something with AWD or 4WD.
After much shopping around we settled on a 2001 Honda CR-V that we found for sale by a private party in a town nearby. When we first got the car the RPM's were running really, really high. The car was idling up around 2000-2200 RPMs, so when it was in gear the car was more or less driving itself. As a nod to the old Yakov Smirnoff joke, "In America you drive car. In Soviet Russia car drives you!" we named her La Rusa, or "The Russian" in Spanish. Seeing as she's a Japanese car, I really have no idea how this makes any sense whatsoever.
We had to have the throttle plate cleaned and the cable adjusted, and slapped on some new tires, but otherwise she's running well. Now I just have to learn to drive a stick shift, which is a whole other battle all-together. All in all, we think we got a pretty good deal for the condition and the mileage, and so far she's done us pretty well. Really, the whole deal was more than worth it for the sweet spare tire cover we got!
2. Thanksgiving 2009
Thanksgiving is definitely an all day, food-centered event in the Schadel house. The day started with amazing homemade cinnamon rolls for breakfast. There's nothing better than fresh, warm baked goods, and they were topped with a simple sweet icing and a sprinkling of walnuts that would have converted any Cinnabon customer in no time.
Later there was beer & Pictionary (Sadrah and I had a variety pack from UFO, Sadrah's brother's stuck to Miller High Life) followed by bread bowl dip and various other appetizers and snacks.
For dinner Sadrah's parents got their turkey from a small, local, pasture-fed, antibiotic free farm called October Rose. We also buy eggs from this local farm-- at $2.50/dozen they're not too expensive, and they definitely beat the tasteless unethically raised eggs in the grocery store. For our dinner Sadrah prepared a
homemade vegetarian "turkey" a few days before. Made primarily from seitan (made with vital wheat gluten) and slowly roasted in "no chicken" stock, the loaf made for a tasty substitute. The texture would have come out better if she kneaded the dough a bit longer, and it tasted a bit more like stuffing, but it sliced like a real turkey and tasted yummy to me.
For dessert there were 3 different kinds of cake & pie. One was a traditional apple pie, the next an apple crisp (both with local apples from Beak & Skiff) and finally one of Sadrah's Dad's famous cheesecakes. The pumpkin flavoring in the cheesecake didn't exactly work out as planned, but it was still damn tasty. Both apple creations were also wonderful sweet treats. I hardly had room for dessert that night, but there's always plenty of time for leftovers over the next few days.
3. The power of nature
We get most of our heat in the house here from a single Vermont Castings wood stove in the living room. That might be a surprise to most of you, but it's true. Sure, we also have a supplemental propane heater, and a few electric space heaters for the upstairs bedrooms set on timers and used on particularly cold nights. But there's no central heating system, per se--the wood stove is the main source of heat. And you know the best thing about heating your house with wood? The shrunken heating bill!
Sadrah's parents usually buy a few cords of firewood every year, but the price pales in comparison to fossil fuels AND it's a local, renewable resource. They also head right out the back door and into the woods to take down some old trees or cut up logs that were downed the previous year. This is totally free fuel, and there's acres of supply. All you need is a chainsaw, a strong back for hauling wood and a wood-splitter. You don't even need the wood-splitter (an axe and a sturdy stump will do) but it sure makes the whole process much quicker and easier. We've already spent a few afternoons under the front porch, splitting, tossing and stacking wood--that is after we've gotten the temperamental engine started.
But it's an easy process, and it's sort of neat to be so connected to your own survival. You cut the wood, and in turn the wood keeps you warm in the sub-freezing temperatures of Finger Lakes winter.
La Rusa - "In Soviet Russia, car drives you!"Buying a new car is always a tough, long, stressful process. But buying a new, used car can be even tougher and more stressful. So when Watson, our trusty old man of a minivan failed NY State Inspection two times over, we knew we were in for a challenge. We had to buy a car, and we had to do it quickly. As much as we would love to avoid owning a car, as we had for the last several years living in the city, bikes and feet were no longer going to cut it. When you live 13 miles outside the nearest town and 30 miles outside the nearest city, a car is an inevitable necessity. Pile on a few inches (or feet!) of snow and you've really got no choice. We needed a car, and more than likely we needed something with AWD or 4WD.
After much shopping around we settled on a 2001 Honda CR-V that we found for sale by a private party in a town nearby. When we first got the car the RPM's were running really, really high. The car was idling up around 2000-2200 RPMs, so when it was in gear the car was more or less driving itself. As a nod to the old Yakov Smirnoff joke, "In America you drive car. In Soviet Russia car drives you!" we named her La Rusa, or "The Russian" in Spanish. Seeing as she's a Japanese car, I really have no idea how this makes any sense whatsoever.
We had to have the throttle plate cleaned and the cable adjusted, and slapped on some new tires, but otherwise she's running well. Now I just have to learn to drive a stick shift, which is a whole other battle all-together. All in all, we think we got a pretty good deal for the condition and the mileage, and so far she's done us pretty well. Really, the whole deal was more than worth it for the sweet spare tire cover we got!2. Thanksgiving 2009
Thanksgiving is definitely an all day, food-centered event in the Schadel house. The day started with amazing homemade cinnamon rolls for breakfast. There's nothing better than fresh, warm baked goods, and they were topped with a simple sweet icing and a sprinkling of walnuts that would have converted any Cinnabon customer in no time.
Later there was beer & Pictionary (Sadrah and I had a variety pack from UFO, Sadrah's brother's stuck to Miller High Life) followed by bread bowl dip and various other appetizers and snacks.
For dinner Sadrah's parents got their turkey from a small, local, pasture-fed, antibiotic free farm called October Rose. We also buy eggs from this local farm-- at $2.50/dozen they're not too expensive, and they definitely beat the tasteless unethically raised eggs in the grocery store. For our dinner Sadrah prepared a
homemade vegetarian "turkey" a few days before. Made primarily from seitan (made with vital wheat gluten) and slowly roasted in "no chicken" stock, the loaf made for a tasty substitute. The texture would have come out better if she kneaded the dough a bit longer, and it tasted a bit more like stuffing, but it sliced like a real turkey and tasted yummy to me.
For dessert there were 3 different kinds of cake & pie. One was a traditional apple pie, the next an apple crisp (both with local apples from Beak & Skiff) and finally one of Sadrah's Dad's famous cheesecakes. The pumpkin flavoring in the cheesecake didn't exactly work out as planned, but it was still damn tasty. Both apple creations were also wonderful sweet treats. I hardly had room for dessert that night, but there's always plenty of time for leftovers over the next few days.
3. The power of nature
We get most of our heat in the house here from a single Vermont Castings wood stove in the living room. That might be a surprise to most of you, but it's true. Sure, we also have a supplemental propane heater, and a few electric space heaters for the upstairs bedrooms set on timers and used on particularly cold nights. But there's no central heating system, per se--the wood stove is the main source of heat. And you know the best thing about heating your house with wood? The shrunken heating bill!
Sadrah's parents usually buy a few cords of firewood every year, but the price pales in comparison to fossil fuels AND it's a local, renewable resource. They also head right out the back door and into the woods to take down some old trees or cut up logs that were downed the previous year. This is totally free fuel, and there's acres of supply. All you need is a chainsaw, a strong back for hauling wood and a wood-splitter. You don't even need the wood-splitter (an axe and a sturdy stump will do) but it sure makes the whole process much quicker and easier. We've already spent a few afternoons under the front porch, splitting, tossing and stacking wood--that is after we've gotten the temperamental engine started.
But it's an easy process, and it's sort of neat to be so connected to your own survival. You cut the wood, and in turn the wood keeps you warm in the sub-freezing temperatures of Finger Lakes winter.
A Wormy Winter Wonderland
The snow started to fall in mid-December, and aside from a short break around Christmas, it has hardly let up. It coats the ground, beautifully clings to tree branches and drifts across country roads. I knew it got cold up here, but a wind chill that feels like -5 is a new thing for me. Of course I've felt cold like this before, but I've never lived in it, day in and day out. I'm still trying to get used to it, but some new waterproof snow boots are helping tremendously. It's not like it doesn't snow in New Jersey or Philadelphia--it just doesn't snow this much, or this constantly. We just keep wood on the fire, keep warm under 5-6 blankets and day-dream of the warm summer days in the garden to come.All this snow and cold not only leaves us with extra time to plan for the spring, but also to focus on other projects we're really excited about. One of these is vermicomposting. Vermicomposting is very similar to the kind of composting you might do in a backyard bin or container, except we're utilizing the power of the worms (in this case Red Wiggler Worms, or Eisenia foetida) to speed up the process. First, we ordered 1000 worms online for about $26. They should take 1-2 weeks to arrive at our door, which gave us plenty of time to get the bin set-up and working.
We bought a simple $5 Rubbermaid bin at Target. Then, we needed to make some bedding for the worms to crawl around in and munch on. Ripped or shredded newspaper, shredded cardboard, straw, peat moss, a little dirt and fallen leaves are all tasty treats that the worms will love. You want to keep the whole thing fairly moist, similar to a wrung-out sponge. Worms don't breath air like we do, but breath through their skin and keeping proper moisture is essential so they don't suffocate. But add too much moisture and they can drown. You need allow for some air-flow to avoid anaerobic conditions which stalls the composting process and can lead to nasty odors as well. We drilled several 1/8" holes in the bottom, sides and lid of our bin to let air flow in and out as well as provide drainage. We propped up the bin on bricks and placed an upturned plastic lid underneath the bin tocollect 'compost tea,' the nutrient-rich drippings of excess moisture. The houseplants will thank us.To get the bin "warmed up" and ready for our worms' arrival, we added a small pile of kitchen compost to the bin (egg shells, coffe grounds, banana peels, and various vegetable scraps...but go light on the citrus or your bin will become to acidic). Simply lift up some of the bedding, drop in some compost, and cover it back up with bedding. What a simple system!
Next time just add compost to a different section of the bin. There should be no odor, so this kind of composting can easily be done indoors during the winter months. We have ours set up in the basement root cellar right now. Once the worms arrive, we should see some fresh, nutrient-rich compost within 2-3 months.Our next big project will probably be building our humanure toilet. I'm sure this project will gross some people out, but it's a wonderful way to harness a powerful resource that most of us dismiss and literally flush down the drain. We've purchased the wood we need and we have our design. Now it's just a question of where to set up our saw and build indoors since the winter cold and snow pretty much prevents us for working outdoors without our fingers falling off.
Also, we desperately need a name for our little farm. Any suggestions??
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