dragonlady7 | Entries tagged with solarpunk

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socalledunitedstates:

Before we can live in a world of vertical gardens covering stained glass skyscrapers, we need to build a world of backyard garden boxes made of reclaimed wood. Before we can cover every rooftop with solar panels, we need to equip every home with solar smokeless cooking made of scrap metal

The appeal of those green cityscapes in the pretty pictures isn’t just that they’re hi-tech and clean, it’s that they sprout from a society that values compassion, the environment, and human lives more than it values profit. We need to build that society first, and we need to build it from the ground up with what we have available

The solarpunk future is for our grandchildren. Our job is to pave the way for it

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˜This book is more or less a coherent distillation of most of what’s at this website [https://oasisdesign.net/greywater/].

Art Ludwig, Create An Oasis With Greywater: Choosing, Building, And Using Greywater Systems : Includes Branched Drains

It’s a large (8x10 or so) slim volume with a colorful cover and a greyscale interior.

It is written in a clear, direct vernacular style, with some technical terms but everything well-explained. What I liked best about the website, and found continued well in the book, was its no-nonsense approach to what won’t work. Here’s why you’d think you could do that, and here, vividly detailed, is exactly what will happen. It’s very good, and extremely readable, even entertaining. This includes “here’s what the law currently is in California, and here’s why everything the code tells you to do is absolutely wrong and you should under no circumstances do it.” But, for the record, and as the website details, since the book was published, the author actually got the law changed in California, and now the code is much better.

Do I think you could get most of this information from the website? Sure. Do I think this book would be a fantastic reference to have to hand as you plan out your actual greywater system? Absolutely. The best part, perhaps, is the mistakes he highlights that an experienced contractor or plumber would make, because they’re used to systems working differently. I would absolutely buy this book even after having gotten it out of the library and copied down everything I thought was important, just to have a thing to show a skeptical observer. It’s very good.

So– if you have ever stood at your sink guiltily watching perfectly clean cold water go down the drain as you wait for the water to heat up to wash your dishes or whatever, you should check out that website, and if you get any niggles of interest, check out this book. He’s got real-world examples of all kinds of systems, including both extremely dry places who need the greywater to sustain their landscape and are desperate to recapture every drop, and very wet places who just need the water to go somewhere that it won’t hurt anything.

My own potential installation is for a site too near a creek to install a septic system, where my primary concern is how to redirect water from showers away from the creek so as not to pollute, without having gross puddles of standing water anywhere, so I feared there’d be nothing useful for me in all the tales of desperately-dry California landscaping– but worry not, there was an Oregonian example with a situation very similar to mine and a very detailed solution illustrated nicely.

So, in short, a thumbs-up recommendation. Even if you don’t have anything concrete planned, it’s an interesting read, if only for the stories of the places he’s done installations.

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Having written out that whole thing, I’m also like, maybe I should have mentioned that “it’s so easy just do it” doesn’t necessarily apply to everybody. I know that. I still do throw out a lot of stuff. It helps to have a compost pile, it makes me feel like it’s less of a waste at least– it’s going back to the earth pretty directly that way. But I’m still not always being efficient and pro-active and all that.

On the farm, we donate a lot of shit to the food pantry because we also do not have time for that shit sometimes. We are so lucky, with our local food pantry– Capital Roots– they have a fantastic program where they get local volunteers to pick up donations from farms, and the like; they’ll even do rescue harvests, where a farmer can’t sell a crop– they’ll send a (n often quite skilled) volunteer crew to get the thing out of the field where it would otherwise rot, and bring it to where hungry people can get it. So for us, if it’s gross, it’s fed to pigs, if it’s not gross, it’s donated, if it’s not gross AND I’m there, it gets frozen or canned so we can eat it later. (Though, they did tomatoes without me this year, which is why I had to do my own batch at home to freeze, lol.)

Anyhow– at the farm, my BIL applied for a grant to get a commercial kitchen through some programs, and he’s got all kinds of business plans for it, but one of my secret little personal dreams is to be able to offer a CSA subscription that’s just all put-by stuff. Stuff that’s already been put by, I mean. By me, in the commercial kitchen so it’s legal to sell.

Think about it– regardless of season, so whenever, you could pick up a box that’s already-canned tomatoes, already-frozen carrots, already-frozen spinach, already-canned broth, all the stuff you never have time to use and have to throw out wilted– but minimally-processed into a stable form so you can just cook with it. I want to take the discarded chicken feet and process them into bone broth and can it so that’s accessible to people who can’t make it themselves. Then it’s accessible for people without big kitchens, people with disabilities, people with really limited schedules and new babies and such.

I’d have to charge more than for a regular fresh share, but maybe we could even manage some of the sliding-scale stuff we do with the regular CSA. (We have a program where people who can afford it sign up to pay extra for their shares, so people who need the food but can’t afford it can get subsidized shares. It’s harder for us to find people who’ll take the help than people who’ll pay extra, which says things about our community, I think! and we need to do more outreach to find people who need help, too, but there’s that bit of data!)

Anyway. I don’t mean to shame people who can’t even manage to freeze the rest of their bunch of carrots. I can’t tell you how many I’ve let go way too long and thrown out. This year, even. Last month. I’m not a superhero.

I just wanted to point out: it’s something you can do on a single-person scale in low-effort ways.

Most of these things I’ve been writing lately, they’re just attempts to be positive and feel like you have choices in this stuff, like you can try to take control of your foodshed, like you can try and make positive inroads yourself. Real change has to come from above, I know, in systemic ways, with legal backup. But the more you’ve taken as much charge as you can, the more informed you are about how the system has to change. And the more hope and energy you can bring to it, instead of hopelessness.

That’s all.

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One of the things I do at the farm is take over preserving excess harvested vegetables so the busy farmers don’t have to stay up late and do it. It’s one of those tasks it’s hard to find time for. Farmsister and VegMan are both expert canners, but the unskilled drudge labor of freezing often falls to me. (There have been jokes about calling me The Freezer.)

Freezing vegetables is super super easy and you can do it in small batches– like, huh these carrots are about to go off, I only used three out of the bunch and I’ll never get through them before they go the rest of the way wrinkly or get slimy–

Wash them, peel them if you’re into that, chop them, put them in a quart Ziploc freezer bag or cram them into an old plastic container you washed out but didn’t recycle yet. Put into freezer. Wham, bam, you’re set, now you have frozen carrots to use at your leisure sometime in the next six months to a year. This works for peppers, onions, celery– you could even make a mirepoix and freeze blends of this stuff, if that’s how you use it most often.

I always just Google the thing I’m about to preserve. Some stuff– spinach, beet greens, Swiss chard, snow peas– you have to blanch first. This is because there are enzymes in them that freezing will not stop, and they’ll keep breaking the food down. Boiling will stop them, and so when you defrost your frozen thing, they’ll come out mushy-cooked, not gooey-gross.

Some things you cook down to save space. Tomatoes, you cook down first, because they’re mostly water and you can save a ton of room by only preserving the part of the tomatoes that’s tomato, not the water. Some things you cook down because it’s the most sensible way of preserving them– like winter squash, which you can store for ages but when you think it’s gonna mold, roast it first and scrape the pulp into a baggie or a container of some kind, and freeze that. Eggplant, you have to cook before freezing because it will just be mush and cooked mush is usable while raw mush is just kind of gooey and nasty. A lot of stuff just tastes better roasted, and freezing is a method of cooking– it breaks down things– so it’s better to have it cooked the way you wanted, and then cooked a bit more by the freezer, than to be trying to cook it how you like after the freezer’s already broken it down.

A CSA customer was telling us she freezes raw cabbage, and then when she thaws it, it’s cooked enough that she can use it to make cabbage rolls with. She just throws it right in the freezer whole and chops it afterward, and then she doesn’t have to boil it for the cabbage rolls. We all were boggled by this, but I haven’t yet tried it myself, so if you do, let me know how it worked.

I guess you can freeze zucchini chopped in pieces and blanched, if you want to eat it in stir-fries later, but you can also just grate it raw into baggies if you’re going to use it for bread etc. later.

This is the kind of stuff gardeners know about, homesteading types and such. But I’m telling you, yes you, apartment dweller, who cooks for one or two– you can do this too. Don’t feel shut out from a CSA share or loading up on amazing fresh in-season shit at the farmer’s market just because you tried it and then had to throw out a bunch of moldy wilted stuff later. No! Get it, get the annoyingly-sized box for four adults, and figure right away that you’re going to eat maybe a quarter of it now, and freeze the rest. Do it. You can do it!

(Another trend worth noting: most CSAs won’t give you a smaller box or let you customize it much [though some will! worth asking!] but many many many will let you get a half share by picking up every other week. Even more will let you sign up with another person to split the share– it’s just on you to organize it. CSA boxes do not just have to be for large families or people who cook a ton. It just takes organization and management, and you don’t have to do it yourself– you can glom onto another person to help you organize. For real, think about it.)

I have found that freezing stuff in tiny quantities means I can make my little freezer work– I just have the one that sits on top of a regular fridge, I don’t have a chest freezer, I have a tiny house and a Dude who isn’t good at meal planning.

But we have a tiny whiteboard on the outside of the freezer, and when I put stuff in there I write that it’s there, so when we’re meal planning later, we can look at the list and at least sometimes it’s up to date and we know what’s there.

He’s starting to get into pickling and fermenting vegetables, and I dunno how that’s going to go, but it’s also pretty accessible and can be done on a small scale with the shit you can’t eat fast enough and don’t want to have to throw out.

I chopped, blanched, and packaged the rest of my bunch of Swiss chard and all the greens from my beets while my Instant Pot was making me beet pilaf last night. I put the water on to boil after I sealed the lid, and I was done before the pot was. I only had one bunch of beets (it was two beets! they were huge!) and one single bunch of Swiss chard and I’d been trying all week to eat them and it was too much for two people and they were wilting in the fridge. Now I have one more two-person serving of each, for future meals when we haven’t been grocery shopping lately.

My point is– you can do it. Do that farm wife shit. Do it on your tiny scale in your tiny-ass kitchen in your little freezer in your stolen half-hour after dinner prep. Then you can buy your lush local shit at the farmer’s market with your precious little basket and all, and not have to throw most of it out and buy frozen Birdseye shit at WalMart in November.

You can do this, it is accessible to you! Maybe that seems obvious and condescending but I am saying it because I didn’t realize it until pretty recently and i feel like our generation hasn’t had the same access to this kind of knowledge as former ones. My mom froze shit all the time but my parents were borderline preppers before that was a thing, and I just plain didn’t realize I could do that shit in the suburbs. But I can! And I will.

And I do. So can you.

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I mentioned it in the same post from the other day– it’s a t-shirt from a tech conference a few years ago, with a large bold image of a monkey (a mandrill? ah yes that answers the question, Mandrill is a MailChimp product and they were always shilling at the conferences Dude used to go to) on the front and no text on it.

So I just cut the neckline out and blanket-stitched the raw edge this left behind over the course of a day or two at work while waiting for various things to load, and cut it into a crop-top length and let it sit for literally like a year, and then last month I took the waistband from the skirt I cut for the black and pink t-shirt-corset dress from yesterday, and attached it to a circle skirt I cut out of an old bedsheet using an online circle skirt calculator, which I didn’t cut the bottom of and left handkerchief-hemmed, and also I attached pockets on the side seams made from the sleeves of a t-shirt I cut up a while ago, and hand-sewed them into place because I couldn’t follow any of the tutorials on how to put pockets into side seams.

Anyhow. I hand-sewed the elastic waistband to the skirt because I was traveling and it was easier, and then I hand-sewed the skirt to the crop top of the shirt because sewing elastic is a nightmare so I do it by hand faster anyway, and then I did another layer of hand-stitching around the waistband to reinforce the connection between the skirt and waistband largely because I was stuck at work and had time and wanted to practice whatever that stitch is called, and I was going to hand-hem it and then was like no fuck that it’s waaay too much yardage and needs trimming too, so I did it on the serger instead, because the hem was where I’d roughly chopped out the elastic of the fitted sheet and so it was crinkly and uneven and the serger has a knife blade in it so it’ll trim stuff nice and straight for you. I still might roll up the hem and sew it nicer, but I don’t mind having the raw serged edge show.

So– photos, and I’m doing a more impressionistic kind of photography of the details, sorry…

you can see why i think dresses with a strongly defined waist area tend to flatter me more, though I am trying to get out of any mindset where “flattering” is important– still, I tend to tug at loose dresses and don’t like how they sit.

POCKETS, deep ones

two layers of waistband stitching, from a really forbidding angle

i am always so awkward in photos. The drawback with the sheets as skirt is that the microfiber polyester sheets stick to my cotton leggings something awful, so that’s an action shot. i either need to wear a slip or wear slippery leggings. which i do own, so. anyhow, the skirt doesn’t hang, it clings, and i’ve got to sort that out. honestly i think i need to make myself some half-slips because this isn’t the only dress i have this problem with.

also i think there’s a stain on the skirt somehow already, so if i wash it and that doesn’t come out, i’m going to have to screenprint or hand-stencil some shit on there. i’m not a huge fan of solid colors anyway, so we’ll see.

Anyhow. I’m apparently a walking Mailchimp billboard. It’s cool.

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kittydesade:

Never been so glad to have a pork sensitivity in my life.

thebiscuiteternal:

Eeeyyy, remember when the listeria cases from lettuce skyrocketed after the administration cut oversight? Just you wait.

lynati:

Time to stop buying any and all pork products until this is fixed.

Spread it around. PORK BOYCOTT. Bacon isn’t worth debilitating sicknesses that you’re likely to catch now that standards are going to be lowered in the industry in order to save money.

whales-are-gay:

context for the joke: upton sinclair’s the jungle is a book from 1906 about the meatpacking industry both about the working conditions and how unsanitary it was. it led to numerous laws about federal oversight on the meatpacking industry (specifically inspection) during what was known as the progressive era.

liberalsarecool:

Trump ruins bacon.

Every Trump policy makes things worse.

Gonna put in a plug here for localharvest.org again. Plug in your location and see what you can find. It’s only a start, not everybody’s on there, but a lot of stuff is.

You need to do your own research into your supply chain.

I want this to make everyone think about their food supply chain, not reflexively turn to vegetarianism– because remember, the USDA’s not inspecting vegetable production lines either? It turns out the whole food safety mechanism in the US that’s kept us largely safe for a century is being dismantled. Vegetables, animals, all of it. There’s no “safe”, “pure” food.

So, I’m urging you, if this is something you’re worrying about, I really think it’s time to lean in and look into your local food scene, and think harder about it than comparing two identical brands at the grocery store. Really find out who’s producing your food and where it’s coming from. You have more choices than you think. It matters more than you think. Demand better.

(Also, it’s not just pork. Obama passed a law similar to this for poultry. It’s food industry lobbyists for all kinds of foods. There’s nothing pure and there’s nothing safe. Your lettuce absolutely isn’t safe.)

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One of the big ways we cut down on our personal plastic use both at the farm and at my house is that we shop in the bulk foods sections at the grocery store.

I know this is like– big corporations do 99% of the consuming, but. Since recycling isn’t actually a thing, then reducing your use is really the way to go, and I’ve gotten into this mindset where I don’t tend to generate a lot of waste in a day, and it helps me feel better anyway.

So we joined a co-op and for a while we were going and getting everything in these plastic bags, and after a while I was like, this is actually not helping at all, I now have all these plastic bags that can’t really be recycled and can’t be reused for much.

At the co-op in Albany, Farmsister shows up with a crate full of jars, and goes to the customer service desk and gets a tare weight sticker on each one. The clerk just weighs them and writes it down, so when she fills it, the checkout clerk knows how much to subtract from what she’s buying for the weight of the container she brought in.

Our co-op in Buffalo doesn’t have a desk like that. So I asked one of the checkout clerks, and she was like “Oh! I mean, I have a scale here, that’s how I ring stuff out. I’ll just write the tare weight down for you!”

So now we bring stuff– mostly Mason jars, but old peanut butter jars, and my whole-ass flour canister from home, and whatnot– and get it weighed on our way in, and then we don’t have a zillion plastic bags to not recycle that make a mess in the kitchen.

Ask at your grocery store. Ours, like, thanked us. It was strange.

My next step is going to be making a bunch of produce bags out of old sheets, because Dude still insists on putting every individual vegetable into a separate plastic bag. The tare weight is negiligible, I feel like, so I’m not that worried. (Bananas are sixty-nine cents a pound. A two-ounce cotton bag is not going to break me, at that price. I just weighed one of my small tote bags. It’s .12 lbs, or 1.92 oz, and that’s for a bag with handles). I have some old track pants that are nylon, I might cut those up and use them too; nylon just frays so you gotta use French seams or a serger but if you do that they’ll hold up pretty well. I feel like that might help keep vegetables a little more moist, maybe? I’ll have to experiment.

The other thing I do is that before I recycle containers, since I gotta wash them out anyway, I use them a couple of times. Might as well get just a tiny bit more mileage out of them before consigning them to the “recycling” which we all know is really trash. It doesn’t look as cool as having fancy glass custom containers for everything but then I don’t care if the pasta sauce stains it or if it gets cracked or thrown out.

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I decided again that discretion was the better part of valor, and instead of leaving early this morning to spend three weeks at the farm, I rejiggered the schedule so I’ll be going for one week, then back a week, and then I’ll be spending three weeks at the farm– gives us more time to get the new inventory thing settled at work, gives me time to begin winterizing the yurt and take measurements and then come back and make more quilts. yeah.

Also, I decided to leave Sunday morning instead of this morning, and so I’ve spent today actually being productive in my own house. Four loads of laundry, including washing the chair pads for the kitchen chairs, one of which got red wine spilled absolutely all over it the other day. It was a perfect day for line-drying– intermittently sunny, but a steady and quite heavy breeze out of the west, which sucked/snapped the linen sheets dry in like literally twenty minutes. (I have discovered that linen sheets can only be hung to dry, and only outdoors, and cannot be used at all if it’s not outdoor-clothesline weather, which is fascinating. The dryer irons intractable creases into them; hanging over a door crinkles them. They must be on a line and must snap in the breeze. Only then do they come out soft and usable.)

And I also cut out a version of the – oh, I don’t think I mentioned, I borrowed the Alabama Stitch Book from the library on the recommendation of mmmm was it

missbuster I think it was?? thank you!!! – anyway. It includes a pattern for the T-Shirt Corset, and for a wonder it was still present in the library book, but of course an XL is for a 44″ bust and that’s quiiiiite a bit shy of my measurement, so I traced it onto some newsprint and then went around and added like uhhh hhh IDK a bunch around the edges, and cut it out and just gave it a shot on an old bleach-stained black shirt and a newish giant dark gray shirt Dude picked up at a tech conference with the logo of some long-ago startup on it. (Because, of course, Ms. Chanin’s instructions have you lay it all out on a single shirt, but she also is assuming you are less than 44″ in circumference at your largest point, and so the layout directions were also useless.) (I do like the book, I like it so much I bought it– for my BFF, who has a bust measurement of maybe 40″, so she’ll be able to use it as written.)

I appear to have missed the straight of grain on at least one of the pieces, which was bound to happen since I couldn’t use her layout and also I’m working on a too-small table, but apart from that, it went together pretty well. I also did not hand-sew the entire thing or in fact a single stitch on it, because while I admire her slow fashion aesthetic, I own a fucking sewing machine, and would like to know sooner than several weeks from now whether the pattern needs serious adjustment or not.

So I basted it all together with my sewing machine, coincidentally with hot pink machine embroidery thread because that’s what I had in there, and tried it on and then adjusted a couple of the seams, and then all of the lower seams had utterly failed to line up at all, so I cut it off level with the shortest one, and then I dug out an old broomstick skirt my BFF gave me that I’d kept with the intention of using it in a different refashion that didn’t work out, and instead of continuing to save it for that purpose, I just cut it off before I could reconsider, and then I took everything upstairs to the serger, and instantly broke a thread and had to rethread the thing so I decided, fuck it, I’m putting the hot pink embroidery thread in the upper looper spot (that’s the one that shows), and doing all the stitching on the exterior the way the pattern calls for (it’s to show off your handsewing, and like, i get it, but I’m not doing that), and so I just sat there and rethreaded the serger like four times but sure enough, in the end, I have a new dress. So that’s not too shabby.

I also cut a circle skirt out of a discarded twin fitted sheet– which neatly wound up not using the badly-worn parts of the sheet– and found the sleeves of an earlier cut-apart t-shirt to be pockets, and the waistband I cut off the broomstick skirt will do to gather the circle skirt to, and then I can sew that to the top of another promotional t-shirt I took in the shoulders of and hand-embroidered the neckline of and cut into a crop top I won’t wear and had figured on sewing onto a skirt. Then I’ll have another t-shirt dress.

I was so productive because I was procrastinating making another yurt quilt, by the way. But it was nice, and I’ll take it, and also I have no idea how to attach pockets into a circle skirt so I should look that up, I started and that’s when I broke the upper looper thread and abandoned that project, so.

Anyway I’ll try to take pictures of the completed dress soonish, we’ll see how that goes.

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I don’t have good photos or a proper tutorial for this but I’m going to tell the story anyway.

Last weekend my dude went through his closet and set out a pile of clothes he didn’t want to wear anymore. He mostly wears button-down dress shirts by day and t-shirts to sleep in, so the discard pile was just a huge collection of dress shirts, with two t-shirts. I went through them again, and sorted out three that weren’t badly worn, just didn’t fit or weren’t to his taste in some way. Those, I can donate or do something along those lines with. The others, though, all had worn or faded or torn bits, little stuff here and there, but it all meant they weren’t things anyone would want in their current form.

So I cut three of the shirts apart and used them to construct a muslin of a dress pattern I wanted to test. This is a thing that’s always stymied me, in sewing– the idea that not only do I have to cut into nice new fabric to make a thing, but i have to do it twice. I know you need to make a muslin (or a toile, whatever, IDK the difference) if you really want to make a garment that fits you properly, but it’s always seemed so expensive and wasteful.

Now, using old shirts for fabric isn’t a new idea, but the twist I have on this is that my dude is a very thin person, and I am a rather fat person, and so I can’t just place a pattern piece on a bit of his shirt and actually cut it out. So to deconstruct the shirts, I removed the sleeves and the back yoke, and left everything else connected. And indeed, my bodice pattern pieces extended beyond the side seams of the backs of the shirts. Even the sleeves of the muslin were larger than any of the sleeves I’d cut out of his shirts, so I had to cut apart that third shirt to get the sleeves out of the big back panel.

And then I needed the majority of an old twin bedsheet to get the skirt out of. I needed the skirt because it did change the fit of the bodice considerably to have all that weight on it.

I may at some point cut the rest of the shirts up and then, carefully matching the grain, patchwork them into another large usable hunk of fabric. I might do that and I might not. Either way, though, this muslin would’ve taken three yards at least of new fabric, and I’d have been able to pick it apart to make a different muslin out of it maybe, but maybe not– the bodice includes several darts.

I might wear it as-is, but I might take it apart. We’ll see. It’d be a reasonably fun farm-work dress, if I get several pockets into it, but might not be so great for work-work. (The colors don’t clash but they only coordinate if you’re kind of. From a different planet, I think.)

The thing to keep in mind is that the drape of a bedsheet is markedly inferior to that of like, any nice fabric at all, so if I make this dress from linen or rayon, as I want to, it’s going to fit completely differently. However! Having the pattern adjusted correctly because I made a muslin is only going to help with that, and maybe it’ll get me to actually be able to bring myself to cut into new fabric…

terrible photos behind cut:

the three shirts in question (yes, very classy)

the only photo so far of it on me, featuring a weird lens reflection of a CFL bulb (that’s the weird green spiral in midair) and my armpit, pre-sleeve-attachment

you see how that needs a whole nother dart. Also you can see how I had to use the back and side of the original shirts, both of them, to eke out enough material for my ginormous hoots.

Yah this dress looks super awkward. If I’m going to actually wear it as-is, I’m going to refine the fit to update the pattern, and then I’m going to spend a ton of time and effort adding pockets and embellishments. I think a bunch of applique wouldn’t go amiss. Is it worth that much effort? Well, is anything worth anything?

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Reinventing the Small Wind Turbine:
zinjanthropusboisei:

Small, local wind turbines provided early electricity for rural farms and homes in the US, prior to rural electrification efforts in the 1930s and 40s that expanded the national grid. One way to bring them back in a more sustainable, efficient (and hopefully socially acceptable) form? Locally crafted, wooden designs: “the company’s mission is to make the countryside – especially farms but also small villages – self-sufficient in terms of power production by designing more beautiful and locally produced wind turbines that people don’t complain about.”

They also discuss integrating small wind and solar, with some beautiful results:

I’m intrigued by wind power, it’s an interesting idea.

In the region I come from, we have a lot of hydro power. And the state has recently started giving out grants hand over fist for solar installations, they want to be Green, they want Alternative Energy… but solar panels require a lot of components that come from mines in conflict areas, they take a lot of power to make, etc.

Hydro isn’t unproblematic, the building of dams devastates fish habitat and the like. But the current problem is that these upstart solar companies are getting all kinds of tax breaks and subsidies, and they’re outcompeting hundred-year-old locally-owned hydro power plants that have been quietly ticking along all this time and who could increase their outputs if only they could afford to, but they’ve been charging reasonably for electricity all this time… and most of them are operating off rivers that were dammed in the 1790s, there’s no new habitat devastation going on and honestly taking the dams down would likely cause more damage than improving them.

(New York State generates more hydropower than any other state east of the Rockies.)

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I keep a gallon Ziploc bag in my freezer. Every time I cook meat at home, the bones go in it. Every time I chop vegetables, the ends go in it. Sometimes the pan drippings from roasted meat go in it, if I didn’t eat those. The leaves of celery. The tops of carrots, and the root tip ends. The ends of onions, and that layer you have to peel off, that’s juicy but still papery sometimes? that goes in there. And the other day I made a braised Swiss chard and chicken dish, and there was the tiniest bit left over of the braising liquid and some extra stem bits, and I threw that in the baggie with the chicken bones.

When the bag’s full enough, I get out the instant pot and throw the contents of the bag into it, and almost enough water to cover, and then pressure cook it for like 10 minutes on high. The meat’s already cooked, I probably don’t even need that much. I used to just boil it in a pot on the stove for an hour and then let it cool enough to put away. (Health Department says you should cool all soups to 40F within some crazy short amount of time, and one of the farm customers explained he uses an ice bath for this when he makes his chicken stock because he is the Perfect HouseHusband, and I don’t blame him one bit, but I also don’t do that and haven’t died yet, so, take it under advisement.)

I freeze it in Ball jars, or plastic Tupperwares– I try to make it be some reasonable amount, two cups or four cups or whatever. Then when I’ve got groceries for a dish that calls for stock (pilaf, risotto, soup, all kinds of stuff) I take one of the appropriately-sized jars out of the fridge and let it defrost for a day or so. (Though last night I realized as I was beginning the recipe that I’d defrosted too small a jar, and the second little jar took seven minutes in the microwave on the defrost setting, so.)

The other thing I did that makes me feel virtuous is that I had a big bunch of celery from the farm, and some carrots and a couple of onions, and here’s the thing about farm celery– I encourage you, if you’ve got a farmer’s market near you, to go and buy celery there, because the kind of celery they grow on a farm is not the same kind as is produced commercially that can sit in your fridge for two months and still be tasteless and go in soups as a matter of formula– the stuff you get fresh is much skinnier stalks and bushier leaves and it tastes totally different and also wilts in a week. So I diced the whole bunch of celery, and mixed it with the carrots and the onions in little diced pieces on a baking sheet that I stuck in the freezer for a couple of hours, and then I poured the frozen little pieces into a couple of Ziploc baggies so I can use it by the cupful instead of the whole bag in one frozen chunk. Mirepoix!

We’ll see how it comes out, but I know frozen farm celery works fine in recipes so I figure the whole shebang will be nice. And then I get to have farm stuff in the winter.

(I’ve done a ton of freezing at the farm but not so much here, so it’s nice to occasionally get a moment to do it for *me*.)

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Growing From Seed (PDF)

I’m on Seed Saver’s Exchange mailing list, and they sent out a link to this free beginner-gardening PDF. I thought some of you might like it, so I’m sharing the link here. It’s a 20-page full-color PDF you can read on your computer, or download and keep on your e-reader or phone, that just goes over the basics of planting a garden and starting plants from seed, explaining all the terms people use and how to read a seed packet.

It’s not very advanced, but it is mostly what you need to know, and it would have been useful to me once upon a time.

And they’re a great organization– they sell seeds for you to plant, sure, but they are a conservation organization, dedicated to conserving and propagating rare open-pollinated varieties, which is more important than ever in this day and age.
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