Sustainable Smoothie (part 3)
2 Smoothie Recipes Well, here are my “secret” smoothie recipes. The first one is what we have been doing until recently. It has some major issues in regards to sustainability. For example the banana and orange are not grown here but transported from far. And then the special ingredients are not grown here either and besides the flax seed, couldn’t be grown here. The second one has also the green super food in it. It is not locally from here, but could be replaced with some green kale, cucumber, spinach, etc. During the winter, which is cold and snowy here, […]
Ecobuilding Retreat
Over a long weekend the Northwest Ecobuilding Guild (NWEBG) held its member retreat, which is also open to non-members. If you have never heard about the NWEBG you are missing out on one the premier green building associations in the Northwest. And, it is not just building, but related areas as well, landscaping, design, manufacturers of green materials and more. According to their website “It is a community of builders, designers, suppliers, homeowners, and partners concerned with ecological building in the Pacific Northwest. The Guild empowers people through education to transform the built environment for long term sustainability.” have to […]
Rain of Plums & Pears
Our plum trees have been pouring plums on us in the last few days. The moment we have finished picking the ones fallen down, the next ones are dropping. The squirrels feast on them and so do we. The trees are a little late this year to offer their bounty. Like all the years before, they have a wonderful flavor. We can’t eat them all, but figured out a great way to use them – as Christmas gifts! We dry them in a dehydrator and store them. When December comes we make little packages for family. They have been so […]
Getting Around
In today’s life for many it is unthinkable to not have transportation available at will at any time. This wasn’t always like that and certainly isn’t like that for the population in many places. Once the automobile was becoming the center of fulfilling our transportation needs, our city and land use plans were designed around the need of the car. Eventually this has contributed a lot to the fragmentation in our lives. We live at a different place where we shop, where we work and where we meet with friends or where we learn. The distances are often so far […]
We have Green Tomatoes
Last night we had the first frost in town. Besides some squash plants the tomato plants were effected. Today it was sunny and nice during the day and I went out to harvest the tomatoes, most of them green. It seems they they have survived the cold temperature. Although they had a somewhat sticky surface made the ones I tried as they were red enough taste different. I have no idea what the stickiness is about. There are a number of things one can do with green tomatoes, one made famous by a movie – Fried Green Tomatoes. Another option […]
Zero Organic Kitchen Waste
In our kitchen we produce a fair amount of organic waste. When we make our smoothies there are peels and seeds. When we prepare for stir fries, there are always some cut offs. Be it the greens of carrots or beets, some wilted or brown leaves from salads. Sometimes we don’t use some veggies or fruits in time and they go a little bit moldy. Then there are tea bags or skins from nuts or the table flowers are passed their time. So, what to do with all this? Is there a way to make this waste into a resource? […]
Sustainable Smoothie (part 2)
Have you been enjoying smoothies recently? We are just past the peak of our fruit harvesting season – pears, plums and apples. In the previous post about smoothies, we posted several questions to consider, if wanting to have a healthy and although otherwise sustainable smoothie, a “green” smoothie. Not because of the color it might have, but in the sense of having considered ecological aspects for its whole life-cycle and its footprint. To which level of detail and level of interconnections to other elements in the chain of processes and events necessary to produce our smoothie one wants to take […]
Produce Bag Solution
Not so long ago I ran across information regarding plastic, specially in the form of grocery bags. The reports were about what types of chemicals plastics contain and what they do to our environment and our heath if ending up in water, how plastic bags go into the landfill and slowly disintegrate into smaller and smaller pieces, finally into particle sized aggregate penetrating groundwater. How much plastic is found in the oceans already, from whole bags to those tiny particles posing and threatening to fish and the whole maritime ecosystems. There was one research project that scooped up water and […]
Thoughts on “Community”
Have you ever asked yourself about how your community, be it family, a circle of friends, or your whole town or neighborhood, your church, etc. are actually forming? What makes a community a community? And than of course why do we want and often deeply crave a community that we are part of? The term “community” for me brings up a number of different associations, like co-op housing, ecovillage, commune and also family – specially when coming together at my grandparents house during my childhood- and also friends and neighborhood. All this in this one word and at the […]
Heating Tidbits
Where we live temperatures get low for winter and part of fall and spring and we can have lots of snow. So heating is needed. We have made sure our house is well insulated and has no leaks. The house is designed in a way to utilize some sun during the cold time of the year and not overheating in summer, but instead staying cool by using passive methods. We have the entry door on the West side, opening into a sort of entry/mud room, which provides another buffer to the outside temperatures. We can control the airflow from the […]
