First Potatoe Harvest of the Year?
Yesterday, I harvested about 25 pounds of potatoes! Spring equinox has just arrived, the weather here is grey, rainy and mostly cold. There is still some snow on the ground and the top layer of the ground is still frozen in many places. So how, you might wonder, am I harvesting the first potatoes in 2012? I’ll tell you in a minute, but first let me share the general idea. In climates like here, one has maybe about 90 days of good growing season, June, July and August. Sometimes the weather is warm and soil temperatures high enough in May […]
Free Notes Paper
I have figured out how to reduce the use of white paper and even how to have plenty of note taking paper, some of it free. Here are some of my thoughts about it, what I am doing and how to get the free notes paper: Even though we are using computers for more and more things in our day to day lives, at work and for entertainment, to store information, paying our bills, conducting business, staying in touch and many, many more things, one of the promises of this technology was to reduce the amount of paper we will […]
Short Green Study on Candle Jars
Here we are, after Christmas, after New Years, after many other holidays one might have been celebrating. I hope you enjoyed it all! I did. Nevertheless, I have been looking for a solution to one particular recycle problem. We use candles. For some of our workshops, my wife has found candles she likes most, for various reasons: The don’t smell and are unscented, they develop hardly any smoke, almost all the wax is burnt and they burn for 100 hours. Moreover they are made from palm wax, which is, potentially, a renewable resource. Of course, to be a sustainable or […]
What to do with Newspaper Bag?
For the longest time we did not know what to do with the plastic bag the daily paper is put in that is delivered to our house door. The recycle situation of both these items in our county is such, that they would end up in the landfill. So after a number of ideas, including to maybe not order the paper anymore, we came up with two different solutions. 1. We take one of the bags and put it a convenient spot in a cupboard, which itself holds the other bags. When we pick up the paper, the plastic bag […]
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 […]
