Now this is someone to look up to: He’s No Impact Man!
Do we all need to go this far? Maybe, maybe not. But even doing one thing to decrease the negative impact we each have on the environment helps.
Of course, it helps a lot if the one thing you choose to do is live without plastic, but something like composting is probably more realistic for most of us!
From Second Nature : a Gardener’s Education by Michael Pollan.
“All the accomplished gardeners I know are surprisingly comfortable with failure…The gardener learns nothing when his carrots thrive, unless that success is won against a background of prior disappointment. Outright success is dumb, disaster frequently eloquent. At least to the gardener who learns how to listen.”
Based on this, I should be giving away tomatoes next year!
Well, after two weeks away, my garden is looking sadder than ever. What hasn’t died of thirst (forgot to ask neighbours to water) has been dug over by the cats. However, we have a harvest of sorts!
Yep. That’s it.
There weren’t many of them, but boy are they sweet…
Did you know that a Jumbo Jet can use over 18,000 litres (4,000 gallons) of fuel just to take off? (from 1000 Fantastic Facts written by Anne McKie and Angela Royston)
How many trees do you think I’m going to have to plant to compensate for that? When I return from two weeks polluting Malaysia with disposable nappies I’ll have to total up the amount of carbon my family have added to the atmosphere and figure out how many cabbage trees I have to add to the local reserve.
As the for the disposables, I don’t know how I can get past the shame of it…my babies have both been in cloth from birth and the thought of my baby using them for two weeks makes my stomach churn. I’ve done my best though. I trotted along to Commonsense Organics on the weekend and forked out $75 for two packs of Moltex, the German made eco-disposable (we’ll just ignore that oxymoron…). I restrained myself from buying some of the nifty Nap-Naps covers that they have in stock there now and I also restrained myself from telling the cashier in a loud voice “I don’t normally use these things you know. I use real nappies!” He probably couldn’t care one way or the other but I felt like he was taking 100 points off my eco-cred. Oh the shame. And it’s actually Real Nappy week this week too! Next time I shop there I’m going to have to buy 20 new real nappies to make up for it.
(BTW if you’re wondering why real nappies are cool, Sharon has written a very helpful post here. And if you want to read more about the downsides to disposables in general, then try this post by Melanie at Bean Sprouts. Sara goes all the way and tells why she chooses cloth in all areas!)
cheers!
If I was more of a “put down my book and get off my bum” kind of person, I’d have a garden like this.
I have no excuse really because I read the same Square Foot Gardening thread that Nikki did.
I planted some cherry tomato plants back at the beginning of December 2006. I thought it was my fault they weren’t ripe yet but it turns out that it’s a bad year for tomatoes in Wellington.
Well, actually, it is my fault. I thought that the north facing garden strip along the side of the house was sunny. Well not sunny enough I’ve learned. You can tell this by also examining the stunted sunflowers.
It’s very sheltered from the southerly wind (good) but also very sheltered from the rain (bad. Especially so when one assumes one doesn’t need to water the garden because it’s been raining so much). And the absence of anything growing there when I first started shoving stuff in? Well, that should have been another clue (if the weeds don’t even want to know about it…).
I also thought I was doing a good thing digging a hole, adding some compost then planting my seedling. I was helping the poor little seedling out right? Um, no. Apparently when you do it like this the roots of the plant keep to the plug of compost until all the nutrients are sucked out and then the plant dies. If you look closely in the photo below you will see that my plants aren’t healthy at all. In fact it’s a race now as to whether the green fruit will ripen before the whole lot drop dead.
I have had one ripe tomato. One perfectly formed, perfectly sized and perfectly delicious tomato. This last attribute was tested by my son last week. We’d been watching it ripen together for days until one day I declared it ready to pick. Faster than I ever thought possible (especially considering his aversion to vegetables when they’re served for dinner) the tomato was snatched off the vine and shoved into his mouth.
“Mmmmm”, he said. “Delicious!”
Sigh. I just hope at least one other tomato makes it. And that I get to it first…
I was out in Porirua on Sunday so I thought I’d check out Trash Palace while I was there to see if I could find some bits and pieces to make some planter boxes with. I didn’t find what I was looking for, but found these instead:
Look familiar? It is the agitator from inside a top-loader washing machine! How nifty is that? I want to buy a couple to plant lemon trees in but my husband was not convinced of their aesthetic merits. Athough I suspect that it was more that he could foresee the heavy lifting for him when we move flats later in the year.
Once I’d got over the “Oh bother” moment when I discovered the other Eco-Worrier, I thought of another name.
But EcoMama had been taken too. Bother. Another useful blog. And, not surprisingly, we have some things in common.
I took a long time to decide on a name for this blog. My first (and favourite) idea was to use Ecoworrier which is the name I use on The Nappy Network forum. When I Googled it though I found this Eco-Worrier! Grrr! If only it wasn’t such a useful blog…
I don’t want to have a sad little garden. I want a permaculture paradise! I want to feast on the organically grown vegetables of my labour! I desperately want to be the kind of person who glides into a dinner party bearing homemade pesto (ground out of home grown basil) and a sourdough flatbread still warm from the oven. I want to plan my meals around what’s ready for harvest that afternoon. But more than that, I want my life-style to be a lot more sustainable than it currently is.
But I’m facing huge obstacles. The biggest of which is that until November 2006 I had never grown any kind of food plant. In fact, I’ve had a bad run with ordinary houseplants. I’m the kind of person who kills spider plants and succulents!
The second obstacle is that I rent a suburban house with a very tiny garden. The landlord would not be happy if he drove by one night and saw I’d replaced the lawn with a square-foot garden.
The third…hmmm. The third obstacle is that I’m much better at thinking about things that actually doing them. I tend to waste time reading about the end of western civilisation rather than doing anything practical, either to prepare for it or try to prevent it.
So, over the next year I’m going to transform my sad little garden into a happy little garden using this blog to help me figure it out as I go.
