frugality & alt currency: March 2009 Archives

Back in February, flush with reading Nourishing Traditions, I joined The Bay Area Meat CSA, a buying coop where local folk coordinate around buying pre-orders parts of pigs, cows, lambs, sheep and so on.

I love this site, love the idea, love the opportunity to buy more direct and at a fair price, but...I have not bought a thing. Why? The little issue of a freezer.

You see, our household is small, two-three at a time, and we're not big animal eaters. So...the benefits of acquiring a chunk of a pig would have to be played out with a place to store it. someplace bigger than our tiny little top freezer of the fridge.

Only, is that really worth it? Would the electricity and expense we'd incur to run the thing (and presumably put fruits and veggies we'd process in, along with meat) be worth it?

Or are we better off buying our occasional doses of pastured meat retail?

Pondering this question has led to doing nothing. Doing nothing is fine for now.

I moved into this house in November, with my sweetie, excited to be in a new community and excited about having a yard. Somehow, as the economy continued to crash--and crash--and I started to read more blogs about sustainability, I become interested in doing more urban homesteading, following a diet closer to Nurturing Traditions and Weston Price's theories, growing vegetables and making more of our food, or trading for it.

At the same time, I became fascinated with permaculture, the study of environmental and agriculture systems. There are some great Yahoo groups around permaculture that I have been reading and I've tried to put some of what I learned into practice.

Here's what my goals are for this spring and summer:

• Recycle/compost food scraps
• Cut down on using bags and plastic of alll types
• WALK MORE, DRIVE LESS (this is a pleasure)
• Establish and maintain an herb garden we can cook with
• Develop a worm bin and keep it going to we can use the compost
• Build a series of container beds w/ fresh potting soil, manure, and gravel/stone(the bottom layer)
• Plant vegetables: sow carrots, radishes; plant tomatoes, squashes, peas and beans
• Keep the lettuce, chard and aragula happy; plant more of it
• Plant vines along the fence: japonica, jasmine
• Establish the lemon tree and keep it alive so it fruits
• Establish a pattern in trading for eggs--offer marmalade(it is coming out great), cake, soup, cornbread, all of which I make really well)
• Get involved  more with fruit foraging and with Forage Oakland-I love what they are doing.
• Start going to the East Bay Permaculture Guild meetings and learning more by doing with others
  
• Have fun with the above, this is a marathon, not a sprint, as we say in start up land.

Meanwhile, there is so much to read, and to learn; I have to remember this is change for the long haul, and it can't all happen at once.

I'm in the very start of my first garden in at least 8 years, and I have alot to learn(relearn). So my plans this season are really about establishing my own garden,  Having said that, I love the idea of cllaborating with neighbors to grow (more) food.  One of the folks on the East Bay permaculture list (a great list!) shared some ideas around motivating neighbors and agreed to let me paraphrase/repost. So. here are some thoughts from Rebecca:

Get a neighborhood group together.  Do a raised bed raising action--make the same sized beds at multiple houses, working as a group, The size Rebecca recommends is
 3x6x1 foot. She saus "This makes it easy to purchase materials (requiring six 2 in x 6 in x 6 ft boards/bed and maybe a 2x4 for stabilization)and nails and screws. Including compost it'll be about $50/bed."

The idea is to collaborate with one another to share space (maybe a disabled person has a great plot they can trade with for the food, etc.)

In addition, R has been going house to house in her area talking about gardening--she says she's gotten 18 neighbors to plant tree collars(to keep trees from blowing over?)

I like these ideas alot; I am asking friends to help plan our garden and to work in it and water in exchange for food and herbs. I hope we have enough of a crop that we can also share with folks on the block and incent them to participate next year.

So I am a soup junkie.
Especially in the cooler weather, soup, like stew, is so comforting. And so affordable.
Over the past three months, I've evolved a routine for making soup a couple of times a month.
First, I buy organic chicken backs, usually at Mangiani's, my favorite butcher (tho out of my way), then onions, parsnips, carrots, greens. The next steps are to make organic chicken soup stock, and then to turn that into all sorts of yummy soups.

Here's how you do it:

Ingredients
2 lbs organic chicken backs
1 lb chicken parts, thighs preferred
1 parsnip
1 large onion
3 carrots
3 cloves garlic
Water to fill kettle (8-10 cups)
Pepper corns
Sea salt

Method:
Wash the chicken and put in kettle.Peel the veggies and put in kettle. Add 8-10 cups water and bring to a low boil. Skim off the scum, reduce heat to medium simmer, cover and cook for 2 hours.  Taste and when flavorful, take off stove and strain. Put the liquid in a container, then put the other ingredients into another container.  24 hours later, skim fat off the chicken stock and throw out or put aside. You're now ready to make soup.

I usually take half the stock and make a soup, and freeze the other half for a later date soup.
For about $5.00, I have super flavored stock and the ingredients both for a great chicken soup and the stock for another soup.

The amount of work people around the Bay area are taking on in terms of helping neighbors create gardens with food to feed themselves and their communities, foraging fruit trees to share and redistribute unused food, offering meals and prepared foods as fund raisers to create operating funds for organizations and so on is amazingly powerful.

Here in Oakland, we have a set of community gardens and food justice/community empowerment programs--City Slickers, People's Grocery, Oakland Roots Garden--among them. There's also the amazing and wonderful Forage Oakland, which is dedicated to locating and redistributing local, unused fruit, and the fascinating and knowledgeable permaculture community, not to mention many people with their own gardens.

There's also lots of equivalent activity going on in San Francisco, which I am less aware of, but equally eager to learn about.  18th and Potrero is a local group in SF that is creating a garden and will grow and share food there; sfglean is redistributing fruit; the free farmstand is a blog--and gardener--driving much of this great activity.

For me,  who works with the bits and bits that ultimate connect people, issues around food, neighborhood and commuity are very compelling, that's why I started this blog.