Change is Hard!

I really dislike all those articles about “X Easy Things You Can Do to Help/Save/Green the Environment!” Yes, everyone should be recycling, saving water, using less energy, but that’s the baseline. We need to go beyond our comfort zones. Not everyone can run away from consumerism and go live in an Earthship. I know I can’t (though I want to!). 

There’s a really great passage in No Impact Man where Colin describes how hard it is to change your habits, on a personal, national, and global scale: how every moment is a challenge the first few days and weeks. It takes about a month to change a habit. It’s usually a really hard, awkward month, too. But if you can stick with it, then the going gets easier. 

So my challenge, to you and to myself, is to pick a habit or two a month and change it. One of the major challenges is giving up. Even if--when--you backslide, you have to get back on the horse. It’s a brief setback, not a failure.

    My habits to change for this year are:

• Reducing the trash I produce
• Making and using cloth pads
• Buying all used or fair trade clothing
• Fair Trade Electronics
• Natural hair and skin care
• Starting an animal and wildlife rescue fund
• Getting started with passive solar
• Insulating the house

This month, I’m going to make and use cloth pads and reducing my trash. What are your goals? What are you going to pick first?

The Story of a Dollar: Or How Hana Learns to be Smarter with her Money

"A hundred objective measurements didn't sum the worth of a garden; 

only the delight of its users did that. Only the use made it mean something."

Lois McMaster Bujold, A Civil Campaign, 1999

It's an embarrassing tale. Last fall, Walmart had a sale, a buck a bag for compost. I try and avoid Walmart, but the deal sounded so good!  Of course, after I bought five bags and brought them home, I found that the compost was clay with a few roots and moss thrown in. It looked much like the dense, non-draining black clay of my yard, in fact. I managed to find uses for it nonetheless, but I still had a bag left this spring. A bag of  finely ground up rocks.

"Compost" Riiiight...

I was in the Dollar Store (another place I try to avoid, but I go sometimes with G), and I realized that a wire trash bin ($1) would make a great compost sifter.

Easiest DIY compost sifter ever!

 I don't have enough compost to make a hot pile, so my compost takes it's sweet time going from kitchen scraps to dirt. The brown chunks in the wheel barrow (above) are a year old and mostly still recognizable as former food and leaves, but there's some fluffy black gold in there.

Fluffy black gold, also known as mostly finished compost.

Left: a dollar's worth of "compost"    Right: a dollar's worth of homemade compost

 Twenty minutes later, I had an equal amounts of clay and compost (above) and mixed them together (below).

Compost and clay mix

I planted some Viking and Yukon Gold potatoes, watered thoroughly, and mulched it with some pulverized straw (the car is too small to fit the cheaper straw bales, so next time I'm bringing a truck!).

Now comes the hard part: waiting for the dang things to sprout!