Gumboot pots and Paper chains

Want to make your house pretty without consuming more, find creative activities for children that don't involve buying more, and/or re-use some of the stuff around your house that is no longer wanted? Here are two ideas that do all three.

Gumboots! There are so many cool kids' ones around but, no matter how funky, they still wear out or (if you're lucky) kids grow out of them. What to do with all that rubber-plastic prettiness?

A few spring flower punnets and an hour of working together and we have had these decorating our entrance for the last two months.

Although we did buy potting mix, more than half the soil was made up of our own compost. (We have three compost tumblers and our guinea pigs contribute substantially to this enterprise!)

Five of these six gumboots drained sufficiently without any help; the sixth needed a couple of holes added. Summer has nearly killed them off now and direct sun has faded the gumboots significantly, but we may get second season out of them and meanwhile, it has been a lot more fun than just binning them.

Your children might not rip through gumboots at quite the rate we do, but if you have anyone small in your house you are certain to have a pile of kids' artwork mounting up. And old posters. Calendars. Wrapping paper. (Most people I suppose have junk mail or magazines, but we don't receive them here)

Eva got inspired to make paper chains for Christmas and it was a great use for the build-up of paper.

Because they were using their own old artworks and posters they were willing to 'repurpose' things that I had not been allowed to throw away (sneaky, huh?!).

Note the hole-punching above. If you have someone who loves hole-punching, its not a bad way to add interest to strips from old calendars while keeping those hole-punching-hands from less productive outcomes.

They both loved making the chains and I am happy to have our living room decorated by their creativity and enthusiasm.

Initial Time: Both of these activities took about an hour. That was part of the point. We have no TV and its school holidays again. Creative, engaging, sustainable activities are what we need plenty of here. (I last wrote specifically about this when Eva was quite small but if you search the labels below for 'free kids activities' there are also other places it has come up as she has got bigger)

Initial Cost: Gumboot pots: about $30 for seedlings and a bag of potting mix; Paper chains: a couple of dollars for a big box of staples.

Ongoing time or cost commitment: We will eventually have to take both these things down and they will ultimately end up in the recycling (chains) or the general rubbish (boots).

Impact: It is impossible to really calculate an impact for these activities and, to be honest, it would probably be quite small anyway. But both are little bits of a bigger picture: finding ways to reuse everything until it really is beyond use, rather than chucking it out after its first purpose; avoiding buying stuff to meet a need (and considering whether it is in fact a need at all); helping children to be creative; celebrating colour and beauty and natural things; finding the quality in our own creative effort rather than needing a professional or 'perfect' outcome (often with associated waste) in order to be happy; sharing activities together and working collaboratively on a combined project.

All I want for Christmas is to change the world

This month's action is to write this blog post, to ask YOU to do something.

Would you consider taking a Small Step for Sustainability this Christmas, as your gift to me, or to someone you love more than me? Perhaps especially as a gift to someone younger than yourself, who will be living longer with the world you are creating.

Or, would you consider asking your friends to take a Small Step as their gift to you, instead of buying you something? You could direct them here for ideas.

Following are over six years of our Small Steps sorted as suggestions for you to try 'gifting':

Reduce your energy usage

Get your electrical equipment off standby; wash in cold water; use more efficient lighting (note that this is an old post and there are many more options now - see comments); boil less water; turn down your hot water heater; insulate your hot water piping.

Make changes to cool your house (and yourself) passively (turn your aircon down - or even off!)

Shade your house (1 2 3 4), put up a heat barrier (curtain), use pelmets, cool with extractor fans and various other tricks.

Make changes to heat passively

Warm yourself before you heat the room; seal up drafts; various other tips. (Particularly for those of you heading for Christmas in the northern hemisphere! You have probably noticed that cooling is a bigger issue than heating for us in Perth)

Make sustainable choices in your celebrations

Christmas (1 2 3 4); Birthdays (1 2 3); catering in general (1 2); going on holiday

 

Make sustainable choices about your food

Buy from a producer (try a farmers' market); use & preserve bulk seasonal fruit and veg: strawberries 1 2, plums 1 2,  nectarines, lilly pillies, tomatoes (bottling and making purchase choices); commit to buying local for a particular item (we chose cheese - 1 2)

Support local businesses

For school supplies and fundraising (toys & books); also ideas around food, above.

Improve water use

Consider a more efficient washing machine (or at least use the one you have as efficiently as possible);  rethink how you use water; use less water in toilets (1 2); short showers instead of deep baths; catch tap water; reuse grey water (with buckets, or with a wheelie bin 1 2)

Reduce your TV use (here)

 

Make ethical consumption choices

Fundraiser chocolates; clothes; printing; use the Shop Ethical Guide; washing powder; use libraries and buy secondhand; also all the ideas already mentioned around food and local businesses.

Be more sustainable in your garden

Grow grapevines; compost; and then compost better; drip irrigate; utilise your garden waste; use grey water (see the water section above) 

Reduce your waste

Get rid of phone books; pack rubbish-free lunches; fix instead of chuck and replace; use cloth nappies and cloth nappy wipes; use bread bags instead of nappy sacks; try no-buy no-waste toddler activities;  return unwanted packaging; rescue items from bulk waste; consider rubbish when you are buying.

Reuse materials to make new things

Verge collection beds reformed into a loft bed; room redecoration using existing materials; uses for pieces from an old washing machine
 

Make choices about your transport

Get to school without a car; car pool; consider a more efficient car; buy a bike (and/or commit to using it); rig up your bike to carry stuff; climb stairs instead of taking the lift.

 

Advocate for sustainability

Have a conversation in your household; write a blog (or share or comment on this one) - or whatever way best suits you to let others know about sustainable choices your are making; join a public demonstration or lobby people in power.

Assorted other posts

Short-form list of lots of actions from before I began blogging - lots of these are the simpler actions, so possibly a good starting place if this is all new to you;  combined blog of six months of ideas; update on how we did with our first year of commitments; Introduction to the blog, the 'one thing a month' project, and us in general.

If you just arrived here this list might look a bit overwhelming, as if we are some sort of sustainability gurus living the life. We are not. I've been writing this blog for just on six years, and we've been plodding away at improving our sustainability for some time longer than that. It all began because I was finding myself overwhelmed both by the enormity of the world's problems and by Tyson's enthusiasm for conquering them, so we decided we would take on just one thing a month. That was a slow enough pace that I thought I could manage it. Small steps. 

There are now a lot of actions documented here and I am hopeful the blog can be a resource for others wanting to take small steps.

 

Initial Time: For me, the couple of hours it took to write this post. For you: if you would like something that doesn't need a lot of your time, scroll all the way to the bottom and choose the label 'under 15 minutes'.

Initial Cost: For me, zero. For you: if you would like to choose something that doesn't cost you much money, choose the label 'under $15' for ideas.

Ongoing time or cost commitment: For me, the time it takes to answer any questions that you might throw at me as you take your Small Steps. For you: depends which Small Step you choose!

Impact: I will never know how many people read this and take a Small Step. Ideally I am hoping for a double impact: less Christmas gifts purchased AND a whole pile of individual little actions all over the world adding up to a better world. It would warm my heart to hear back from you if you do something in response to reading this. Perhaps you could even send me a photo of your Small Step (I may manage a follow-up post to report back on the impact of this Christmas action)

 

And a big smoochy thank you to everyone who reads this blog regularly. I really appreciate you giving it your time. Have a lovely Christmas season.

Get ready for Christmas - give something away

I have decided it is time to initiate a new family custom around times of receiving gifts - birthdays and Christmas: give something away in preparation.

 

Tyson and I had a go at giving away some of our books. We are book-lovers and book-hoarders, so this was quite a challenge! They are destined for charity - most likely Save the Children. (Their annual book sale at UWA raises upward of $250,000 for their work, and they now have a permanent second-hand book shop at Belmont Forum, which is near to us)

I packaged up a box of baby clothes for a friend who is expecting a third child... having given away all their baby things after the second child got beyond baby.

And I asked Eva and Edan to give away one toy each. (OK, I did this on Edan's behalf, as he is too little to understand). We have one-year-old and four-year-old birthday parties to attend this week, so rather than buy gifts our children have selected something of their own. In good condition, of course, and it had to be something they had enjoyed and played with, not a 'reject'.

Not for giveaway! But he does love climbing into boxes... and everything else...

I am hoping that this can become a family practice - the new normal - and that both we and our children might learn to let go of stuff and live with less. And to appreciate the new things all the more.

We are also preparing with this lovely Advent calendar from my sister in PNG

Initial Time: About an hour going through the bookshelves and baby clothes

 Initial Cost: Zero

Ongoing time or cost commitment: Five times a year we do it again - four birthdays and Christmas. I anticipate the time commitment will vary depending on what sort of stuff we turn our eyes to. At birthdays only the birthday person will be looking for something to give away.

Impact: None of the items leaving the house this way would have gone to landfill. Never. Not on my watch. But I understand that in other homes baby clothes, books and outgrown toys DO join the mountains of landfill our culture produces.

I am aiming for more intangible impacts of generosity, lightness of ownership, reducing my propensity to hoard, and gratitude for what we keep.

For other Christmas ideas, see my two posts from last year.

Post Script update: I thought we were pretty bold getting the kids to give away one thing each - until I had a cuppa with my friend who had got her kids to give away one toy each... EACH DAY through December, as their lead-up to Christmas. Her kids are five and nearly eight and they managed it just fine. 

Christmas: small practical steps

We have taken quite a few small steps towards a more sustainable Christmas.

Many many online sites tell me that Australians use 4000 tonnes ('25,000 trees') of wrapping paper each Christmas, although I have not been able to find the actual source of this figure, so the historian in me is tentative about it. This year I have wrapped presents either in fabric pieces and ribbons from my sewing box or decorated brown paper wrap that Eva, along with other children from our church, was involved in preparing. The kids sold it to raise money for TEAR.

I am inspired by the Buy Nothing Christmas movement, but don't want to be quite that disciplined. Our gift giving is small scale: one present each in our household and one for each of Eva's cousins we will actually see (three, this year), and then only if we think of something the recipient will really want. Better to buy something next May that they really want than give them something now just to fill a place under the tree. And no present for the baby: he doesn't need anything, and he doesn't care. Our gifts have little or no packaging (most are books). I didn't blog about gifts back at Eva's birthday, but for that round we purchased Duplo second-hand from Ebay and, among many thoughtful gifts, were particularly thrilled with the play stove made entirely of recycled materials Eva received from her aunt and uncle.

I also liked the sustainable gift ideas posted recently by Tricia at Little Eco Footprints and was inspired to make playdough for a recent three-year-old birthday party Eva attended.

Card by Eva; ribbons cut from some garments that don't need shoulder loops

Because it us super easy and quick, here is my mum's playdough recipe:

1 cup plain flour
1/2 cup salt
1 cup water
1 tablespoon oil
2 tablespoons cream of tartar (the magic that stops it going sticky)
food colouring
disinfectant (we use tea tree oil, a hearty dollop)

Mix all ingredients together in a saucepan. Stir over heat for about 3 minutes, until it starts to stick. Knead out, with more flour or oil if necessary. Store when cool in an airtight container. Lasts for months and months. Extra oil can restore it if it dries out.

Our Christmas tree is a live potted Australian native - Adenanthos sericeus (Albany Woolly Bush) - a gift from Grandma and Grandad (thank you!). We hope to keep it alive for years to come, although we are not extremely successful gardeners. We also have several large woolly bushes in our garden and have in past years made a tree out of prunings from these.

Live trees are not without sustainability issues, but they score better on production, transport and waste concerns.

Our decorations are the same each year. This is how I grew up and it was only in recent years that I discovered people actually buy new decorations each year. I remain baffled at this trend.

Eva and her grandparents also shared making some of our decorations together. Hopefully this is one more activity that will help her understand her own resourcefulness and that she doesn't need to go to a shop and buy something for every occasion.

We are not buying or sending Christmas cards. In fact we rarely buy cards all year, and certainly not if we will be saying nothing personal inside them. I struggle to understand the practice of buying cards with a standardised preprinted greeting and then only inscribing a name above and below the preprint. When a card is warranted Eva makes it for me and I try to make sure the words inside say something about why the recipient is of value to me.

We also don't tend to receive many Christmas cards, so it seems we have something of a 'don't send me a card' vibe about us. Either that or our friends don't really like us ;-)

It probably goes without saying that we are not running Christmas lights all over the outside of our house!

Estimates say we will throw away around 35% of the roughly $10 billion of Christmas food purchased this year. We are bringing the meat for Tyson's family Christmas lunch and have ordered it from  our local corner butcher, which stocks free range and local meats, and fits with my ethos of supporting small local businesses where possible. We have attempted to order an amount we will actually eat, to minimise waste, and will be keeping and re-using any leftovers. The local butcher is more expensive than a supermarket and I am OK with that. 

Its forecast to be 40 degrees (C - thats 104F) here on Christmas day. We won't be at home much on the day and intend  to close the house up early with nothing running. From the hum in the air on hot days it seems many around us choose to leave an aircon going while they are out. If you are celebrating somewhere hot by all means run air cooling where you are gathered (we will be!) but let one aircon serve several gathered families - don't cool homes unless you are actually in them.

And as I wrote yesterday, I'm also trying to change the way we talk about our seasonal celebrations.

Just in case you are left thinking that we are miserable scrooges about Christmas, here are a few pics from our annual Christmas Baking Day, held last weekend, when we revelled in luscious, delicious, gourmet goodies and an abundance of good time shared together, before giving most of the produce away.

two thirds of this year's produce - four more bowls to come

May your celebrations be joyful, your footprint light, and your vision into 2013 hopeful.


Links:

Instructions for gift wrapping with fabric

Sustainable Christmas ideas with a few more statistics on what we use and waste in Australia at Christmas: http://www.veolia.com.au/news-media/blog/another-christmas-gone-to-waste  

Planet Ark '12 dos of Christmas' and Festive Season Green Guide - the latter is probably the best and most comprehensive link if you only have time for one.

Someone else's blog post of green Christmas ideas

Christmas: changing the questions

I struggle with Christmas. For me there are two completely separate festivals, both called 'Christmas' and celebrated on 25 December. 

One is a religious celebration of God sharing God's love by coming into humanity as one of us. This phenomenal miracle is profoundly significant to me and is, in my opinion, appropriately celebrated with prayer, reflection, community gatherings of praise and wonder, story, song and attention to the poor - those for whom God consistently shows the highest regard.

The other festival is a secular celebration of family, friendship and community (although many without family to share with feel the friendship and community aspects are not really celebrated by the majority, and as a result if is often a time of isolation and exclusion). It is celebrated with gift giving, eating and sharing time with loved ones. It's not necessarily a bad thing, but it is a festival I don't feel very connected with. However, as it is a major festival of my culture and my families, I participate. I attempt to do so with good grace. I have a three-year old: I do not want to teach her to say bah humbug just yet.

The place of conspicuous consumption in the celebration of Christmas is disturbing to me for many reasons, not least because it appears contrary to the essence of the religious festival that it runs alongside, and is in my mind evidence of a deep spiritual malaise inherent in western culture. However, in the context of this blog my concerns are around its impact on our earth.

There are lots of practical ways to reduce your Christmas footprint, and I intend to write a separate post about some of the things we are doing here. The thing I am particularly committing to this year, though, is changing the questions I ask children (and others) about their Christmas celebrations.

The questions we ask teach others what we value. The most common Christmas question is What did you get for Christmas? I think this teaches children that we value hoarding stuff, even if in other ways we try to teach them other attitudes. This year I will be trying to not ask this question at all. Instead I will be asking:

Who did you spend time with this Christmas? What did you do together?

What was your favourite present you gave to someone this year?

What stories did you hear told at Christmas?

What did you notice that was beautiful?

And when the inevitable discussion of loot gathered arises: Who gave you [item under discussion]? What is your favourite thing about that person?

This takes no time and costs nothing. I am hopeful its impact is as one of the many feather strokes that form the character of my and others' children.

Christmas Baking Day

Christmas Baking Day is an annual baking extravaganza held at our house. This year we had about 22 people, other years it has got up closer to 30. Kids and adult come together. It includes a wide range of friends and family, many of whom don't know each other as we have so many circles of contact from which to invite people. I provide all the ingredients, and I make people work really hard all day baking gourmet biscuits and confectionery. There is a lot of chocolate involved and, I discovered this year, a lot of nuts (amazing what a friend with a nut allergy will bring to light!).

 

Is this a sustainable act? We use the oven for up to 6 hours straight and make the poor fridge work harder than it does any other day of the year. However, our energy bill for the period didn't have a spike, so this musn't be too much of a strain on our overall usage total. We end up with quite a lot of packaging rubbish, but we re-use washed and saved take-away containers (saved all year) to package up the resulting goodies. Many of the ingredients I cannot guarantee are fair trade. The chocolate in particular (this year close to 5kg worth) is not fair trade sourced - mostly because I have not found a fair trade source for decent cooking chocolate that melts and resets appropriately. 

The reason I have included Christmas Baking Day as part of this blog is that I believe it does contribute towards sustainability in a number of perhaps more subtle ways than changing light bulbs or taking shorter showers.

Firstly there is the basic good of many people coming together to share work, food and conversation. I see Christmas Baking Day as a living experience of what might happen if we let down our barriers a bit and got involved in each others' lives - stuff I consider essential for living sustainably together on our planet. 

The Day also contributes to sustainable thinking about Christmas, as it provides nearly all of what we give as gifts, and models to others a way to make gifts with our own hands, rather than buying manufactured items. We don't wrap the biscuits we give out, and many of those who bake bring their own container to take their share home in. 

Over many years I have also overheard some quite remarkable conversations taking place around the baking tables, including friends opening up concepts of justice, equality and the mess we have our world in with others who have had less experience of these issues. It seems such conversations are easier to have while working alongside one another elbow-deep in chocolate - perhaps less threatening? Perhaps less needs to be defended? 

And then there is the value of sharing an experience of abundance and generosity. Not just that we are being generous in offering to our friends the space and the ingredients, and most of the produce, but the generosity of our friends in giving us their time and friendship and hard work and joy, all of which are essential to the day. Generosity I think is also essential for sustainable living.

Finally I think it is important to demonstrate that living sustainably doesn't mean being misers and doesn't mean having no fun. I suspect some of our friends or family sometimes think our life choices and attempts to live sustainable must make our life awfully drab, tight and limited. Grey. Christmas Baking Day is the antithesis of grey, and I delight in sharing that with my friends, especially those who think our lifestyle is perhaps just a little odd.

Initial Time: About 4-5 days. We rearrange our entire living space to fit in 20+ bakers. Sorting out an ingredients list and doing the shopping is another day. The actual day is a marathon beginning about 8am and often not finishing until we collapse into bed about 10pm. Delivering goodies afterwards takes varying amounts of time depending on how far away people live this year. Lets just say that cleaning up a living space after it has hosted 20+ bakers, including children, is no quick nick around with a broom either!

Initial Cost: Around $300.

Ongoing time or cost commitment: zero (until next year...)

Impact: I guess that's what I've been trying to tease out above. Also I think I put on a couple of kilos each year in the week following...

Now its December...

So as you can see, I have not been the least bit successful at keeping up with this blog. I have to confess that as we headed into the second year of our sustainability commitment we also began slipping away from doing something every month. Having said that, though, we are still averaging one thing a month and not naming it as part of the original commitment.

Things we have done this year since May:

Garden make-over. This involved help from about ten friends, bless them, especially the guys who forked a whole trailer load of woodchips in and then out of the trailer, and around the garden. The garden make-over was to reduce the water needed for the garden (and also to reduce the number of spidery corners as our little girl began to get mobile) and also, we hoped, to improve our vegetable returns. We installed a raised garden bed and Tyson reworked the gravity-feed irrigation system to service it. Most of the front courtyard was woodchipped to get rid of grass areas, and the remaining woodchips were used to mulch every pot and garden bed around the house. Initial time: one full working day with an average of five workers at a time, plus another day with two of us finishing things off. Initial cost: about $300 for sheets of corrugated iron and a few sturdy posts (all from the salvage yard), two trailers of good quality soil, and a donation for the woodchips that we collected from the front lawn of a church that needed to get rid of a large fallen tree. Ongoing cost: various bits and pieces, but no more or less that for any other garden - well, perhaps less, as vegetable seeds cost less than, say, pots of orchids, and the most successful vegies have been the ones grown from seed either harvested at the end of season or accidentally sown through the compost. Ongoing time: Less than for most gardens, as the woodchips stop most weeds and there is no longer grass to mow. Impact: Sorry, I just can't calculate that one. But I know that the new garden makes me happy, and I spent much of winter just enjoying looking at it out our windows.

Rugs and Carpets. Our living space is tiled, which in winter means it can get quite cold, but in summer it is lovely. This year we acquired two more floor-covering pieces for winter, making five rugs on the floor in winter. One was a second-hand piece from a nearby carpet store, which Tyson trimmed and turned around to fit under our dining table and chairs. The other was from his parents as they were replacing a large rug at their house. For summer we have lifted three of the pieces, leaving soft coverings only at the areas where Eva's toys are kept, so that she has some softer play space. Initial cost: zero (except maybe the $5 for a roll of duct tape for reshaping carpet pieces into the floor piece we needed. We didn't use the whole roll, of course) Initial time: about 15 minutes going through carpet off-cuts to find a decent piece; about 30 minutes for Tyson to work the carpet into a good shape. The rug given to us was no time at all! Ongoing time and cost commitment: about 5 minutes at the change of seasons to pull up and store or lay down again the rugs. Storing a couple of large rolled carpets through summer is also a bit of a space-taker. Impact: Its hard to prove whether we turned the heater on less in winter once the carpets were down, but I suspect we did, as my feet didn't feel cold when working on the laptop at the dining table. As for summer... Eva sometimes lies down on the nice cool tiles when it is hot but so far I have not got hot enough to shake off my social conditioning that says adults probably shouldn't be found lying on their kitchen floor.

Bamboo blinds for the back window.  We were given a couple of bamboo blinds so Tyson rigged one up on the back toilet window. This room gets the afternoon sun and absolutely bakes in summer. The blind fits perfectly and makes an amazing difference! Initial cost: zero, as the blind was a throw-away. Initial time: about 15 minutes to attach the blind - hooked into the small screen/vent at the top of the window with hooks Tyson made for the job. Ongoing time and cost: zero. Perhaps in winter we will decide to take 5 minutes and roll the blind up again at the start of the season. Impact: We never heated or cooled the toilet, but it was a very hot buffer between outside and inside temperatures. As it is now substantially cooler, the inside temperature is not pressured nearly as much from this side. Its also much MUCH nicer in there on a hot day - which, although it is not the toilet we mostly use ourselves, is a huge improvement as it is the room where nappies get dealt with.

Making Eva's Christmas present out of items salvaged from hard rubbish. The items: two dolls' houses. Tyson is in the process of renovating them, pulling bits off one to make the other perfect. So far everything he has done has used recycled materials from around our home, except for the rewiring of the lights. Initial cost: I think Tyson spent about $30 on wiring and little LED lights. He tells me he is working on a plan to put a solar panel on the roof and run the house lights that way. I'm not sure how serious he is. Initial time: Lets just say this is a labour of love for Tyson and he has spent many happy hours in the shed pottering about creating the perfect recycled dolls house. Ongoing time/ cost: hopefully zero, but probably a few repairs along the way. Impact: most of two dolls houses saved from landfill; numerous bits and pieces of household 'waste' saved from landfill (did you know a plastic honey sachet makes a great sink?); all of us saved from buying more stuff for Christmas for this one time, a tiny ripple against the great tsunami of Christmas consumption.

Shed vent. The shed is a tiny tiny place, from which Tyson has to unpack several items in order to have space for himself to get inside if he wants to use it as a work space. It is also extremely hot and humid, as it was built with no windows, vents, or openings other than the door. Tyson bought a vent and installed it so that hot air could escape into the roof space above the ceiling and thus through the tiles. I don't go into the shed except to reach in and get a broom or snail bait, but even those brief forays were unpleasant pre-vent. Tyson says the vent has totally transformed the place into a viable workspace. (For the record, no we didn't ask permission from the landlord. I'm sure he would have said yes - eventually. Everything takes forever on that front. We figure we've made an improvement, at our cost, so if he even notices the vent he surely can't complain). Initial cost: bout $15 for the vent. Initial time: I'm starting to forget details, but I think cutting a piece of ceiling out and fitting the vent into the space took about half an hour. Tyson is pretty handy. It would probably have taken me at least twice that long. Ongoing time/ cost: zero. Impact: we didn't heat or cool the shed, partly because there is no power point in there (you gotta love investment builders ... don't put anything in past the bare minimum specs if you won't be living there yourself!) but Tyson doesn't come inside wilting and need cooling down like he used to. Also I think it counts as a sustainable action to improve quality of living without increasing energy usage or global impact.

Better compost system. We decided to put some of the money left to us after Tyson's beloved grandmother died towards buying a decent (read: completely sealable) compost system. It works. It also seems to breed tomatoes, capsicums and pumpkins effortlessly. Initial cost: $200. Initial time: about an hour to assemble the tumbler, transfer the existing compost pile into it, and get the new tumbler settled into its garden home. Ongoing cost/ time: five minutes a day to put the scraps from the kitchen into the tumbler and give it a spin. Impact: great soil! and self-sown vegies. I don't think we will need to buy potting mix for a while. Also of course we are saving all that organic matter going into landfill.

Tarpaulin shading the northwest wall. In summer this wall soaks up heat in the afternoon, and transfers it pretty quickly through into the living area. Our clothesline is there, and last summer I had tried making sure there was washing on the line on hot days to provide some shading, but this was not really enough. This week Tyson has rigged up a tarpaulin to cover about half of the courtyard on that side of the house, shading much of the wall - and also a decent chunk of the shed. It is hooked into the gutters with metal hooks, and tensioned with shock cord (left over from earlier exercises in shading windows). So far we think it is helping reduce house temperatures. We haven't had a real heat wave to trial it on yet. Much of the clothesline is shaded now, but only the nappies really need direct sun and they can either go on the sunny bit or go on a free-standing drying rack out in the hot bit of the courtyard. Initial cost: zero (the tarpaulin was given to us by a neighbour who was getting rid of it; the shock cord was left-overs) Initial time: about half an hour. Ongoing time/ cost: this one will need to be taken down in heavy weather, as it blows around a bit. Its also quite noisy, so Tyson is thinking of ways to soften the scratchy noise of the hooks in the gutters. Even if it doesn't come down in heavy weather, it will need to come down at the end of summer.Impact: Reduced need for airconditioning in summer. Possibly also longer life for clothes that don't appreciate drying in direct Perth summer sun!

 
Front blinds. It took us ages but we finally found a spot suitable for the second of our donated bamboo blinds - a larger one. I was hesitant to allow Tyson to put the blind on the front living area window, as I love sitting in the lounge looking out at our front garden - especially since it got remade at the start of winter. However, we tested it out and to my amazement you can see right through bamboo blinds, much like a fly screen but not so grey! I'm sure everyone else in the world already knew this, but it was news to me. The blind is hooked into the gutter - no permanent fixtures. It can be retracted with a draw-cord, but so far we haven't bothered. Initial cost: zero (blinds were a cast-off gift). Initial time: about 15 minutes to put the blind up. Ongoing time/ cost: need for removal at start and end of season, and probably during heavy weather as they are loosely attached to the guttering. Its the lee side of the building, though, so not too punished by weather. Impact: I can have the inside venetian blinds open in summer without heating up the house dramatically - which is extremely good for my mental state when I am home all day with Eva on a hot day. I know shutting the blinds is good sustainability sense, but I get tetchy living in a cave. Somehow the sun still sneaks in the side of the blind until about 9am (later when its not the middle of summer), so the venetians are still shut then. Overall it seems this is making the room much cooler, hence less airconditioning. And the not-cave effect makes me happier about living in a shaded house.

Tyson's work. In October Tyson passed his 100th home sustainability assessment. That's something like 200 hours spent one-on-one educating people in their own homes about ways to reduce their impact. If everyone he visited reduced their energy bills by one unit per day (not an unreasonably estimate as an average) he would have taken about 21.5 tonnes of carbon out of the air (as of today). We heard yesterday of a family of four who he visited about six months ago who have since installed solar panels and made lifestyle changes so that their last energy bill was $1.05!