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.

Grapes in a rental garden

Grapevines are wonderful. They provide good shade in summer, drop their leaves to allow sun in winter, don't need much water or loving care, and best of all: they grow grapes!

But in a rental garden, are they possible?

We started with a cutting in a pot. As it turns out we have been in the same rental house nearly seven years, but while our lovely vine was getting established in his pot, we could have relocated with him if we needed to. In the photo below he's been settling in for about six months.

By Mr Vine's second summer he needed something to grow up, and we helped him with bits of makeshift trellis in the raised garden bed - mostly recycled items heading for bulk waste, like a rusted clothes drying rack. 

 

But what I really wanted was for the vine to provide shade for the front of the house.

Our lounge heats up not just from direct summer sun, but from reflected heat off sunny bricks. So the challenge was to build a trellis so the grapevine could grow over the garden entrance as far as the roof, without putting up any permanent fixtures.

The main support was a branch salvaged when trimming the gum tree. The trellis comprises two lengths of thick wire, each with loops twisted into them, one lying along the gutter and one connecting the gutter to the gum tree support. Loops between the two wires are connected with pieces of clothesline.

Our vine has now spent two summers growing up the trellis and I am thrilled with this addition to our garden, and to our passive cooling measures for the living area. Grapevines need firm pruning but its not an excessive task. Thus far, only pruning a couple of times a year, the vine has been easy to keep away from the tiles and causes no problems along the roof line.

We know the vine has been through the bottom of the pot for years now. If we need to we can dig it out to remove it when we leave (but why would any landlord want it gone?). Hopefully it can be left to bless future residents.

The grapes are delicious, although they come ripe each year exactly when we are away on our summer holiday. Eva spent the weeks before we left this year telling all our friends to come and eat our grapes while we were away and we were delighted that one good friend did just that, so the harvest was not wasted.

Initial Time: well now... Putting a grape cutting in a pot took about five minutes. Building the trellis took me about five minutes (erecting the gum tree support post) and Tyson about an hour (twisting wires). Growing a grapevine has taken five years so far. We got edible grapes from the fourth summer.

Initial Cost: Zero. We were given our cutting by friends.

Ongoing time or cost commitment: Zero cost. We water with recycled bath, shower or washing machine water through summer, top up the soil with home-grown compost and mulch with leaves off other plants around the garden. Pruning takes about half an hour two or three times a year. As its in a well-mulched pot, there are hardly any weeds.

Impact: Our bricks are shaded a little more of the day and reflect less heat in our lounge window and front door. I don't know if the temperature is actually much cooler but I feel cooler to have a green space rather than the glare of a brick driveway when I look out the window. As it takes so long to be cold enough for leaves to fall here, I have actually cut most of the leaves off to let autumn sun through. And we get to eat home-grown grapes! Which is cool, and also saves a bit on  food miles/ pesticides/ packaging/ etc.

This picture was taken last July - not much sign of leaves dropping off despite it being the middle of winter! Last year we had only one week between the last leaf falling and the first spring shoots emerging. Ah Perth. Not really a climate of four seasons. 

Australian native jam

Do you know Lilly Pillys? Those bright pinky-purple berries that grow in many Perth yards, in hedges and public gardens, and on rambly old overgrown properties? I love the way they look and I like their name - its sounds quirky-romantic to me. 

As of last month, I now also love that they are edible, that they are an Australian native, and that they grow in our neighbour's yard between our two driveways.

So we were making jam again.

Eva was so excited by the idea that we could harvest these beautiful berries and make something edible that she was the main motivation for the project.

It was Greg's idea, though, and he put me onto this recipe, which we followed. I checked the internet to be sure I had lilly pillys and found there are over 60 different species of lilly pilly and all of them are edible.

The recipe calls for one lemon and 1kg of sugar per 1L of lilly pilly pulp. We doubled the amount of lemon, and wouldn't have wanted any less.

Next time I think I would go for a 3:4 ratio of sugar to pulp, as the 1:1 ratio has given us jam that is sweeter than it needs to be.

pulp coming through the sieve - it really is that colour

BUT: it is surprisingly delicious, and very beautiful. 

no it didn't boil down that far - I tipped it into a bigger pan so I could supervise it less closely

Six jars of lovely jam - 2L of pulp, about 2.5L of jam once sugar and lemon juice was added.

As I put too much water in when boiling the lilly pillys, I was left with a couple of litres of bright pink liquid once they were all scooped out. 

This I put in the fridge and used as a herbal tea. With half a teaspoon of honey per large mug, heated in the microwave, it was fantastic!

I am so excited that I cooked an Australian plant! OK, I don't think its native to the southwest of WA where I actually live, but at least its not from the northern hemisphere...

This is now our third jam-making session in less than a year (see posts on strawberries and nectarines). We are a big jam-eating house, but even so we are more than keeping up a supply for all our needs and gifts for friends. I am therefore now prepared to commit to NO MORE BUYING COMMERCIAL JAM.

 

Initial Time: About 3.5 hours - although the stove-top sections didn't require constant supervision, so actual labour time was closer to 2.5 hours (1/2 hour harvesting; 1/2 hour washing and preparing; 1/2 hour boiling; 1hr smooshing through a sieve to get seeds out and thin the pulp - this is the really labourious bit; 1/2 hour cooking; 1/2 hour bottling and cleaning up)

Initial Cost: About $2 for a bag of sugar. We remembered this time to get lemons from Grandma, and (with our neighbour's permission) the lilly pillys were free. She found the jar we gave her too sweet for her taste but her grandkids loved it.

Ongoing time or cost commitment: Half a day every three or four months to make whatever the latest seasonal jam will be.

Impact:

Australian household spend on average about $1 per week on jam, with each Australian eating around 2kg of jam per year. We are a net exporter of 'jams, spreads, pastes, etc' - around $12mill worth per year, a small portion of the approximately $625mill annual export of substantially processed fruit and vegetable from Australia, and a blip beside the approximately $1.6bill of processed fruit and vegetables imported. Food and vegetable processing in general employs around 75,000 people in this country. (more stats here - from 2011-12). So not buying jam is not about reducing reliance on food imported from overseas. Very little if any of the jam available in supermarkets is produced in Western Australia, however, so we are reducing our food miles for produce trucked across Australia (I really hope it is trucked. Surely we don't need to fly our jam around? Actually I would love to think it was brought by rail... there is always hope, surely?)

Commercial manufacture of food products involves all manner of inputs and dependencies, such as: transport fuel, transport network, communications, banking services, electricity, gas, water (HEAPS of water is used in commercial processes!), chemicals for cleaning, preservatives to extend product life, packaging materials (including their production and transport)...

Think about it for a jar of jam:

Lid - sourcing raw materials (mining), processing them into a workable form, shaping the metal into a lid, adding labels (inks, dyes, etc and sometimes paper), at each of these stages transporting the stuff to the place where the next stage happens, at each stage a business operation with a footprint of all it takes to run an office (at bare minimum) and possibly a factory or a mine site. Quite likely a mine site that flies workers in and out every day or so.

Jar - sourcing raw materials (mining), turning them into glass (I'm no expert but that needs HEAT!!), shaping into jars. And at each stage another round of transport and business footprints.

Label - sourcing raw materials (forestry), turning them into paper, graphic design work, adding dyes etc to print and finish, glue to attach to jars. Add transport. Add business bits and pieces like the office coffee machine, toilet-flushing for all those staff, and replacing the carpets every few years...

Jam - sourcing raw materials (fruit, but also sugar, preservatives, corn syrup - although to be fair the Cottees and IXL jars I have left over in my pantry from before the jam-making began both have very few ingredients beyond fruit, water, citric acid and pectin), all the inputs required for horticulture including many pesticides, and lots and lots of water; all that is required to fit-out a factory for production.

And each piece has more sub-pieces that have their own chain of impact - Where did the glue come from? Where does the dye come from? What chemicals are used to clean all the equipment needed along the way? What materials are the machines in the factories made from?

By comparison our lilly pilly jam used:  recycled glass jars; about 30L of water to wash berries and jars, gas to run the stove; electricity to run the oven to sterilise the jars; no electricity for light or heating or cooling as we worked during the day on a nice winter's day; petrol to transport lemons from Grandma to us (but we didn't make a special trip); and all the supply-chain stuff above for commercially produced sugar - especially HEAPS of water that it takes to grow sugarcane. Our equipment (stove, our kitchen, the stainless steel saucepans, mixing bowls and spoons, plastic lemon squeezer) all comes from somewhere and has its own footprint.

Impact on my lifestyle: The only thing I may miss is ginger marmalade, unless I can find an acceptable recipe to try, and a cheap-enough source of ginger.

PS: North American friends, we Australians use 'jam' for what you call 'jelly'. 'Jelly' here is what you call 'jello'. Not so great on toast.

Garden resource not garden waste

Recently we pruned our eucalypt to allow a bit more winter sun into the front courtyard. We remain hopeful that vegies will grow this winter. A little less tree also means a little more winter sun through the window onto our loungeroom floor, one of Eva's favourite play areas.

 

We missed the Council's bulk green waste collection by about two weeks. Initially we looked at the pile of pruned tree and saw a waste problem - how could we get rid of it? Options included adding it to our general rubbish bin over several weeks, or borrowing a trailer and paying $40 to take it to the nearest Council green waste receiving depot.

Then we did a re-think: what if this was not a waste problem, but a resource boon? Potentially we had a whole lot of timber suitable, once dry, for stoking up my sister's wood-fired pizza oven. Potentially we had a whole lot of weed-retardant eucalyptus mulch.

We borrowed a garden shredder from a friend and turned our garden waste into two excellent garden resources. I confess my contribution to this project was ideas, and Tyson's contribution was the hours of manual labour to saw and shred the eucalyptus off-cuts.

Initial Time: About 4 hours. However, either cutting it small enough to get into our household rubbish bin or taking it to the Council depot would have also involved an hour or so of work.

Initial Cost: Zero (we did consider hiring a shredder/ mulcher but remembered our friend's one before we checked the price on that)

Ongoing time or cost commitment: zero

Impact: A couple of cubic metres of 'green waste' that has not gone into landfill. Either the Council bulk pick-up or their depot drop-off would, I understand, have also turned our green material into garden products, but we wouldn't have got the benefits of this resource.

At least one or two pizza nights at my sister's catered for on the wood front. A free supply of mulch for a portion of our front courtyard.

Again the more important impact was really on our thinking: shifting us from seeing a pile of rubbish to a potential resource.

Grey Water Wheelie Bin

Recently we purchased a heavy-duty 140L plastic wheelie bin from Weatherworks designed to capture and distribute water from our washing machine. This is a great alternative to a plumbed-in grey water system for those of us in rental properties who can't make permanent changes.

 

The washing machine pipe hooks over the side of the bin, which sits next to the machine while it is operating. We sometimes tie a bit of rag around it to catch the lint, as in the photo below.

 

We then wheel the bin outside to where water is needed. A tap fitting allows for a hose attachment, or we often just bucket it out straight onto the garden. No more lugging buckets all over the place!

I like the hose attachment, but Tyson finds the water flow too slow so goes with buckets most days. We don't have lawn (except for on the verge, where our rear neighbours water HALF of the front verge and our other-side neighbour gives a less-intense sprinkle to 'our' half, resulting in a very obvious divide between lush green lawn and the patchy brown hanging-in-there covering we are satisfied with) but these bins are designed to flow slowly enough to gently 'flood' a lawn area. Some models are also designed to catch roof run-off. More expensive models have an in-built pump so that you can water at pressure as from a garden tap.

The bin is reasonably easy to manoeuvre, although its four single-direction wheels sometimes make turning corners a bit of a heave. However, we have still decided that it is probably an activity best avoided by a pregnant lady, so Tyson is doing all the bin wheeling for now. 

Initial Time: However long it takes you to decide on the what and how of a new purchase. The guy we bought from delivered it to us for free, as we were not too far away. Setting it up by the washing machine takes no time at all.

Initial Cost: $180. We chose to support a local small business, which often has a stall at our farmers' market. We could have bought a cheaper one if we had it shipped from Melbourne or went with a two-wheel single-axle version from Bunnings.

Ongoing time or cost commitment: Watering the garden still takes time. There is just no getting around that unless you go with an irrigation system that does the whole garden just by turning on and off at a tap. But its only about 15 minutes most days, and Eva loves watering with Tyson.

Impact: We are capturing about 60L more water per wash than our previous system of buckets in the wash trough allowed. This photo shows the water level after one washing load, which gives an idea of how much we are catching and recycling.

Tyson has decided that even with this extra water our vegies need more than we can capture through this hottest part of summer if they are going to give us anything more than scruffy leaves, so we also turn on the drip irrigation system from the mains for about 3 minutes each day (it uses about 25L/minute).

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!