It's Easy Being Green

Over the last few years we’ve become increasingly better at storing and saving produce we grew at home and even stuff we bought while it was in season.  Surprisingly we ended up with about a dozen lemon cucumber plants this year that in a flurry of growth, took over much of the backyard.  We’ve had lemon cucumber vines trailing across the back fence, climbing a prickly pyracantha bush as it reached toward the sky and meandering throughout three different flowerbeds.

We never anticipated we’d have this many lemon cucumber plants.  Last year’s lone vine didn’t fair too well, setting a couple small cucumbers before withering to unrecognizable remnants.  With only a scant amount of seeds left in our seed box, I ended up planting them in seed trays but forgot what they were.  We’ve had a lot of unknown plants this year and another round of John Does didn’t concern us at all.  My wife set them about knowing we’d soon figure out what they were.

Two months later we’ve picked several baskets of delightful lemon cucumber.  My Homestead Hottie wife has loved the lemon cucumber ever since we were first introduced to them at the Farmer’s Market in our old hometown of Flagstaff, Arizona.  We slice them and eat them raw or mix them in with salad when we need a nourishing cool-down from Summer’s oppressive heat.  But with the amount we’ve harvested, there was simply no way we’d be able to eat them all before they went bad.

I wasn’t convinced they were able to be pickled but Homestead Hottie quickly found a canning recipe online that proved they were in fact a candidate for pickling.  Jill over at Jillicious Discoveries has a great recipe that we put to use this last week.  Our four quart jars of lemon cucumber pickles are now resting quietly beside their cousins, four jars of freshly preserved tomatoes, on the shelves in the garage.  I can’t wait to try them out.  Winnie Abramson over at the Healthy Green Kitchen also has a recipe for lacto-fermented lemon cucumber pickles that I’d be interested in trying as well.

Do you have a favorite recipe for lemon cucumbers or a favorite pickling recipe to use them in?  Let me know, I’d love to try more!

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Being the nomadic little family we are, last year’s vegetable garden and all others prior to that, have been one year affairs with little planning.  We literally moved to a new rental house at least once a year if not twice depending on the circumstances.

Before moving to the Midwest, we enjoyed high-elevation mountain living in Flagstaff, Arizona.  At 7500 feet, Flagstaff has a growing season that lasts barely 90 days.  If you blink, you might miss it!  Transplants couldn’t hit the soil until late May (snow that month wasn’t out of the question) and you had to hope you’d have something to harvest by late August before the first frost set in.  It was an incredible challenge and consequently we chose to always keep the veggie garden on the small side.  It ranged from just a few potted vegetables at our townhouse with a 10×10 foot patio to a 4×8 foot raised garden bed at our biggest rental house.

Here in southwest Indiana we’re strangely in the same USDA climate zone as our old home in Flagstaff but our growing season is double what we’re used to.  It feels like you can grow half the year and that is awesome!  Because we were renting the house we just bought, we kept the vegetable garden small and spontaneous.  I planted a strip about 4 feet deep and 20 feet long against our northern fence.  It was originally lawn space so I crudely turned the heavy clay soil with a pitchfork, tried to get rid of as much grass as I could and plopped in some transplants from the local farm market.

Now that the house is officially ours and we plan to stick around for awhile, I decided to actually plan this year’s garden space as most experts recommend.  Our 80 square foot planting space last year included about 6 tomatoes, 2 zucchinis, 2 lemon cucumbers, 6 regular cucumbers, 6 collard greens, 2 eggplants and about a dozen stalks of sweet corn (which didn’t do very well because there were so few of them).  We packed a lot in to that tiny space and we didn’t have to buy produce the entire Summer.

I then began to lay out different ideas on graph paper.  I tried different sized beds and layouts until I came up with a design that I liked and that maximized the amount of space I had to grow in.  When you come up with your design, make sure to list your priorities before you get started.  I wanted to plant as much space as possible yet keep it accessible and pleasant to look at.

After mulling several different designs for a day or so, I didn’t like anything I came up with so I started drawing a few more.  I simply tweaked the designs I had previously come up with.  Finally one I put down on paper felt right and I knew I had a winner.  I opted on a central aisle that is 3 feet wide, big enough to roll a wheelbarrow up and down.  Branching off the main aisle will be wraparound aisles for harvesting that are about 2 feet wide.  That’s less than recommended by Bartholomew but I think it will be okay since I don’t plan to roll a wheelbarrow up and down those aisles and don’t mind to brush my vegetables as I walk by.

Planning the raised beds on graph paper also made estimating cost and materials a lot easier.  I was able to quickly come up with how much lumber I needed and calculated the formulations of soil mixes I’ll need to buy to fill the planting beds.  I’ll also make photocopies of the full-size garden plan so I can actually plot out what will get planted where.

Over the past two weekends I bought the lumber and built 6 of my raised garden beds.  I still need to build 3 more beds but that will take just a couple hours of time.  To make sure I was still on track with my plan, I laid out the finished beds to see the full-scale look of garden 2010 and I like what I see so far!  I’m exited to start putting in my soil mix, mulching my aisles and building the gate and arbor that will serve as the entryway to veggie heaven.

Stay tuned for our next installment as I put the finishing touches on the raised beds and get to growing!

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Here in Evansville, Indiana, recycling seems to be somewhat antiquated.  Compared to the system we had in Flagstaff, Arizona, there are even fewer things the recycling program here will accept.  To make matters worse, they only provide you with one small bin to put all your stuff into.  I quickly made friends with the man who runs our curbside pickup (which by the way, only happens every two weeks and is a huge drawback for big time recyclers like us) because I watched him have to sort out every category of item and place them in specific bins at the curb.  I thought that just seemed a terrible waste of time for him and decided we would sort our own items into separate containers.  Using old plastic storage bins, we now have four containers we place curbside.

My Crude Recycling Setup

Yesterday, I completed a week’s worth of sorting duties on the back porch and was amazed at how much we actually recycle.  Each week, we generally only produce one or two bags of garbage thanks to composting the organics and sorting out the recyclables.  My  neighbors aren’t so diligent though and that’s when I ran across something they should watch.

A Canadian filmmaker has released a new project that is all about our waste: the trash you put in that container to be picked up and hauled away.  Andrew Nisker shot his documentary using the McDonald family.  The family of five were asked to collect every piece of trash they generated over three months and keep it in their garage.  What was generated three months later is said to be an eye-opener.

Garbage: The Revolution Starts at Home runs 76 minutes and explores the waste generated by the family as well as where the materials came from to generate the waste and where they will go in the end.  The film shows how we act with our garbage has a profound impact on our surrounding environment.  To learn more about the film or to order a copy, head over to their website by clicking the link above.  I think it’s worth a look-see and can’t wait to watch the film.

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Saturday was Arbor Day in case you missed it.  It is always seems like Arbor Day gets a bit overshadowed by Earth Day earlier in the month so I was even surprised when it popped up on my calendar just a day or two before the weekend.  In celebration of Arbor Day, The Arboretum at Flagstaff opened their doors for free on Saturday.  We trucked out there to see what was springing to life on the garden grounds.  It’s still been very cold at night but a lot of their penstemon plants are sprouting up along with various other native perennials right now.  Obviously nothing is in bloom but it was kind of fun to see the garden in that stage of awakening from spring.  Whenever I go out there I sit in awe of the amount of land they have and imagine what we could do if our garden could stretch that big.  Maybe one of these days, wherever we land, I will start an arboretum of my own to pass on to future generations just like Frances McAllister did here in Flagstaff.

On Sunday, our itch for green-thumb domination continued.  We headed to Home Depot and a local plant nursery to pick up lots of flowers, vegetables and seeds.  Some natives and cool weather perennials are okay to go outside in our cold nighttime temps.  But everything else will move in and out of the house for another month until the threat of a late frost has disappeared.  We expanded our herb collection to include chocolate mint, pineapple mint, apple mint, lemon balm and lavender.  All of them smell amazing when you prick a leaf.  We purchased a couple 1 gallon sized tomato plants to shuffle in and out while all of my tomato seedlings catch up to full-size in the window sill.  We picked up some bare root plants too like a concord grape, another hop rhizome for my home-brewing use, elephant garlic and a horseradish rhizome.

We bought some more seeds to plant too.  I have a large box of seeds, some of which are pretty old.  As I’ve been planting them in my starter trays, I’m keeping track of which ones don’t sprout or have a low germination rate.  Then I just toss them into the composter because they’re not going to grow.  So I picked up some pumpkin, sweet corn, rosemary, cilantro, bush bean and cantaloupe seeds.  It’s challenging in the high-mountains of Arizona because our growing season is so short.  It’s only 103 days long!  So, you have to pick varieties of veggies that are often smaller and mature more quickly.

We’re very ready for the gardening season to kick into full swing but we’re finding plenty to do while waiting.  How is your garden growing?  Let us know about what activity you have going with your green thumbs right now!

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I caught an interesting program on The Science Channel the other day while I was at work, called Invention Nation. The show profiles some pretty cool inventions and developments in the green movement while the three hosts take a veggie-fueled trip across the country to get an up-close look at each one. While I don’t think the production quality or the hosts do the idea much justice, it’s nice to see various aspects of sustainable living shaping up across America, despite the reefer-infused hippie bus theme the show portrays.  Come on, green is more mainstream than that! This one episode got my attention because they were making stops in the Flagstaff area, visiting a LEED certified home. The house, being built in Bellemont just 10 miles west of Flagstaff, is one of only four platinum-certified homes in the U.S.

So what makes this house so green? The list is a long one and amazes me that they’ve packed so many environmentally responsible features into one home. The show focused on the “brain” of the house, an automated control system that essentially runs the place. A weather station installed outside the home monitors all weather conditions and relays them into a computer. That computer automatically opens and closes windows, adjusting the interior temperature with the outside temperature. The system also keeps the interior humidity at a healthy range. Aside from just the way the home feels, the system also tracks water and power useage, providing the homeowner a full rundown of just how much they’re using in the way of resources. The power monitors also look at the power output of the solar system, generating a little more than 7 kW hours of power and a wind turbine harvesting the almost regular northern Arizona wind, generating 2kW.

The Bellemont home is not connected to any water service. Instead it harvests all of its water from the sky through 40,000 gallons of collection tanks. The home’s designers say that’s enough for 2 years of potable water and irrigation uses. It doesn’t matter whether it’s rain or snowmelt, it all eventually finds its way into a collection tank where it’s stores and purified. The computer monitors just how full the collection tanks are. A newly planted apple orchard at the home is watered thanks to the home’s grey water system.

The eco-friendly house produces zero emissions. It’s zero energy and zero carbon emissions and produces more energy than the home itself uses. The extra electricity is fed onto the local power grid where the home actually earns energy credit for the power it produces. The home is outfitted with all Energy Star appliances and lighting. In fact, the house has such a high Energy Star rating that it exceeds IECC 2007 requirements by over 75%. When it comes to heating and cooling, a solar hot water system feeds an in-floor radiant heat system throughout the house. It’s also designed with thermal massing and passive solar design to reap the rewards of the Arizona sunshine during the cold winter months. Sewage from the home is treated with a UV alternative septic system which designers say is the first to be installed in the state of Arizona.

I think this home is truly remarkable and inspiring for the sustainable living movement. As the idea catches on and more and more homes are built with the ideas being demonstrated in the LEED Pilot Home, I think green construction will become more cost effective and mainstream. It shows people that what seems difficult could be really very easy. It would be easy for many to live green if their home was outfitted that way from get-go!

The house was designed by Architectural and Environmental Associates. Carl Ramsey, the company’s owner, seems truly committed to green and sustainable design.

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I just wanted to take a minute to plug one of my favorite places to visit in Flagstaff, The Arboretum. They have more than 2,500 different species of plants that grow great here in the high altitude of northern Arizona and they have great collections of the native plants that grow here on the Colorado Plateau. I like to make a trip out there once or twice a year and see what all is going on. It’s quiet, peaceful and best of all they have a bunch of different demonstration gardens including a killer greenhouse. I envy the greenhouse because eventually I want one similar to it. Anyway, if you live in the area and are looking for a great volunteer opportunity, you should check out the Arboretum. They’re currently looking for volunteer docents to lead the daily tours of the garden. If you’re interested head over to their website to find out more on volunteering.

If you happen to be in the area and want to learn more about gardening with native plants of the Colorado Plateau, stop on in!

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