Independence Challenge - Week 19

An awful lot of gourds from one volunteer vine.

Went to Baltimore this past weekend, to one of my daughter's regional youth meetings the weekend of the 13th-14th, so my Independence post timing will be wacky. This Week 19 post is for last week.

Planted: Nothing. Too busy with other stuff, and too confused about when first frost will happen. It was down in the 40's at night last week, and this weekend it hit 90.

Missing pumpkin on August 19th, not yet orange.

Harvested: Peppers, tomatoes, gourds. Someone stole my bigpumpkin at the back fence. It was just barely all-the-way orange. Next time, I'm carving a symbol on the bottom of the baby pumpkin, so it grows in with scar tissue, and I can identify a stolen pumpkin I find on someone else's porch.

Preserved: Attempted to dehydrate banana chips, which went oh-so-badly. Saved seeds from Brandywine tomatoes, black-eyed peas, Siberian Iris, bearded iris, false indigo, and an Asian tiger melon from the market.

Cooked: I borrowed an idle bread machine from Neighbor M - the "rent" will be paid in cinnamon-raisin bread. Turns out I have a manual for it, from a similar Welbilt machine I used to have. DD11 and I immediately made a loaf of white bread to get started. DH sounded interested in trying it out. Worked great, and she popped in a second loaf to give Neighbor M the next day. It really was fast to throw the stuff in the machine. There should be no reason we can't bake every day.

Found a great resource: The King Arthur flour website has a chart that lists the weight of common baking ingredients, so you can measure accurately.

We are making an effort to cook more collaboratively. DH made an herb-crusted pork roast, DD15 made cheesy-pesto penne, and DD11 made bread in the bread machine. I made a spiced peach sauce/butter that was good on the bread. Nothing was really new, but the meal came together easily, even in our teeny kitchen. It helped that bread gets started 3 hours in advance.

Stored: 5 lb cornmeal mix, 10 lb White Lily pastry flour (for biscuits), 5 lbs of whole grain pasta, 24 rolls toilet paper, Grey Poupon mustard, Miracle Whip (don't judge me!), fennel seeds (to make sausage), and marshmellows. All this stuff came from the BRL grocery liquidator in Blandon, and cost less than $20.

We joined the local BJ's Wholesale Club ($45/yr) and I wrote down a lot of prices to compare to other sources of shipped and local bulk goods. The selection is limited, and not everything is cheaper than a good grocery store sale, once you figure out the comparison between the huge wholesale size and regular store quantities. If you buy name brands, this is great deal. But we buy a lot of generics, so I will have to watch closely. I do like their chewy store-baked bagels, 9 large for $3.49 - I will get bunch when we have a freezer. They also have good prices on car batteries and tires.

Prepped/Managed: Following up on my September grain storage goal, I posted a lot of questions to my food storage lists, asking what proportions of grains to store, how to manage buckets, and what kind of equipment I might want to acquire.

I decided to continue using the big Rubbermaid lidded bins under my tables for short-term storage - a pantry. I will store bulk grain, beans, legumes, sugar, and salt in 5-gallon buckets with oxygen absorbers in the basement, on pallets. Here is the projected storage list for 3 months:

50 pounds of soft wheat berries (local)
50 pounds of bread flour
30 pounds of pastry flour (local)
20 pounds of spelt flour (local)
50 pounds of rolled oats (maybe local)
50 pounds of rice
20 pounds of whole spelt (local)
30 pounds of cornmeal (local)
50 pounds of dent corn (local)
20 pounds of cane sugar

We won't know for 3 months if that is a good guess for our needs - we just started baking bread. But, if I use 2 cups of flour per day, and there are about 4 cups in a pound of flour, we will go through about 45 pounds in 90 days by baking a daily loaf.

Local/Family: Woo-hoo! I found something that DH wants to do: make hard cider. We hardly ever drink, but when we do go out we tend to order Woodchuck hard cider. The equipment and supplies are cheap, and we can have a tasting party when it's ready. Found a long fascinating article about the history of hard cider in America, and a scanned copy of a 1871 Harper's article about Johnny Appleseed. I've also seen mention of a pear cider called "perry," which sounds delicious.

Had a porch meeting with the Neighbor Club. I made a list of info for us to work on exchanging - cell phones, emergency contact info, things we could use help finding or doing. Neighbor M remarked that her relatives could help find stolen car parts, and one has a port-a-potty biz in New Jersey, if we need any poop. We made a couple of loose plans. Neighbor M and I will try to drive up to a u-pick farm near Fleetwood, and stop at BRL, the grocery liquidator in Blandon. She lent me the bread machine.

Neighbor M wants to make granola. and so do I. Must research recipes and look for deals on bulk ingredients. DD11 wants yogurt and chewy granola bars for breakfast. I bought 3 kinds at the store to compare. I like Trail Mix types, like Nature Valley or Kashi. DD likes Fibre One Oats & Peanut Butter, which lists chicory root extract as its first ingredient. What the heck is that? A fiber additive that is supposed to be full of the soluable fiber inulin. Huh. I woulda thought granola had enough fiber on its own.

Neighbor V is hugely pregnant - 3 weeks to the delivery of her fourth child, and my kids will help entertain hers so she can get some naps. Her husband works at a Pepperidge Farm bakery, and can get bread and other products at cost. We seldom use packaged stuff - croutons, crackers, goldfish crackers, cookies - and we just started baking bread. I think I will get some bread when we have a freezer, as back-up. Cartons of goldfish crackers would be good to give to the church preschool for Sunday snacks. Who can pass on Mint Milano cookies? I'll hide some away for a day when everyone is tired of eating healthy.

Learned: How to get rid of suburban groundhogs. Mom has a den under the decorative boulder in her front yard. They ate all the sweet potatoes - they must go. I learned I can bait a trap with apples, and if I take them more than mile away, they will not find their way back. I don't want to use poison in our yard. I could shoot them - but that's not allowed in the suburbs. (Come on - they ate the sweet potatoes.) I am going to wait for Mom to come home from California. I want someone to keep an eye on the trap once it is set up.

Posted about my banana chip woes on a food preserving list, and got some good advice. I will get back on that horse next week. Did a lot of price-checking on new chest freezers. I was surprised to find that Sears genreally has the best prices, among the big box stores and chains. I will watch some local appliance dealers for sales, to see if anyone beats Sears.

Library: Nothing new, but did some big bookcase reorganization. I have more reference books to shelve. We sorted the homeschooling books into those we will keep for permanent reference, and those that can be donated. I made a pile of some to sell online, but most don't bring enough to make them worth shipping. I will give some to a 2nd grade teacher I know, and see if DD11's 6th grade teacher can use some of the rest, since there is a wide range of reading level in her classroom. We boxed up a lot of fiction that we'd already read, to get back out one day in a bigger house.

Independence Challenge - Week 18

Reading's Labor Day Parade - Sept 1, 2008

Summer is, well, over. Fall always feels like the time to start new projects. I made an important realization, this week. A blog post at Women Not Dabbling in Normal crystallized it for me. Asked what the important skills for homesteaders are, Gina said,

"Figure out how to single-task.... It is very helpful to be able to draw your focus to one project... and complete it/organize it. Multiple projects left in various stages can snowball out of control very quickly..." (Read the whole post here.)

I am not a homesteader, but I am re-arranging our lives around new ways to get, store, cook, and eat food. Homesteading in my own kitchen. There are so many things on my to-do list, and I have been chipping away. I feel busy and productive, but only small tasks seem to get done, no big picture things. Big tasks are made up of small ones, but I am seldom getting the gratification of checking off a big task. I am going to try to address that by choosing an over-all goal for each month.

I am using more of some things than I ever did before, since I have started canned and pickling. I am using up my stored supply of sugar, flour, and vinegar. And I am baking more. I need to find some local sources of bulk staples - 50 pounds of sugar and buckets to store it, 50 pounds of flour, etc. We may have to tap our limited savings to do that, but it will pay off in the bulk savings, as we rotate through the stored supplies.

So the goal for September: focus on storing 3 months of grain, beans, and sugar. That means 400 lbs of grain, 100 lbs of beans and legumes, 20 lbs of sweetener - properly packed and labeled in 5-gallon buckets, on pallets in the basement. I'll report progress on that goal as the month progresses.

Planted: Nothing this week. Did some early fall clean-up. Can't decide where to plant garlic. If I plant it here, we could move before next summer's harvest. If I plant it at mom's, that crazy groundhog will eat it. Hm, might be a groundhog hunt in the next post.

Harvested: Mint, basil, thyme, parsley, sage, peppers, carrots, black-eyed peas, celery, broccoli.

Preserved: Froze carrots and celery in stock-making portions. Froze green beans for DD15. None of the rest of us really like green beans. Froze organic chicken backs for future stock.

Canned 2 pints Peach Jam that turned out much better than my hyper-sugary first effort with the Blue Book recipe. I barely let it cook before I was smearing it on thick slabs of whole wheat toast. I'm definitely making more before peach season ends. If I find more cukes, I better also make more bread-n-butter pickles; it seems everyone like them.

Also canned 5 pints of Green Tomato Chutney, the first chutney I ever made. DD15 wouldn't even taste it, which surprised me - she tastes everything. But then again, she doesn't like curries with apples and raisins in them, as this chutney does. I tasted and think I will like it a lot when it mellows. I've been to parties where someone set out red pepper jelly poured over cream cheese with crackers, and it was very good. I think this chutney could be used similarly, or with other cheeses. It was the first recipe for green tomatoes that appealed to me enough to try it. Smelled great cooking.

Cooked: No new experiments. It was humid this week, wet air pushed up the Eastern seaboard by various tropical storms. Makes me less likely to cook new stuff.

Stored: Bought a one-pound block of beeswax ($4) at market, from the boys at Two Gander Farm. That should be more than enough for my little bit of salve-making. It keeps for a long time. The beekeeper said it might get a white bloom on it after a while, from a kind of oxidation, but it will melt back in when heated.

Managed/Prepped: Did more jarring up of bagged herbs and beans, and lots of labeling. I used slips of paper covered with clear packing tape, since I hate scraping old labels from jars. I got a dozen quart canning jars via Freecycle, and bought a dozen new ones, and more plastic lids. The Wal-mart closest to me is out of pints and all metal lids. I need to find other places that might still have them.

Reduced, Reused, Recycled: Got a queen-sized bedframe via Freecycle. We have a queen sized bed with enormous cannonballs on the head and footboards. It overwhelms our small bedroom. If we switch to a simple frame, we have more options for positioning the bed. I'll send the big bed to Freecycle. Had to spend some gas to pick up the frame in Morgantown, but we found peaches and watermelon on the way back, off Route 10 on Freemansville Road.

Trash-picked another bunch of candles. I have been collecting old candles for a winter round of making votives and firestarters. I was planning to put dryer lint in cardboard egg cartons and pour hot wax in the cups - but I just realized we stopped using the dryer! Better ask a neighbor to save dryer lint for me.

Local/Family: Big week in this category. I gathered three other women on my block and we agreed to form a mutual support club to carpool, compare prices and buy food, help each other get what we need, and swap babysitting and other favors. We are also trading skills - one knows how to make biscuits, another has a pressure canner, and a third makes her own noodles. I am good at finding things for free. We also agreed that we need to keep an eye on our elderly neighbors this winter, some of whom have bed-ridden spouses and fixed incomes. If it goes well, we may invite other neighbors, but we are starting small.

The discussion shows promise already. One neighbor has a bread machine she doesn't use, another has a husband that works for a bakery and gets deeply-discounted bread, and a third is showing me to a Mennonite pick-your-own veggie farm. None of them are aware of the long-term economic changes I think are coming, but I don't have to talk about that to get them interested in simply saving money together. I find it hard to be silent about weird food choices, but learning to keep my mouth shut is a good neighborly practice.

Researched local CSAs for next year, and wrote an article about my frustrations with CSAs for urban dwellers. City dwellers may get a lot more out of informal small-group-buying and combining backyards for communal gardening or a small-scale neighborhood CSA.

Learned: Sharon Astyk's online class "Adapting in Place" wrapped up this week, and I had a nice half-hour phone chat with Sharon. I got a lot of mental work done in this class. I still need to work on the details of our written plan. I am going to write a separate post about the class in the next week or so.

I saw a cast iron potbelly stove for sale on Craigslist, so I started doing stove research. Stoves seem to have good resale value, so if I see a good deal, I should probably buy it, even if we are not sure exactly where it will go. I need to start looking for someone local that installs stoves and makes stove pipes. A few useful links:

Good Times Stove - photos of stove types
EPA: Cleaner Burning Wood Stoves and Fireplaces
WoodHeat.org - sustainable wood use
Mother Earth News: Wood Stove Buyer's Guide

Library: No new books this week, but I did work on a different library: a gallon ziplock that contains all of the loose recipes I have collected over my lifetime. It was a trip down memory lane. I was reminded of old friends, places I worked - even an ancient clipping from 5th grade, when a favorite teacher won a gas range in a recipe contest. Found a handwritten copy of Julia Child's "Chicken Melon," that goes with a photo of me proudly holding the dish as a teenaged cook. I didn't find the Peach Kuchen recipe I was looking for, but I did a first pass sorting of my cooking life. I have over 500 recipes collected digitally at WeGottaEat.com, but I haven't even touched the loose ones in the baggie, yet.

My city neighborhood

I live in a little neighborhood at the top of northeast Reading, nestled at the foot of Mount Penn under the Pagoda.

It is bounded by City Park on one end, and the large high school five blocks away at the other end. The neighborhood is only two blocks deep: from 13th Street, to the half-street Linden, then to 14th Street, with the wooded hillside starting up just beyond 14th. Nine residential blocks, 2-by-5 minus one taken up by a high school band practice field. According to the 2000 US Census block data, there are 468 houses.

We are dominated by schools. Ripley's Believe It or Not says that 13th Street is the only place in the country where you can go from kindergarten to college on a single street: it has two elementary schools, a middle school, the high school, and Albright College down at the far end. The college even offers scholarships to students that are All-Thirteenth-Street grads. A new junior high is being built on the site of a former hospital - also on 13th Street.

Since there is no school busing within a 2-mile radius of schools in the city, most of the city's teen population walks to the high school every day - all 4400+ of them. About 65% are Hispanic, 16% black, 18% white, reflecting the city mix. 91% of the 500+ elementary school kids nearby qualify for free lunches. There is a certain amount of chaos and a hint of violence, but it is surprisingly orderly as more than 5,000 people come and go past us each school day - especially when you consider how frequently the city's adults solve their problems with drugs and guns. I cannot tell you how lucky they are to have the superb elementary school crossing guard I have watched for the past 4 years.

The little Hillside neighborhood is tucked just above that passing stream of cars and students. The typical house is about 100 years old, 3-4 bedrooms, 1 bath, and costs $45-55,000. Rented houses typically cost $600/mo plus all utilities. Oil heat is common, which has been painful this past year. Parking is tight, especially the nights before the weekly street cleaning. But there are few cars during the day, a testament to the employment pattern.

The rows of houses marching up the steep streets from 13th to 14th are squarely blue-collar and always have been. People work in factories, trades, and service jobs, or are retired from similar jobs. Probably split about evenly between tenant and owner-occupied, racially and ethnically mixed, with a bit of tension over that. 14th Street is almost suburban, with an odd little public playground, a ball field, a semi-public pool, a set of condos, and a strip of ranch houses under the wooded side of Mount Penn. Most of the vehicle traffic we get is people who live in our 2-by-5 block neighborhood, or are attending ball games. It's good for kids, who can walk to school, park, pool, pizza, and convenience store without crossing a busy street.

The houses are mostly similar. 12-15' wide brick rowhouses with 40' narrow back yards to an alley. A small front planter or square of grass, although some are just concrete. I know my own block best, of course. Many of the back yards are used daily to play, garden, hang laundry, and grill. A few are weedy and ignored, or are used only by a family dog. Lots of dogs. The turnover of tenants and owners over the past few years has seen an uptick in modest backyard improvements. Yard furniture, grills, better flower and veggie gardens. The alleys are often grass and seldom used by cars, unless someone is doing construction.

We would benefit from a neighborhood group. Work at the playground and pool is monopolized by "old" residents, mostly white home-owners, and renters are ignored. But I think both renters and owners would join a garden club, if we made it bilingual. Gardening would be a good foundation for other forms of neighborliness - a potluck, cooking and canning activities for families, car playing or movie nights. There is an annual garish display of Christmas lights at the playground, with visits to Santa, which will probably need to change, with increasing electric costs. Might be a good time to propose something less blindingly commercial.

Beyond our own little park area. We are close to the city's greenhouse building in City Park, which used to be a place to buy plants, and could again become a center of gardening education in the city. The city is planning to renovate the whole Park area, which would benefit us. We enjoy the bandshell concerts on Fridays in July.

If we end up staying here, it is likely I will start something, probably to the dismay of my DH. If only the stupid house were bigger! (And less covered in shag carpet and paneling.)

What have you learned this year, so far?

Been sharing the parsley flowers with some little visitors. When they get big, we will put them in a bug box to watch them make a chrysalis and then emerge from it.

Anyway, I wrote this in response to a question on a container gardening list.

1. WATER: Invest in soaker hoses and water barrels. Manual watering is uneven and hard to gauge. Most things in containers need a self-watering feature, no matter how faithfully one plans to water.

2. FISH BOXES: Get more fish boxes - works great for greens. Focus on what we already eat: romaine, spinach, bok choy, and kale. No exotic lettuce.

3. FERTILIZER: Compost is not enough. Everything got bigger after the fish emulsion. Explore other organic fertilizers. Find a source for mushroom dirt or compost at the start of the season - small city yards cannot produce enough compost.

4. SOWING: Winter-sowing in milk jugs is good for annuals and herbs, not so much for veggies. Mid-March start for onions, lettuce, spinach, peas was good. Transplanting peppers, eggplants, and tomatoes too early is dumb. Build cold frame this fall.

5. YIELD: Herbs, celery, onions, potatoes, sweet potatoes, carrots, beets, and peppers suit us best, so far. Tomatoes, zucchini and cukes are hard to protect from bugs, and local organic can be bought easily and inexpensively. Plant lots more beans and peas. Replace some ornamentals with more medicinals.

6. NEIGHBORHOOD: Expand program of helping kids plant tomatoes in containers. Ask more neighbors if we can "farm" their unused front yard planters.

"Circle of Life" in the alley

This image is a notecard designed by artist Adrienne Trafford, for sale through the Humane Society of Berks County.

Alert: Potential gross-out ahead, involving dead animal. Squeamish cat owners should stop reading.

Three boys around the age of 10 or 12 found a dead cat in our alley and were throwing rocks at it this afternoon. DD11 saw them from her window and told me.

I could smell it in the 90+degree heat before I got out of our gate. I had a heavy glove on one hand, and a trash bag in the other. "Is that a dead cat?" The boys affirmed, not taking off running, as I thought they might.

"I'm going to pick it up and dispose of it. I hope I don't throw up." The boys stuck around, likely hoping I would indeed vomit. "Since it's summer and the alley is close to houses, it will stink up the place if I don't do something. And since we don't know why it is dead, we also want to keep nasty diseases from spreading to other animals or kids that touch the dead cat." They stepped back ever so slightly.

I use my foot to move the rocks away from the carcass and reach for it. The boys make little excited noises, and I can almost hear them thinking, "That old lady is going to touch a dead cat!" One boy blurts, "Why doesn't it have any eyes?" If one of my kids had been there, she could have warned them not to ask questions like that.

I launch into a long explanation about how the bugs that eat dead animals have started their work. If an animal dies up in the woods, it lays there and is eaten by bugs and birds and worms and tiny little things. They start with the easy parts, like eyeballs. It is the job of those birds and bugs to eat dead things and return them to the dirt, where they fertilize plants. In the woods, the carcass would dry up over time, stop stinking, and after a while you would only be able to find a bit of fur and some scattered bones, and then nothing at all. Other wise, the woods and everywhere else would be cluttered up with smelly dead things.

I mentioned that the alley cats have hard, short lives. They have no warm place in the winter, and no regular food or water. They are attacked by other cats or stray dogs, and get hit by cars. They usually have worms and other diseases that must be painful. This particular cat was less than a year old, a small female that had already had at least two litters. We try to catch the females in a humane trap before they have kittens, but most of them are very wary of people. One of the boys agreed he hears cat fights a lot at night.

Surprisingly, the boys stayed for the lecture. Probably because I was also trying to get the limp cat in the trash bag, and I missed the first two times. It was surprisingly difficult to manage the bag in one hand and the cat in the bulky gloved hand. I stopped and showed them some big black bugs under the carcass when I moved it. They pointed out the flies, and I told them about maggots being fly eggs that hatch and eat garbage until they grow up into new flies. They had all seen garbage get maggoty in the summer, and I told them that maggots are part of the process of turning dead things into dirt. At this point, I could actually hear the Lion King theme "Circle of Life" playing in my head.

I told them to come tell me if they see any more dead stuff, so we could dispose of it. The boys wandered away after I bagged the cat, probably stunned by the sudden science lesson in the alley, and weird lady that picks up dead cats.

Even after triple-bagging, the carcass really stinks. We moved the trash can to the end of the yard. The city won't pick up trash until Wednesday morning, but I have no idea what else to do with it. It will hit the high 90's tomorrow. Ugh!

Independence Challenge - Week 6

This is a 2-week catch-up post. Between work and family stuff, I was too busy last week to do more than make some fast notes. Mom saw her doctor and is doing a bit better; 85-yo aunt is not doing so well. Weather was suddenly record-breaking hot, close to 100F. The tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, onions, and potatoes seem to be loving it.

Planted: Sweet potatoes at Mom's. Scored whole flats of broccoli, romaine lettuce, and cabbage starts for free. They were half-dead but have revived nicely with regular watering. I fish-boxed most of the lettuce (almost 40 plants); digging up a new spot for cabbage - but 60 plants is too much for me - will give some away. Getting more fish boxes for broccoli (about 50 plants). Some may bolt or die after the stress and heat wave, but it's worth a try. I also planted cowpeas to replace the English peas that were done, and potted up some basil and marjoram sprouts.

Harvested: PEAS! My first English peas, shelled by DD11. I can see that I would have to plant a LOT more to have peas to freeze. DD15 ate the whole harvest this weekend, raw. Granted, it was only 2.5 cups. I need to get some innoculant for the next batch, to increase my yield - and plant many, many more vines. DD11 keeps pulling sweet baby carrots. She won't get any mature ones if she keeps it up.

Picked parsley and thyme for cooking. Harvested mulch by shearing grass and clover. I dry it on the sidewalk and then use it to mulch my beds. I watched birds eat a whole lot of those inedible "white" mulberries from a neighbor's tree. I didn't harvest the berries myself, but I benefit from it, since the birds help keep the bugs down in my yard.

Preserved: Drying more peppermint and lemon balm from my yard. I wanted to report that I canned my first strawberry jam, but the heat made us postpone the u-pick trip until tomorrow. Bought a food dehydrator for $3 (woot!) at a yard sale. Expect posts about dehydrated stuff as I figure out how to use it.

Prepped/Managed: Bought extra bleach on sale. Ten pounds of Goya's Thai Jasmine Rice ($1.24/lb in 5lb bags). They were the last two bags in that store, and I was worried they were the last we would see. But no, they were restocked - at a 54% increase! From $6.20 to $9.55 ($1.91/lb) in ONE week. There was an 11-lb burlap bag of Indian Basmati for $19.95, but my experience with that brand was weevil-y. Basmati and Jasmine have been out-of-stock at Aldi. American basmati and jasmati are grotesquely expensive. I am trying a small bag of Giant-brand organic brown long-grain at $2.50 for 2 lbs.

Found a sprouting lid that fits mason jars at Echo Hill ($1.99). I had been wanting one, but didn't want to pay for shipping. Now I need to find something to sprout. One step at a time.

Cooked: Shopped at the opening day of the West Reading producer market. Enjoyed our first all-local meal for the One Local Summer challenge: grass-fed eggs, grits, bacon, toast and nectarine jam. Decided to make my own yogurt, and while looking for a yogurt maker on FreeCyle list, I was sent instructions to make yogurt in my crockpot, so I am going to try it. Worst case, I lose a gallon of milk.

Bought some of that local spelt flour for experimenting. Tried waffles first, with good results, substituting spelt flour for whole wheat. In looking for spelt recipes, I found another local source of flour, Daisy Flour, spelt and white/wheat pastry flours from a historic mill in Lancaster County. The pastry flour seems like the best deal, with a 50-lb bags for less than $40. Have to work that into a Lancaster provisioning trip. Soft Red Winter Wheat for pastry flour is grown here most frequently.

System-building: I asked a 7-yo neighbor child if she wanted to grow something for her mother. We planted romaine, basil, a tomato, and some marjoram in containers (photo at the top of this post). We carried them up the block to her front stoop, and when I left she was asking passersby to stop and smell the marjoram. She agreed to water it every morning (unless it was raining) and I gave her a watering can and showed her how to use it. We will document her efforts with photos. I am going to ask some other neighbors if I can plant stuff in their barren front planters. They have soil going to waste, and the small beds are easy for idle neighbor children to tend.

Also attending a series of discussions about economic justice at our church. The small group is moving toward looking for a project, and I am going to try to poke them in the direction of something with local food. We already run a monthly food pantry, and many members are food-conscious, so we would be adding to an area of competence. Perhaps we could prepare a directory of sources of fresh food in the city. It could be handed out in Spanish and English at the food bank, and might also get some press coverage.

Reduced, Reused, Recycled: Fixed a weed-whacker I thought was broken. FreeCycled a computer monitor and printer; replaced DD11's mattress via FreeCycle. Sold unwanted clothing on eBay. A neighbor gave me a wooden pallet for Mom to more neatly store a pile of salvaged vintage cobblestones. Found an egg producer that can use my big stack of egg cartons. Salvaged flats of empty 2" and 4" pots from a neighbor's trash to use for rooting cuttings. Not only did I get the dehydrator at a yard sale, I also found a good knife-sharpening steel and some metal hooks for hanging things from rafters. Trash-picked the planters for the neighbor kid's garden. Made the kids stop sneaking clothes into the dryer.

Learned: More about yogurt-making, spelt, the usual gardening research. Researching more on urban farming and spending a lot of time looking at various cities to which we might move.

Library: Had DD11 catalog my cookbooks on the book-tracking website GoodReads.com. Still need to work on manually adding books that don't have ISBN numbers, like my vintage regional and church cookbooks. I will put her to work on the reference shelves next. I will then be able to print a catalog of my books, with comments on each volume. Borrowed library books about canning, to see if I want to buy one beyond the Blue Book.

Neighborly Pepper

I noticed the neighbor planting his garden and stuck my head over the wall to see what he had. Lots of transplants of hot peppers, lots of tomatoes only about 6" apart, cilantro, onions. From previous years, I know that he will put in tall stakes and make rope trellis for the tomatoes. He gave us a yellow pepper plant that looked longish on the tag I glimpsed - not sure if it is hot or not - but we stuck it in an empty spot among the green onions to try it out. We will have make sure to give them produce this summer. Our conversation is a little short since the man has limited English and I have no Spanish - but gardening somehow makes that inconsequential. His wife and I trade food samples, although she has even less English - we mostly smile and nod at each other.