The very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. - Barbara Kingsolver

All righty, I am digging this eat-local thang. Let me on the bandwagon! I’ve always been sort of conscious of the vibe, but now I am realizing exactly how much good even just a little effort can do. And I have the zeal of the convert, only not so much converted as convinced. Maybe more on the do-good-to-your-fellow-man and a little less on the hellfire and brimstone, but you know, otherwise...just like a convert.

Barbara Kingsolver has inspired me with her wonderful Animal Vegetable Miracle; Suse and I have been planning our commune’s farming venture (Suse, can we name some of the chooks (that’s Aussie for chicken, my little Internet schweeties) Burp and Slurp? I’ll explain later...), and I have been reading about chickens and chicken coops and chicken feed and chicken breeds pretty much nonstop.

Gina and I have a date on Saturday night to MAKE OUR OWN MOZZARELLA.

My CSA starts next week (and we are going to be gone for a bit, meaning my first haul of strawberries and asparagus are going to be eaten by other people! Wah!)

I have found a source to recycle plastics 6 and 7 (the city only takes up to 5); once a pile accumulates, I can drop them off on my way to work (which means I have to drive rather than take the bus...hmmm...everything’s a trade-off, I see). I have found a place that accepts paperboard and boxes for recycling, so all our cereal boxes and cartons go in a box to be hauled off once a month there, along with any corrugated cardboard we have amassed. I am contributing kitchen scraps to my neighbor’s compost bin. I faithfully dump several pounds a month of junk mail and scrap paper into one of those fundraising recycling dumpsters. And the grocery store recycles plastic bags of any kind. Our family’s garbage output has decreased from emptying the trash once or sometimes even twice a day, to emptying about once every two days.

Alas, we still have all the dog poop and cat litter to cope with (it’s the only type of “manure” you CANNOT compost – why is that?) - and I am still using disposable diapers. I also am still drinking my share of “Colombian blood” in its 10% post-recycled sleeves and paper cups. But we are working on it. I am in the market for a nice, hefty, refillable travel mug type of dealio...

(But I continue to drag the empty soda cans and bottles out of the desk trashcan at work and throw them in the recycling bins – is it so hard to walk the ten steps to the bins? Really?)

I just requested Joan Dye Gussow’s This Organic Life: Confessions of a Suburban Homesteader from the university EZBorrow program. I also want to read Plenty: One Man, One Woman, and a Raucous Year of Eating Locally, by Alisa Smith, but my public library account is currently blocked because I owe them for a lost book (Primo’s, not mine). And I am trying to track down a copy of Jackie French’s Backyard Self-sufficiency but it is apparently unavailable in the States for less than a mortgage payment or two.

I am also interested in reading It’s a Long Road to a Tomato, by Keith Stewart; Second Nature by the inestimable Michael Pollan, which is sitting on my living room bookshelves; Coming Home to Eat: The Pleasures and Politics of Local Food - Gary Paul Nabhan; and Deborah Madison’s Local Flavors: Cooking and eating from America’s Farmer’s Markets. (As is my wont, I will track down and read voraciously every single book I can find about a topic that has piqued my interest. It’s Droutism, but for books.)

Today – today I built the raised part of a raised bed. It’s only a little bit raised, to account for the slope of the side yard. See why I am terrified my children will roll down the hill and over the wall into the brick alley below?



Thank God I have my Matrix. But the little truck, it is missed.


The walls of the bed are contructed of 2x4s which, at a buck-fifty for an eight-foot-length, seemed about the right price. My nailing skills leave a lot to be desired so I just screwed the damn thing together with scabs and 3/8" drywall screws and my weenie little drill, and hope it won’t be moved for a long while. Next comes the fun part (ha!): removing the grass and digging in the peat moss and topsoil.


See my collection of studly tools? I DO own a real (Makita) drill, but it’s dead, so I am forced to use my mother’s itty-bitty Black and Decker.
And I love my Sawzall. I have no idea how we lived before we bought a Sawzall.



I have been bringing home stray plants for several weeks, and they will be greatly relieved to be in the ground...currently they live on my front steps.


Except my tomato plants. They’re my favorite (shhh, don’t tell the others). They went in right up against the house, where H is terrified I will flood the basement while watering them. (Yeah, I know, hard to believe he’s an engineer.) (Also, I am well aware that my rosemary is looking peaked.)



My lettuce trenches come in a close second; I just planted them a few days ago so no sproutage yet but I look forward their tidy little rows marching down the planters.


My Shasta daisies seeds have sprouted! I like masses of the things, but started plants are too expensive. So just as at the old house, I dumped several seed packets into some peat pots and voila! We have daisiage.


The chives, however, refuse to poke their pointy little heads aboveground.


While waiting for the weeniedrill to recharge, I cleared weeds and removed dead-leaf mulch and yanked out maple volunteers from around the rosebushes. We have about a dozen lining the alley wall. We also, turns out, have wasp nests all over the place. Which I discovered after raking out the roots of some dead grass under the rosebush. They were little teeny wasps, and were fortunately even less interested in me than I was in them.


The cat, whose secret hiding-from-Punto place I discovered, was even less interested in me. Go figure.


The raised bed is four feet by approximately eight feet. A prefab chicken coop with a covered run would have a footprint only about two feet longer, and if I built my own, I could tinker with the dimensions/layout.
The other sideyard is crying for chickens.

Cluck, cluck, cluck!