Let Thy Laundry Fly

"If my husband has a right to have guns in the house, I have a right to hang laundry."

So says Carin Froehlich of Perkasie, Pennsylvania, the focal point of this article about the growing tensions between folks who want to save a dime with line-dried laundry and communities who are not so hot-to-trot about seeing their neighbors garb flapping in the breeze.

Give me a break. Can the powers that be find something else much more worthwhile to spend their time on?

We've been line drying for over a year now and I just LOVE it. Call me crazy, but I look forward to getting out there for a few minutes -- often by myself -- and just putting up the wet stuff piece by piece. It's almost meditative for me, especially early in the morning when the sun is just starting to peek through the trees and the bird songs are being carried on the tip of that slight breeze blowing by.

But beyond the psychological benefit (for me anyway), line drying does save money. No doubt about it. Less carbon in the air, more cash in your pocket. Works for me.

Project Laundry List, a non-profit promoting line drying and line drying rights, is quoted in the article with the statement that up to six percent of a home's annual energy usage is tied to the clothes dryer. If your monthly National Grid bill averages about $100, that six percent works out to $72 per year. I can sure find something else to spend that on. I bet you can too.

Here's to exercising our collective "right to hang"!

[Photo Credit: Sallster via Flikr]

Thanksgiving Farmers Market This Weekend

Great news! A special Thanksgiving Holiday session of the Sakonnet Growers Market will be held this Saturday from 10:00AM - 2:00PM at Pardon Gray Preserve, Main Road, Tiverton.

I'm not sure of the farmers/producers that will be on hand, but it's safe to say there will be lots of great things to pick up. This might be one of the last times to help support our local farmers this season. Hope to see you there!

October Poll Results; November Poll Gives Food for Thought

So much for being timely with the polls! Nevertheless, our October poll asked about interest in connecting with like-minded folks from around town to get your green on. The majority of you (78%) said yes with the rest voting in with a maybe. So now what?

I have a couple ideas and wondering what you're thoughts might be. We could:

• Create a new online community using a tool like Google Groups or Yahoo! Groups. Folks could create new discussion threads on topics that interest them (home-scale renewable energy projects, gardening, local food, kids & the environment, homesteading skills, etc.); maintain a new community calendar of events; etc
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• Meet face-to-face on a regular basis in a relaxed, loosely organized way. Maybe it's a green film series with discussions, or maybe even more of a meet and network approach a la the Green Drinks model (Providence, Newport).
  
  
• Any other idea you might want to throw out there. I welcome your feedback!
  

Now, onto November's poll:

Coming off of our Local Food Weekend (see previous post), I'm really interested in how feasible eating a totally locally grown/produced diet could be here in Sakonnet. Have you thought about it? Tempted to start out with just a totally-local meal (Thanksgiving is coming up!)? Or maybe try it for a week? Or a month? Granted, fall/winter might not be the most appealing time of year, but as the Wintertime Farmers' Market shows, there is still plenty of fresh, local, seasonal food out there.

To help with this idea of fostering a more widespread approach to eating local and in season, I'm starting work on something that I hope you might find of interest -- a comprehensive list/guide of as much locally grown and produce items as I can find. Basically, what's out there and where you can get it. Tapping into resources such as Farm Fresh RI, Edible Rhody, local grocery stores and the like should make for a good guide.

Knowing my schedule, it's going to take some time to pull together, but I'm hopeful it will be worth it. If you have a favorite local food product, feel free to comment on this post or drop me a line. Thanks!

Local Food Weekend!

What a great weekend! Fantastic weather, lots of catching up with old friends, and everything seemed to be connected by local food.

On Saturday we headed to Pawtucket for the first weekend of the Wintertime Farmers' Market. What an amazing space. Located in the south end of the Hope Artiste Village, this indoor market was buzzing with activity. From veggies to meats and seafood to cheeses to jams and just about everything in-between. We scored some lunch from the Hewtin's Dogs cart, washed it down with some very tasty local soda courtesy of Yacht Club Bottling, and then hit the market.

Walking along, surrounded by over thirty different producers just brings the importance of supporting and growing the local food scene home for me. It is community nirvana. While we were there, our friends Eric and Jenna introduced us to one of their friends, Steve Hancock of NorthStar Farm in Westport. Steve had a booth at the market where he was selling some amazing greens and radish (amongst other things). Actually, the Sakonnet area was well represented at the market with a number of farmers/producers setting up shop. 

Then, as if Saturday wasn't great, on Sunday night, Sara and I sat down to watch Food, Inc. We had this documentary in our Netflix queue for some time and it finally was released this week. Over the course of an hour and a half we were floored, astonished, mortified, and motivated. You MUST see this film; then tell all your friends to watch it. Honestly, you will never look at "food" and your grocery store the same way again.

If you're not into documentaries, no worries. The film is extremely well produced with a story line that hooks you from the first minute. We finished the movie recommitting ourselves to work even harder to ensure that as much of our food as possible is locally grown and in season. I'm sure you will too.

Seeing Food, Inc. is really driving home the notion of trying to assemble a comprehensive local food resource guide. Maybe you call it the "100-Mile Diet". Maybe you just call it smart eating. Whatever you call it, we really need to try and do all we can to foster our local food systems: Conserving farmland, bolstering farm education and training programs, enabling local market development, and then leveraging that market to change our eating behaviors for the better. We can do it. We have to do it.

22 Months Off. 6 Months On. The TV Saga Continues.

You may remember that we were about 22 months without a TV . Then, back in April, right before I headed to China for a few weeks (and Sara was in her last two weeks of pregnancy), we caved, bought the TV and DVD player, hooked up the cable, and rejoined the ranks of the Mainstream American Television Consumer.

Well, after six months, we're pulling the plug again. Technically, not on the TV, just the cable. This time around the reason is not due to a lightening storm. Rather, it's a combination of things: part financial (really, $75 to watch TV in my own home every month?), part dissatisfaction with garbage programming, part avoidance of all those commercials.

Don't get me wrong, we were very select in what we let the kids view: primarily PBS, sprinkled with a dose of the National Geographic, Science, Green, and Discovery channels. But even still, we were amazed on how influential the few commercials they saw were. Case in point: My four-year-old daughter telling me out of the blue one day "Daddy, don't hide it, solve it." in reference to my graying hair and some men's product she saw.

No way are we going to have our children be the foot-soldiers for a legion of advertisers. We have a responsibility to protect our children from succumbing to the lure of consumerism so early in life. Our little planet cannot afford to raise yet another generation of "stuff"-mongers. We must do more with less; be satisfied and thankful for what we have; not yearn for the empty happiness that buying and using more brings; avoid being another cog in the wheel of planned obsolescence.

Alas, we look forward to the blank stares and silly questions from people who cannot fathom the thought of no cable (even the Cox representative on the phone asked Sara, "What are your going to do for TV?" when she canceled in). We are OK with it and so are the kids. Not once have they inquired about why they can't watch their shows anymore. Instead, we've been busy dusting off some board games, popping some popcorn, and having a healthy dose of unplugged fun together. Cadoo anyone?

99% Vegetarian

Our diet has never been heavy in the meat category. Chicken, fish, the occasional pork or ground turkey would grace our plates; beef had been cast away for the past couple of years. Overall, Sara and I estimate that we were already around 75% vegetarian.

But a couple of weeks ago, we dove into the deep end and committed ourselves to a MMM (mostly meatless meals) lifestyle by ramping up to 99% vegetarian. The only hold out: bacon (for Sara) and the occasional fish. I've been totally meat-free for three weeks, so it will be interesting how I handle the next wave of seafood fare.

The two oldest kids (6 and 4) present an interesting dilemma. We have decided to not force them to give up meat -- both for dietary reasons and the fact that we want to encourage the maturation of their decision making. But they have been fine, taking in a chicken nugget here and turkey sandwich there. We're grateful that their young palettes are so willing to try new things.

All of the success so far goes to Sara and her prowess in the kitchen. It's amazing what can pull together; it keeps things interesting and far from routine. We've tapped into a few new cook books from the library, as well as getting some newbie tips from this starter guide at Vegetarian Times. The bonus: Our grocery bills are down a bit because we're buying a lot of staples (beans, legumes, rice) in bulk. And we're squeaking out the last bit of fresh veggies from the local seasonal harvest (and looking ahead to some of the winter time farmers markets to see how we'll keep the local stuff coming).

For us, this all makes sense: Healthier eating that is more in line with environment. The toll that the raising, slaughtering, packaging, and shipping of animal products is well documented. We hope our little bit of a MMM lifestyle will result in a win-win for our family and the earth.

For some added inspiration, I'm thinking of picking up a few books by Michael Pollan through the inter-library loan system. Has anyone read any of these? Thoughts? Is anyone else out there finding success with a vegetarian lifestyle? Feel free to share your story.

Recycling 101

We're two weeks in to the new No Bin, No Barrel rule here in town and I'm disappointed to see first hand that it's not being enforced.

This morning, I watched as one of my neighbors had their lone trash barrel emptied by Patriot (the waste hauler) with no recycling bins in sight. As I said before, this new rule is only going to be successful if two things happen: Enforcement and Education.

So far, neither appear to be happening. I sent our DPW director an email just now saying just that. If you're going to talk the talk, you have to be ready to walk the walk. Granted, this could be an isolated incident (we'll see next week), but if your front line people (the hauler employees) are not sticking to the plan, then you might as well toss that plan right out the window.

Now for the education:

Most of us know this (I hope), but NOT EVERYTHING IS RECYCLABLE. There was a letter to the editor in this week's Sakonnet Times lamenting that even though this person recycles "pretty much everything" all their toy box plastic from a recent party was not picked up. My guess is that the plastic this person is talking about is neither #1 or #2, which is what we're currently limited to. (Check out the Rhode Island Resource Recovery Corporation's list of recycling FAQs and a copy of their Recycling Don'ts brochure for more how-to. Or this quick tutorial on the plastics numbering system.)

Again, this new rule presented the town with a prime opportunity to engage the community with a recycling education campaign. Maybe that's still in the works? Timing is everything though and from where I sit, time is ticking away.