Indicators of Going Green and Sustainability

Are there other factors which tend to run concurrent with being green, having a small carbon footprint, and sustainability? Two things I have seen in my life which usually but not always trend with a sustainable life style are frugality or saving money and a reduction of trash and waste.

There is zero waste/trash in nature without mankind. In nature everything has a use, is recycled and is reused. As much as we can emulate nature in this regard, the better. Yet I go by so many residences and see two huge trash cans overflowing with extra filled trash bags beside them on their once a week pickup day. Yes, the having  one trash can just for recyclables pickup is a great improvement if people will use them but still there is way too much non-recyclables going to the landfill or being dumped in the ocean.  Plastics are the worst culprits; they are built into products to last a couple years (planned obsolescence so we must go out and rebuy the product in a couple years) but the same plastics last in the environment for five hundred years. By comparison, even metal cans eventually rust away.

I do not have a trash pickup service but make a trip to a county trash and recyclable center three miles from our home once every month or two. Let me repeat that I take my trash once every couple months. How so? All my yard wastes and garbage and part of our paper products are turned into garden compost or mulch. Since we eat a lot of our own home garden produce, that puts a lot less metal cans, glass jars and plastic containers into our recyclable cans. What plastic containers we do have, like milk jugs etc, I smash flat by stepping on them so that I am not hauling around air. Ditto for the small amount of aluminum cans we generate. It used to be that metal cans had rims on either end and could be opened from either end. I remember my mom cutting the lids out of both ends of metal cans. Then she put the cut lids into the cans and smashed the whole thing flat. If I could do that today I would only need to take in one trash bin of metal cans a year to recycle them. Some plastic containers like butter tubs and quart yogurt containers can be stacked one inside another and so a year’s worth of tubs take up very little space. We use reusable canvas shopping grocery bags and so do not build up those ubiquitous plastic bags. What paper and cardboard that I do not either use as compost or recycle, I burn. I burn only paper, mainly mail and cereal boxes, and never any plastic. I make the fire in a hardware cloth cage so that it gets plenty of air and does not smolder. I never burn on a windy day or during a drought when vegetation is dried out. So I have very little actual trash, mostly just plastic food wrappers and styrofoam  egg cartons. I really should switch back to cardboard egg containers that are compostable; there is always room for improvement.

I think that being frugal is also usually a sign of a lighter carbon footprint. For example in the above paragraph, we have considerably monthly budget savings by not subscribing to a weekly trash pickup service. That is a win win for our pocketbook and the environment. Likewise, if we reduce our monthly natural gas and electricity bills we are saving money at the same time we are burning less fossil fuel. By driving our newer, lower gas mileage car most of the time and using our older less fuel efficient car as a backup vehicle we have saved about $20 dollars a week on gasoline; that is $80 a month that can go toward the loan on the newer vehicle, while lengthening the life of the backup vehicle and again burning less fossil fuel. If what we cook and eat from our organic garden reduces our grocery bill, it also reduces trash waste and the need for food to be shipped from distant growing areas. So in general, saving money by being frugal and creating less trash waste are indicators that we are at the same time living more sustainably.

Deep Fertility in a Medium Sized Garden

I have already discussed a couple methods of increasing the deep fertility and water holding capacity of garden soil i.e. ways of putting organic material into the top foot to eighteen inches of garden top soil. This is especially important in very droughty sandy soil which by itself is both low in fertility and unable to hold hardly any moisture. For the small but productive postage stamp gardens one can enrich the soil with the double digging method also called trenching. I discussed another method of deep furrow planting followed by hilling. For the medium sized garden where double digging would prove too labor intensive one could use the hill method of growing which is probably most similar to the method used by the native Americans to grow their “three sister” crops of corn, beans and squash with only one tool, the stone bladed hoe. First the “hill” doesn’t always have to be an actual mound; it is just a close planting of seeds in a circular area of relatively rich soil. This soil is enriched by “robbing Peter to pay Paul.” The circular area is enriched by pulling the surrounding area topsoil with the hoe and concentrating it in the three foot diameter “hill.”

Better yet this hill could actually be a hole, a honey hole into which the gardener has dumped skimmed off inverted turf, compost, and a cup of organic fertilizer. There is never enough compost and in a medium sized garden and this is one of the best ways to make it stretch. For melons, squash, cucumbers, corn etc. I dig a hole about a foot deep, trying not to bring any subsoil out of the hole. Topsoil is dug out but not subsoil. I then skim off the top inch of winter ryegrass turf surrounding the hole and invert it into the three foot diameter foot hole and dig some of it into the subsoil. Next I pour in a five gallon bucket of compost into the hole and mix it with the topsoil I had dug out earlier and add my store-bought organic fertilizer. My “hill” or “honey hole” is ready for planting. These hills are in a row with four to six feet between each hill. If every year I move my new hill three feet then after three years the entire row if deeply fertilized with a water holding sponge of organic matter. If I have used this method throughout the garden then the entire garden is of good tilth and drought proofed. I also dig similar holes for tomatoes and bell peppers but the holes are deeper (about two feet deep; I wheel barrow the subsoil out of the garden). The honey holes are about two feet wide with two feet in between hills. I like this method because it makes very good use of scarce compost, drought proofs plants, and reduces the amount of hand digging. The results are long lasting.

What the (Frugal) Poor Man Knows

The frugal man knows that his “ fast foods” are soup and salads. Soups are made from vegetables from his garden and cooked in large batches. This is how the frugal made it through the Depression.

The frugal man knows if company comes you add water to the soup.

The frugal know that oatmeal, rice, and barley all soak up a lot of water.

The frugal know for the price of one large soda a bottle of lemon concentrate can be purchased to make a month’s worth of lemonade.

The frugal man knows that with a fifty-cent, day old French bread loaf sliced in half, he can use his own home made salsa sauce and  a little shredded cheese, to quickly bake or microwave his own pizza stromboli.

The frugal man knows that a toasted cheese sandwich fried with butter and dressed with dill pickles, mayonnaise and garden tomato and lettuce is almost as satisfying as a cheeseburger.

The frugal man knows hot buttered toast with fruit jam is similar to a doughnut shop pastry. Likewise, canned biscuit dough baked on a pan with butter, brown sugar and nuts is as good as cinnamon rolls.

A frugal man knows that a box of overripe bananas can be bought for a pittance then peeled and frozen and put into a food processor to make a nutritious smoothie to match any milk shake.

In short, the frugal man knows how to make inexpensive substitutes for overpriced goods.

Natives and Irrigation

What are the plants you should never need to water? The answer is the ones which are growing wild in your neighborhood, the native plants. If they can grow wild in your area then they can grow in your garden without watering. We had a hard drought almost all of last summer. I had expected the melons, especially the watermelons which probably originated in the Kalahari Desert of Africa to handle the drought the best. I also thought the sweet potatoes, a crop that grows in the hot South and has a long tap root to handle drought well. Both the water melons and sweet potatoes did fairly well in the drought but both required some watering. The only plants which required no irrigation at all was the sunflowers whose wild relatives grew along a nearby creek bank.

The same holds true for ornamental plants in the yard, although sunflowers could just as easily be grown as  ornamental plants as in the vegetable garden. We have also started mimosa trees on the property which are beginning to spread like the weeds which many people consider them to be, but are covered with beautiful fragrant flowers all summer long.  The wild Hoosier ditch lilies have covered one of our road banks for years. Neither the mimosas nor the ditch lilies have ever been watered except by rain. So take a good look around your neighborhood to see what is growing wild and then consider if the wild plants has any close relatives which might be grown as vegetables or fruits. Someday we may not have fresh water for our gardens and yards but the natives should continue to survive on natural rainfall. 

Strange Rotation

For the organic gardener, rotating vegetables within a garden is important both to confuse insect pests and to allow plant diseases time to die out due to the absence of their plant family host. In a small garden in which the beds for each vegetable are close together this may be less than totally successful. If you rotate the white potato bed with the zucchini bed, it will not be too great a task for the potato bugs to find the new potato bed three feet from last year’s potato bed. Also the squash bugs and borers will find their way the three feet to the new zucchini bed. One solution would of course be to separate your beds to the four corners of your back yard but that could cause lighting issues and other problems.

An unorthodox solution might be to not have a plant family in the small garden for three years but to have its culinary equivalent in the garden instead. Sweet potatoes, butternut squash and carrots all come from different plant families and are not much bothered by the same insect pests but from a culinary point of view they all cook up to about the same thing. Similarly, French fries can be made from white potatoes, sweet potatoes or zucchini wedges. Zucchini and cucumbers have similar uses and could be alternated even if they both are in the same family. Some salad greens are in the lettuce family, some in the cabbage family and some in the beet family so one might rotate lettuce with kale and then with chard. Cooked greens could be substituted for green beans one year. Green beans and asparagus are also good culinary substitutes for one another.  White potatoes and rutabagas are from different families but both of them cook up to “mashed potatoes” and serve as similar stew ingredients. The bottom line is that if the small, postage stamp gardener can find enough culinary equivalents  then he can starve insect pests out of existence by planting similar tasting vegetables from different plant families on alternating years.

Fruits and Nuts in the Vegetable Garden

I have long felt that a vegetable garden was a better investment of my time and money than an orchard or raising my own meat. Simply consider that for the cost of a single apple tree I can cover the expenses of an entire vegetable garden for a year. For that expense one must wait several years for any return from a fruit tree but only two or three months for a return from the annuals in the garden. Both green tomatoes and zucchinis make excellent mock apple pies. Cherry pies are outshined by strawberry-rhubarb pies. Melons are equal to any peaches in summer and in the fall and winter, sweet potato pies and pumpkin or winter squash pies and puddings are the standard fare.

So fruits are pretty well covered in the garden for pies and jellies without even considering the wide array of bush and bramble fruits grown around a vegetable garden, but what if I want some nuts in my zucchini bread or in my oatmeal raisin cookies? There are three nut substitutes that can be grown in a vegetable garden. The first is peanuts, a legume which also adds nitrogen to the soil. Peanut plants can also add a lot of fodder to the compost heap.  The second nut substitute is sunflower seeds. A row of sunflowers adds a lot of beauty to a vegetable plot. The third nut substitute is the one which I plan to go with this year, “naked” pumpkin seeds. Although all pumpkin seeds can be roasted in the oven, the hulless “naked seed” varieties work best. Just because you grow a vegetable garden does mean that you must deprive yourself of sweets and nuts. 

Can Vegetable Gardening Save Money on your Grocery Bill?

The best answer to that question is, it depends. If you do not change your eating habits and cooking then, no, not much. The average shopper does not spend very much of his grocery budget in the fresh produce aisle and some of the items he does buy there cannot be grown in the vegetable garden, e.g. bananas, pineapple. Furthermore, much of what a gardener can grow in his garden is inexpensive in the produce aisle, e.g. potatoes, onions and carrots. Many prospective gardeners, when they realize what I have just said decide that vegetable gardening just is not worth the trouble; besides, they kind of enjoy shopping anyway.

If however you also change your cooking and eating habits toward a nutritionally healthier vegetable diet, what my family calls “good old Depression food”, making one meal per day a vegetable soup and another a plate lunch with two vegetable sides then you are not so much replacing what you would have bought in the produce aisle as replacing the expensive prepared ready to serve convenience foods from the frozen food aisles, and that is where the real savings on the grocery bill comes in. For this reason I have always said that when it comes to being frugal, cooking is more important than gardening but gardening vegetables causes the necessary change in cooking. If you grow vegetables, then you will find a way to cook and eat them. I have always felt that there were two kinds of chefs. The first buys expensive ingredients from the store to follow a recipe exactly. The second kind looks at what you have available in the fridge, larder, pantry, and root storage and says, “Oh, turnips, turnip greens, onions and butternut squash, yeah, I can make something good out of that.” This is not to say that a lot of time must be given to food preparation if one is to eat frugally. A large pot of potatoes can be boiled once a week and then put into the fridge to be micro waved and eaten throughout the week. A large slow cooker crock pot of soup can cook over night or while one is at work, part of it eaten over several days and part of it frozen to add variety to future menus. Ditto for hashes and goulashes. Red beans and rice with liberal hot sauce is one of my favorite quick micro wave convenience meals. Salads can be pulled from the fridge and ready in seconds. Vegetable gardening teaches us how to eat and cook frugally just in case hard times come knocking. My wife and I currently eat well and healthily on a grocery budget of less than $200 per month and that includes toiletries, laundry soaps and other miscellaneous bought at a grocery store.