What If

What if in a suburban neighborhood a block of neighbors decided to pool their backyards. Then they could have a cow, maybe only a small cow, and then each household could help tend the cow. Even Violet gives about 2 gallons on average a day, which is plenty for one family. Maybe each household would have to compromise and take only a gallon. Or maybe, everyone would see that the benefit was more important than complete equity in milk distribution. Perhaps, the resulting calf- there is always a calf when you're keeping a cow in milk- could be turned into ground beef and shared equally. Imagine a neighborhood where the people were producers instead of only consumers.

Sure, sure, there are logistical problems, and anyone who has been in a cooperative knows the work will not be divided evenly. But again, maybe the benefits would be more important than the headaches.

What, you may be wondering, would be the benefits?

1. Fresh, raw, unhomogenized milk. For the squeamish, they could pasteurize it themselves. This is a benefit beyond the ken of most people today. Most of the things done for "safety" regarding milk are actually more closely linked to shelf life.

2. A relationship with a cow. Cows are good for people; they make you be calm because you're going to lose if your bad attitude irritates the 1200 pound cow.

3. Nice, lush, low-maintenance lawns. Cows are good for grass and they will mow it just right, given proper handling.

4. A reason to work things out with your neighbors. Now, if your neighbor is annoying you, the easiest solution is avoidance. When you and that annoying neighbor are sharing a cow, you're going to have to face those issues and find solutions. That's better for the whole world.

5. A reason to be outside. Cows require some work, and most of it cannot be done sitting on your butt watching television. So, at least once a week, you'll have to go outside a couple of times and commune with the cow, or at least make sure she has food and water and has been milked.

6. Closer link to nature. Cows have less mediating their relationship with nature, so when working with a cow, you become more attuned, as well. Cold has more meaning when someone you care about lives outside. Heat, too, is more significant if it triples the amount of water you must haul. What exactly is growing underfoot takes on significance when it will appear on your OWN table in the form of milk.

I cannot see this happening with ordinances and what not, but wouldn't it be amazing if someone out there could make it work. Even one successful neighborhood cow could start a movement.

Composting toilet

This post has been sitting blank for more than a year; it' the post that made me wonder if I really thought blogging was a thing I wanted to do. I fretted about actually talking about this, because my feelings run strong and I worried about offending people. And then I came back to blogging and this blank draft is sitting in my post list and I think I have to talk about this.

I live in a place that seems (at least to someone from Texas) to have an unlimited amount of water. There's water everywhere. It falls regularly from the skies; the rivers seem to never be dry. Our sandy soil stays saturated for weeks in the spring and the occasional week throughout the summer and fall. So, why would I worry about water?

First, water is limited. Really. It is. There is only so much, and only so much of it is potable. Being from Texas, I know that water does not always fall from the sky when you need it.

Second, we have a spring that we get water from. This means we can actually have NO water if we forget to turn off a garden hose. Truthfully, the spring recovers pretty fast- about 2 hours in high summer- so we have never been without water long. But if you have never experienced the thrill/horror of turning on the tap and no water coming out, then you'll have to believe me that it is a sobering experience. It helps me not take water so much for granted.

Because I was always on city water in Texas, it never really registered. If the water did not come out of the tap, it mean the city had a problem to fix. Can you imagine a robocall telling everyone in Fort Worth there would be no water for two hours?

Third, there's the whole potability thing. Probably everyone who reads this post shits in their drinking water.Then, that water gets "cleaned" and cycled back into the system so you can either drink it or shit in it again. I hope you're a little grossed out at this point.

Coming to this realization, coupled with trying to conserve our spring, led me to try something that seemed completely crazy- much crazier than cloth diapers. I now compost our waste, "humanure" as it's called. While I have you cringing already, you might check to see what your city does with the human waste cleaned from your city's water. Around here, the guy who empties septic tanks sprays that "manure" on hay fields. I'm not sure exactly what regulations apply regarding when that field can be used to feed animals, but I am sure that my compost is sitting much longer and most definitely turning into dirt before it's used agriculturally.

And really, what ARE they supposed to do with all this shit we're dumping down our pipes?

So, as I try to keep at least on foot off the soapbox, I'll say we've been doing this for an entire year as a family. We made it through last winter by building a box with a toilet seat that a five gallon bucket sits in. The bargain I made to get everyone in this house on board is that I switch out the buckets and clean them. It's not such a big deal, except maybe in January. Things I've learned: I need three compost piles to get a family of five through winter; the compost pile compacts faster if I put a little sprinkling of compost on the finished bucket; everyone must be very clear on which bins are aging and which compost bins are active. I had two bins that should have been ready this fall, but the kids added kitchen scraps and cat litter in the spring, so those will wait awhile longer. Pine shavings break down better that cedar.

For now, we still have a flush toilet with a humanure receptacle beside it. Jason insists that people will not visit us otherwise. I'm not convinced, but sometimes, the more squeamish person should set the bar.

No Dryer

We chose to not have a dryer when we moved in here. We had experimented with this from time to time, but this house is so tightly configured that the space that might hold a dryer was quickly occupied by other necessaries.

It's been over three year; we've made it three winters. Actually the winters are not even the most difficult season. Since we run the wood stove throughout the winter, the house is relatively dry and laundry dries pretty well. I can set a drying rack in front of the stove loaded with laundry before bed, and it's all dry in the morning.

Today's weather presents the real difficulty. It has rained pretty steadily since we've been back from Maine, and there was a lot of laundry to wash when we got home. So, with steady shuffling and a fan, I've gotten most of it washed and the last "catch up" load is hanging in the laundry room.

We talked about taking it to the laundrymat, but the dryers there smell burned. We are tired of hearing the fan running, but it seems like a pretty good compromise.

Raising Chicks

If you've dreamed of raising your own chickens, you have probably read the long list of things you must do to keep them alive- keeping them an exact temperature, feeding them only chick starter, giving no scraps, etc. You may have decided not to handle them too much because they might get dropped. Maybe you've designed the perfect brooder.

I'm going to share with you a bit of advice the lady at the feed store gave me- "They're chickens!"

Many moons ago my friend got chickens, and within the first twenty-four hours she had offered them apple. It did not take long to assess that this would not kill day old chicks. When ours arrived the other day, we gave them their initial beak dip, a tray of chicken mash, and then a few seed heads from the garden.

I do use the chicken electrolyte stuff for the first couple of days because I figure being shipped is not that easy on a chicken's system. However, we are not using special chick food this time. Maybe they will not grow as fast, but I'm not too worried about that. And the seed heads lead to another way in which I officially disregard some of what I've read about raising chicks.

Those chicks were SO excited by the seed heads that I let the kids take the "pet" chickens outside to see what they would do. The thing that should NOT have been a surprise is that these precocial birds began foraging immediately. They love being in the grass and when given the opportunity, lay on their sides to try their hands at dust bathing. Also, they enjoy feasting on bugs; the children bring them crickets and grasshoppers, but they like looking for them.

They liked it so much that I began questioning the whole brooding them thing. We brood chicks in great big plastic tubs with modified lids. We put pine bedding in the bottom. The fact is, even with pretty rigorous attention, they smell. I have accepted a bit of odor as a given. However, seeing them in the grass made me think that even if they spent only part of the day in the grass the odor in the house would be less.

The next question was keeping them that perfect 90 degrees they supposedly require. I already do not use a thermometer. It is much easier to monitor the chicks. If they are all clustered together or peeping loudly, they are cold and need the light on or closer. If they are all avoiding the light, they are too hot. We were not keeping the light on at all within the first two hours because no amount of moving the light away seemed to bring them into a fluidly moving cluster. Once the light was off, they happily moved throughout the tub doing their chicken business. They still definitely want the light at night, and they want it pretty close to the top of the tubs.

Since they did not seem to want a light during the day, I decided to build a small chick "tractor". The idea was for it to be small enough that Ezra and Phaedra could carry it, but big enough for all the chicks to be in it comfortably. With ample help in figuring out how to do an a-frame, we now have a 3 x 5 grazer. It is about 3 feet tall. It is not predator proof and it has no nest box, but it means the chicks can spend part of each day on grass. There are, of course, problems.

The chicks are so small that it must be completely flush with the ground or they can pop out. You might think, "Big deal!" unless you have tried to put a stiff frame completely flush against the ground. Even very smooth ground has slight variations that would allow a chick to get out. The solution has been to put rolled up beach towels outside the edge to cover any gaps. And within a week or two, they will be big enough that this will be less of a problem.

I wish I has made it narrower because it is pretty hard to fish those little bits of fluff from the far edges. I did put in two doors, but that isn't that much help. I wish I had incorporated handles into the pieces that are about halfway up each side so it would be still easier to carry. I wish I had framed out the door area to give it a bit more security and rigidity.I'm wondering if a couple of squares would work better than a rectangle. And so on.

Still, I'm glad they can be on the grass some. I figure they will be better foragers, which is part of their work. We have been baffled in the past by how long it takes chickens to start foraging when we finally move them from the brooder to outside. Maybe this will solve that problem.

A Question

Jason and I gave up nonstick pans around the time we married. It seemed that the nonstick coating was not entirely non toxic once it began to wear off.

We discovered the beauty of good stainless steel cookware and cast iron and enameled crockery. The thing is, with very little care, these forms of cookware are nonstick and easier to clean than the other. I can use BonAmi or Baking soda or the occasional scrubbing pad with impunity. The cookware we assembled fifteen years ago still looks perfect, and I figure our children can use it when were gone. The cookware it replaced was less than five years old and pretty worn out.

I like that these things will not need replacing. And my question is- Who benefits from selling cookware that will not last a lifetime? Certainly not the user.

The Unquestioned

I think I'll start a new stream of posts on this topic. If you have read Ishmael, you have at least considered the idea of "mother culture" before; I like to find places where I've just accepted what I've been socialized to accept. Then, I like to look a little more closely and see what is really behind it.

The current one is about hand lotion and sodium laurel sulfate and shampoo.

When I was about eight and visiting my grandmother, who knew everything about keeping house and tending herself, she said, "Well, Sister, your hands need some lotion. Here- put this on and you should do it every day." I slathered on that lotion that smelled exactly like my perfect grandmother, delighting in the smell and the feeling of being like her. The slimy feeling on my hands was kind of gross, but I was a well-behaved child, and I tried really hard to do as she advised. I have used hand lotion pretty miuch daily ever since.

My first shampoo memory involves a green bottle on the side of the tub and then a clear bottle with a picture of Eve draped in flowers. Again, the smells in these two bottles make an even stronger memory than anything else. I also remember my perfect grandmother once saying nothing cleaned hair "these days" like her mother's homemade soap. She said they would wash their hair once a week, then braid it, and that was it until the next hair washing.

The thing I am questioning is the value of these products and if we have really progressed with all our washing and slathering. Someone suggested to me that we have become addicted to sodium laurel sulfate, and if we give our skin some time, we can just use soap on our hair and oil when our skin needs a little help. I have tried before, but I am trying again, as my question to reduce our plastic intake is never-ending, and it is surprising how much of the "new" plastic in our house is from hygiene products.

I have not used shampoo in two weeks, and there were about three really scary days that involved me actually hiding my hair. Then, I used baking soda paste followed by a cider vinegar rinse, and things look pretty awesome. The baking soda comes in a paper box and the vinegar I can either make myself or buy in a glass bottle. Side benefits are that my hair doesn't seem to tangle anymore and it's easier to put up. I figure the hair oils play into this, but I reiterate, my hair looks great, not nasty.

I'm using a homemade hand salve composed of beeswax and olive oil. Again, it took a few days, but my fingers are not split, and the feet I abuse by going barefooted as much as possible seem to have many fewer cracks. I have tried a million things for my feet and my cracked finger tips, so I am pretty amazed with the difference. What I understand is that the ingredients actually dry out our skin and hair so we soak up this little bit of oil but are ultimately more parched.

I'm not really willing to try to convince you, because I can already here the, "No, but my hair..." comments, and it has to be up to you. I'm just saying if you get really tired of bring all that trash into your house and your hands and hair being a mess, you could at least try this. It's a lot cheaper than any other thing I've heard of.