A major new project — unconventional housing

I have a new project in the works and thought I would share it with the world and take advantage of your accumulated wisdom and experience.

After nine months living the Riot life and being a part-time academic in the urban northeast of the US, I’m moving back to Virginia, where I will probably still be a part-time academic but will also be helping to run a very ambitious community garden designed for serious production.

One reason I can do this is I have been offered very low cost, minimal shelter. This past winter I started looking around Pennsylvania College Town for a more-or-less bare, dry space with electricity and running water that I could outfit to accommodate my new, Riot-based lifestyle. Nobody wanted to rent me anything in the area I wanted to live in (with public transport and wi-fi).

But my friends in the Blue Ridge mountains of Virginia, who were already looking after my gardening equipment, worm colonies, hoophouse, and furniture, had the almost-perfect space: a large, dry, clean room in an uninsulated cinderblock building with windows. It is set on a hilltop and surrounded by deciduous trees, so there’s some heat gain in the winter but not too much in the summer. The prevailing winds are from the northwest. The four windows of my room face north and east. To the south of my room is another large room, used as a garage and workshop, and below me is yet another garage. (Place used to be owned by a truck driver who did a lot of automotive projects. So there are two stories, three big spaces, two of them garages, on the top and north side of a hill. I will live behind one garage and over the other.) My room has a plywood floor, roof trusses that are only about 6′4″ above that floor, and electricity, but no running water, no ceiling. There is a wood stove in the garage room to the south of me and I have permission to put a woodstove in my space, tapping into the same chimney.

My plan is to build a design-for-disassembly (collapsible), well-insulated, small room modeled after a Vardo, or gypsy wagon — about 6 x 10 — right in the middle of that space, probably from SIPs (structural insulated panels). In the dead of winter, that space will allow me to do some very minimal cooking in a warm space and provide a cozy place to read, work, and sleep. In the more moderate seasons, I will live a little more large in the bigger space. Composting toilet, rainwater catchment, some wood heat, eventually perhaps some wind or solar power driving RV or boat-type appliances. (I already bought the freezer/refrigerator, a little chest model.)To start out, I will just be using the same low-wattage electrical appliances and butane burner I use for my all-electric studio apartment here in PA College Town. I managed to get down to about 60 kwh a month here, sometimes lower, plus an 8-ounce canister of butane.

Even though the property feels private and rural once the trees leaf out and hide the developments nearby, I will be on a city bus line (important since I sold the car a couple of years ago) and will have internet access. According to the architect I talked to I am not breaking any zoning rules or laws because the space doesn’t qualify as a dwelling. If Cousin Martha wants to sleep in the garage, apparently that level of eccentricity is not yet illegal where I am going.

It will be like living out of a modest-sized RV situated in a rather nice garage where I also happen to be storing all of my furniture.

OK! That’s a long setup for my first question about systems! I want to build about a six-foot counter with everything I need to wash food and dishes. It should have separate dispensers for potable water and water for washing. I need to be able to drain the water tidily into a five-gallon or so bucket. I don’t mind spending a modest amount of money but want to look first at repurposed and recycled. Rather than use a lot of rinsewater, I picture dipping a sponge into soapy water, scrubbing the dishes, and placing them in a rack where they are then rinsed with a hand-held sprayer.

Any thoughts on this topic would be helpful, also anyone who has experience using a woodstove in an uninsulated building — how well does that work? I will have a pretty good supply of free wood. I don’t plan to try to get it very warm, but it would be nice to prevent things from freezing. Temps will occasionally get into the low teens in this location, and in the winter go below freezing on a pretty regular basis. But it rarely stays very cold for very long. Heat and humidity are actually a bigger issue.

Mushrooms leave footprints

I had no idea that Chester County, Pa., was one of the important mushroom-growing centers in the world. Neither had I any remote idea how they were produced, though I had a vague understanding of very rich compost being part of the story.
I read today that the crop (as commercially grown) is very energy-intensive. The crop is apparently climate-controlled 24/7, going from heat to air-conditioning and dehumidification to avoid spots and other imperfections. Good reason to grow them at home, give them up, or find a “green” producer.
I try to buy as little refrigerated food as possible, but really like mushrooms for my vegetable stock, not to mention their nutritional value. I wonder how much of that value survives the drying process, and whether mushrooms grown for the dried-and-bagged market are raised in the same energy-hogging, climate-controlled environment as the fresh ones?

On the other hand…

The rest of us, whose average incomes and living spaces are so much smaller, have a pretty powerful incentive to save money by reducing consumption. At my house, the cash difference between heat and no-heat has always justiified some cutbacks, but once I started really aiming for low kwhs the reductions became dramatic.
I wonder how much more there is to cut, though, in houses with tighter budgets than mine, or small children, or…
I wish I could read more about this sort of thing. Wonder what percentage of income buys relatively carbon-innocent activity?

And that top-earning 30 to 40%…

…they’re the ones who are consuming the bulk of the US consumables and emitting most of the emissions. An op-ed in the NY Times a few weeks ago said each person in the big 4 western economies — North America, Japan, Australia, and Western Europe — was consuming, on average, 32 times as much as a citizen of a developing country. And in our country, half of the income is earned by the top 20% of the people.
Now, they don’t spend all their money producing direct emissions, but they do have the most SUVs and the biggest houses. So responsibility for emissions falls primarily on Americans whose backs are not against the wall, and who have the means to change if they can find the motivation.

Friend Kyle pointed out recently in a R4A post that 50 to 60% of emissions originated at the household or individual level. He also wrote that a 30 to 40% reduction was really not very difficult. So, just figuring on the back of an envelope, you can make a reasonable guess that if everybody at the top of the heap would cut back by 30% on just household and automotive emissions, fly less, shop at farmers markets, and lay off the beef, we could see emissions drop a lot. The really big spenders could hire me and Juan and Maria to compost their scraps, hang their laundry out to dry, and take care of their organic vegetable gardens. Couldn’t that add up to as much as 12% in one year?

Once committed to greening, wouldn’t these movers and shakers start demanding renewable energy for all and more public transport for the rest of us?
I think Friedman’s wrong on this. I think we need to win over the well-off people if we’re going to get anywhere.

What’s the real potential of R4A type activism?

I’ve had a lot on my mind related to climate change activism. I did what I could with the Focus the Nation effort on campus, showing McDonough and Braungart’s “Next Industrial Revolution” to a packed hall. (Thanks to Tony Viscardi for making it required viewing by his architecture students!) I’m working on a series of articles that could provide valuable lessons for small-scale growers and cooks. But what I often picture myself doing is going out on the civic-league circuit with a slide show.
Not an “inconvenient truth” big picture slide show, but a “what we can do now” slide show. I’ve been teaching history of art, architecture, and design for a while now, so I know how to do slide shows, by God.
I’m still stewing over Tom Friedman dissing the personal conservation movement. I think he underestimates the possibility for serious change in the behavior of the educated, high-consuming, top 30 or 40% income class of Americans, the very group that is most susceptible to this kind of persuasion (since they have time to read about it). I also think he overestimates the likelihood that electoral politics will produce real leadership. I think elected officials will lag somewhat behind the educated, moneyed class, mainly because they are so responsive to industry’s cries of protest against anything that might affect their short-term bottom line.
A very charming person issued a “less garbage” challenge on Gristmill the other day, and I was struck by how tentative, even apologetic, she (?) was about what she was asking. She even mentioned her household’s many electrical appliances and their desire to avoid “drastic” changes.
Why so cautious? What’s so precious about our domestic habits that they can’t be improved by substantial, meaningful change? And as important as waste reduction is, we need to keep our proportions straight: the place to put the most effort is in reducing driving, heating, hot water, coal-fired electricity, flying, air-freighted produce, and conventional meat (mainly beef) and dairy.
If you cruise around the web looking for close analysis of consumption patterns and their effects, you’ll probably come away, as I did, with the impression that the Europeans are out ahead of us by several leagues, and they’re *still* having trouble meeting Kyoto standards. It takes time to get enough people on board.
So I don’t get this business of disrespecting personal reductions. It looks like a damn fine way of converting words into practice and at the same time putting more people in a state of mind to demand some help from their elected officials.

Advice for low-carbon dieters.

According to Richard Woods, Times Online (UK), Feb. 3: Scientists are refining the “eat local” message to take more GHG emission factors into account. While we wait for the development of LCA (life cycle analysis) data, some familiar rules still hold true: Eat less meat; no air-freighted food; reduce waste; make compost; reduce packaging. Most GHGs are emitted in food production (especially true for meat). Bulk transport by land or sea is of much lower overall significance.

Late update (March 14): I’m a little skeptical of these messages in the press, wondering where they originate. Just recently read a comparison posted by a southwest Virginia farmer who calculated that his pickup-truck-to-local-market transport operation was 32 times more efficient than the typical tractor-trailer-to-supermarket system. See http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03/07/AR2008030702520_pf.html

Funny stuff at the “Cleaner Plate Club”

http://cleanerplateclub.wordpress.com/

Go over to The Cleaner Plate Club for a very serious but also quite funny post on the “downer” meat problem. And just before that is a nice greens-and-beans recipe with chard, garbanzos, and pasta, with another funny riff on the children’s take on the meal.

Electric laundry

I think that about once a month I’m going to find myself at the laundromat, using the washer, and occasionally the dryer. My little home-operated pressure washer works, but if I don’t stay right on top of it all the time (which amounts to pretty much always having wash hanging) I get too far behind and need a couple big loads. Today it’s towels and rags.

Attention from the Wall Street Journal

I generally stay on the sidelines during Peak Oil discussions, because I’ve never done the reading and don’t know when I might get to it. Maybe never, as it falls outside my general areas of competence. I believe there’s a real good chance that my overconsumption has had or will have a negative impact on the blameless, so I am on-board with the 90% reduction goals.
But I did notice that the Wall Street Journal published an article a day or two back on Peak Oil that acknowledged the variety of believers while making the entire community sound like they needed to have their meds tweaked.
As Tom Philpott noted some time back on the “locavore” backlash, this invites creative interpretation on our part! I find it interesting that they chose to address the issue, found their tone to be both careful and gently mocking, and wonder what kind of response they’ll get from readers. Interesting that (as best I recall) they didn’t associate Peak Oil-inspired activity with Global Warming activism, when the two so often coincide. I’ll have to read it again.

“Cook, is the answer… Cook, and evangelize.”

“By growing or buying good things and cooking them well, you, and your neighbor, can effect the small but collectively crucial changes that could take the human race, and its fellow creatures, safely through the twenty-first century. People often ask me, when I proselytize in public places: ‘But what can I do?’ Cook, is the answer. Cook with knowledge. Cook and evangelize.”
(Colin Tudge, Future Food, 1980.)

What my winter diet looks like.

(*means I eat it twice a week or more.)

*Oatmeal with Martha’s Miracle Mix (flax seed, nutritional yeast, cinnamon, and calcium citrate)
Oats with almond butter
*Bread (homemade, mostly whole wheat with sprouted wheatberries and sunflower seeds)
Cornbread, sometimes fried and sometimes baked

Chili
*Bean spread with hot pepper and dried tomatoes.
*Beans and rice (rice, cooked in vegetable stock, garnished with toasted sesame and sunflower seeds)
Lemon-lentil soup

Frittata with vegetables and a crust of ground sesame seed and salt
Yogurt with oats and fruit (or sometimes with Martha’s Miracle Mix)

Anchovy/sundried tomato sauce over pasta with greens.
Salmon cakes (canned wild salmon)
Sardines from the can (once in a while)

*Steamed dark greens (kale, collards, turnip greens) with garlic and onion
Occasional steamed broccoli or rabe, chard, beet greens, or spinach.
*Curried winter squash with sweet potato and fruit
*Carrot juice with apple and ginger, sometimes with beet, sometimes with red cabbage
*Roasted winter vegetables (sometime in crock pot, sometimes in oven): parsnips, potatoes, sweet potatoes, onions, garlic, turnip, beet, cabbage, carrots
Sautéed red cabbage with apples and onions
Grated red cabbage, carrot, and sprout salad with oil, lemon juice and balsamic vinegar

*Lemon-garlic-tahini sauce, mainly for greens, but sometimes for other vegetables or beans or rice
Occasional salads of baby greens (baby mustard greens)

*Crockpot apple crisp with oats and walnuts and maple syrup, often cranberries, also.
Occasional vanilla pudding – from egg yolks and cream, with maple syrup and vanilla extract.
Occasional almond cookies with raspberry jam or walnut cookies with coconut and orange marmalade
Occasional waffles with maple syrup and butter.

*apples
*grapefruit
Occasional kiwi fruit
*Cranberries as long as I can get them
Other citrus fruit or pears from time to time
*Dried fruit – pears and prunes

*walnuts, almonds, occasional cashews, brazil nuts
*sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds
butter, miso, Bragg’s sauce
*maple syrup, raw clover honey, buckwheat honey, molasses

*Coffee – sometimes with cream
*hibiscus tea
occasional spice tea or green tea

Choosing fruit in the dead of winter.

This is the area of worst temptation for me. I have local and organic sources for almost all my vegetables now, as well as eggs and dairy, but I crave fruit, and in Pennsylvania in the winter there’s not much to choose from besides apples. I love apples. I eat apples. But since I’m also buying non-local fruit from time to time, I want to consider the wisdom of my choices.

What I didn’t buy at my favorite conventional grocery store:
Three fruits really tempted me, but two are on the “dirty dozen” list for pesticide residues (from the Environmental Resource Group site) and the other was imported from Italy:

deep red cherries, imported, $4.99 a pound.

• I usually pass on imported conventional fruit, because of food miles and pesticide questions. Sometimes I make exceptions, but didn’t this time because…
• Cherries are high on the pesticide residue list, 7 of 45, 75/100.
• I can get them locally in the summer and they’re wonderful, so I’ll just wait.

strawberries, 2 pounds for $5. Looked terrific. Florida.

• Strawberries are one of my favorite foods, and I usually consider fruit from Florida to be marginally acceptable in terms of food miles, but…
• Tom Philpott’s article in Grist about soil treatments for strawberry-growing has really put me off the conventional berry.
• Strawberries are high on the pesticide residue chart: #6 of 45, 83/100 pesticide score
• I have often been really disappointed with the flavor of conventional berries, and think I ought to just hold off for the fresh, local variety in the spring and summer. But this is tough for me to do.

kiwi, 3 for a dollar. italy

• very low on the pesticides chart: #38 of 45, 14/100 pesticide score.
• normally I would consider kiwi because of their price, nutrition, keeping qualities, and low pesticide score, but… these appeared to be from Italy, and I had other fruit choices.

What I did buy in the fruit department.

plastic bag of cranberries, $1.99, from Maine

• Not listed on the pesticide chart, but since it’s a relative of blueberries, I’ll guess that it is grown in a similar manner (not a very good basis for guessing). Blueberries are a pretty safe choice, at #32 and a score of 24/100. From what I have been able to learn from a quick look online, the Cranberry Institute took steps in 2004 to increase grower’s knowledge of relative pesticide risks and to encourage IPM (integrated pest management). There was a reference to an economic collapse of the market in the 1990s. Paradise Meadow is the brand I bought, which is unfortunately described on its website as produced by the “Worldwide leaders in technologically advanced cranberry based ingredients.” That doesn’t sound so wonderful.
• I love to cook with cranberries in the winter. They are good baked with apples in a crisp. I’ve been thinking of trying them in a bread pudding, sweetened with apple juice and maple syrup. I also like to add them to a curry of squash, sweet potato, and apple.

lemons, 2 for a dollar, from Florida

• relatively low on the pesticides chart #25 of 45, 31/100 pesticide score.
• One of my favorite sauces is made with lemon juice, tahini, olive oil, and garlic with seasoned salt or miso. It’s wonderful on greens. It has the deeply satisfying feel of butter, and there’s not much it doesn’t go with.
• I love lemons and will continue to buy the Florida kind until I have a good substitute. I’ve read about Meyer lemons, which grow on a bush suited to non-tropical zones, and my friend Rachel has a friend with a productive lemon tree in his house, but for me, for now, lemons come from the conventional grocery store. I still have a big bottle of the concentrate, but won’t buy more; I’m using what I have for cleaning.

pink grapefruit, Florida, 5 for $1.59

• relatively low on the pesticides chart #27 of 45, 31/100 pesticide score.
• I love to eat citrus fruit in the winter, and these small grapefruit are just the right size for breakfast. They only cost about 32¢ each. Last winter I religiously ate one every single day and longed for them when the season was over. This year I’ll try to moderate my consumption by alternating Florida citrus with locally grown and stored apples, dried fruit, and cranberries.

Update: Back to the store 8 days later. This time I went for fewer, larger, more expensive grapefruit with no packaging, lemons (no packaging) (both from Florida), kiwi from Argentina shipped in cardboard crates and available to me with no additional packaging, local apples (shrink wrap and styrofoam), blood oranges from California (sh wr & styfm), and a cellophane (?) bag of dried pears, also from California.
These fruits, along with nuts (almonds and walnuts), are the Achilles heel of my Low-Carbon Diet efforts. They come from far away, they are conventionally farmed, they are often unsustainably packaged, and I buy them at a conventional grocery store, though it is one I admire for its decision to put a huge produce section at the center of the store.
Valley Farm Market, a local chain, is serious about produce and keeps quality and selection very high and prices quite low. It’s on the bus line, so is accessible to me and my neighbors, who live in an underserved area, not quite a food desert. (I’ll write about this another day.)
Valley Farm’s clientele are more working class than the patrons of Wegman’s, which does carry more local and organic produce, but is a little boutiquey for me. And Wegman’s, I understand, does not allow the city buses onto its parking lot, so there’s a hike involved. I try not to take this personally, but it has been suggested that discouraging customers who use public transportation raises the tone.

Carbon farming – negative impact?

I’ve been reading about sequestration of carbon in agricultural soils and am wondering whether small-scale versions would be worthwhile for householders looking to improve garden beds, enrich soils with humus, and produce usable crops. What are the plants that would provide the most benefit in terms of carbon capture from the air? I’d like to try sesame followed by red winter wheat. Wonder if that would work.

Energy: casual sunpower

I am working on a simple “sungrabber” device to make the most of cold sunny days in northeast Pennsylvania. I have a big south-facing bay window in my studio — a big area of glass relative to the total size of the place. As an experiment, I put a large sheet of black construction paper backed by the lid of a plastic bin into the space between the inner pane and the storm window, left the inner sash open about an inch, then used a couple of thermometers to judge the effect. The cooler air from the room was pulled into the space and heated, sometimes as much as 22 degrees warmer than the next window set up the same way without the construction paper or bin lid. Today I’ll try to build the thing, in preparation for a partly-sunny day tomorrow.

Electricity: Peak load awareness.

I am just starting to understand the significance of peak load demand in relation to the building of new power plants. Though I need to do a lot more reading on the topic, the short version is that a KwH saved at 4 pm in August is worth a lot more than one saved at 6 am in April. As I understand it, reducing demand between 1 and 7 pm is best. Don’t know how much that varies by season or geography, but summer afternoons on the east coast are killers for sure. So I set my refrigerator to run just before and just after that time. Let’s see if I can come up with a routine that lets me keep the door closed during that period as well.

Garbage.

Jan. 8. Took out 1.8 pounds of trash. First trip to the garbage bin since November. This represents about one month’s trash as I was gone over the holidays. But there’s quite a bit of paper scattered around the apartment!

More local all the time

I’ve worked out a way to get local (30 miles) organic winter vegetables! My first delivery was yesterday. Sarah, who teaches part-time in the same department I’ve been teaching in part-time, works on my CSA farm in the summer. She shops at a certified organic Mennonite farm during the winter and will pick up my order when she does her own shopping and bring it in with her on a school day. I give her cash to cover her gas and trouble. It ends up being pretty reasonable, at least judging by this week’s haul. I would say I have 30+ servings of apples and veggies and the total cost to me was $20. I think that’s comparable to what I was paying for the CSA this summer, plus I get to pick and choose and skip deliveries if I want to.

Following one of Sharon’s suggestions (see Casaubon’s book on the blogroll), I’m trying to grow some greens indoors from root vegetables. She suggested turnips, but I didn’t have any, so I put a ratty old beet in the window in a small pot and am hoping it will remember how to make greens. I’ve sprouted both quinoa and buckwheat groats this week and made salads out of sprouted grains and grated carrot and red cabbage with olive oil, lemon juice, and balsamic vinegar. Awfully good.

I’ve also started experimenting with another bread technique, which has so far produced one pretty-good loaf. The cold temps in here have made bread-baking and sprout-growing a little tricky, but the low kwhs have been a very gratifying payback. According to my electric utility, my usage is just over 10% of average for an all-electric, one-person apartment the size of mine. That feels good.

I’m thinking about starting a second worm colony to give to the Lehigh students at the Green House. I cleaned the fridge and culled the vegetable bins a couple of days ago and now have a bucket of food waste and damp sawdust. Not sure I’m ready to give up any of my workers yet, though.

Discouraged about recycling

I thought that if a recycling center accepted materials, that meant they recycled those materials. I didn’t know my trash was just driven around in a truck, shuffled, and thrown into a landfill. It does make my own task easier in some ways, though, since I don’t have to worry about finding a way to the cycling center for all these drink cartons and styrofoam trays from the grocery store, since it doesn’t appear that they will be used for anything. I may have a use for some of them myself, I guess. The job now is to learn a little more about what they *do* use, then just stop buying this other stuff, and let the store know why I’m not buying it. I’m going to wind up giving up entire food groups at this rate. (On the other hand, there’s my new Mennonite organic farm. They have cows. Maybe they will sell me butter wrapped in paper, and yogurt in a jar. I’m saving the news about the Burkholders for tomorrow’s post.)
And on the good side, there’s those worms. My worms are doing good environmental work. Not one scrap of organic matter goes to the landfill these days, and I’ll soon be fertilizing my microgreens with the drained liquid from the bin. My Christmas cactus already loves it.

Domestic goddess.

I made a beautiful mini-loaf of my famous low-impact crock pot bread, plus a batch of spicy bean spread. I have a jar of buckwheat groats sprouting and another jar of quinoa. I’m hoping homegrown sprouts, grasses, and microgreens, along with conventional cabbage and whatever I can get from the garden (kale and parsley), will largely substitute for summer CSA veggies. Maybe some wild greens if I figure that out. I definitely know dandelions.
I tried brushing a little egg wash on the bread to see if it would brown a little, and it did, just a tad, and looks appetizing. Threw the rest of the wash plus another egg into the slow cooker once the bread was done and had a hot openface egg sandwich. Before bed I want to make a salad with carrots and red cabbage. Maybe apple. With balsamic vinegar.
The green tomatoes I saved from the garden are ripening in a brown paper bag on top of the fridge. About half of them are reddish now.

An update on food

This past month, during which my CSA ended for the year, I spent $186.41 on food, including meals out. That feels like a lot. It was 41% local (mostly organic), 34% dry bulk (mostly organic), and 25% conventional produce and processed food. I think those numbers are going to improve next month because I have a new source of local organic veggies and I am doing a lot better about fruit.

I also fiddled around with a personal way of evaluating my diet that breaks things down a little more — for instance, I give carrots a better grade than farmed trout; avoid the “dirty dozen” for pesticides, etc. And I think patronizing a restaurent that puts collards in its burritos is definitely socially responsible! (Tulum, in Bethlehem’s south side, near Lehigh U. Beth-Mex cuisine.)

I am interested in how a conventional shopper could minimize environmental damage and personal hazards, especially during the winter, when eating local is inconvenient, if not impossible. Especially if you’re not into driving all over. The shortest answer is “less meat, less dairy” but there are other choices that matter, too, I think.