anotherkindofdrew blog

This Christmas we’ll be swamped with offers, ads and invitations to buy more stuff. Pan and I do everything we can though to avoid the commercialization of a holiday that is so special to us both. One of the ways we do that is to make gifts for all of our loved ones. Below is a video of me starting our gifts for this year followed by some links to some really cool DIY Christmas ideas!

• A Do-It-Yourself Christmas (34 gifts you can make)
• 50 Christmas Gifts You Can Make
• DIY Christmas Gifts
• Some pretty cool Instructables

The post below was originally published on The Good Human. Run by David, The Good Human aims to be a destination that encourages people to be better humans through working to clean up the environment, being active in political issues and being more aware of one’s life and surroundings. If you aren’t already reading him daily I strongly encourage you to. His posts are informative and easy reads.

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We all end up with it in our house – old radios, televisions, computers, CFL’s, portable CD players, tape decks – but do you know what to do with it when you are ready to dispose of it? Many communities have made it illegal to dispose of e-waste in your regular trash because of the dangerous chemicals that can be found inside electronics, which include toxins like lead, cadmium, beryllium oxide, lithium, mercury, sulphur, and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs). These items need to recycled carefully and safely, and luckily there are different options to look into to make sure it gets done that way:

• The US Postal Service will recycle, for free, inkjet cartridges, PDAs, Blackberries, digital cameras, iPods and MP3 players – without having to pay for postage. They have envelopes in the post office for sending these items.
• Staples will recycle computers, office technology products, ink and toner cartridges, cell phones and other personal electronics, and rechargeable batteries.
• Best Buy recycles e-waste from any manufacturer, and takes just about anything electronic, including TVs, DVD players, computer monitors, audio and video cables, cell phones, and more. Most things are recycled absolutely free, with a few restrictions.
• IKEA stores will recycle burnt out CFL lightbulbs
• Apple Computer will recycle your old computer and monitor for free – with the purchase of any qualifying Apple computer or monitor. However, they will also recycle your cell phone or iPod free of charge with no purchase necessary.
• Waste Management, the huge trash services company, will recycle fluorescent light bulbs, batteries, electronics, and other universal wastes with their recycling kits.
• Office Depot takes back recycling, but charges you for the small, medium or large box that you can fill to the brim with your stuff.
• Dell Computers recycles through a partnership with Staples. They also work hard to keep e-waste out of developing nations.

With all the different companies willing to recycle your e-waste free of charge, there really is no need to pay for recycling. If you don’t have access to any of the resources listed above and need to find an e-waste recycler in your area, check out websites like E-Cycling Central, Earth 911, the National Recycling Coalition, or Call 2 Recycle. Whatever you do, please don’t just throw e-waste in the trash – it ends up either being burned and the toxic gasses are released into the atmosphere, or it ends up sitting in a landfill where the toxins to slowly leach into our groundwater. Do the right thing and find an e-waste recycler!

Since 2005 photographers and filmmakers Christine Anthony and Owen Masterson have been documenting young, organic and sustainable farmers in Georgia. They’ve travelled all over the state, spending time on the farms getting to know the farmers and watching this burgeoning movement grow.

We’re drawn to them because of their dignity, passion, intelligence, and dedication to growing clean fair food. We also believe that they hold the key to a more sustainable future and that they provide a solution to our broken food system.

They chose 12 farms located throughout the state. The cast includes 21 farmers, each one unique as far as education, experience, opportunity and motivation. Most of them do not own the land they are farming on.

Anthony and Masterson began filming in April as the first crops were going into the ground. They will continue filming through November as the growing season comes to a close. The winter will bring about editing and readying the film for the premier at the Georgia Organics Annual Conference in Savannah, GA in March 2011.

However…
It takes more than good intentions to make a film about young farmers.
It takes time, patience and passion.
It takes waking up early to begin filming when the sun comes up.
It takes putting up with ravenous mosquitoes, unpredictable weather, torrential rain, thick Georgia mud, extreme heat and humidity.
It takes everything it needs to be a farmer, including taking chances.

And that is where we come in! I personally donated yesterday (amount irrelevant) by visiting this site on kickstarter. I did have to join the site but it took less than 25 seconds.

Here is my challenge to you. Watch the video below and ask yourself if you can support such a worthwhile project. I think it goes without saying that farmers are a dying breed and to ensure life as we know it and to keep American jobs in America (for a number of reasons; economic and organic) we need to help in any way we can to educate the public.

So? What are you waiting for? Click play!

GROW! Movie Trailer 2 from Anthony-Masterson on Vimeo.

Watch even more clips on Vimeo!
Read more about GROW!

(The following post is about our experience making a cob oven. We built in the middle of the summer and that presented a multitude of problems. But today we fired it up and it worked and we are getting ready to have homemade pizza for lunch. So it does work. The construction details have been trimmed back a bit. However, feel free to contact me for more detailed instructions on how to build an Earth Oven that costs less than the 24 beer bottles I used in construction.)

I love pizza. Having lived in Brooklyn, NY for a while I can’t NOT love pizza. It was on every corner and as a photographer with little money it was the most affordable meal most days. I have also recently taking to making bread of all sorts. So in the spirit of DIY neo-homesteading projects I thought an outdoor earth oven would be a perfect experiment. And since we live in Georgia – home of red clay – I figured the materials were just out in the yard so why not?

After a fair amount of research I decided we would build a small cob oven that would hold two personal size pizzas or three loaves of fresh bread. The cost was right in my estimation, we had nothing but time really, and compared to masonry oven, a cob was more eco-friendly and better for our diet as traditional concrete contains a small amount of volcanic ash and dye.

As is my tradition the first step I took was to do a little research which I did with the help of Kiko Denzer’s Build Your Own Earth Oven, a small book covering the construction of cob ovens from the ground up.

So how did I actually build it? Well….

The foundation

With little more than some Georgia red clay, concrete sand, what straw, brick, some recycled beer bottles and old granite slabs, plust a little wood, I had everything I needed to make my own oven. After familiarizing myself with Kiko’s cob oven design, I began building the foundation for my stove from the reclaimed granite slabs. The foundation served two purposes I figured. It would raise the oven off the ground in order to have it at a more convenient working height and it also provided a place to store wood for burning.

A fire brick hearth with insulation

An insulating layer of beer bottles in a wheat straw/clay mortar was constructed on top of the foundation in a ring of cob and beneath the firebrick hearth. The hearth, a simple arrangement of 12 firebricks (the only real expense at $1.85/each), would serve as the bottom of the cob oven, where breads and pizzas would bake directly. The hearth bricks were carefully laid on a thin bed of sand, so that they could be gently tapped to be firm and level.

Sizing the Earth Oven

After all my reading I felt like a 21″ diameter oven would be perfect. Anything larger would be larger than we needed and anything smaller would be little more than a rocket oven. I have found today that our oven heats up to about 550 degrees in less than two hours of solid firing with good, dried, hard wood.

Making a brick arch and cob dome

Before building the actual oven dome, we made an arched doorway with some reclaimed red brick, pebbles (for holding the bricks at an angle) all mortared with a sand/clay mix. The cob dome (nothing more than a mix of sand and clay at a 3:1 ratio) was carefully built up around a moist sand form covered with wet newspaper and up against the brick arch. The sand was piled out of the doorway after the dome had dried some.

NOTE: The door is a critical 63% of the cob dome height, or 10″ high. (The dome is 16″ high, which is Kiko’s recommendation for cob ovens across the board.) This one measurement is the most critical because it allows the oven to actually draw. Because the door is left open while the oven is firing, the cool air is drawn in, and hot air and smoke can pass out the top half of the door. (A larger ovens would more than likely need a chimney.)

After all the above steps are done I would suggest adding layers as necessary. Because we built in the middle of the summer we encountered cracking with our layers as the mud simply dried too quickly. We will also need to add a final insulated layer made of earth clay, no doubt, to ensure all the heat is retained and the cracking does not effect cooking heat or time.

Overall, this oven has been a tremendous learning experiment and one we will continue to employ and expand on.

To see all the pictures from start to finish just visit this Flickr set.

You can also see the first firing by watching the embedded video below:

And like that, the firestorm is over.

You may remember my Sun Chips trials. If not, you can find them here: Test 1, Test 2, and Test 3. In those trials I used the very claims of Frito-Lay to test the compostability of the *new* SunChips bags. My first trial received a lot of online attention to which I even got a call from the R&D and Marketing teams at Frito-Lay SunChips. They wanted to talk to me about my motives, my networking, and why I may not be getting the results they claim. In that conversation I also mentioned how clever I thought they were to introduce a new bag with a new look, feel, and sound, to convince consumers this was, indeed, a new technology.

The second test revealed no better results. The bag had not begun to compost and was still just as loud coming out of its funeral plot as it was going in. I began to be chided with this test though as comments came in from folks telling me they had composted the bag just fine. I asked each of them if they were running illegal composting centers in their yard. I was told they were not but that instead of just burying the bag in similar conditions they used $200 and $300 composting “machines” that they had purchased for personal use. Interesting, I thought. Does SunChips expect Joe Consumer to either drive each discarded chip bag to a commercial compost center (there are only 3 in Georgia) or better yet, buy a composting tumbler for home use?

As test three came around I full on expected to see something. I don’t know what but I thought surely this compostable bag would have at least started to get thin. WRONG!

So on that very day I decided not to be greenwashed any longer. I promised to never purchase a bag of compostable SunChips again until I heard otherwise in regards to their compostability. I then spent the afternoon watching YouTube videos of people crumpling the bag and comparing it to lawnmowers and living on an airstrip. It seems the bag was making more noise than anything.

And then today I woke up only to see USA Today and its article that read Frito-Lay sends noisy, ‘green’, SunChips bag to the dump by Bruce Horovitz.

I felt strongly that this day was coming. When Frito-Lay launched the new bag roughly 18 months ago their claim that the bag made from plant material was 100% compostable seemed so far-fetched. If it had been true and proven, why was no other company racing them to market? Why did industry giants like Doritos and Ruffles not move in the same direction? A number of reasons, I am sure.

Granted the company is removing these bags from the shelf because of the noise (anyone else feel like this is a bogus reason?) and returning to the quieter, non-recyclable bags, is noise really worth shelving a technology based on plant molecular structure?

Frito-Lay has also announced that they are going back to the drawing board and will, in fact, have a new bag on the market by next fiscal year. What do you think?

Are they burying the bags due to noise or is something a little dirtier going on here?

For whatever reason, Pan and I have talked about soda multiple times the past few days. We really don’t drink it. Yes, when we have the occasional movie date we have the occasional Cherry Coke (something about fountain drinks, I think). Of course that is ONLY to wash down the occasional swedish fish and reeses pieces. But the fact remains, we just don’t buy it; not at the grocery store, the convenience store, or out of a machine.

What about you? Have you ever looked at your grocery bill to see how much you spend on soda or diet soda each trip (assuming you drink the acidic treat)? Take a look and then multiply that number by the number of times you shop each month. Now take that amount and multiply it by 12 to give you a ball park figure of how much you spend on soda/diet soda each year. Are you surprised by the number? Are there options to save you some money?

Some estimates suggest a family of 4 that drinks soda could save over $500 a year by switching to water; good, clean, filtered, tap water (NOT the bottled kind). So if your family is selecting soda or diet soda as a drink of choice, here are some ideas to help you save money simply by focusing on the soda/diet soda on your grocery list.

• You can save the most money by drinking tap water instead of soda especially if you drink diet soda like water. This provides nutritional and health benefits as well as saving you money. If you think your tap water is dirty or poor in taste, try a faucet filter from a company like Brita.
• If cutting soda out completely isn’t going to happen, try taking a first step and cutting consumption in half by cutting your serving size in half. Most sodas now sell 8oz. cans in the grocery. Who needs more than 8 oz?
• If you still want to include carbonated beverages into your meal planning, learn to become brand disloyal. Many times if Coke products are on sale then Pepsi products are not. Instead of stocking up on your favorite when they are on sale, which encourages the soda habit, try buying what is on sale, even if it is not your favorite. If there are no sales, commit to drinking water for that week.
• Individual serving cans or bottles are typically more expensive then 2-liter bottles. Avoid purchasing individual serving containers and select only the 2-liters if they are on sale. If you think the 2-liters go flat too quickly then perhaps you will be less likely to drink the whole bottle. Wasteful in the pocket but eventually you will get the point you are giving yourself.
• Drink store brands or off-brands.

Of course, drinking water and giving up soda and diet soda all together is the best money saving and nutritional tip I can think of. When I first ditched soda and started drinking coffee, tea, water, and even some milk, I lost nearly 7 pounds within a week. Why? Because our body stores up the sugar from the soda and keeps it as unused calories or pure liquid bloat. The real point though is that any small steps you take to cut back will save money and hopefully lead to drinking more water thereby increasing your overall health.

So, how much money do you estimate you would save in a month if you gave up soda and diet soda altogether?

Inspired by Tara over at OrganicSister I have decided to make Monday, Inspiration Monday. And to open things up I want to point you to Pan and I’s latest decision in life.

We have decided that the next year of our life will be spent building our own minimal, earth-friendly, tiny homestead, including our own Tiny House. If you don’t know what a Tiny House is you may want to start here. But to find out about our plan you can read this post.

We call it the Tiny r(E)volution as it is a not 100% a revolution but more of a 50% revolution and a 50% evolution. We have slowly moved our lives into a more minimal space requiring less and less in order to be happy and maintain balance. A lot of inspiration has come from Tammy Strobel over at RowdyKittens and Dusti at MinimalistAdventures. Whether this sort of lifestyle is your cup of tea or not I do hope you will cruise over to Tiny r(E)volution and become part of it all. You can subscribe just by clicking the RSS feed button. This will keep you in the loop everytime we write something.

In the meantime I would strongly encourage you to:

• Watch this video – It is sure to remind you how things used to be done. And the stop compression is cool.
• Buy a pair of these – Your feet will thank you….at least Pan says they will.
• Grow some – It is recycled. It is free. And it looks pretty tree-hugging chic.
• Toast a cold one – It is turning to October, isn’t it?

And so now I turn the mic to you. What is inspiring you? What do you want to share with the world?

I was so very pleased when I spoke to my mother yesterday and she told me the one watermelon that survived the drought conditions this summer had been picked after a few days of final ripening.

I asked her how the taste was and she left out no detail. “When I went to slice it open,” she said, “it almost split itself. The rind was thin but the the melon had so much meat. I really couldn’t believe how much juice came from it.” I was jealous that I didn’t get to witness it all. She continued, “And when we bit into it, it was just so sweet. It is definitely the best watermelon I have had all summer.”

That meant the world to me. My momma loves watermelon and has eaten from at least 7 or 8 this season so for our little Sugar Baby Watermelon to be her favorite….well, that was just too cool.

What about you? How did your melons do this year? Any seed I should consider next year?

I read a lot of blog posts in the course of a week. I would like to say that I keep up with my reader each day carefully going through each post and gleaning valuable information from each one. But I don’t. I typically let them build up and then have a marathon of browsing them and reading only the ones that appear halfway interesting. Some really stick out though such as the following post written yesterday by my dear friend Sarah over at Polyface Farms. Her blog 8 Muddy Boots is a great read and the way she eeks out a space on this planet for her family is both inspiring and encouraging.

It’s so easy when you start watching documentaries on how your “food” is made, and processed to just throw your hands up and say, “well, I’m gonna die some day anyways…”. Or in seeing the way that commercially produced meat is raised and treated, it’s easy to become a vegetarian!

And when you hear about how they have now come up with a genetically raised salmon, that is close to being approved for the masses….. Why, it just makes me mad!

So, what can we do? Our food is killing us!

There are LOTS of things you can do, whether you live on 20 acres or zero… You just have to be smart, not scared!

• If you don’t have land, raise what you can, WHERE you can! Be it on a balcony, in a window or rooftop, plant some herbs and veggies in planters!
• If you DO have land, grow what you can. Start out with some, and as you find that you enjoy it or have more time, plant more! Don’t let your flower gardens be big and beautiful, but you don’t have time for veggies! It’s all in priorities!
• Make sure you look at the “Dirty Dozen” and the “Clean 15″ to make sure you are able to put your money into food that NEEDS to be organic. Some foods just aren’t as effected by pesticides, like bananas because of their removable thick, skin. Make sure you buy those potatoes organic!
• You don’t NEED to become Vegetarian! Shop at meat markets that DON’T ship their meat from a far… I was once in a chain grocery store and looked at the hamburger which had a sticker on it telling that it was a product of Mexico, Canada & the US! That seems SO wrong!
• If you have land, make the investment of animals! PRODUCING ONES! Chickens, goats, sheep, cows, etc… We started out getting some for ourselves, but now are going to grow, because we have had people who want to buy from us! In doing this, PART of your investment can come back to you. Animals are SO enjoyable! You don’t realize it until you have them. Don’t believe me? Go visit a friend’s farm, and ask them to take you along as they do their “chores”. Then watch those happy animals! I wouldn’t give this up!
• Shop from the FARMER! This is the best bet yet for those without land or time to raise animals. If you can actually GO to the farm, even better. Make sure those cattle are pasture raised, make sure those chickens are free-ranged… Make sure you don’t see round-up dead grass around their “natural/ organic” garden… You may not be able to grow much, but it doesn’t mean you have run out of choices!
• Cook and Bake! Don’t be afraid! Something is better than nothing. Find a homemade bread or dish that you like to make… Ask a friend to show you EXACTLY how she makes those healthy casseroles! Find a few things that YOU CAN DO and DO IT! Why??? Well, you know EXACTLY what is in them… Better than store bought!

I’m sure there are MANY more great ideas I didn’t mention, but the point is wherever you are, whatever your situation in life, knowing what is in beef and chicken for the super market doesn’t mean you have to be scared. You DO still have choices!

You can also find 8 Muddy Boots on Facebook.