Grandiflora

Driving home from Sydney. Winter is the only time, that it is at all bearable, to drive into a sunset.

Milking the short lived snowfall. I love watching the snow fall. Every time it happens, which is once or twice in winter, I feel the same. I rush out and let it fall on me. I guess it’s the novelty of it.

I like that the highway is closed for a time - icy and windy highway. Even though we don’t live near it, the distant low end rumble can be faintly felt and heard, so snow means no trucks, cars, semi-trailers for a brief time.

The cold and stillness that snow brings allows you to stop and take deep breaths that slightly sting on the inhalation. Your world is enveloped in a fleeting moment of quietness. The lament is that it doesn’t last long.

And now for the reckoning. Week 3.

Gas use - we are slowly climbing. 35mj per day  increase on last week(390mjs a day!!!!) and we are trying hard to conserve. Oh the irony! Furthermore, the gas companies are worried about supply. They have asked industrial users to cut back on non-essential use as they fear they may not have enough immediate supply to cover the domestic surge in use (due to the cold weather) and all industrial uses.

Petrol - same as figured in our base line. I drove to Sydney twice for classes. No improvements this week.

Electricity - 12.6kWH per day. A marginal improvement on last week. I have been researching the power usage of our appliances. Some are provided in manuals or online technical data. For the ones that have neither available, I have emailed then with a consumer enquiry and strangely, no response yet.

I may have to investigate borrowing/hiring one of those meters that gives you a read out. It’s not that I want to keep all appliances, I just want to know how much power they use.

Actually, maybe that can be my epitaph, “I want to know” .

Water - 104 L per person per day. That’s about 30% of average per person usage. So slow, incremental improvement.

Garbage - I started weighing certain items this week. Two plastic pasta packs weigh 15gms. We probably put out about 1 kg of rubbish for landfill and about 5kgs for council recycling. Ideally, I’d like zero to landfill and recycling.
One thing I have been doing is emailing companies to take me off their mailing lists. You know, I was not that interested in audio engineering equipment -Wow the new euphonix desk, you say it can communicate with extra-terrestrial beings as well as being an sound mixing console. Wow! - when I was working as a sound editor, I’m even less interested now. I don’t care that the SMPTE conference is on.

Spending- I really like not shopping but then again the new kitchen tap (from last week) was expensive enough to halt any thought of consumer spending. I must admit, I really want to read the new Bill McKibben book Deep Economy but will wait until I can get it through one of the libraries I can borrow from.

Food - Most fruit available for purchase is from Queensland. So no to bananas, avocados and strawberries. But we can get local apples (grown less that 4kms away), oranges + lemons from my mother’s place and then what surplus local gardeners sell on consignment at the co-op. This week it was kiwi-fruit from Springwood (40kms).

I’m not sure, what I was expecting to happen by starting this dissection of our patterns and habits. Awareness about choices and our impact? A simplification of things? Clarity about what a person really needs?

Achieving the results in the space of a year, is not really what it’s about for me. I want to form new habits that stick. On a much less introspective note, I want to see if my husband’s often uttered statement is true - Charles claims he can live on the smell of an oily rag. All I can say is…..let’s see.

This tree had tipped over due to the snow. The roots were weakened by a week of solid rain and strong winds.

It started falling last night. I could hear the tinkle on the skylights. I was re-loading as much material as I could salvage back onto my computer - a meltdown and operator error turned my laptop into a blank slate…..and for the first time ever I was slightly ahead with my studies.  That’ll teach me for being a girly swot. No back up….very silly. Lost all or most of the garden photos. A few deep breathes, no tears and a reconstruction plan was enacted.

Once the snow started falling, the highway was closed. Everything was so quiet, still and peaceful. It had started to slowly melt by the time I went to bed. I could hear the drip, drip in the down pipe.

This morning there are more fallen trees including the beloved candle banksia. It’s fallen onto the road and Charles has gone to deal with it. Saws and chainsaws can be heard and there is a faster gurgle in the down pipe as it all melts away.

After the warmest May on record, we have dived straight into winter. Blackheath had sleet last week and Lithgow, where C. works, had light snowfall. Now, rain in Sydney over winter is fairly normal but in the Mountains we tend to get our rain over late summer/autumn. The storms over the last ten days have already pushed our rainfall to 5 times the June average - 255mm has fallen as opposed to the 50mm average. Now this isn’t a bad thing because we need the rain but as the dams fill up, people want to know if the government will relax the water restrictions. Lord, love a duck*…….the dams aren’t even half full and people want to know if they can wash their fucking cars again!

Not much to report in my garden - I’ve got parsley, some herbs, celery, arugula (rocket), ruby chard that can be eaten (small quantities only) plus peas, broad beans, garlic, spring onions,a few leeks for spring . I put the brassicas in too late and they are growing but….oh…so…slowly. Everything has slowed down. On the bright side, we are in a frost free pocket but oh to have MORE sun on the garden…..

Down at my mother’s we have lettuces of all kinds, silverbeet(swiss chard), tomatoes (in small quantity), brassicas surging forward as are the peas + broad beans ( not leggy like those in my garden) and oranges, oranges, oranges…….come August/September there will be paw-paw and the time consuming coffee harvest. Maybe a few cherries. The late warm weather played havoc with the fig which is losing leaves and fruiting simultaneously. Her garden is really looking good.

The 90% reduction goes slowly. Not huge progress and a few set backs and so to our Week 2 totals -

Petrol - 5 litres (me) + 5 litres (C) - 10L. This is 65% less than our average weekly total and 75% less than our state average. I had one less class and did part of the journey by train. Shared a ride back…so that’s all.

Electricity - 12.86kWH per day. This is 35% less than our average daily use and about 45% less than the national daily average. Slightly higher than last week but I did switch the answering machine/cordless phone back on. Tell me it’s not using 1kWH per day. Check that!

Gas - 355mj per day. The cold weather and baking , marmalade + jam making all add up. It’s very high.

Water - 143 litres per person per day. 19% less than our usual average and 60% than the national average.

Food - 35% local, 40% bulk and 25% wet + non local.

Consumer spending - A new kitchen tap…..more water efficient(5 star) but expensive. Adjustment for that…I should really check…..???????

* I just wanted to use that expression. Looking for any excuse.

Oranges from the tree in my mother’s garden.  New season. Juicy and bitter. Perfect timing because we were coming to the end of last season’s marmalade.

Bubbling away!

Jars ready to use. I should say that it didn’t set properly the first time (tasted good but was very runny), so I tipped the marmalade out of the jars, back into the pan, added more lemon juice and cooked it a little longer.  Much better.

Last week’s poppies - rumpled but still elegant!

So at the end of the first week, we are surviving. Not that I thought we wouldn’t. My husband Charles, has expressed some concern about my ‘enthusiasm’……. me, a calculator and various appliance manuals and the question, “Which ones are we prepared to give up?”…..non-essentials first.

So I pulled the plug on the dishwasher . It was used once during the week, when we had dinner guests - wine + washing up is not my forte. I know the arguments about efficiency but we have a very energy efficient dishwasher and it still churns through electricity. Not using it reduced our electrical use by 15 -20%….I kid you not!

These are small steps and I think, so far the only thing that has troubled me, is my deep shame about how little I knew about the appliances I considered derigueur.

So the stats are so far -

Petrol - 10 litres (me) + 5 litres (C) - 15L. This is 50% less than our average weekly total and 68% less than our state average.

Electricity - 11.86kWH per day. This is 41% less than our average daily use and about 50% less than the national daily average.

Gas - 323mj per day. This is much higher than our average use because we are heating the house. During the warmer months we use much less (75-80% less) and if can’t moderate it will mean a rather LARGE gas bill, to say nothing about how much crap is being pumped into the atmosphere. The bill, of course, will in no way reflect this!

Water - 143 litres per person per day. 19% less than our usual average and 60% than the national average.

Food - same as the initial listing. 50% local, 35% bulk and 15% wet + non local.

Consumer spending - Nothing bought. On-going tuition/books costs spread across the year would be about $45 per week. This is adjusted to be 10% of that so $4.50. I can’t remember the adjustment figure-damn!

It hasn’t been onerous and really, apart from my obsessive collation, quantification and calculator use, has been fun. Okay, my husband may have rolled his eyes a few times and exhaled pointedly.

I haven’t been doing much digging lately, instead I’ve been scraping, sanding and painting. We’ve been helping my sister with her house and she bought these poppies as a gift. My muscles are indeed larger and consequently, I’ve dubbed my sister’s house “The Gym”. I love poppies and have tried growing them but without much success. My sister and I mixed some old Shirley Poppy seeds, plus some saved Love-in-the-Mist (Nigella something?) and some cornflower seeds she’d bought and tossed them around in her front yard. Even though her house needs a good deal of work, we always manage some garden activity - to this point it has mainly consisted of heavy weeding, pruning, chopping etc. so the raking, scattering and watering seemed novel. I hope that seeds germinate and she gets a nice spring wildflower-esque display. Next it’s the raised no-dig vegetable bed and some more scraping, sanding and painting.

I read Barbara Kingsolver’s book “Animal,Vegetable,Miracle” - it was in fact, one half of my last hurrah purchase before embarking on the 90% reduction jaunt. Some people were buying or debating about buying things like solar ovens and such - me I bought this book and ordered my seed potatoes. The book was very encouraging about growing your own food, eating locally grown produce and was an ode to the home-gardener and small farmer. It affirmed to me that there is immense power in these simple gestures and immense benefit to you, your community and everyone’s health.

She talked alot about her local farmers’ market which made me a little sad. It’s one thing we don’t really have here, the Farmers’ Markets movement the US does. I loved going to Farmers’ Market in Kerrytown (Ann Arbor) with one of my sister’s and nephew. The produce was great - really! I thought I was going to die when I saw an entire raspberry and blueberry stall. My nephew apparently has become quite the food shopper not afraid to question the vendors , ” Are you sure that watermelon’s yellow inside?” He knows what he likes.
The “dig, dig” quote was mentioned in the book but in fact was coined by John Raeburn as part of the Victory Garden push in WW2. This site has some old Victory Garden manuals uploaded. In the manuals (c.1945)they still take about soil humus and soil nutrition as being the way to gardening success. That changed after the war and the chemical manufacturers needed to put their factories to some other use.

Something else I learnt from the Kingsolver book, was that what we call a crumble (as in apple and rhubarb etc), the Americans call a crisp. I always thought that a crisp involved toffee but not so.