25
1990
2015
One, Two, Three ...
JU MP! By the Numbers ... # Of Uses for Coffee Grounds (15) # Of Towns in this State (251) # Of Steps to Roast Pumpkin Seeds (6) # Of Must-Have Kitchen Tools (5) # Of Years for Green Living Journal (25)
E E er m R m F Su 15 0 2
WELCOME L I G H T A N D S T Y L E I N TO YO U R H O M E
Open Open Open Open up up upyour your up your your living living living living space. space. space. space. Elegant yet tough, Integrity doors change the dynamic of any room they’re in, and blur the line between inside and out. 21 West Street • Rt 5 North • West Hatfield, MA • 413.247.8300 385 Cole Avenue • Williamstown, MA • 413.458.8121 691 Depot Street • Rt 11 & 30 • Manchester, VT • 802.362.1952 103 Exchange Street • Middlebury, VT • 802.388.2721
www.rkmiles.com www.rkmiles.com www.rkmiles.com www.rkmiles.com
GreenLivingJournal_rkMiles_6901_42.indd 1
5/7/15 3:18 PM
2 •
Green Living Journal • Summer 2015
Green Living Journall 100 Gilead Brook Road, Randolph VT 05060 Publisher/Editor: Stephen Morris 802.234.9101 editor@GreenLivingJournal.com Advertising Manager: Amelia Shea 603.924.0056 amelia@GreenLivingJournal.com
We don’t hide what’s inside our Natural Mattresses NATURAL QUEENS
Design/Website/Data: Michael Potts Michael@thepublicpress.com
$
Ad Production: Nancy Cassidy Nancy@GreenLivingJournal.com
START AT
1100
Distributors: FlyBy News Service, Laurelae Oehler, Susan Hoffman. For information on becoming a distributor contact Editor@GreenLivingJournal.com, 802.234.9101. Cover design by Nancy Cassidy Printed with vegetable-based inks on recycled paper Green Living Journal is a publication of The Public Press LLC. It is published quarterly and distributed free of charge in the Connecticut River Valley region of Vermont, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts. While Green Living encourages readers to patronize our advertisers, we cannot be held responsible for individual advertising claims. Green Living Journal is published in several other local editions around the country. To inquire about starting a local edition of Green Living, contact Stephen Morris. Copyright © 2015 by The Public Press LLC.
Organic Cotton
100% Natural Latex
German Pocket Coils
If We Can’t Find It, We Design It QUEEN SOLID CHERRY
$
799
PREPARE YOURSELF FOR A VERMONT FUTURE
WITH A DEGREE IN ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE
Plein-air Merino Wool
EXTRA WIDE 7” SLATS
A Fly By Night Exclusive!
The Noho Bed • Select Solid Cherry • Hand-rubbed oil finish
CONCEALED METAL CONNECTIONS
Breathe Easy in your Living Room Flame-Retarda nt Free Soy-Based Fo am Cushions
• Natural fabrics • Certified sustainable wood frame • Water-based wood finishes • Recycled fiber pillow filling
CLASSES AT 12 LOCATIONS STATEWIDE AND ONLINE
CCV.EDU
21 State St • Downtown Northampton 413-586-1464 • 800-927-1464 • flybynight.com
Visit us online at GreenLivingJournal.com • Green Living • Summer 2015 • 3
FROM THE EDITOR
It’s About ... Organizing Community By Stephen Morris municipal sources. We receive no government subsidy, although we have received government recognition “Oh, we don’t do space advertising,” a business in the form of the Vermont Governor’s Award for owner told us. “Our business is about organizing environmental education. Nor do we receive money community.” The speaker was not Barack Obama from the consumer, as our solar friends do through the (whose early career as a community organizer in the sale of product. Our product of “practical information projects of Chicago was widely ridiculed by Sarah for friends of the environment” is free, and has been Palin), but a local solar business. This is a private resolutely so since our first enterprise, and the life-blood issue. of their business is the revenue We’ve neither sought nor stream generated from complex Consumers have some received philanthropic funds. business relationships between important decisions to make, Our life-blood, we decided large, for-profit utilities and long ago will come from the financial institutions. Excellent! and to make those decisions, businesses that most stand to We’ve spent the last quarter they require the education that benefit from the awareness century promoting awareness of comes from our articles we create. As a group they renewable energy as a preferred are mostly small, local, alternative to burning imported and advertisers. entrepreneurial, missionfossil fuel. Every issue of Green driven businesses who seek to Living Journal has at least one suild community with friends article on the subject, meaning of the environment. These are our peeps! that since 1990 we’ve published … let’s see, 25 years Our product is space. We think of it as a seat at times 4 issues per time 2000 words per article … the table for the feast we are sharing with readers. roughly 2000 pages of material. That’s the equivalent of Others call it advertising, and therein lies the rub (the 4 books on this one subject, not to mention an equal phrase is borrowed from Shakespeare). Advertising amount of coverage to organic gardening, healthy has a bad rap, with associations of lying, deceit, home and hearth, socially responsible investing, and misrepresentation, and manipulation. the list goes on. On a macro scale, the bad rap is deserved. You’ve We’re not claiming credit for the embrace of solar seen Madmen. Those guys wearing tailored suits, that we’re seeing now, only saying that it’s been a long drinking martinis, and smoking cigarettes (stop it slog to open the public’s eyes, and that we are proud to ...my lungs hurt!) are often trying to distinguish a have played a part. product that is indistinguishable from its competitors. We, too, are community organizers. We differ from When they find a point of differentiation, no matter the young Barack Obama, whose salary was paid from how small, they then amplify it it as much as possible. This is exemplified by a Monty Python comedy sketch in which the client comes in with warehouses of string to sell. Unfortunately, the string is in threeinch lengths. “No problem,” says the ad man, “We’ll sell your waterproof string ...” “It’s not waterproof,” interrupts the client. “No problem,” says the ad man unflustered, “Our water-absorbent stringettes are perfect for ...” He hesitates. “For what?” asks the client with genuine interest. “Our water-absorbent stringettes are perfect for tying tiny parcels and binding mice.” Organizing Community - Continued page 6 4 •
Green Living Journal • Summer 2015
CONTENTS
HOMEMADE BUTTER
BY THE NUMBERS
12 Strategies for Efficiency ................................................ 14 6 Tips on How to Work ....................................................... 20 5 Steps to Roasted Pumpkin Seeds ............................... 26 251 Quest ................................................................................ 30 5 Must Have Kitchen Tools ............................................... 39
FROM THE EDITOR Organizing Community..........................................................4 Short Takes ..................................................................................7
EDUCATION Bethel University .................................................................. 41 The Grillmaster ...................................................................... 42 15 Uses for Coffee ................................................................ 44
ENERGY AND BUILDING Sealing Air Leaks ................................................................. 18 Barn to Bank On ................................................................... 23
HEALTH
CHURNED FRESH DAILY
Made in Maine
“The Old Fashioned Way”
Kate’s Homemade Butter is made fresh daily by the Patry family in Old Orchard Beach, Maine. Our butter is made from fresh cream that is gathered from farms that do not treat their cows with “artificial growth hormones.” The cream is then carefully churned in small batches into butter the same way we have made it for over 25 years. Kate’s is 100% natural. We do not use artificial ingredients, dyes or preservatives, so all you taste is the creamy natural flavor of real butter. We promise to keep it that way! Whether you’re enjoying a morning muffin, baking a family favorite, or serving garden-fresh vegetables, you’ll savor the delicious taste of Kate’s Homemade OLD Butter in every bite. ORCHARD Thank you for choosing Kate’s Homemade Butter. BEACH Enjoy!
Tasty Teas ................................................................................. 34
MONEY Fossil Fuel ................................................................................ 36
ON THE NIGHTSTAND
Kate’s Homemade Butter P.O. Box 79 Old Orchard Beach Maine 04064 Tel. 207-934-5134 Fax 207-934-0515
www.kateshomemadebutter.com
Being Mortal........................................................................... 32
Eco+Plan
Energy Efficient Home Design & Consulting
NOW OFFERING LONG LENGTH PREFINISHED FLOORING! Available in 3 widths Partial Selection of Species:
Maple • Birch • Oak • Ash • Hickory Custom Colors Available • 25 Year Limited Warranty Passive Solar Design Alternative Energy Systems Deep Energy Retrofits Zero Net Energy Passive Houses
413 . 773 . 7559 www.EcoPlanDesign.com Design . Drawings . Support
U Save $$ Forest to U Pricing 3-2897 (802) 45 587 2) 453-7 Fax: (80
mber The Number For Lu
Proprietors Tom C & Pam Lathrop (5th Generation Lumberman)
Hewitt Road, Bristol, VT
Visit us online at GreenLivingJournal.com • Green Living • Summer 2015 • 5
FROM THE EDITOR
Organizing Community Our business partners, by contrast, do not need to be distinguished from lookalike competitors by meaningless features. Just the opposite. They frequently offer meaningful difference that needs something more than a catchy phrase for the benefit to be understood. The advantage of keeping money in the community, for instance, is more nuanced and difficult to understand than LOW PRICES! The advantage of long-term payback can be a difficult sell matched up against INSTANT GRATIFICATION. That’s why we provide “practical information for friends of the environment.” Consumers have some important decisions to make, and to make those decisions, they require the education that comes from our articles and advertisers. We don’t want to charge money for this; we want to spread the gospel as far and wide as possible to make the world a better place. If, in the process, our readers benefit and our our business supporters prosper, that’s the win/win we are looking for. Easy online drop off at...
Continued from page 4
Don’t look for water-absorbent stringettes on the pages of Green Living Journal. Even if you have tiny parcels to tie and mice to bind, we’ll bet we can come up with a more practical way that will be better for the community and the environment. We are publishers, and what publishers do— literally—is to take information and “to make it public.” We do this the old-fashioned way on the pages of our journal, online at greenlivingjournal.com, and by the personal contacts we make in the great, wide world. We don’t know of anyone else who is providing our kind of “practical information” the way that we do and for as long as we have. We’ve seen imitators come and go as the interest in the environment ebbs and flows. And with that catchy phrase, we dismount the soap box! Come join our community. It’s a very pleasant place to be.
CollectiveCopies
REAL PICKLES
We ship anywhere in 2-5 business days.
Naturally Fermented & Raw
– Worker-owned, union shop since 1983 We stock tree-free & recycled paper only. Fine quality digital color and b/w Books & manuals
Live
Brochures, business cards Publishing Envelopes
cultures
Posters Document scanning
for health!
Digital design Co-op Products Account billing available • 10% of our pre-tax
www.realpickles.com/health
profits are donated to the community
Florence, MA (413)586-5829
Amherst, MA (413)256-6425
Northeast Grown 100% Organic
www.collectivecopies.coop 6 •
(413) 774-2600
Green Living Journal • Summer 2015
Greenfield, MA
SHORT TAKES Letter to Editor:
By the Numbers from WalletHub
Excellent article about honey in the spring issue of Green Living. Honey has always been used medicinally in this country, though not widely. Immigrants used it and passed along their knowledge to other people who did not regularly visit the doctor, and even one hospital knew of its healing qualities. As a young nurse in New York, in the late 60’s, I remember frequently using honey for skin conditions, especially irritating bedsores. This was in a very hightech cardiac hospital where open-heart surgery was routinely performed. It was most likely the nursing nuns who returned from their work in poor countries that had brought some of the good-ole-fashioned healing techniques to this advanced hospital. That experience at a young age helped to lead me down a road to natural healing techniques in general, and to the plant world specifically. Thanks for keeping Green Living going all these years. It’s a gem!
With billions of taxpayer dollars being devoted to environmental protection efforts and energy costs eating a significant portion of the average household’s take-home, the personal finance website WalletHub today released its report on 2015’s Most & Least EcoFriendly States – showcasing the areas doing right by Mother Earth and calling out those seemingly intent on spoiling things for future generations. A few highlights:
Kathleen O’Rourke, herbalist and naturalist Shelburne Falls, MA
Pee-cycling? HI Everyone - This just in! It’s hard to resist word play, even while acknowledging the good work these folks are doing: I’m proud to announce that Rich Earth Institute (richearthinstitute.org) and pee-cycling are prominently featured in this short but informative documentary - “From Toilet To Table”. The video was released today. Feel free to send it to others.
Vermont’s Eco-Friendliness (1=Best, 25 =Avg.):
• 6th – Air Quality • 20th – Soil Quality • 9th – Water Quality • 17th – Percentage of Municipal Solid
Waste Recycled • 7th – Number of Green (LEED) Buildings per Capita • 8th – Percentage of Energy Consumption from Renewable Sources • 3rd – Energy Efficiency Scorecard
• 11th – Percentage of the Population Not Driving to Work
For the full report, please visit: http://wallethub. com/edu/most-least-eco-friendly-states/11987/
http://dme.engin.umich.edu/toilettotable/ It’s too late for this year, but if you find yourself in Brattleboro, Vermont, next April 10th, don’t miss the Rich Earth Institute’s 4th Annual Urine Donor Kickoff and festivities. It’s free. Children and Adults Only! (contributed Ben Goldberg)
Correction: The spring issue of Green Living Journal erroneously attributed the original publication of Ray Anderson’s article “Good Greed” to our publication. It appeared originally in Green Money Journal. We regret the error and apologize to our friends at Green Money Journal. Visit them at GreenMoneyJournal.com.
Visit us online at GreenLivingJournal.com • Green Living • Summer 2015 • 7
SHORT TAKES
LineSync Architecture Recognized Local Architecture Firm LineSync Architecture was recognized as one of North America’s Top 1,000 Architecture Firms in the 2015 Almanac of Architecture and Design 2015 . Noted as “The definitive fact book on architecture and design” by the American Institute of Architects, LineSync Architecture was one of the four Vermont Firms so honored. Known throughout the region for excellence in design, sustainability and innovation, LineSync Architecture recently won two design awards for a Resilient River Apartment in Wilmington, Vermont. Principal Architect Joseph Cincotta will be giving presentations on this project at the Rochester Institute of Technology and ACX/15, Vermont’s Architecture and Construction Expo next month. For more information and photos on Resilient Design or LineSync Architecture: LineSync.com LineSync Resilient Apartment. Photo by John Sprung
Create A Personal Memoir A treasured keepsake of your travel adventures in Vermont with this one-ofa-kind 6” x 9 ” journal. All of the state’s 255 towns, cities, gores and grant are listed alphabetically along with their charter, grant, or patent date on lightly-lined archival paper. A map of Vermont county and town boundaries is included as well as useful travel resources – maps, books and websites – an all in one reference and notebook for the curious traveler.
Call 802-446-6100 for full color brochure
The Vermont Travel Journal: $18.00 plus $3.00 shipping & handling. Send orders to: Gilead House Publishing 100 Gilead Brook Road, Randolph, VT 05060
Email: vttraveljournal@together.net • Phone: 802-234-5039
8 •
Green Living Journal • Summer 2015
SHORT TAKES
Cooperatives By the Numbers The most recent data from a University of Wisconsin study found that in New England, there were:
• 1,400 co-ops & credit unions • With 5 million members
• Generating $9 billion in revenue • Holding $58.4 billion in assets • Employing 22,000 people • And paying $1 billion in annual wages (data provided by Erbin Crowell, Executive Director, Neighboring Food Co-op Association) • Over 300,000 Vermonters are members-
owners of co-ops.
• Nearly 50% of Vermonters belong to at
least one co-op!
Vermont is home to an array of cooperatives of varying size and type including;. Agriculture: 6000+ farmers. The trend is to more value-added products, savvy marketing while retaining the local connection. Consumer Food: more than 25,000 memberowners. Food co-ops have changed the American diet and have led the way in organic and natural food and health products. They are now becoming “Main Street” grocery stores. Credit Unions: more than 260,000 Vermonters are members of 35 Vermont credit unions. With a commitment to local development dating to their origins, Vermont credit unions continue to expand financial services while seeking new ways to serve their members. Education: For over 25 years, Vermont has led the way in setting standards of child-care for cooperative education impacting more than 900 Vermont students. Energy/Electric: More than 50,000 members.
Electric cooperatives wired rural Vermont when no one else would. Today, Vermont’s electric and fuel cooperatives offer dependable services with an increasing emphasis on renewable and clean energy. Farm Credit: impacts more than 1600 Vermonters. For 65 years, farm credit has provided financial services in addition to loans in support of equipment, operating costs and home mortgages to farmers and rural residents. Housing: at least 200 units of housing. From urban renovations to mobile home parks to timeshares, Vermonters are committed to the success of cooperative housing. Insurance: Three small rural insurance cooperatives, organized in 1915, 1924 and 1933, combined forces in 1951. Today Co-operative Insurance Companies ranks as Vermont’s largest farm insurer. It is also the 2nd largest homes and the 9th largest auto insurer. With more than 55,000 policies in force, this co-operative is growing rapidly and expanded into New Hampshire in recent years. Employee-Owned: Employee-Owned: Vermont has a growing number of worker cooperatives that create jobs anchored in community. Furniture makers, farmers, software developers, carpenters, and others who want to jointly own and govern their own businesses have formed such cooperatives. The Vermont Employee Ownership Center actively promotes this business structure. Recreation: Vermont also has a number of other cooperatives including water utilities in at least 12 communities as well as Mad River Glen, America’s only cooperatively owned ski area.
Stencils by Design All Originals Cards • Gifts Rooms • Rugs
Laurelae Oehler 802 295-5452
Visit us online at GreenLivingJournal.com • Green Living • Summer 2015 • 9
Wood - The Original, Solar Fuel
“We think the fire eats the wood. We are wrong. The wood reaches out to the flame. The fire licks at what the wood harbors, and the wood gives itself away to that intimacy, the manner in which we and the world meet each new day.” —Jack Gilbert, Collected Poems Paul Bianco of Chimney Savers, Inc. (Randolph, VT) has been in and around the chimney service business since he was 14 years old. “Fall has always been a crazy time of year for my family,” he says, as “it is the busy season or fall rush. Here are 5 reasons why having your chimney swept in the spring can actually benefit you.”
1. Schedule at your convenience
During the fall months, as the temperature begins to drop, chimney sweeps begin to feel the heat as their schedule fills to the brim. If you wait until September to call your chimney sweep, you will likely have to wait over a month for an appointment. By scheduling your chimney cleaning in the spring we are better able to work within your schedule and at your convenience.
“Chop your own wood and it will warm you twice” Henry Ford 10 •
Green Living Journal • Summer 2015
2. Eliminate odors in your house
Everyone loves a clean house in the spring and summer. Cleaning your chimney early in the year can eliminate odors caused by creosote and ash in your chimney, keeping your home smelling fresh. “To dwellers in a wood, almost every species of tree has its voice as well as its feature.” — Thomas Hardy, Under the Greenwood Tree
“Every man looks at his woodpile with a kind of affection.” — Henry David Thoreau
Visit us online at GreenLivingJournal.com • Green Living • Summer 2015 • 11
“Maybe that is the one real division between men: wood men and desert men.” —Kurban Said, Ali and Nino: A Love Story
3. Prolong your chimney’s life
Creosote is acidic. When this acid mixes with moisture – think of all those rainy spring and summer days – it can cause deterioration of the chimney’s interior. By removing this creosote after the burning season you can significantly prolong the life of your chimney.
4. Leave yourself plenty of time to get needed repairs
During your annual chimney sweep and inspection we make sure all parts of your chimney are in good working condition. If your chimney is in need of repair, a spring appointment gives you plenty of time and flexibility to address those needs. Also keep in mind that masonry repairs can only be done in above-freezing air temperatures, and as you know, that frigid weather approaches quickly in the fall months.
5. Save money
Chimney service companies frequently offer discounts for chimney cleaning and repairs in the spring in order to spread out their workload more evenly throughout the year. Take advantage of these discounted rates and save some money. Make your annual sweep part of your Spring Cleaning tradition and reap the benefits. 12 •
Green Living Journal • Summer 2015
More choIceS. More StYLe. InSIde & out.
IntroducIng the WindoW & door SyStem
New Andersen® A-Series windows and doors let your customers enjoy virtually unlimited customization. Choices include extensive exterior trim options; hundreds of exterior color combinations; interiors in maple, oak or pine with nine stained or painted finishes; an exceptional selection of hardware with a dozen finishes, and an endless array of grille patterns. Stop in to learn more.
leaderhome.com
123 Street Address Line 2 Address Town Name, ST 00000 (111) 111-1111
“ENERGY STAR” is a registered trademark of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. “Andersen” and all other marks where denoted are trademarks of Andersen Corporation. © 2010 Andersen Corporation. All rights reserved.
Visit us online at GreenLivingJournal.com • Green Living • Summer 2015 • 13
BY THE NUMBERS 12 Strategies for Inspired Efficiency By Sarah Lozanova Our homes can be comfortable and energy-efficient: Especially if we borrow from the high-performing, effective ideas used around the world in “passive houses.” Developed by the
Full service solar, including
German Passivhaus Institut in 1996, a Passivhaus is defined by core efficiency standards. What does this mean in practice? Homes built to the Passive House standard are extremely comfortable to live in — with natural daylighting, even tem-
AllSUN TRACKER systems!
Full service solar, including Serving Southwestern Vermont Karen and JimTRACKER Lee, Owners systems! • 802 375-6462 AllSUN www.HotOnSolar.com Serving southwestern Vermont
(802)375-6462 www.HotOnSolar.com Replacing Fossil&&Nuclear Nuclear Fuel Fuel Replace Fossil One House & Business with Solar PVAt A Time Replacing Fossil & Nuclear Fuel OneOne House Business a Time Houseor & Business At AatTime
Boost Winter Solar Gain
.
2 Fiske Mass 2 FiskeAve, Ave, Greenfield, Greenfield, Mass
2 Mass 2 FiskeAve, Ave, Greenfield, Greenfield, Mass 2 Fiske Fiske Ave, Greenfield, Mass 14 •
peratures throughout and virtually no drafts. Passive homes require 90 percent less energy to heat because energy losses are minimized with generous amounts of insulation and air sealing. The homes are heated largely by solar heat gains and internal gains from people and electrical equipment. Although fully retrofitting a home to the passive house standard is usually very costly, we can use many of the elements of passive home design to make our homes more efficient. Apply the following concepts to your home to boost comfort and reduce energy bills.
Green Living Journal • Summer 2015
South-facing windows and, to a lesser extent, east- and westfacing windows help gradually warm our homes with solar energy. Maximizing this free energy source reduces dependence on heating systems, in turn lowering utility bills in cold climates and promoting indoor air quality. Forced air heating, for example, can carry dust with the heat as it passes through duct work, while wood-burning stoves and heating systems that use natural gas or propane can emit carbon monoxide. Wood-burning stoves also can produce breathable pollutants such as smoke and ash. Clean southern windows and remove screens. When the heating season begins, remove screens on south- and east-facing windows and wash the windows to increase your solar gains by up to 40 percent. Keep screens in the west- and north-facing windows to provide protection from the winter wind. Avoid shading southern win12 Strategies - Continued page 16
design & landscape
The Ruby House by Brach Design Architecture in Salt Lake City is three times tighter than Passive House requirements. Photo By Paul Richer
www.abounddesign.com
Visit us online at GreenLivingJournal.com • Green Living • Summer 2015 • 15
BY THE NUMBERS 12 Strategies Continued from page 14 dows in the winter. Evergreen vegetation, carports and porches can shade southern windows, hindering solar gains. In colder climates, plant only deciduous trees and shrubs (which lose their leaves in winter) outside south-facing windows, or space vegetation and structures far enough away from the house to avoid shading southern windows. Expand with a solar addition. If you are planning an addition on your home, consider adding a sunroom, which can help heat your home. Effective sunrooms face south, include lots of thermal mass, are thoroughly insulated, and include ventilation options with windows, doors and skylights.
Tighten the Building Envelope
The building envelope is the physical separation between the inside of a home and the unconditioned environment, providing a weather, air and thermal barrier. After maximizing solar gains, make sure your home retains warm air in the winter and cooler air in the summer. Use insulating window treatments. Although they help bring in wanted heat during cold, sunny days, windows also serve as a significant avenue for winter heat loss, especially at night. Prevent this by installing thermal shades, blinds, shutters or curtains. Minimize the space between the curtains and the wall with magnets, shutters or Velcro, and ensure that insulating shades are properly sized for the window. Keep window treatments closed all day on north windows and at night for all windows. Weatherize existing windows. Plugging air leaks will boost the energy performance of your windows
Good Food, Beer, Wine and Live Music! At the Corner of Grove & School Streets in Beautiful Downtown Peterborough, N.H. (603) 924-6365 www.harlowspub.com
and doors. Adding storm windows and lowering them during the heating season will keep in more warm air. Caulk stationary cracks or joints that are less than a quarter-inch wide, and add weatherstripping around moving components, including windows and doors. Install smart overhangs. Thanks to the difference in the sun’s position in the sky through the year, welldesigned overhangs can both block summer sun, helping keep houses cooler, and admit winter sun, helping heat interiors. Try any of several options: eaves or overhangs; a pergola with deciduous vegetation; or even an awning of strategically placed solar panels. Minimize winter use of exhaust fans. Although they help expel unwanted cooking vapors and moldproducing moisture, exhaust fans and vented range hoods also allow heat to escape from our homes. Whenever possible (without sacrificing indoor air quality), minimize their use. Installing a timer on exhaust fans can be helpful. Because winter air is often dry, you may be able to get away with simply leaving the bathroom door open after showering or turning on the exhaust fan for only a couple of minutes. In the kitchen, only use the range hood fan during stovetop cooking; turn it off as soon as possible.
Capture Heat with Thermal Mass
Thermal mass helps stabilize indoor temperatures by capturing and storing heat from the winter sun and slowly releasing it at night. This helps avoid large temperature swings, with a room becoming uncomfortably warm during the day and then chilly at night. Thermal mass works most effectively in the direct path of the sun’s rays. Install tile flooring in sunny southern rooms. Stone or concrete tiles have a high thermal mass. If you have rooms on the south side of your home that receive a lot of sun, install dark- or medium-colored tile where the sun hits the floor and avoid covering it with carpeting. For slab-on-grade construction with insulation underneath and around the edges, consider keeping concrete floors exposed. Add masonry planters. Placing heavy concrete, tile or stone planters in the direct path of the sun will help capture daytime heat and boost comfort. If they are dark in color, they will absorb more heat during the day for nighttime heat release.
www.myspace.com/harlowspubmusic
16 •
Green Living Journal • Summer 2015
12 Strategies - Continued next page
BY THE NUMBERS
On a hilltop overlooking Oregon vineyards, the Karuna House by Holst Architecture combines an advanced building enclosure with optimized solar design. Photo Courtesy Passive House Institute Us
Mitigate Energy Drains
Many homes have rooms that use a disproportionate amount of the home’s overall energy. Identifying these will pay dividends in savings. Identify inefficiencies with an energy audit. Many homes have significant leaks and thermal bridges, where heat is drawn out of the home by discontinuities in a thermal barrier (for example, from gaps in insulation). Energy auditors use infrared cameras or a blower door test to identify inefficiencies and make recommendations for corrective action. Prioritize uncomfortable rooms. Many homes have one or two rooms that are less comfortable than the rest, causing the heating or air conditioning to work overtime to compensate. Finished basements, poorly insulated spaces, north-facing rooms, and spaces that have malfunctioning ducts or that are far from the HVAC system all have this tendency. Enhancing the thermal performance of these rooms can have a significant impact on household comfort and energy use. Targeting such rooms with improved insulation, air sealing, upgraded windows and thermal window treatments, as well as balancing or cleaning the HVAC system, can impact the comfort of the entire house. Purchase energy-efficient appliances. Major appliances, including the refrigerator, washing machine, clothes dryer (if electric) and dishwasher, can account for a large portion of a home’s energy usage. Appliances
more than 15 years old are far less efficient than current models. Use a Kill A Watt electricity usage monitor (available on Amazon for under $30 or sometimes from the library) to measure the energy usage of your appliances and electronics. When purchasing appliances, look for the Energy Star label and use the EnergyGuide label to compare the energy use of different models. Ensure that any appliance is the right size for your needs, as oversized air conditioners, water heaters and refrigerators waste energy. Excerpted from Mother Earth Living, a national magazine devoted to living wisely and living well. To read more visit MotherEarthLiving.com. Copyright 2015 by Ogden Publications Inc.
BRING YOUR CRITTERS!
To this charming 1839 Cape on 3.5 mostly open acres. Lovingly renovated and restored with some nice vintage features: handsome pine board paneling, 3 fireplaces, one with beehive oven, beamed ceilings. Post and beam barn w/5 stalls and hayloft, and a 2 car direct entry garage. Close to Lake Contoocook and Rails to Trails.
Visit us online at GreenLivingJournal.com • Green Living • Summer 2015 • 17
MLS # 4392403 $195,000
$179,900
ENERGY & BUILDING
Seal Air Leaks to Cut By Dan Chiras Air leaks cost us dearly. According to the Energy Star program, most people could save about 20 percent on their heating and cooling costs by sealing up air leaks. Most older homes are riddled with holes in the “building envelope,” which is made up of the outside walls, roof and foundation. These leaks range from large, obvious holes — such as broken or missing windowpanes in the basement — to tiny, almost invisible cracks. To seal air leaks, you first need to identify them, either on your own or with the help of a professional energy auditor. To identify leaks yourself, begin by looking for large openings in outside walls, then search for smaller, less visible openings. On windy days, you can find these leaks by feeling around doors and window frames, at the base of walls, and anywhere else with an opening from outside to inside walls. You can also detect leaks with a stick of burning incense — air leaking into a home will deflect the smoke. Be sure to check around electrical outlets and light switches (even those on interior walls). Ceiling fixtures — especially recessed lighting and wholehouse fans — are other major sources of heat loss in the winter. Basements are a major source of air leaks, so they’re a good place to start. Begin by sealing the largest and most visible cracks in your basement or crawl space. Replace any broken or missing windowpanes, or install rigid foam insulation over the openings. Seal any gaps — such as
18 •
those around dryer vent exhausts — with caulk or expandable liquid foam, which we’ll discuss shortly. Next, seal cracks between the top of the foundation and the wall. These are often so large that light shines through them. Turn off the basement lights and look at the walls from inside to locate gaps, then seal them with caulk or foam. You can usually seal cracks from inside, though some may be easier to access from outside. This is also a good time to insulate the cavity formed by the floor joists and the rim joist. Place batt or blanket insulation in the cavity, or use rigid board insulation, which can be cut to size and friction-fit into the space. Another option is to use expanding foam insulation. For large cracks (those wider than threeeighths of an inch and deeper than a half inch), professionals often use a tubular foam called backer rod, which you can purchase at a hardware store. Vacuum or brush dust and dirt out of openings, then stuff the backer rod into gaps with a screwdriver or small putty knife. You also can use liquid foam insulation to seal large gaps. The foam quickly expands to fill the gap. After it’s dry, trim off any excess. Exposed foam can be sanded and painted. Like backer rod, liquid foam seals large openings, prevents airflow, and adds insulation, further reducing heat loss or gain. Liquid foam insulation is available at home improvement centers and hardware stores. Two types of foam are available: polyurethane and latex. Polyurethane expands rapidly and extensively. It sticks to your hands and clothing and is difficult to clean up. Latex foam expands less and is a bit easier to clean up. For openings wider than a half inch, I use Dow’s Great Stuff Big Gap Filler. This polyurethane insulating foam sealant fills, seals and insulates. For cracks less than a half inch, I use Dow’s Great Stuff Gaps and Cracks polyurethane insulating foam sealant. Note that these products work best if you use the whole can at once instead of storing some of the sealant for later use. Smaller cracks also can be sealed with a clear or paintable caulk
Green Living Journal • Summer 2015
ENERGY & BUILDING
Home Energy Costs (if you want the caulk to blend in). Caulk comes in small tubes or cartridges for use in caulk guns. When caulking, cut off the plastic tip of the cartridge at an angle (a small opening is better) using a utility knife, then insert the cartridge in the gun, push the plunger forward and engage it. Pierce the seal at the tip and advance the plunger. (To save partially used caulk cartridges, wrap the tip with electrical tape.) Caulk comes in three basic varieties: pure silicone, a silicone/modified polymer formulation and latex. Silicone and silicone/modified polymer are the best products. Although they cost a bit more, they’re more flexible and can expand and contract with changing temperatures without cracking. This, in turn, means they last longer than the less expensive latex caulk. Latex caulk is a bit easier to apply, but again, it is less flexible and won’t last as long. When sealing with caulk or foam, be sure to clean the surfaces first. Vacuum or blow out dust, then use a wet rag to remove the remaining particles. You can also wipe the surface with rubbing alcohol (isopropyl alcohol). After the surface has dried, fill the gap with caulk or foam. Apply caulk slowly and carefully so you deposit a steady, consistent bead. I use my finger to smooth out caulk, or you can try smoothing it with the back of a plastic spoon. Wipe up any excess immediately. Be sure to seal heating, cooling and ventilation ducts that run through the basement, as well as openings in the foundation wall where plumbing pipes exit. When sealing leaky ducts, many heating and air conditioning professionals use mastic sealant, which is by far the best product on the market for sealing leaky ductwork. Mastic is a paste that’s painted over the seams between sections of metal ductwork. It creates an excellent seal and outlasts the cheaper, less durable, metallic tape and duct tape. (The only thing duct tape doesn’t stick to is ducts!) Unfortunately, duct mastic may be difficult to locate at home improvement centers or hardware stores. Be sure to get mastic
for sealing ducts, not for laying tile floors — these are entirely different materials. If you have trouble locating mastic, try calling professional energy auditors, or heating and air conditioning installers, to ask where they purchase theirs. Walls in living spaces often have numerous cracks, typically around doors and windows, and along baseboards. You can usually seal these openings with clear or paintable caulk. Air leakage is common at the base of walls, so pay special attention to these areas. Excerpted from MOTHER EARTH NEWS, the Original Guide to Living Wisely. To read more visit MotherEarthNews.com. Copyright 2014 by Ogden Publications Inc.
SHEDS • GArAGES • bArnS ADDitionS ScrEEn HouSES • cAmpS Sun porcHES lumbEr • bArk mulcH SAwDuSt
We Custom Build on Your Property
25 Year Guarantee!
724 Greenfield Road Route 5 & 10 Deerfield, MA 01342
(413) 773-8388 FAX (413) 773-3188 email: Lamore@Post-Beam.com william r. lamore www.post-beam.com president & owner
call us for information on All post & beam buildings
Visit us online at GreenLivingJournal.com • Green Living • Summer 2015 • 19
BY THE NUMBERS
6 Tips on How to Work: The Most By Steve Maxwell In October of 1986, I cut through a tumbledown wire fence and drove my old pickup truck onto the rural property I’d just bought with my life savings. I was a 23-year-old dreamer back then, with a desire to live in the country by the labor of my own hands. I’m now living that dream and thriving on that same property along with my wife, Mary, and our five kids. We built our own house, and we enjoy food, fuel and beauty from our land. We’re now blessed to see a second generation setting up a homestead of their own, and putting their self-reliance skills to use, on our family acreage. Few other dreamers I’ve known have managed to fulfill their ambitions. In my experience, most dreams don’t die because of a lack of practical homesteading skills or passion, but rather become casualties of the failure of knowing to work efficiently to get enough of the right kind of work done. Bills pile up, gardens don’t get planted, roofs continue to leak, enthusiasm wanes. The cause of these problems often goes unrecognized until passion is cold, relationships frazzled and finances exhausted. Knowing how to work efficiently on a homestead where you are your own boss requires a specific skill set that contrasts sharply with the skills needed to work a traditional office job. I’ve worked for wages and now I work from home on my own land, and the two experiences are entirely different. If your goal is to be in charge of your own successful modern homestead, you must learn how to work, which is just as important as learning practical skills. Put into practice the following six homesteading habits to help you get the right work done in the right way, and you’ll bring the satisfaction of self-reliant living one big step closer.
1. Learning How to Work: Set Guiding Principles
A homesteader without goals is like a ship without a rudder. You may be sailing, but you won’t end up where you want to go. You need to decide at the outset what kind of lifestyle you want. For us, it came down to three main guiding principles: Earn all family income without leaving the property, raise our kids with us at home, and provide for as many of our basic needs as possible from our own land and labor. 20 •
2. Learning How to Work: Follow a Disciplined Schedule with Rest
No boss, no outside schedules, no imposed deadlines — these are some of the attractions of working from home, but they’re also likely to contribute to failure. Not having a boss means your success will depend almost entirely on how well you determine what must get done. When setting your own schedule without imposed deadlines, you’ll thrive only if you fill your day with productive activities. Self-reliant living is really about responsibility.
3. Learning How to Work: Do the Right Work
Today, we have easy, unprecedented access via the Internet to the information needed to create a thriving homestead lifestyle. You can pick up almost any selfreliance skill imaginable, learn how to work from home, and establish international connections with like-minded folks online, which makes the Internet an invaluable tool for the modern homesteader. You’ll need many more tools, of course, but the Internet is crucial — I’m sure our homestead life would never have succeeded without it.
4. Learning How to Work: Work the Right Way
Having the proper tools to work efficiently will make a huge difference. Doing work in the right way means equipping yourself the way a professional would, not as a hobbyist would. You probably won’t be able to buy professional-grade tools and gear right away, but work toward it.
5. Learning How to Work: Carry a Notepad
Pound for pound, my notepad and pen are the most valuable physical tools I own. They’re always with me to catch the little thoughts that waft through my head throughout the day: “Buy 5 pounds of 4-inch deck screws,” “Call Rob about shingle order,” “Take photo of spiders in pasture for blog,” “Harvest garlic.” This habit prevents me from letting tasks that need doing escape my memory, neglecting details, and wasting trips to town by forgetting to buy all the items I need.
Green Living Journal • Summer 2015
BY THE NUMBERS
Important Reliance Skill Ever
6. Learning How to Work: Work Efficiently and Avoid Distractions
The most spectacular homesteading failures I’ve seen all involve people who talk a lot and move slowly. While the Internet is an essential homesteading tool, it’s also full of distractions that turn people into spectators and consumers rather than participants and producers. No responsible boss would allow you to watch television, play games or socialize online while you’re on the clock. What you might not realize is that, when working from home, your homestead can actually fire you. When your garden doesn’t get tilled in time and your woodpile is too small
come November, the homestead will hand you a pink slip — and it will be at least as shocking as the regular kind. You’re free to indulge in these distractions during the workday, but they could cost you your dreams of a self-reliant, hands-on life. They probably will.
My day starts at about 7 a.m., when I either work on digital projects or hands-on jobs, such as fixing machinery, tending cattle and fences, or working How to Work - Continued page 22
White cedar cedar from from GOODRIDGE LUMBER, White cedar from GOODRIDGE LUMBER, INC.INC. White
Vermont’s Northeast Vermont’s Northeast Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom! From theFrom From Kingdom! the the Kingdom! time cedar logscedar entercedar the enter time logs time logsthe enter the sawmill yard until theyuntil sawmill yard sawmill yardthey until they leave as finished leave leave asproducts, finished products, as finished products, the Goodridge family family the Goodridge the Goodridge family are are all actively White Cedar Log Log Homes & Log&& Siding White Cedar Homes LogSiding Siding are allinvolved actively involved White Cedar Log Homes Log all actively involved in the Rough and Finished White Lumber the manufacturing Rough and Finished White Cedar Lumber• T+V in Rough and Finished White CedarCedar Lumber • Decking Groove in the manufacturing manufacturing process and Decking ● T+V Groove ● Shiplap ● Square Edge process and look forward Decking T+V Groove ● ShiplapProducts ● Squarefor Edge Shiplap Perma-Chink • Square●Edge • Perma-Chink Log Homes process andforward look forward Products for Log Homes look to assisting to assisting you with Perma-Chink Products for Log Homes www.goodridgelumber.com www.goodridgelumber.com to assisting you with you with your white www.goodridgelumber.com your white cedar project. your white project. Bailey-Hazen Road Route14, 14Albany, cedarcedar project. Goodridge Bailey-Hazen Road ••Road Route Goodridge LumberBailey-Hazen • Route 14VT Goodridge Albany, Vermont Lumber- lumber Lumber-quality quality lumber and Albany, Vermont quality lumber andsince 1974. and service service since 1974. Superior Cedar Products & Services since 1974
802-755-6298 802-755-6298 802-755-6298
Superior Cedar Products & Services since 1974
Superior Cedar Products & Services since 1974
service since 1974.
Visit us online at GreenLivingJournal.com • Green Living • Summer 2015 • 21
How To Work Continued from page 21
in the garden. My wife, Mary, is a full-time homemaker. She has lunch ready for the family at noon, and then I go back to work until 6 p.m. Lately, I’ve spent my afternoons cutting and splitting firewood, and helping my son build his own house for him and his wife. The kids handle cleaning up after supper, so Mary and I are free to walk with our dog along a forest trail for a couple of miles. It’s quite a treat to hear whippoorwills sing while a full moon rises through the trees. As I write this article, my to-do list includes putting the garden to bed; completing a promotional video and website for a local marina; helping one of my sons finish a simple, portable chicken coop he’s building; picking some apples for Mary to use for a pie bee that she’s participating in with friends of hers; extending the watering system on our cattle pasture; and working on my websites with my digital assistants, Mike and Kristena, who live 400 miles away. This is a general pattern of our day-to-day work for six days a week. We don’t work beyond the essential chores on Sundays. The variety of a homestead workweek makes it so much nicer than hourly paid work, at least for me. I look forward to Mondays just as much as I do Fridays, and I’m excited to get out of bed each day. Our carbon footprint is smaller than it would be otherwise, because we don’t travel for work, we heat with wood, and we make, reuse and repair a lot of what we need. This isn’t the life for everyone, but it certainly is for us. Excerpted from MOTHER EARTH NEWS, the Original Guide to Living Wisely. To read more visit MotherEarthNews.com. Copyright 2015 by Ogden Publications Inc.
Cooperative Fund of of New New England England
Celebrating Celebrating40 40years yearsof offinancing financingco-ops co-ops www.coopfund.coop www.coopfund.coop
Facilitating investment in cooperatives since 1975. For more information, visit or call: www.coopfund.coop 800-818-7833 22 •
Green Living Journal • Summer 2015
ENERGY & BUILDING
A Barn You Can Bank On By Andrew Weidman Farming is hard work, without a doubt. Another job always needs to be done, with too few hours left in the day and too few days in the week. This is especially true if you also hold down a full-time job, as so many small-scale farmers do. Efficiency, labor and timesaving devices can make or break your operation, and the right barn will go a long way toward helping you get it all done. Maybe you should consider a bank barn, an innovative idea that has found application especially in locations where winters tend to be harsh. German immigrants began building these barns more than three centuries ago when they arrived in Pennsylvania, and many of the earliest barns are still in use today. Bank barns were designed to maximize production while minimizing effort, and they’re just as efficient today as they were 300 years ago. With lofty upper-story haymows and granaries, they can hold enough feed and fodder to last through even the harshest winters, while keeping livestock warm and secure in the lower floor.
Efficient construction
A bank barn’s signature feature is in its construction, Barn - Continued page 24
An interior view of a bank barn shows the spacious upper level and loft that can be filled with feed and fodder. Photo By Andrew Weidman
Visit us online at GreenLivingJournal.com • Green Living • Summer 2015 • 23
Barn Continued from page 23 Your Local Renewable Energy Partner Since 1975
K THIN
Start the process NOW a summer installation
R MME for
SU
Solar (Photovoltaic)
Net Zero Integrated Systems
Geothermal
The Power is All Yours
802.257.7493
www.isasolar.com
Go Green, Save Energy and Have Fun
NO
CYCLE LICENSE OR INSURANCE REQUIRED (MA)
For Mopeds & 50 cc Scooters • 70-200 MPG! Great Values & Selection of Mopeds & Scooters A2B Electric Bicycles (no license required)
built into the side of a bank or low hill. If no bank is available, an earthen man-made hill can take its place, with ground floor access to both levels. More to the point, it allows drive-in access to the upper level. The beauty of this arrangement first becomes apparent at harvest time. Loaded hay wagons can be driven inside the central bay in the hill-sided back entrance of the barn, then unloaded into the mows without the need for a hay elevator or hay hook. With a little determination and a couple of farm hands, you can fill an entire mow to the roof completely by hand. That is, assuming you use small, easily manhandled square bales. If an unexpected thunderstorm should roll in, as they often do in the heat of July and August, you can continue working while keeping your hay prime, yourself dry, and your barn protected from spontaneous combustion: A barn load of wet hay can create a dangerous situation, heating up quickly, catching fire, and causing disaster. A bank barn’s upper level extends out over the front of the lower level by 8 to 10 feet, forming a sheltering forebay over the livestock entries. The front wall can feature main doors opening over the forebay, which allows you to use gravity to load hay into a waiting truck or wagon positioned below. Inside the barn, trap doors in the mow floors enable hay bales to be dropped into the lower level for convenient feeding. The oversized double bay doors on the back wall are typically 10 feet wide by 12 feet tall, easily large enough to admit loaded wagons into the central bay. A smaller mandoor set into one of the bay doors allows you to slip inside quickly in bad weather conditions.
Lower level
Also: Snowmobiles • Motorcycles 5’-18’ Wood Canoes For Use or Display
www.claudescycles.com
The energy-saving beauty of a bank barn shows itself in another way when livestock are brought into the lower level for the winter. The insulating properties of the earth surrounding the back and sidewalls, combined
877-49-BIKES • 508-543-0490
Barn - Continued page 25
Distinctive Canoe Furniture For Home or Office Carbon Fiber and Kevlar Canoes
Foxborough, MA
24 •
Green Living Journal • Summer 2015
ENERGY & BUILDING
Barn Continued from page 24
with mows filled with hay and straw, helps contain the animals’ body heat and maintain a comfortable 50- to 60-degree atmosphere in the stables. A south-facing bank barn also catches the low winter sun’s rays, adding light and a little solar heat. Add a fenced-in barnyard, and you have an ideal spot for exercising your stock on mild days, giving them a chance to stretch their legs and get some fresh air. The lower level of your bank barn can be set up to handle a variety of housing arrangements. Need box stalls for horses? Are milking stalls for dairy cattle in order? How about a gutter that runs along the rear of the stalls for easy cleanup? Do you need common housing for calves, sheep or goats? Simple. You can even set up a walk-in coop for chickens and other fowl. Typically, a bank barn will be laid out in several stables divided by feeding bays, which run from front to back. The feeding bays provide room to store supplies, a day’s worth of hay and straw, space for a feed cart and silage cart, and a water source. Even better, the trapdoors in the haymows open directly over the feeding bays, right where you need them. Each stable and bay will have its own set of “Dutch” doors. Open the top doors on warmer days to bring fresh air into the barn while keeping the stock inside, or close them to keep the heat in at night. Plus, the fore bay shelters the entry from rain and snow.
sions to the typical bank barn. Many barns even have high population milking parlors added to them to modernize and make room for automated milking. Pennsylvania bank barns have stood the test of time, and not just in the midAtlantic region. As America’s frontier extended west, Pennsylvanian pioneers took their beloved barn style with them, building bank barns in the Midwest and
as far north as Ontario. If you’re ready for the challenge of a farming life and want to allow your barn to help you, you can bank on a Pennsylvania bank barn. Excerpted from GRIT, Celebrating Rural America Since 1882. To read more articles from GRIT, please visit Grit.com. Copyright 2015 by Ogden Publications Inc.
energy emporium
Your Local Renewable Energy Experts
Visit our Zero Energy Building (ZEB) and chart your own path towards energy independence! 78 Main St Enfield, NH 03748 603-632-1263
www.energyemp.com
Expansion
As your farm grows, your bank barn can grow with it. Many old barns have had satellite buildings added to allow more space. Lean-to stock sheds on either side are common additions. Silos are built beside the back wall, with a lower opening entrance into one of the feeding bays below, again harnessing gravity to help with the daily chores. Root cellars, corn sheds, hog and chicken houses, milk houses and workshops are all possible exten-
603.359.1912 / geobarns.com
Visit us online at GreenLivingJournal.com • Green Living • Summer 2015 • 25
BY THE NUMBERS
5 Steps to Roasted Pumpkin Seeds By Tabitha Alterman Pumpkin and squash seeds are loaded with protein and fiber, and they make a great energy-boosting snack or crunchy addition to many meals. Save these delicious and nutritious seeds from ending up in the compost heap in five easy steps. Step 1: Soak Scoop out the seed mass of the squash or pumpkin, and rinse the seeds in a strainer under running water. Don’t worry about getting all of the pulp off, because soaking them for a while will make it easier to rub the pulp off later. Allow the seeds to soak in a bowl of brine (half a teaspoon of kosher salt per cup of water) for a few hours. Step 2: Rinse and Dry Rinse the seeds in a strainer again, rubbing them between your fingers to loosen any remaining pulp. Scatter the seeds on a clean towel to dry for a few hours, or until they are dry to the touch. Step 3: Season Use whatever sounds yummy. Sweet and savory both work — be creative. First, toss the seeds with a little honey or oil to add flavor and help your seasonings stick. Try these tasty combos:
local farms! local food!
Open
D aily 8 -9
• 33 0 N o r t h K i n g S t , N o r t h a
mpto
Sweet: honey, cinnamon, sugar Spicy: olive oil, cayenne pepper, smoked paprika, salt, pepper Zingy: peanut oil, soy sauce, crumbled seaweed, ground ginger, spicy red chili sauce Addictive: melted butter, thin slices of garlic, coarse sea salt Step 4: Roast Place the seeds in a baking dish and roast at 300 degrees Fahrenheit for about 10 to 15 minutes, tossing them around once or twice. They’ll be done when they’re golden, and they’ll become crunchier as they cool. Step 5: Eat Up! Try sweet seeds as a topping on yogurt or applesauce, and savory seeds on soups and salads. When eating the roasted seeds as a snack, you can bite off the pointed tip to crack the shell and enjoy the tasty inner seed meat. Excerpted from MOTHER EARTH NEWS, the Original Guide to Living Wisely. To read more visit MotherEarthNews.com or call (800) 234-3368 to subscribe. Copyright 2014 by Ogden Publications Inc.
n
Truly A Gardeners Delight
Dedicated To Providing Exceptional Plants and Inspiration 1000’s of Choice Perennials
4 Acres of Beautiful Flowering Trees & Shrubs Explore Our Extensive Gardener’s Gift Shoppe Delightful Miniature & Fairy Garden Plants & Accessories!
Stop by to see what our local farmers delivered today. Enjoy sweet local peaches from Apex Orchards, Shelburne, MA. www.rivervalleymarket.coop
26 •
Located In Beautiful Manchester, Vermont 2 Miles South Of The Village Open Daily Mon-Sat 8:30am to 5 pm, Sun 9am to 4pm 802-362-2610 www.equinoxvalleynursery.com
Green Living Journal • Summer 2015
Healthy Foods Healthy Communities
Fostering Community Connections as a Trusted Food Resource
Healthy Foods http://springfieldfood.coop http://springfieldfood.coop 802-885-3363
Bring the familyto our AnniversaryPicnicJune 20th!
802-885-3363
193 North Main St. WRJ, VT (802) 295-5804 ~ uppervalleyfood.coop
open 7 days a week
Healthy Communities
open 7 days a week
In the heart of our community for 40 years!
Your Local Food Co-ops...
1975-2015 Healthy, Local Food Since 1844!
• Brattleboro Food Co-op, Brattleboro, VT • Co-op Food Stores, Hanover & Lebanon, NH, & White River Junction, VT • Green Fields Co-op Market, Greenfield, MA • Leverett Village Food Co-op, Leverett, MA • Littleton Food Co-op Littleton, NH • Monadnock Food Co-op, Keene, NH • McCusker’s Co-op Market, Shelburne Falls, MA • Old Creamery Co-op, Cummington, MA • Putney Food Co-op, Putney, VT • Quabbin Harvest Co-op, Orange, MA • River Valley Co-op Market, Northampton, MA • Springfield Food Co-op, Springfield, VT • St J Food Co-op, St. Johnsbury, VT • Upper Valley Food Co-op, White River Junction, VT • Wild Oats Co-op Market, Williamstown, MA
Since the founding of the first successful co-operatives over 170 years ago, food co-ops have enabled people to work together to improve access to healthy, local food and community ownership. Find your Neighboring Food Co-op at www.nfca.coop/members
Mon– Sat 7–9 pm • Sunday 9 –9 pm 2 Main Street, Brattleboro, VT www.brattleborofoodcoop.coop
The Neighboring Food Co-op Association P.O. Box 93 // Shelburne Falls, MA // 01370-0093 info@nfca.coop // www.facebook.com/neighboring // www.nfca.coop
Monadnock Food Co-op 34 Cypress Street, Keene, NH Open 7 Days a Week 603-355-8008 www.monadnockfood.coop
Buy local and help young farmers grow REX RODANAS, TRUE NATURE GARDENS, KEENE, NH
Visit us online at GreenLivingJournal.com • Green Living • Summer 2015 • 27
GARDENING
Branching Out By Dorothy Rieke Trees play a vital role in providing habitat, beauty and utility in our surroundings. Deciduous trees disrupt the wind and shade our homes from the hot summer sun, and during winter months, bare trees allow sunshine through and still offer some protection from the wind. Many coniferous evergreens grow large enough to serve as windbreaks and offer all manner of cover for wildlife. Flowering trees including dogwood, cherry, lilac and tulip soften the landscape by providing beautiful living art, while fruit and nut trees produce nutritious foods. A tree is a lifetime investment that may not pay the biggest dividends for generations. However, like many long-term investments, with thoughtful choosing, careful planning, care and nurturing, trees will provide substantial value to your landscape from the very beginning. It’s a long-term proposition that can pay off big-time if you follow these tips.
Location is everything
For the best return on your tree investment, choose the species or cultivar and its intended location carefully. Begin by determining the tree’s growth habit, mature age and size in your region, tendency to send
large limbs crashing to the ground as it matures, and the likelihood that its roots will seek out and clog sewer lines or leach fields. If you don’t enjoy cleaning gutters, keep things like seed production and leaf drop in mind as well. Does your tree like full sun, partial sun or a shady spot? Does it have a taproot? How does it do in clay soils, wet soils, dry soils, sand – you get the picture. Once you know what you wish to plant, it’s time to locate it. Depending on the size of the tree and whether it is dormant bare-root stock, balled and burlapped, container grown, or freshly dug with a tree spade, you will need to create a relatively large hole to receive the tree. Ideally you will locate it away from overhead powerlines and cables, and a safe distance from buried pipelines, powerlines, fiber-optic cables and other subterranean obstacles. (Call 811 to be sure.) If there are buildings in the vicinity, plan to locate your tree a minimum of 18 inches plus half the mature canopy width away from the structure. If your species is prone to blowing over in certain circumstances, you may want the tree to be at least as far from the structure as its eventual mature height. Plan now and prevent heartache or worse later.
Dig deep
A hole double the width of the root ball is sufficient when planting trees. Photo By Rick Wetherbee 28 •
To minimize stress on transplants, follow a few simple tips. When transplanting trees, be sure to dig a hole wide enough for the root system to establish itself in its new location – about twice the diameter of the container or root ball. If transplanting container-grown or balled stock, be sure to gently pull and loosen the roots so they don’t retain the memory of the container they were previously in. Feel free to trim back any long pieces of root along with a good pruning of the aerial portion of the tree. The trick is to give that root a head start and not tax it with too much above-ground structure to support in that first season. But watch the depth. Situate the tree in the hole so the crown (where the roots and trunk meet) is no more than a couple of inches below ground level. With container-grown stock, situate the tree so the soil surface in the container is roughly even with or up to an inch above grade. Planting too deep can be just as damaging as not planting deep enough. Once situated in the hole,
Green Living Journal • Summer 2015
GARDENING
Planting trees gives a homestead personality. Photo By Rick Wetherbee
backfill slowly with well-crumbled soil and pack it gently so there are no air pockets around the roots. Water it in, brace it with guy lines if recommended and be prepared to keep a close eye on it for the next couple of years.
Take care
If the tree is planted in fine-textured soil with high levels of clay or silt, the tree should receive about 1 inch of water each week, or about a 5-gallon bucket’s worth (depending on the size) during the growing season. In easily drained soils, 2 inches of water per week is more appropriate. When planting, making a well around the base of the tree helps contain water so it seeps into the roots rather than running off. Adequate rainfall reduces the need for frequent watering, and automatic lawn irrigation systems may actually deliver too much moisture for newly planted trees causing root damage or even death. A rule of thumb is to water until the soil has a cakelike texture, and the water seeps slowly into the ground. If in doubt, be sure to ask plenty of questions from experts in your area. In general, it is better to water deeply and less frequently than the other way around.
While a newly transplanted tree grows in its first year, it draws from stored energy within its trunk, branches and roots. Root growth especially depends on the carbohydrates drawn from the leaves of the tree. During this formative period of growth, perhaps one of the most important post-planting practices to improve the health and vitality of a young tree is mulching. Mulching with wood chips can nearly double a tree’s growth in the first few years after planting – primarily by protecting the root zone from wide in-season temperature swings and moisture variation. It also provides a well-groomed appearance, helps keep weeds and grass from competing with the tree, and prevents mower damage, a leading cause of injury and death to growing trees. It also prevents soil erosion, and as mulch decomposes, it adds to the soil’s organic matter. Mulching materials vary widely, and different types will do some jobs better than others. Ask your local garden center which type would best suit your environment and tree species being planted. The mulched area should be at least 2 feet or more around the base of the tree, but not directly up against the trunk of the tree; pull it away from the trunk several inches to create a donut hole. A 3- to 4-inch layer of organic wood chips or shavings, bark or similar materials is sufficient. A mulch layer thicker than 4 inches may create excessively moist conditions and harbor small rodents, insects, diseases and such harmful to young trees, especially during winter months. Mulch diameter ideally extends to the drip line of the branches, but after a few years this is not practical. In poor, highly compacted soils, heavy mulch may cause shallow root growth, which makes the transplant particularly vulnerable to drought. Trees represent a considerable investment in time, but they also play a large role in our environment and bring joy with their beauty. The shade offered by most trees will lower cooling bills, they make great windbreaks helping to lower your heating bills, and fruit and nut trees are a great food source for a homestead. Take time to select the right tree for your landscape, and care for it wisely because your investment will reap many dividends. Excerpted from GRIT, Celebrating Rural America Since 1882. To read more visit Grit.com. Copyright 2015 by Ogden Publications Inc.
Visit us online at GreenLivingJournal.com • Green Living • Summer 2015 • 29
BY THE NUMBERS
Completing the 251 Quest By Stephen Morris This is a story that deserves background music. As we turned off Vermont Route 10 onto the dirt road heading towards Baltimore, Vermont, our excitement was palpable. Despite the sizable snowbanks lining the highway, there was a bright sun offering promise of spring. Rivulets of snowmelt were on either side of the roadway. The winter had been long, hard, and cold but now there was a hopeful glimmer of spring. A half mile up the hill towards the town, however, and we were back in the purgatory of Mud Season, that curious time between winter and spring when the entire state turns to goo. A half mile further still, and we were now firmly back in winter’s grasp. We came to a crossroads and a sign “Baltimore Rd.” We stopped to take a picture. “I think we’re there,” I said. You can’t always be sure of these things. Just a day earlier, while enroute from Halifax (Vermont) to Athens (Vermont, pronounced “Ay-thens,” by the way) our GPS told us we had reached our destination of Dummerston Center, although the only verification could be provided from some nearby cows, none of whom were offering any help. Then, we turned the corner and saw it, a simple, white, clapboarded structure with a community bulletin board and an announcement of the upcoming Town Meeting. “ “Baltimore Town Hall.” We cheered. It may have been the first time anyone ever cheered upon reaching this isolated building. For us, however, it marked the completion of a quest several years in the making. We had now visited all 251 towns in the state of Vermont. While the final leg was an uneventful ten minute drive on a dirt road, our full journey was a cornucopia of the Vermont experiences, encompassing an entire spectrum of seasons, road conditions, personalities, local food experiences, and memories. The Balimore we visited offered no crabcakes or steamed crabs, no Camden Yards, no Inner Harbor, and no Orioles. “Doesn’t seem big enough to host a Town 30 •
Meeting,” commented my wife and traveling companion, Sandy. She’s a city girl, accustomed to big metropolises like Bethel, Vermont, where we live. According to the 2010 census, the total population of Baltimore is only 244 people. There was nothing in the surrounding countryside to reflect our exultant mood. No brass bands, no mayor to present us with the keys, just snow, trees, and hills, in a word, Vermont. We could easily have leaned on our horn without disturbing anybody. The lack of fanfare, however, did nothing to dampen our sense of triumph. Maybe this wasn’t Dr. Livingston discovering the headwaters of the Nile, but heck Livingston never made it to all of Vermont’s 251 towns. Little known fact … the name “Baltimore” comes from Irish: Baile an Tí Mhóir, meaning “town of the big house.” That’s the kind of factoid that comes from Esther Munroe Swift’s Vermont Place Names: Footprints of History (1977), our other traveling companion for this final leg of the journey. It is not required reading. In fact there are no requirements of the 251 Club. You get to make your own rules. We just found that Ms. Swift always had something of relevance for each of the places we visited. Rather than being named for its Gaelic translation, however, the name “Baltimore” more likely came from Cecil Calvert, the second Baron of Baltimore, the namesake of the town in Maryland that has the good crabcakes. We’d had a similar experience the previous day when we were tracking down Halifax, named after Lord Halifax, a tiny town down by the Massachusetts border. It’s not far from Green River, if that helps. In Halifax could find no signage to direct us to the town center, but we finally happened upon a gaggle of road crew workers. Relieved at such good fortune we asked which direction to take to Halifax. “Either” came the answer, then he clarified, “Both ways take you to Halifax”. Responding to our involuntary double-take, the road worker added, speaking slowly and more loudly, as if addressing a child or someone unfamiliar with the English language, “It depends where in Halifax you want
Green Living Journal • Summer 2015
BY THE NUMBERS
From Halifax to Athens to Baltimore All in One Day and One State to go.” There’s more than one place to go in Halifax? As we drove off, scratching our heads at the apparent incongruity of road heading in opposite directions leading to the same place, we realized that we had been given the polar opposite response of the classic punchline of Vermont humor, “You can’t get there from here.” This time we couldn’t get anywhere else but Halifax from here. Our 251 quest had languished for a while, until last fall when, on an epic weekend trip to the Northeast Kingdom, we knocked off a whopping 36 towns from our list. This included the crown jewel of the the 251 Club, the uninhabited, unorganized town of Lewis. The place is reachable via a series of dirt roads, marginally maintained, that lead through miles of nothingness, until you reach a little more nothingness. That’s how you know you’re in Lewis. There’s a pond, a small dock, and little else, certainly not signs for town meetings. Baltimore, by comparison to Lewis, is Paris, London, and Manhattan rolled into one. This reduced our unvisited towns to a Baker’s Dozen. The end was nigh. A foliage trip netted us Belvidere, population 294 in Lamoille County. The remaining towns were in the southern part of the state. We decided to hit them all on a single trip over Washington’s Birthday. Windham,
Green River Jamaica, Dover, Townshend … each one fell to our relentless pursuit. Even the uninhabited town of Somerset was checked off the list. Then there were three, then Halifax fell, and Athens, then only Baltimore. We hadn’t discovered the Northwest passage or climbed Mount Everest, but we sure felt as if we had accomplished something. You hardly need an excuse to explore the backroads of Vermont, but if you are looking for one, or maybe 251, here it is. (Full disclosure. My wife, Sandy Levesque, is also the Executive Director of the 251 Club of Vermont. For information on membership visit VT251.com.)
Visit us online at GreenLivingJournal.com • Green Living • Summer 2015 • 31
ON THE NIGHTSTAND
Being Mortal
Reviewed by Michael Potts Two healthy septuagenarians, my wife and I often read to each other at tea time, on the principle that hours so spent enrich. At the risk of Too Much Information, may I amend that to chai time? Being Californians, ours never has been a conventional arrangement, and we do not mean it to become one. A Frontline story on Atul Gawande and his book Being Mortal attracted our attention, and when I requisitioned the book at our library, I found myself number sixty-something in line ... so I broke down and bought the Kindle version despite the fact that as a recovering book publisher I am offended that Macmillan charges 66% of the hardcover price for a product that costs nothing to produce. But I digress. Now to the meat: Being Mortal is a stunning book. Its author writes with authority, heart, courage, and common sense about the nightmare that too often attends the ends of the lives of people we love. Dr Gawande practices general and endocrine surgery at Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital, professes
®
M-W 9-7, Th.-F 9-8, Sat. 9-6, Sun. 11-5
32 •
at Harvard, does health research, writes for The New Yorker (one sometimes wonders if these overachievers sleep or have lives) and so is eminently qualified to speak directly to us about the bumpy part of life right before the precipice. In our youth-oriented culture, we do everything we can to deny age while staying young. We love our stories about 80-year-old tennis players, particularly if they are known to smoke, drink, and indulge in the activities we so enjoyed in that blessed decade after we survived our thirtieth birthday, thus outliving our own predictions. And while most of us will live into a ripe elderhood with relatively few health alarums, most of us will experience, right there at the end, a highly unpleasant, most likely painful, interlude, possibly only a few seconds long but sometimes spread out over an agonizingly slow year or more. And here’s the crux: our medical establishment usually makes it worse. If our suffering is prolonged, especially if it involves the modern scourge of cancer, our doctors will most likely offer us knives and poisons instead of palliatives. This is precisely the topic of Dr Gawande’s inquiry: how are we, as the strategists of our own endgames, able to make good decisions about the moves we decide on? “Death, of course, is not a failure,” he writes. “Death is normal. Death may be the enemy, but it is also the natural order of things.” Big hint: the title of the book. We are mortal, and so we will die. At some length (hard to tell with a Kindle book, but the hardcover is 304 pages) Dr Gawande examines, through stories about the deaths of friends, patients, and his own father, the difficulty we have asking the important questions when we face a harsh prognosis. “The purpose of medical schooling,” he writes in the Introduction, “ [is] to teach how to save lives, not how to tend to their demise.” And so, quite naturally, doctors guide us toward prolongation at all costs when a timely and graceful exit would be more satisfactory for all concerned. Before offering some considerations for improving the manner of our departure, Being Mortal takes us through a leisurely, thorough examination of how death has changed in recent years, and why we still die. “The story of aging is the story of our parts. Consider the teeth... By age eighty-five, working memory and judgment are sufficiently impaired that 40 percent of us have textbook dementia... Hair grows gray ... simply because we run out of the pigment cells that give hair its color ... This is not an appealing prospect.” Explaining why geriatrics is a waning discipline
Green Living Journal • Summer 2015
ON THE NIGHTSTAND this piece) obliges us to seek more humane ways for ourselves and our friends. This death business isn’t a comfortable conversational topic, but it’s surely an important one. Reading, and then discussing this book, has helped me to be clearer about how I want to shuffle off. Second: reading a book on a Kindle is a delight. Atul is very good about defining technical vocabulary, but resting my finger on
Author Atul Gawande
despite the increasing demographic load of elders on our society, a colleague advises that “mainstream doctors ... do not have the faculties to cope with the Old Crock. The Old Crock is deaf. The Old Crock has poor vision. The Old Crock’s memory might be somewhat impaired. With the Old Crock you have to slow down, because he asks you to repeat what you are saying or asking. And the Old Crock doesn’t just have a chief complaint – the Old Crock has fifteen chief complaints... You’re overwhelmed.” Another colleague enunciates her understanding of a physician’s true role: “to support quality of life ... as much freedom from the ravages of disease as possible and the retention of enough function for active engagement in the world.” Some months after finishing the book, the Author’s Message that sticks with me (Spoiler Alert) is that when confronted with the inevitability of our own demise, we must ask a very few simple questions about any proposed treatment, questions that most doctors are not trained to answer. What do we need to finish? Acknowledging that we will not be able to regain
youthful vigor and recognizing that death will ultimately take us, what course of treatment is likeliest to allow us to get that done? Every person’s answers will differ, and unless we give this some thought prior to necessity, our nearest and dearest will not be able to help us. I invite you to cogitate on this. If you need encouragement, read the book. A pair of personal observations. First: much of what’s bad in the culture I see around me appears to be traceable to greed, and our willingness to accede to, and our doctor’s quickness to propose, costly, painful, marginally effective “remedies” can easily be seen to be the long-term result of an increasingly interventional, chemically dependent, diseasefocused health establishment. For-profit hospitals and insurance schemes, Big Pharma, the medical schools they finance, and even the practitioners they train, are more interested in corporate profitability rather than corporeal wellness. In our classless culture, noblesse (in the form of literate, critically thinking people with time on their hands to read clear to the end of
a word I’m not sure of and getting a dictionary definition and an offer to look up the Wikipedia citation is a welcome amenity. As my sight dims, I will be able to brighten the page and enlarge the type. We are living, and getting ready to leave, a world where many old delights (including ourselves) persist ...and some of the new stuff is delightful, too. An Inspiring Certification and Training:
Permaculture Design Course July 17 th - 30 th at Sirius EcoVillage (near Amherst MA) 2015 Learn Ecological Design Practices! Gain Skills in Edible Landscaping, Community Resilience, Water Harvesting, Energy Efficiency, Earthen Building, and more! Offered By:
Sowing Solutions Ecological Design Services
w w w. Pe r m a c u l t u re S e r i e s. o r g
Visit us online at GreenLivingJournal.com • Green Living • Summer 2015 • 33
HEALTH Tasty Teas (& More) from Trees: Black & Yellow Birch By Russ Cohen Scratch and then sniff a black or yellow birch twig, and the pleasant aroma will likely put a smile on your face. What you are smelling is oil of wintergreen (methyl salicylate). This chemical compound is present in the inner bark in both species, although typically to a greater degree in black birch. In the trees, as well as several edible berries
that grow in our region, the compound serves as a defense against herbivorous insects. Most people, however, enjoy the taste. You can make a very nice wintergreen-flavored tea from peeled black or yellow birch twigs. I advise against trying to brew this the traditional way, though (i.e., steeping twigs in boiling water). The reason is that oil of wintergreen is volatile and easily driven off by heat, so if you attempt to make tea with hot water, your kitchen will smell great but there will likely be little if any flavor in your tea cup. Here’s my recommended method: get a couple of quartsized, wide-mouth Mason jars. Peel about three dozen twigs. A carrot peeler works well for this, but a sturdy pocket knife should also do the trick. Fill the jars with cool-to-lukewarm water, then add as many of the peeled twigs, and the peelings from those twigs, that you have the patience to cram into the jars. The more you put in, the stronger the flavor. Put lids on the jars and wait. While I used to think that you needed to put the jars in the sun for a day or two, and slow-brew, I have since found that just letting the jars sit around, unrefrigerated, for several hours is enough to ensure strong flavor. If you’re not a tea drinker, there are other ways to enjoy that wintergreen taste. Simply chewing on a twig is pleasant, and if you’re camping and have forgotten your tooth brush, you can use black or yellow birch as a natural toothbrush and breath freshener. This is not as far a stretch as it sounds: xylitol, another compound in both species, contributes sweetness and reduces the number of bacteria that cause tooth decay. It’s an ingredient that appears in some varieties of toothpastes, mouthwashes and chewing gum. Birch – not just yellow or black, but other species such as paper birch – can be tapped just like sugar maples. Tasty Tea - Continued page 35
Radiation Free Thermal Imaging Full Body and Breast Exams Available
FDA Cleared Pain-free
97% Sensitivity Affordable
“Breast cancer overtreatment costs the US $4 bill per year.” Journal of Health Affairs “The focus must be breast cancer prevention along with detection.” Learn your personal risk factors.
Ann J. Barker, BSN, RN, LMT, CTT 603-897-9645 www.baiscreening.com Brattleboro, VT • Groton, MA • Nashua, NH 34 •
Green Living Journal • Summer 2015
Tasty Teas
commercial | new homes | renovations | additions | design energy retrofits | institutions | schools | construction management
Birch sap typically starts to flow just after the sugar maples have ended their run. Many years ago, I tapped some black birch trees on my family’s land and I got about one gallon of sap per hour per tap from the trees. Unfortunately, birch sap is even more diluted than maple sap, and I had to boil the heck out of it to get anything. What I eventually got didn’t have any oil of wintergreen flavor; it looked and tasted very similar to molasses. Another use for birch is as a natural pain killer. Methyl salicylate is related to salicylic acid, the active ingredient in aspirin, and it has a similar painkilling effect (in fact, methyl salicylate is one of the active ingredients in Bengay liniment). So, if you are out in the woods this spring and twist your ankle, consider chewing on a black or yellow birch twig. At the very least, the taste will distract you from the pain, and you’ll limp home with fresh breath. Russ Cohen is the Rivers Advocate for the Massachusetts Department of Fish and Game’s Division of Ecological Restoration. He is the author of Wild Plants I Have Known... and Eaten and has been teaching foraging since 1974. The illustration for this column was drawn by Adelaide Tyrol. The Outside Story is assigned and edited by Northern Woodlands magazine and sponsored by the Wellborn Ecology Fund of New Hampshire Charitable Foundation: wellborn@nhcf.org
Our commitment to sustainable building gets stronger every day.
www.pvsquared.coop WORKER OWNED
COMMITTED TO COMMUNITY
vision | integrity | exper tise
SOLAR ENERGY FROM DESIGN TO COMPLETION Contact us for a free solar assessment of your home or business!
2
(
)
MA Elec. Lic. A13764 and MA HIC 140077
Continued from page 34
™
PioneerValleyPhotoVoltaics a
w o r k e r- o w n e d
c o o p e r a t i v e
311 Wells Street, Suite B, Greenfield, MA 01301 413.772.8788
Like us! www.facebook.com/PVSquared
Your donations and purchases provide essential services which help low-income residents in Windham & Windsor counties. Reuse and Recycle — Discover the GOOD BUY STORES for Clothing, Collectibles, Furniture, Vintage, Jewelry & more.10% off with AD. 676 Hartford Ave & Hartford Recycling 2 stores in White River Junction 802-359-4183 or 295-6373
45 Rockingham St. Bellows Falls 802-463-9084
23 Main St. Springfield 802 885-7074
You can drop off clothing, shoes and linens in our little red sheds at recycling centers in Brattleboro, Rockingham, Springfield, Ludlow, Norwich, Plymouth, Cavendish, and 9 other VT locations. We will pick up your furniture donations. Visit us online at GreenLivingJournal.com • Green Living • Summer 2015 • 35
Fossil Fuel Divestment: BIOMASS® A Growing Movement
1 800 STAY
TARM
WARM
Innovative Leaders in Alternative Heating Solutions
The New Bonus Plus Wood Gasification Boiler GET $5995.00 * FIRED UP!
Since 1927
100,000 Btu/hr Supply Return
• Induced Draft Gasification Technology • Low maintenance design • Small footprint, high output • No compromise affordability • Easy Integration
IMPROVING THE WAY YOU LIVE WITH RENEWABLE HEATING! *Does not include thermal storage, accessories, or installation.
Tarm Biomass | 4 Britton Lane, Lyme, NH 03768 | 800.782.9927 info@woodboilers.com | www.woodboilers.com 36 •
By Joanna Poncavage Money is shifting away from coal, oil and gas thanks to a growing coalition that’s pressuring universities and other prominent institutions to divest from fossil fuels. Even the heirs of John D. Rockefeller — a man who built a vast fortune on oil — are divesting fossil fuels from the family’s philanthropic organization, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. To date, dozens of foundations and institutions (including the British Medical Association and the Sierra Club), hundreds of churches, 30-some municipalities (including Madison, Wisconsin, San Francisco and Seattle), and at least a dozen colleges and universities (including Stanford University) have decided to divest funds they once held in the fossil fuel industry. Boycotts have worked to spur sweeping social change before, and today’s fossil fuel divestment organizers hope to be as successful as the divestment campaign that played a key role in overturning apartheid in South Africa. Are these seemingly big moves having a big impact? “I would say it’s absolutely working,” says Jay Carmona, national divestment campaign manager with 350.org, the nonprofit group leading the way on the divestment efforts. (The number 350 comes from the maximum parts per million, or ppm, of atmospheric carbon dioxide climate scientists agree will maintain our planet’s ecological health. The level is already past 400 ppm, and it’s rising by about 2 ppm each year.) “Divestment is spreading and becoming more global. Campaigns are launching in Australia and Europe, including in the Netherlands,” Carmona says. Organizers at 350.org launched the Fossil Free project primarily on moral grounds: Investing in companies that profit from burning fossil fuels is morally wrong, they reasoned, even if such investFossil Fuel - Continued page 37
Delivering donations of wholesome food to our neighbors in need We’re always looking for volunteer gleaners Join us! www.willinghands.org
Green Living Journal • Summer 2015
Fossil Fuel
SEE US
Continued from page 36
AT THE
ments yield good returns for the investors. Burning coal, oil and gas releases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, thus contributing to air pollution and climate change. “Fossil fuel companies’ profits come from the destruction of communities and the planet,� Carmona says. Divesting isn’t just about taking a moral stand, though — it makes long-term financial sense, too. Investors can earn just as much money by shifting their investments to companies listed in the new Fossil Free Indexes, a set of resources founded by Stuart Braman, former managing director of the Risk Solutions Group at Standard & Poor (S&P). The Indexes are based on the S&P 500, but omit the largest coal, oil and gas companies identified on the Carbon Underground 200 list. Fossil-free investing also protects portfolios from the obsolescence of fossil fuel resources, Carmona adds, given that many countries are moving to reduce pollution and slow climate change by taxing the burning of fossil fuels — a way to make oil and gas companies pay for the true costs of their business. The Risky Business Project, cofounded by climate activists and government players, published a e report in June 2014 called “A Climate Risk Assessment for the United States.� According to the report, continuing on our current, fossil fuel-dependent path will have grave effects on people and the economy: rising sea levels, agricultural disruption, and risks to labor productivity and human health. This warning is echoed by the Third National Climate Assessment, the authoritative and comprehensive report on climate change and its impacts in the United States, released in May by the U.S. Global Change
HOME SHOW! BOOTH #83
Your Your Local LocalRenewable Renewable Energy Energy Solution Solution Electric and N Solar Electric and Hot Water Water Systems Systems Hot N Home Heating Indoor/Outdoor Wood Boilers Systems N Wood and and Pellet Stoves
ADVICE, SALES & INSTALLATIONS %MERALD 3TREET +EENE .( s (603) 358-3444 GEOSOLARSTORE GMAIL COM s WWW GEOSOLARSTORE COM
Fossil Fuel - Continued page 38 Visit us online at GreenLivingJournal.com • Green Living • Summer 2015 • 37
of Sciencein in MasterMaster of Science
Fossil Fuel
Program Graduate Program GraduateGraduate Program Community Mental Health Community Mental Health in Community Mental n Community Mental in Community Mental Health & Mental Health &Health Mental Health & Mental Counseling Health Counseling Health Counseling
Continued from page 35
Classes meet one weekend a month
Classes meet one weekend a month
Classes meet•one weekend acompetency-based month in Burlington, VT Nationally recognized, program Classes meet one weekend a month Burlington, Vermont • Nationallyin recognized, competency-based program and Manchester, NH 48- and 60-credit Master’s degree and continuing education classes meet•one weekend a month inoptions Burlington, Vermont PreparationClasses for licensure as a mental health or options professional • 48- and 60-credit Master’s degree and continuing education classes Preparation for licensure as a mental health professional counselor Preparation•for for licensure as mental health orororprofessional Preparation licensure as aMaine, aVermont mental health professional counselor in New Hampshire, Maine, other states. in New Hampshire, Vermont other states • Preparation for licensure as and aand mental health or professional counselor counselor in New Hampshire, Maine, Vermont and other states. counselor in New Hampshire, Maine, Vermont and other states. in New Hampshire, Maine, Vermont and other states Accepting applications for February 2014 Specializations focused on clinical services and administration in Accepting applications for 2014Abuse Services Accepting applications forHealth February Integrated Community Mental and Substance (Qualified applicants accepted through May) Specializations focused on Adults. clinical services and administration in for Children, Youth and Families or September 2015 in Manchester, NH Integrated Community Mental Health and Substance Abuse Services (Qualified applicants accepted through May) Children, Youth2016 and Families Adults. September 2015 and forJanuary in orBurlington, VT
pecializations focused on clinical services and Accepting applications now for dministrationSpecializations in Integrated Community Mental focused on clinical services and Manchester, NH, Burlington, VT Health and Substance Abuse for Children, Accepting applications now for administration in Services Integrated Community Mental and Brunswick, ME outh and Families or Adults. Manchester, NH, Burlington, VT
Health and Substance Abuse Services for Children, Youth and Families or Adults. and Brunswick, ME
Phone: 800.730.5542 | E-mail: pcmhadmissions@snhu.edu | www.snhu.edu/fosters1 00.730.5542 | pcmhadmissions@snhu.edu | snhu.edu/pcmh
Phone: 800.730.5542 | E-mail: pcmhadmissions@snhu.edu | www.snhu.edu/fosters1 800.730.5542 | pcmhadmissions@snhu.edu | snhu.edu/pcmh 12/12/13 2:03 PM
snhu121813.indd 1
6h-snhu121813.indd 1
12/12/13 2:03 PM
Lower cost for hot water, lower carbon footprint, even raise the value of your home. Showering never felt so good!
Accelera® 300 Heat Pump Water Heater › Not a “hybrid” — this is the only true heat pump water heater available in the U.S. & the largest seller in Europe for 35 years
Brandon Turner Renewed by the Son Erving, Mass. 413.829.1103
Chris Wetherby ASHS, Inc. Rutland, Vt. 802.558.3429
Spartan Giordano Spartan Solar Greenfield, Mass. 413.768.0095
Gary MacArthur Marlboro, Vt. 802.257.7026
D.A. Gratz Hatfield, Mass. 413.247.6161
Imitated, but never duplicated.
O r i G i NaL
GreeN
In twenty great classic colors. Stiebel Eltron Solar Hot Water › Superior German engineering & 40 years of experience with solar thermal drives us to manufacture and supply only the best
$750 Rebate
Sales and installation available from: Jim Renaud Arctic Refrigeration Greenfield, Mass. 413.774.2283
Research Program. The good news? The report says we can still reduce these risks by aggressively adapting to climate change and reducing carbon emissions. The fossil fuel industry has “five times as much carbon in its reserves as it would take to break the planet,” wrote Bill McKibben in Rolling Stone in his open invitation to attend a massive climate demonstration in New York City in September 2014, which coincided with the U.N.’s Climate Summit. Keeping that carbon out of the atmosphere was paramount for the 400,000 people from around the world who marched through the city. “I think it signifies new territory,” Carmona says of the diverse coalition that came together for the march. “It’s just the beginning.” Excerpted from MOTHER EARTH NEWS, the Original Guide to Living Wisely. To read more visit MotherEarthNews.com. Copyright 2015 by Ogden Publications Inc.
Qualifying installs
0% 7-year Loans Complete details at
www.StiebelEltron.us/MassSave.html
For Vt. rebates & credits
Complete details at
www.efficiencyvermont.com
You’ve trusted our twenty luminous shades of Milk Paint to brighten your porous surfaces since 1974. Now we’ve created a new, flat formula designed specifically for walls and other non-porous surfaces — SafePaint Organic Milk Paint. Like our original formula, it’s organic, biodegradable, permanent, durable and nonpolluting. Try our “love it or it’s free” no-nonsense 100% money back guarantee. Also AvAilAble:
More information: www.milkpaint.com Toll free at {866} 350-6455 Five Corners Antiques, Essex Junction {802} 878-6167 r. k. Miles, Inc., Manchester Center {802} 362-1952
Simply the Best
800.582.8423 www.StiebelEltron.us
17 West St. | West Hatfield, MA 01088
The OLd FashiONed MiLk PaiNT COMPaNY 436 MaiN sT., P.O. BOx 222, GrOTON, Ma 01450
38 •
Green Living Journal • Summer 2015
BY THE NUMBERS
5 Must-Have Kitchen Tools By Carol J. Alexander Recently, I asked the homesteaders who read my blog, “What is the next tool you plan to purchase?” Almost half listed kitchen tools. Most cooks have an ample supply of gadgets to perform various tasks. Items like knives, thermometers and wooden spoons find themselves in kitchens on and off the homestead. But homesteading homemakers need a set of tools unlike many others. These tools are needed to process the large quantities of food that homesteading brings to the kitchen. However, homemakers new to homesteading often don’t know where to begin. Grandma’s pressure canner blew up, and a new meat grinder costs $400. How do you know the equipment you want is safe to use and necessary enough to warrant the financial investment? Let’s take a look at five highly desired kitchen tools on the homestead.
The pressure canner
The grain mill
Once you begin baking your own bread, you may want to add a grain mill to the kitchen counter. Grinding your own grain produces a superior product with more nutrients than the flour that’s been sitting on the grocer’s shelf. Grain mills come in two basic types: the electric mill and the hand-cranked variety. The Wondermill or Nutrimill are examples of electric burst mills. They produce flour from grain in a matter of seconds. For the homemaker without a lot of time on her hands, this is a great option. However, you cannot use oily grains like corn or coffee beans in a burst mill. Also, a burst mill only produces flour. If you want grits or cracked grains for hot breakfast cereals, you will need a burr mill. Country Living and GrainMaker are two examples of hand-cranked burr mills. Don’t let their construction fool you. With a little ingenuity, these types of mills can be attached to a motor for easier use, making
In order to kill botulism spores when canning lowacid foods, the contents of the jars must reach 240 Kitchen Tools degrees Fahrenheit. Since boiling water only reaches 212 degrees, no matter how long you boil it, a pressure canner is essential to safely preserve foods like green beans, meat or potatoes. Many homemakers are afraid of them, though, because of the horror stories they’ve heard from their elders. “There is a big trend moving back toward canning,” says Chaya Foedus, owner of Pantry Paratus, a self-sufficiency store that supports consumers in the art of food preservation. “I think Internet technology is helping folks rediscover and learn that canning can be done safely.” When you place your #5 containers into Modern pressure canners are your recycling, it does not mean they are nothing like your granny’s. They now have dial gauges to show always recycled. We send your #5s to Preserve when the pressure approaches an where they are remade into new products. unsafe range, and more than one pressure release valve so that one Bring your #5 containers to our Hanover or allows steam to escape if the other Lebanon Service Desk. becomes clogged. In addition, the modern range delivers a more conHANOVER: 45 South Park Street sistent heat and is safer to use for LEBANON: Centerra Marketplace, canning than our forebears’ woodRoute 120 stoves.
Make sure your #5 plastics don’t end up in the landfill.
Visit us online at GreenLivingJournal.com • Green Living • Summer 2015 • 39
- Continued page 40
BY THE NUMBERS Kitchen Tools
Continued from page 39
it possible for you to grind any type of grain, whether you have electricity or not. Some hand-cranked varieties like the GrainMaker can even be adapted to a bicycle for larger volumes and easier people-powered use.
The dehydrator
Nothing beats drying your foods for convenience and saving space, but not all food dehydrators are created equal. According to Foedus, dehydrators with an element in the bottom and a stack of trays you rotate throughout the day are a dime a dozen. She explained that the tray closest to the element gets dry, but when you rotate it to the top, the fan blows the moisture from the bottom trays back up through the unit onto the driest tray at the top. This makes it difficult for even drying, and it prolongs the drying time. “The back-to-front, square unit is the preferable design,” she says. This shape holds more food, as well. “We chose the rectangular Excalibur,” says Tessa Zundel of Utah, “because you can fit a lot more into that area than you can into a circle. Geometry doesn’t lie.” You don’t need to rotate the trays with the Excalibur, as it has an adjustable thermostat and a timer. No matter which brand you choose, these are the types of options you will want to compare.
The vacuum sealer
I first saw a vacuum sealer in operation at a hog butchering day. While I struggled to stuff chops into zipper-lock bags, the gal working next to me had all her meat packaged, in coolers, and was heading home before I could catch her name. “Wow,” I thought, “Do I need one of those?” It depends on who you ask. Zundel said if she had to ditch one appliance, it would be the vacuum sealer. “I’m trying to use plastic less and less,” she says. “So, the fact that my sealer uses plastic bags is less appealing.” Jo Rellime of Ohio says she couldn’t live without her vacuum sealer, and she doesn’t even use plastic. Using a special attachment, she vacuum seals foods she dehydrates herself and staples she buys in bulk in canning jars. Both women use a FoodSaver Vacuum Sealing System. If you prefer to shop around, Foedus recommends you look for a product designed to protect the motor from moisture, as that is the most common cause of malfunction in these machines. Likewise, if you find one secondhand, test the motor before purchasing. 40 •
The meat grinder
At the same hog butchering event, I saw a commercial-grade meat grinder in action. Several families were processing hogs that day, and the grinder was in use nonstop. Karen Beachy of Virginia uses a Cabela’s commercial-grade food grinder with various attachments purchased separately to make applesauce and hamburger patties, and to stuff sausage. “When we butcher our chickens,” she says, “we grind all the scraps and bones in it to make our dog food. If anyone is doing homesteading in a big way, I strongly recommend this type of machine.” But according to Feodus, if you just want to grind meat, there is no need to spend $400. “It is a major score to find an old Enterprise grinder/chopper at an estate sale,” Foedus says. “If you find one, you found a gold mine.” Why? After more than 100 years of manufacturing food grinders, Enterprise is still in business as Chop-Rite Two. The company manufactures its cast-iron, handcranked grinders using the original design, and still sells parts for them. Don’t let the hand-crank part scare you: Some well-built hand-cranked models can be adapted for motorization, just do your homework on the specific model first. Hand-crank grinding deer meat, with the cartilage and sinew, is quite a chore, and the same goes for a lot of other meats. Understanding what a tool can and cannot do, having a thorough knowledge of its parts and safety features, and knowing what to look for in a used appliance will help you make the decisions you need to make before purchasing anything for your homestead kitchen. If you don’t feel safe operating any of these tools, ask a friend or neighbor to come over and walk you through the process the first couple of times. Excerpted from GRIT, Celebrating Rural America Since 1882. To read more visit Grit.com. Copyright 2015 by Ogden Publications Inc.
Green Living Journal • Summer 2015
EDUCATION
Bethel U., a Pop-Up University
By Professor Stephen Morris
Did you ever see one of the old Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland movies when all seems bleak and lost. They need money for a puppy’s operation and someone has stolen the cigar box with the money they made from the lemonade stand. Everyone’s head is hanging but suddenly Mickey says “Hey kids, let’s put on a show!” Instantly, everyone is running around with purpose and energy. The day is saved! March is a desperate time in Vermont. The days are short, dark, and cold. Then, on the rare occasions when the sun shines, the roads turn to mud. Some people escape by heading for warmer climes, others by drowning themselves in forms of chemical escape. Others sit, motionless and destitute, in front of the television set until the first crocuses poke through. Innovative community organizers in Bethel, Vermont, however, decided to “put on a show” to raise the month of March from the abyss of despair. They created an educational forum in the form of a pop-up university, taught by community members in public spaces on subjects of personal passion. Classes are free to all students. They call it Bethel U. In only its second year, Bethel U. offered a course for nearly every day in March. There were a total of 415 registrations for 43 courses from 250 students living in 40 different towns. The otherwise dreary month was capped by a gala graduation ceremony, then followed with a successful crowd funding campaign through Indiegogo to keep it free for next year. No wonder that the volunteer staff declared on their website: “We’re ready to take a break and party hard.” Best of all, this is a model that can be replicated almost anywhere. All it takes are some plucky kids willing to put on a show. The letter below from Kirk White, one of the Bethel U. community organizers, is full of tips on how to run a successful pop-up university in your town: Dear Prof. Stephen, Thank you for teaching a course at Bethel University! We’ve had a tremendous response this year and courses are filling up fast. Bethel University would be nothing without YOU, our teachers, and we’re grateful for your ideas and your time. Tips for Community Building & Course Structure The main goal of Bethel University is to build community, and you are the most important way we can do that. Please take some time to think about ways that you can help build connections and strengthen community through your course. Here are three easy ways (Read the manual for lots of great ideas): Do Introductions. Allow time for course participants to introduce themselves, say where they are from, and share something about themselves or their interest in the topic.
Consider a fun ice breaker. Make it Interactive. Schedule time for your students to have discussions, work in groups, or otherwise interact and get to know each other. Keep it Going. If your students are interested in forming an ongoing group or staying in touch with each other, we can help. Collect names and addresses, and either you or we can share them to help people connect. Download our Teachers’ Manual and read our tips online. Get lots of advice on how to structure your course to be most effective and how to build community among your attendees! Course Registrations, Attendee Lists & Attendance People may contact you separately and ask to join your course. Kindly direct them to the website to register. People may even just show up if they are on the waiting list. You may want to gently send them away. Please help us enforce the policy that all students must register ahead of time in order to participate. This helps us respect minimum/maximum number policies, space limits and fire codes and ensure that all students get notifications. Please take attendance at your course and turn in the attendance sheet. You can put out a simple sign-in sheet at the door or take a mental note if your group is small. We record absences so that we can track “repeat offenders”—people who may register and not show up, taking a space from someone else. Communications with Students We will be sending reminder emails & details to all students. We send out emails at the end of the week to all students who will be taking courses the following week. Arrival, Setup, and & Cleanup Plan to arrive at your course about 15 minutes early (see details on getting in below, by location). If you need to set up, you may want more time. Please leave the room in exactly the condition you found it – or better! That means cleaning up any trash or supplies, moving furniture back to where you found it, etc. All of our locations are donated, and it’s essential that we take good care of the spaces if we want BU to continue! If you requested supplies, we will contact you ahead of time about logistics for those supplies and/or someone will meet you at the room with equipment. Please be sure you bring anything else that you did not already request. Graduation. We offer a fun “graduation” event with food, a slide show, celebration, and recognition for all of our professors and students. Please encourage your students to attend (they will receive invitations). Please also think about whether you want to showcase any work from your course – art, public speaking, etc. More information at betheluniversityvt.wordpress.com/
Visit us online at GreenLivingJournal.com • Green Living • Summer 2015 • 41
EDUCATION
The Grillmaster Speaks Hello ... the Grillmaster here. For some, the lengthening days and warming temperatures mean the rebirth of roots and the call of the dirt. For me it means the sweet sound of sizzling flesh over open flames. Today I will open the mail bag and answer some of your “searing” questions about how to get the most from your grill
1. Is it unmanly to clean a grill?
I used to subscribe to the theory that all grills were self-cleaning, and that cleanliness was simply a matter of getting the grill hot enough before cooking. Whether due to my accumulated wisdom or just a rudimentary sense of hygiene, I now wire brush my grill (before starting the fire, stupid) and rinse it with the hose before lighting the first match. I still make sure to pre-heat the grill before starting to cook.
2. What is the best fuel for grilling?
Aha, this is a key question. The ONLY proper fuel for grilling is hardwood charcoal, preferably made north of 45 degrees latitude. By being incredibly smallminded and snobbish about your fuel, people will assume that you know what you’re talking about with cuts of meat, utensils, and other nuances of the grilling process. It all starts with being snooty (not sooty) about your cooking fuel. A side benefit of this is that you can release any pent-up hostility onto the people who don’t share your fuel predilection. In a day and age when you can’t make any kind of negative reference to someone’s gender, race, ethnicity, or sexual preference you can refer to someone as an “ignorant gas-grilling scumbag” without much fear of reprisal. Go ahead, slur away.
3. A friend used the phrase “advance planning” in conjunction with grilling. What were they referring to?
Not to worry. Things like marinating meat, menu planning, and table setting are sometimes grouped together under the category of “advance planning.” These, collectively, are essential functions that contribute positively to the overall culinary experience. The important thing for you to know is that “advance 42 •
planning” is done exclusively by OTHER people, a group including, but not limited to, partners, spouses, significant others, kids, and guests. A Grillmaster is like a matador. His function is to look up to sky and say “Looks like a good night to fire up the grill.” Then, when the time is right, he goes in for the glory of the kill. (Aside to animal rights activists, the Grillmaster is not in favor of bullfighting.)
4. How do you actually cook on a grill?
This is the easy part. Get the fire right, meaning glowing coals, no flame. Sear both sides via direct heat (i.e. direct exposure to the coals), then put aside onto indirect heat (i.e. with foil or some kind of barrier between food and heat), and cover until done. Do not overcook. It’s that simple, except for hamburgers. Hamburgers are a separate subject, way too complex for the scope of this article, which is limited to the subject of grilling everything but hamburgers.
Green Living Journal • Summer 2015
EDUCATION
Deep, Philosophical Thoughts While Burning Chicken 5. What does “everything” include?
If you can eat it, you can grill it. If you don’t believe me, get a copy of Steven Raichlen’s The Barbecue! Bible, (Workman Publishing). This book will keep you going all winter long with creative ideas about what is grillable. Steve Raichlen could grill cold cereal.
6. What do you think about in that period between when the fire has been lit and the coals are ready to begin cooking? Hm-m-m ... this is a very personal question, but for a moment I will set aside my Grillmaster facade and share some of my innermost thoughts. But first, let me open this beer. I use this time to think about life and art, and why are we here? Is there life after death and what causes washboard.? Who should the Red Sox use for middle relief, and should a separate basketball league be created for LeBron James? Did you ever notice how so much of what we cook on the grill is called by a different name from what we call the animal itself. We do not, for example, eat “ground cow on a bun.”. We do not eat “pig cubes on a stick,” but rather pork kebabs. We eat countless parts of chicken–breasts, thighs, wings--but never hen or rooster. Pass me another beer.
7. Should Grillmasters, as is the custom with Native Americans, ask an animal’s forgiveness before throwing it on the grill?
This is an individual choice. America is a land of religious freedom. My own habit is to say a prayer before opening a tin of Spam, remembering the days when the Spamalo ranged free on the plains of Vermont.
8. How do I become a Grillmaster?
There is but one Grillmaster, and the position is currently filled.. Qualifications include years of vast experience, good looks, and, most importantly, a job at the local paper so you can make up your own title.
9. Can women become Grillmasters?
[The Grillmaster says nothing, but picks up a long, wooden pole.]
10. What’s the pole for?
It’s an 11 foot pole for questions that should not be touched with a 10 foot pole. The identity of The Grillmaster is a highly guarded secret, protected by First Amendment rights.
I think about the past, about the 1950s, when Vermont was a vast plain roamed by great herds of Naugahydes and Spamalos. Now, the Naugas are all gone, their hides made into BarcaLoungers® and Spamalos are on isolated reservations, their meat available as precious tidbits of canned loin that you can buy at Shaw’s. Spam is quite good on the grill, especially on a skewer with chunks of pineapple, like they serve it in Hawaii. I also think about who made the stars? And, of course, did we buy enough beer? What was the question? Hic. Visit us online at GreenLivingJournal.com • Green Living • Summer 2015 • 43
EDUCATION
15 Household Uses For Coffee then apply mixture to scratched wood surfaces using a washcloth. (For smaller scratches, use a cotton swab.) Let the stain sit for about five minutes for light-colored surfaces, or up to an hour for dark-colored surfaces, before wiping away. Note: If you are worried about the stain getting too dark, apply in small increments until you achieve the color you want. 4. Hand Savior: Rub coffee grounds into your palms after handling smelly foods such as garlic, onion or even fish. The grounds will absorb the smell, as well as any oil that may have hitched a ride on your hands. 5. Disposal Cleaner: For a better-smelling garbage disposal, pour a tablespoon each of coffee grounds and baking soda down the drain to clean the blades. Note: This works best with newer disposal units. If you are unsure about your drain efficiency, consult your owners’ manual for tips. 6. DIY Candle: Want the warm scent of a coffee shop in your home without roasting beans all day long? Repurpose used coffee grounds into a homemade candle: In a small jar, place a metal-based wick in the center of the container, then fill the jar with alternating layers of coffee grounds and melted bees40th Anniversary wax. (Allow the beeswax to solidify between layers.) This candle will release a subtle coffee scent that will help perk you up after a long day — without the caffeine. 7. Dish Cleaner: Mix a handful WELCOMING ALT ENERGY VEHICLES, PRODUCTS & SERVICES! of coffee grounds with your dish soap to add abrasive grit that can help scrub away tough bits stuck to pots and pans. The Alt Energy will showcase a full spectrum of both mainstream and newly-developed, alternative energy-based vehicles and technologies on July 25th, 8. Meat Rub: Combine 1/2 cup for demonstrations and option to drive up to the summit of Mt. Washington, coffee grounds with 1/4 cup ground the highest peak in the Northeast at 6,288ft! pepper and 3 tablespoons kosher salt for a savory coffee meat rub. Sprinkle the rub on your favorite raw meat before grilling. (For best results use fresh, finely ground coffee.) 9. Worm Compost: Coffee grounds make a phenomenal fertilizer. They are slightly acidic, which is great for acid-loving plants such as blueberries, tomatoes, roses Contact event director Ted Dillard at and hydrangeas. Plus, they attract ted@altenergysummit.org or (978) 621-5178 worms, who love this gritty mate(603) 466-3988 AltEnergySummit.org rial. Coffee grounds help worms’ 1 Mt. Washington Auto Road, Gorham, NH digestion, yielding great soil in
By Taylor Nutting The average American drinks three cups of coffee a day — that’s about 400 million cups of coffee consumed each day in the United States alone. For many, the morning ritual of brewing a hot cup of coffee is a necessity as well as a treat. But instead of creating landfill-bound waste by tossing out used coffee grounds, put these caffeinated soldiers to work. Coffee grounds are surprisingly versatile and can be reused nearly everywhere, from your home to your garden. 1. Odor Eater: Just like baking soda, used coffee grounds can absorb unpleasant odors. Combine a week’s worth of used coffee grounds in an open jar, then place it in the back of your refrigerator or freezer to naturally deodorize the space. 2. Hearth Helper: Before cleaning out your fireplace, sprinkle used coffee grounds over the ashes to dampen the dust and keep it from flying everywhere. 3. Scratch Remover: Reinvigorate scratched wood surfaces: Mix 1/4 cup coffee grounds with 1/4 cup warm water and 1/4 cup vinegar, let steep for an hour,
Mt. Washington Auto Road
ALT ENERGY SUMMIT
Saturday, July 25, 2015
44 •
Green Living Journal • Summer 2015
EDUCATION
return, and give worms a boost of caffeine, helping them work at double the speed. Dump used grounds into a compost bin or straight onto your garden. 10. Color Boost: Thanks again to coffee grounds’ acidic nature, you can deepen the blue color of your hydrangeas — or even turn pink hydrangeas blue — by composting with coffee grounds. Hydrangeas’ color is dependent on the pH of the soil. 11. Control Pests: Although there wouldn’t be enough caffeine left in used coffee grounds to kill snails, slugs and other unwelcome garden pests, the pungent aroma will still deter these guys from disturbing your garden. Sprinkle around the perimeter of your plants. You could also use coffee grounds inside the home to repel ants. Sprinkle the grounds where ants commonly enter your house. 12. Seed Starter: Use coffee grounds to help start seeds. With a high carbon-to-nitrogen ratio (almost 20:1), used coffee grounds will release nutrients, including nitrogen, potassium and phosphorus, into the surrounding soil as they break down. This is great for young seedlings. 13. Sugar Scrub: Gently exfoliate skin with used coffee grounds: Mix 1/2 cup used coffee grounds and 1/2 cup sugar with 2 tablespoons coconut oil. Rub all
Astrology & Tarot Amelia Shea
Specializing in Relationships, Career and Transitions
Readings by phone and email, MC/VISA accepted
www.ameliashea.com
603-654-1043
over dry skin. This scrub can help reduce the appearance of cellulite as well as tighten and tone skin while feeling great and smelling wonderful. Add a few drops of vanilla extract or essential oil for a vanilla-latte version. 14. Exfoliating Soap: Add coffee grounds to melted soap (either from a homemade soap bar or from scraps of soap bars around the house) and allow hardening to make a light exfoliating hand or body soap with a subtle coffee scent. Use 1 to 2 teaspoons of coffee grounds for every 1 pound of soap. 15. Hair Treatment: Massage a mixture of 1/4 cup coffee grounds and 1/4 cup coconut oil into your scalp for a luxurious but deep clean. The caffeine can stimulate hair growth and give your locks fresh luster while dispelling build-up. The coconut oil will moisturize your scalp and hydrate dry strands of hair. Rinse out with an apple cider vinegar rinse. Note: This works best on dark hair, as coffee grounds may stain lighter tresses. Excerpted from Mother Earth Living, a national magazine devoted to living wisely and living well. To read more articles visit MotherEarthLiving.com. Copyright 2015 by Ogden Publications Inc.
Atkins Farm is known for old-time customer service, long-standing and Atkins Farm is known for the old-time friendly employees, Atkins’ famous Enjoy the best of season customer service, long-standing and are cider donuts and fresh local produce at Atkins Farms. Select from friendly employees, Atkins’ famous customer’s favorites. cider donuts and fresh local produce Enjoy the best of the season at the freshest Massachusettsare customer’s favorites. Atkins Farms. Select from the freshest native delivered Enjoy theproduce, best native of the season at delivered Massachusetts produce, Atkins Selectfarms fromto the freshest directlyFarms. from local our market directly from local farms to Massachusetts native produce, delivered daily. our market daily. directly from local farms to our market Visit our Orchard Run Ice Cream Shop also find our daily. forYou’ll a taste of our “cream of thelocally crop” Visitserve, our Orchard Run Icedeli, Cream Shop soft gourmet ice cream, sundaes, renowned bakery, meats, for a tastefloats, of ourhot “cream of the crop” shakes, dogs and more. You’ll seafood, specialty foods, sushi, soft gourmet cream, sundaes, alsoserve, find our locallyice renowned bakery, shakes, floats, hot dogs and more. You’ll deli, meats, seafood, specialty foods, cheeses, flowers and gifts to be also find our locally renowned bakery, sushi, cheeses, flowers and gifts to be truly exceptional, too.foods, deli, seafood, specialty trulymeats, exceptional, too. sushi, cheeses, flowers and gifts to be New Beer & Wine Section offers a large Our Beer & Wine Section truly exceptional, selection of local too. beer and wine, as well offers a large selection ofa local New Beer &from Winearound Section large as offerings theoffers world. Come selection of local beer and wine, asand well beer as well as delightand in thewine, festive atmosphere as offerings fromthat around theAtkins world. Come friendly service makes offerings from around delight the festive atmosphere Farms in a sensational experience and the friendly service that makes Atkins ... all world. year ’round! Farms a sensational experience ... all year ’round!
Visit us online at GreenLivingJournal.com • Green Living • Summer 2015 • 45
“Folks at The Public
Press say ‘authors are our business partners.’ That isn't just lip service!
A Mim’s-Eye View by Miriam Herwig The Wrath of Irene by The Herald
At a time when traditional publishing is governed by ‘the bottom line," and your best bet is to write a cookbook or rename yourself Stephen King, the Public Press provides an alternative! St. Peter on a pogo stick! The Public Press is the best!”
Under a Fig Tree by Sandra M. Levesque High on Business by Alan Newman
– Alec Hastings
Otter St. Onge and the Bootleggers by Alec Hastings
The Public Press We specialize in Author's Editions
No Crying in the Kitchen by Michel LeBorgne The Great Beer Trek by Stephen Morris
Change body copy below Author's Editions to "For many, an Author's Edition is the fastest and most reasonable route to publication. The author maintains creative control and copyright ownership while benefitting from the experience of book publishing professionals.
100 Gilead Brook Road Randolph, VT 05060 802.234.9101
thepublicpress.com 46 •
Green Living Journal • Summer 2015
Group by Annette Aberdale-Kendra pearls of a Sultana by Hinda Miller
2015 Full page (7x9.4):Green Living (Full 7x9.4)
04/21/15
11:37 AM
Page 1
Be a member. Not just a number. At Co-op, we’re member owned and member committed. Since 1915 we’ve been providing protection for individuals, farms and businesses with a large network of local agents, fast and fair claims service, knowledge of farm safety practices and affordable rates. At the Co-op, you’re not just a number.
INSURING YOU AND YOUR NEIGHBORS HOMEXAUTOXBUSINESSXFARM
Local agents with a local product supporting our communities, local businesses, and farmers.
292 C olonial D r ive, Middlebur y, V T 05753 Find a local agent by v i siting w w w.co-opinsurance.com | (800) 639-4017
Member owned. Member committed. Visit us online at GreenLivingJournal.com • Green Living • Summer 2015 • 47
BENSONWOOD Sustainable Design • Engineering • Green Building
“What’s the use of a fine house if you haven’t got a tolerable planet to put it on?” Henry David Thoreau
Award-winning, high-performance custom homes & commercial buildings since 1973
BENSONWOOD.COM
877.203.3562
48 •
Green Living Journal • Summer 2015