Quickie: Seed Savers

Did you ever look at a grocery store isle selling seeds and feel like something had gone madly wrong?
Did you ever buy a packet of, say, pepper seeds and then continue with your shopping to the vegetable isle and buy a pepper?
Then, for the sake of this post, did you go home and want to make a salad?
Did you scoop out all the seeds, throw in them in the garbage and continue with your salad making?
Well, did you?

I know, grocery stores don't really sell seeds and no one "makes salad" anymore, so the whole premise was silly - especially the part about throwing out 25-40 seeds in a pepper and buying "real seeds" in a store.

Well, last season I tried a little experiment with peppers that I got from the coop. The pepper was orange and organic. I dried out the seed and eventually germinated them, planted, transplanted and transplanted again and eventually got peppers from those seeds! All this is the topic of future posts, I just wanted to tell you I've done it before so its not a totally crack pot idea.

Well, check out these photos:

2 peppers worth of pepper seeds, dried.

1 small squash's worth of seeds. Originally I took them out to cook but they were too small and I decided to add them onto this experiment. I bet starting squash from seed is harder than pepper, but its worth a try.

The process was simple: remove the seeds and take out as much plant-matter as possible. I dried these out in two ways: one I laid out on a napkin and put in the sun (inside a window), the other I put in the small ceramic bowl you see there and placed it on top of the toaster oven when it was toasting something.

Hopefully there will be a part 2 to this post, and then a part 3, then 4, 5 and however many it takes until I have grown peppers from them and do a post about saving the seeds.

Which, not to brag or anything, I've already done - it was just pre-LLTNA blog (that is a terrible acronym). But hopefully this year I will be planting first with my second-generation seeds which I harvested from a pepper grown from seeds which I harvested from a pepper which I bought from the coop. Other seeds that will be second generation this year: cucumber, cilantro/coriander, and maybe others - we'll see what survived the move.

So much for a quickie,

-Mark

Quickie: What to do with eggshells

I made a promise to post a few quickies because if only ever post long-winded ones two things will happen: 1) no one will read them and 2) I'll never write them, which really negates the first one.
Anyhoo - check out this photo:

What's this, you ask? Why, its eggshells crushed into the bottom of a tin can.

Why, you ask?
A much better question, I answer.
I have just moved into my new house and don't have a compost (the subject a future post, I promise, but in short: its tough to start a compost in the winter). But Sara and I cooked up a storm and I was left with 8 egg shells and no compost to put them in.

What else are eggs good for other than a landfill?
Well, eggs are made of calcium (you can thank the hens for that) and calcium is a nutrient that plants love. I don't have any plants right now to fertalize but luckily calcium is particularly good at keeping (see: your teeth, your bones, seashells, etc). So I crushed them into a tin can and I'll most likely store the can in the freezer.

Why a freezer?
Well, the eggshells would keep fine anywhere but, even though I cleaned the eggshells, I'm sure there are remnants of egg on them and that can get right nasty if left out. I could inspect every inch and be careful or just put them in the freezer and not worry about it. When I'm tilling the earth and getting it ready for garden time, I'll take these out and scatter them throughout the soil.

Eggshells & compost, a side note
I mentioned above and you might know that eggshells are very often used in compost but not exactly for the same reason as above. They do add nutrients to the soil eventually but they serve a more important purpose: they help the worms. Worms are crucial to composts for lots of reasons that I won't cover here but a long story short: they eat our leftovers and poop out stuff that plants love. The worms digestion system actually needs 'grit' which is exactly what is sounds like and crushed up eggshells count as this. Also (and this is an idea I'm less familiar with), I've read that egg shells help keep the pH balance from getting too acidic but if you want to know more about that - find someone else's blog. :)

So much for a quick post.

-Mark

The Story of Stuff, a perspective-changing film series

More at www.storyofstuff.com

Is that 'for here or to go?

Its been a while since I started to think about the 'stuff' I am a part of putting in a landfill but its taken a surprisingly long time to really get it to enter into my day-to-day thought stream. Recently though its really started to integrate into my life and its like a little bell goes off everytime I'm about to buy something with extra packaging, plastic utensils or bags. Well when I find myself buying food out and I hear the words 'is that for here or to go?', a bell goes off but I'm not sure what its telling me.

In general, I think 'for here' creates less garbage, especially if the restaurant will use a ceramic plate and silverware instead of throwawayables. But it has happened plenty of times that 'for here' just means a different kind of throwawayable. To go means they wrap it three times (once in wax paper, once in foil and another time in wax paper) and then put in a plastic bag, along with a plastic fork, spoon and knife, 10 napkins, 3 salt packets, 3 pepper packets, and a ketchup packet or two; meanwhile, for here saves you the condiments but they still may give you plastic utensils, napkins, and wrap your sandwich three times.

But what can you do? They asked 'for here or to go?' - I have two options, bad or worse.
What about not answering the question? What about asking your own question.. 'can you just put it in my hands?'

The man behind the counter stares in disbelief -
The lady in line behind your gasps -
The boy throwing the pizza dough in the air forgets about it in shock and finds it splattered on his head -
'...in your hands?' asks the man behind the counter?
'...no wrapper or bag? just, in your hands?' repeats the lady behind you.

'Yeah, just put the pizza slice (bagel, wrap, sandwich) in my hand', you reply smoothly, '.. just, in my hand'.

Now, before I go further - I cannot claim this idea as my own. Sara introduced it to me as a former campaign created by the Teva Nature Education Center. The 'Just Put It In my Hands' campaign is exactly what it sounds like - no plate, no wrap, no bag, no utensils. Just eat it.

But, shout the naysayers, what about soup?! and salad! How can I ask for that in my hands?

Fine, not every kind of meal fits so well in the palms of your hands, but once you realize that 'for here or to go' are not the only options, maybe you can think of another option. Like, 'can I just have it on a paper plate' (salad) or 'do you have any reusable bowls for soup?'. Its become slightly more fashionable to bring your own travel mug to coffee shops, which is a great trend, but maybe we can extend that further. Some of us, if we are honest, have a job where we eat our every single day for lunch. Well, if you know that 2 days a week you get a salad and they give you a plastic fork every time - you could slip a fork from home into your bag and say casually to the people packing your meal 'Oh, I don't need a fork, thanks'.

As with a lot of similar actions - its important to remember that for every time you tell the person behind the counter that you don't need a ____ (fork, plastic bag, styrafoam tray) - you make an impact. You keep one item from the trash, true, but even if no one bats an eye, four people around you noticed. Each time you say something, the people around you hear and think 'oh, you can do that?'.

To quote our great American president, tell them: 'Yes, we can'.