A recurring ideal in our house is sustainability. We want to have as small a foot print as possible on the natural world, and indeed to leave our physical and social environment better than we found it. Our decisions are very deliberate (can we keep our buying to a minimum? can we resist the urge to drive when alternatives exist?). By the standards of our society, we’re doing well, though we harbor no illusion that we are either trailblazers or paragons of consistency. We are still more dinky guppies than granola hippies, and the tension between the two is at times exhausting (must we process again?). Such is the price we pay for conscious living.
We have big plans to make our new house more green: edible garden, native plants, solar panels…. We took the first step this weekend, when we set up our very own vermiculture system. Yes, that’s right, we purchased (there’s that consumerism!) a worm factory. Red wiggler worms, it turns out, excel at digesting many kitchen and yard scraps into castings that make a very valuable compost and a nutritious “tea” for garden plants. We’ve set up the wigglers in their new home and fed them. Now we just have to wait, see, and fine-tune.
We also started work on our back yard. We planted a big lilac tree (obtained free on craigslist) and a winter currant bush (obtained cheaply from the arboretum). We moved some of the shrubs from the front garden to the back, and we topped it all off with fresh wood chips from the neighborhood tree recycling program (they delivered a whole steaming pile of them to our door!).
L’chaim!
