Radical homemaker?

Leave it to the west-coasties to come up with a name to match what it is, apparently, so many of us are hankering towards: Radical Homemakers.

According to the author of the book Radical Homemakers, this is what a city-dwelling RH looks like:

He or she might be gardening on a rooftop, a balcony or, if they are lucky, in a backyard. They might be cooperating with others in the neighborhood to work a city garden plot, traverse the city taking advantage of fallen fruits from unharvested trees, pressing cider, making wine, beer or mead. They are bartering with their friends — exchanging homemade yogurt, canned pickles, jars of sauerkraut or gardening expertise for plumbing or carpentry. They find time to visit with family and friends, are well-connected at the farmers market and likely spending some time on a sewing machine, tinkering with a bike repair, or walking. They’re regulars at the thrift stores, finding things they might need, and giving things away. They’re probably activists advocating for poultry and small livestock in the city, trying to get better bike lanes and improved public transit, or helping on myriad creative causes that speak to their hearts.

That touches on pretty much everything I do other than the bartering:

• I grow veggies, and am hoping to participate in Not Far From The Tree this year.
• I’m (canning) putting up LOTS of things this year and even hope to have a pressure canner by year’s end.
• We know most of the vendors we buy from at the Farmer’s Market well enough to exchange pleasantries every week.
• I’m hoping to learn how to sew; I have at least two sewing projects on the books for this year and, with help/training from my Mom, will get them both done!
• We’re heavily into transit and walking, as discussed in my earlier post on Green on a Budget.
• Thrift stores, Craigslist, and Freecycle: hell yeah! See also this post.
• Man, I’d love chickens if we had a bigger back yard.

Read more of the interview with the author on Oregon Live.

Greening on a budget: Lessons learned

Ann Nichols says that it’s damned expensive to live green, and that it’s simply out of the financial reach of many folks. For those of us in the middle, we do what we can afford – and feel guilty about what we don’t do. Sure, I agree. After all, one of my biggest guilt buttons is meat. While I now buy eggs from happy, free-range chickens raised ethically and with their own Starbucks every morning (honestly, after reading Omnivore’s Dilemma I could do little else), I have yet to be able to afford to buy totally happy meat 100% of the time. The fact is that at the market, a 3 pound chicken costs $9. A 2.5 pound ethically raised organically fed Starbuckian chicken from a local grower costs a whopping $22. Ouch. So yes, like most locavore-foodie-liberals I have my guilt buttons. But I have found a number of things that I can do to save money AND live more green:

1. Napkins. I was raised in a household where you had to use a napkin at every meal. So for half my life I’ve used paper napkins – supermarket cheapies during lean times, nice thick 3 ply dinner paper napkins when times were more prosperous. But when I met the now-hubby and his two kids, we started going through all those dead trees a lot more quickly and expensively – 12 napkins a day adds up. Two years ago I took the plunge, headed to our local thrift shops and began to pick up cloth napkins. We now have a good pile of them – enough to last us a week or so – and haven’t used paper napkins in years. We’re saving trees, and while it does cost money to wash them, the entire wad of napkins only takes up about as much room in the washer as a single sweater.
2. Reused goods. When it came to redecorating our home, we did two important things. One, we either resold (via Craigslist, Kijiji, or eBay), donated (to local thrift shops) or freecycled at least 95% of the items we were getting rid of. It saved a huge pile of consumer products from ending up in a landfill – where, I’m sad to say, I have thrown many things back before I knew about treating the earth a little more gently. Two, we made heavy use of those same resources – Craigslist, thrift shops, garage sales, even Freecycle, when redecorating our home. Most pieces needed a little fixing up – repainting, sanding, recovering, refurbishing – but that also meant we could customize the items to our own style. This saved a lot of cash – bargoons are everywhere if you take the time to look for them, and reselling our own unwanted items meant that we had a little extra cash in hand for buying and/or fixing up.
3. Gardening. I grow a lot of our own veggies and virtually all of our own herbs. This saves lots of money from the farmer’s market and allows me to concentrate my market money on items we don’t grow/make ourselves, like meat, dairy, fruit, and mushrooms.
4. Broth. I save tons of cash on making my own soups, risottos, and flavoured rice by making all of my own broth. I keep chicken and turkey carcasses for poultry broth, and am beginning to reserve (in the freezer) veggie scraps to eventually boil down into veggie broth.
5. Transit. It just costs less than owning a car and is better for the environment since we’re sharing our enviromental impact with all of the other riders. We take transit whenever we can.

It’s not perfect, and it doesn’t address every greening problem that an urban family can face, but it’s a start – and every one of these saved us money, too.