Greenblade - creation - faith - justice

Big Changes

This was a Spring Cleaning Sunday: I swept, vacuumed, mopped, and dirtied all of my clean rags. I hauled out my hippy-dippy earth-friendly cleaning products and gave my apartment the sort of scrubbing that it hasn’t had all winter. I even deemed the weather warm enough to take my house plants outside and put them on the stoop, where they get more sun than they ever would on my windowsill.

Among my houseplants is one that is growing (quite happily, I might note) in a glass ice bucket, the ice bucket that held my first foray into urban gardening. It was two summers ago that I got a tomato plant from my CSA and planted it in an ice bucket, and attempted --poorly-- to get something to grow on my concrete patio. I did a lot wrong: the plant didn’t have enough sun, got too much water (no drainage in an ice bucket), and it produced one measly tomato. Still, ... MORE

Size and Scale

One of the things that I love about Rhode Island is its small scale. Only 40 miles by 60 miles, roughly, nothing in this state is ever too far away for a day trip. When I miss my local CSA pickup, it’s a 30 minute trip to the farm. The city newspaper reviews restaurants statewide; the best that each and every community has to offer is accessible to every person in the state. Nothing is more than an hour away.

The small scale changes your perceptions of distance, of course. Whereas in New York I’d think nothing of a 25 minute drive to get to Trader Joe’s (a trip I’d be known to make weekly), the comparable trip in RI seems a long distance, and is only undertaken monthly. I suppose this helps to shrink one’s carbon footprint, but if you’re not careful, it also shrinks your perception of the world. When every single thing in the city of Providence ... MORE

What makes Waste?

Jake and I have taken advantage of Rhode Island’s Cash for Clunker Appliances program to buy a chest freezer and a dishwasher. The deal with the RI program (as with the program in all states) is that you have to purchase an Energy Star appliance, it has to replace an old appliance which is disposed of in an environmentally conscious manner, and in exchange you get a hefty rebate on your purchase. Win-win-win, as best as I can tell.   The freezer is only a replacement in the loosest sense of the word: Jake has an old fridge/freezer in his basement (unused, but usable), which we’re “replacing” with a big ol’ deep freezer. The way that my CSA works (with smallish quantities of veggies stretched over a long period of time, rather than an abundance of one thing all at once), I’ve found that freezing -- rather than canning -- is my local-food-preservation method of choice. Jake and I have ... MORE