Firewood

Firewood
We put a Vermont Castings woodburning stove in our house in 2007. I think the guy who installed it thought we were a little nutty because when he explained a few things to us it was apparent that we had no idea how to build a fire. We kept giving him blank looks and I think he left hoping we wouldn't burn down our house.

Last year it was such a big deal for us to build a fire and it took the better part of an afternoon to really get it going and start heating up the house. We have gotten a lot faster at it and we really enjoy the heat that comes from the stove. It is so much more comforting and relaxing than the kind of heat from our gas furnace. We think we have discovered that the reason the heat is so much better is because it heats everything - the bricks, the walls, our bodies - instead of just heating the air like the forced air heat from the gas furnace. There is something delicious and wonderful about connecting with the primitive nature of real fire that is truly warming when it is cold and dreary outside. It is difficult for us to pry ourselves away from the fire in the winter and I often fall asleep reading by it in the evening.


Cozy fire in our Vermont Castings stove

Some people who are concerned about sustainability have chosen not to use wood for heat because they are concerned about pollution. The argument goes that if everyone had a woodburning stove in the winter the air could become very smoky and, although trees are a renewable resource, we might use up too many of our forests. This is a fair argument and one we thought seriously about as well. However, in the end, we have chosen to use wood over gas, coal, and oil because we feel that it is a local, renewable resource, and because it puts us in direct contact with our consumption. We have to work (and we will explain just how MUCH we have to work) to heat our home by gathering wood and building the fire. This give us a direct connection with the source of our heat and with our footprint on the earth.


So, to get back to our process... the first step was to choose the stove we wanted and get it installed in our house. We also looked at pellet stoves because they are a little easier to deal with, but they use electricity to feed the pellets into the stove and our goal is to get "off the grid" as much as we can. Also, you have to purchase the pellets from someone, and we wanted to develop more independence as consumers. We chose the Vermont Castings stove and had it installed, and then set about learning how to build a fire.


But, oh - how could I forget...THE FIREWOOD!




Where do you get firewood when you are college educated teachers - intellectual subanites? We hadn't a clue! We bought some wood from the place we bought our wood stove from and we also bought some wood from a local farmer. But it started to bother us to have to pay so much for wood, so we started foraging for wood and looking for free wood offers on Craig's List. Then last year we had a huge storm caused by a hurricane in the Gulf Coast and trees were down all over the place around here. People were chopping up trees and leaving them by the curb as yard waste, so Saul took the pick-up and collected wood like a fiend. He gathered about a 2-3 year's supply of wood at least! I think collecting the wood tapped into his hunting and gathering instinct!


OK, so we had the stove, we had a bunch of wood, but we then had to CUT and SPLIT it. Oh my, what to do? We both have a healthy fear of chain saws, so we hired someone to cut it into lengths that would fit into the stove. Then we tried a number of electric wood splitters, but they weren't really powerful enough to split some of the large stumps we had. Finally, through some community networking that happens when you live in a small town, Saul found out about a gas wood splitter that someone was willing to loan us free of charge. It was a large one - 27 tons of pressure! We borrowed the wood splitter and Saul went to work...for almost the entire summer of 2009! What a job! It was a very physical job for a college professor and it was a lot of hard work, but Saul persevered and we are very well set for firewood for at least a few years.


Saul's summer vacation

The last step in the process was to organize and STACK all the firewood, which was also new to us. We had no idea there were so many things you have to do in order to build a cozy fire in your newly purchased woodburning stove! Before we could stack the wood we had to have some place to stack it, so that was a decision-making process. We learned that it's probably not a great idea to stack it against the house because of termites (which we had already done and we are using that wood up this winter), so we had to have some kind of structure to put the wood on. The first time we stacked it most of the stack fell down, which was very disconcerting, but we finally got our log stackers (which we ordered off the internet and assembled) and we got the all the wood stacked. Whew!





Sooooo....just to reiterate the things we did:
1. Picked out the stove at the store (took some doing).
2. Had the stove installed (took some doing).
3. FOUND firewood (had to learn where).
4. Hired someone to CUT the wood (the easy part).
5. Borrowed a lot splitter and SPLIT the wood (oh man!).
6. Ordered and assembled log stackers and STACKED the wood (backbreaking).
7. Learned how to build a fire and BURN the wood (took some doing).
8. Enjoyed our fire (haven't burned down the house yet).
9. Felt like pioneers from "Little House on the Prairie" (little energy efficient house in Yellow Springs)
10. Wrote this blog post (brag, brag).


Voila! Stacked wood!

The Manure Pile

Building the Soil - or in other words...
The Huge Pile of Horse Crap in our Front Yard

We really are very fortunate that we live in a neighborhood where not one person has complained about the fact that we have about 3 tons of horse poop on our front lawn!

This came about because we found a farmer on Craig's List who owns 20 or so horses and wanted to get rid of some manure. He sold it for $75 a truckload - and I do mean a TRUCK load. A huge truck, not a pick-up truck. He was willing to deliver it, which we were ecstatic about because we had filled up our own pick-up with manure several times and that job - pardon my slang - really totally sucked! The farmer who delivered the manure is an older man and he didn't make it to our house for a long time, so when he finally called to say he was ready to come with his truck load of poop we were ready. He arrived with this huge truck and we realized that if he drove the truck to the back of our lawn it would probably sink into the soil and make big ruts - and he might actually get stuck. Sooooo...we decided to have him dump the manure in the front yard. We didn't really want to think about what that was going to look like - we were just excited to get started gardening.

After he dumped the first load he offered to bring ANOTHER load, and we thought we might as well strike while the iron was hot. He was such a sweet guy, and he kept telling us that he didn't feel very well and might not live much longer. That did it for us and we ended up with 3 loads of manure that day. He ended up only charging us $50 for the whole pile!! I imagine he had a lot of manure he wanted to get off his hands that day that was maybe clogging up his barn and we were willing takers. I suppose you might wonder about us a little - taking 3 tons of sh_t and paying $50 for it. But I'll tell you that the manure is black gold when you want to start a good organic garden. One friend has actually told us that she has "manure envy" because we have so much manure now!!

It helps to know that we can start another garden bed whenever we want to because we have so much good rich composted manure. We are wealthy in horse crap and are the envy of the neighborhood! Who would think!

It is interesting what one finds valuable in life, and to take note of how that can change...


Piling manure on a new bed

Lawn to Edible Garden: creating the beds for planting

Creating the garden beds for planting

In order to transform our lawn into an edible landscape, we have to create garden beds where we have had grass. The hard way to do that is to dig up the grass by hand with a shovel or to use a rototiller. There is an easier way, however, using inexpensive and easily accessible materials: cardboard, old carpet, wood chips, and horse manure.

Our first step in creating garden beds is to go on a scavenger hunt around the village in search of large sheets of cardboard and old carpet. We bought a used pick-up truck for hauling firewood and gathering materials, so it is easy for us to drive around town with the pick-up scouting for our FREE materials that people have put at the curb. We usually do this on trash night and it's actually a fun routine that we often do as a family.


Once in awhile we hit the motherlode of cardboard and we really feel happy when that happens. I know that weird things make us happy, but when you can envision a large garden bed coming together easily because of your big pile of cardboard it's really quite satisfying! We pile it all into the truck and drive home, ready to work. The back of our house looked messy when we first started gathering these materials - in fact it was a little hillbilly-ish and a bit embarrassing, but we pressed on...





When we find carpet it is, of course, carpet that people are throwing out. Once when our neighbor saw us in her driveway piling her old, dirty carpet into our pick-up, she came out with a concerned look on her face and told us that we probably didn't want her carpet because it was full of cat pee! We explained what we were using it for - and that the cat pee was not a problem - and, although she was still a bit puzzled, she let us take the carpet. Now she stops often as she is walking her dog to see how our garden is coming along.


In addition to gathering carpet and cardboard, we also have to accumulate horse manure and wood chips - which is another story in itself and deserves to be told at a later time. Suffice it to say that we have huge piles of manure and wood chips in our FRONT yard and we are fortunate to live in a garden conscious neighborhood!


In order to create a bed for planting, we put the cardboard down where we want to develop the bed in order to kill the grass. We cut the carpet into strips the width of the pathways we want to have because we don't want weeds to grow on our pathways and the carpet will not only kill the grass, but it probably won't disintegrate for another 300,000 years or so. It's nice that we can use it for something useful since carpet full of cat pee isn't a sought after commodity.


Once we put the cardboard down and create pathways with the carpet, we pile manure on top of the cardboard and spread it out. Then we put wood chips on the pathways and - voila - we have a new garden bed!





Sometimes we begin planting right away, and sometimes we prepare the bed in the fall, pile leaves or straw over it so it can compost over the winter, and then plant that bed in the spring. Last summer I created a bed and planted zucchini in it the same day. We have such an abundance of manure that I can pile it on 6-8 inches deep. (I know how that sounds...6 inches deep in sh_t, but you know, we do what we gotta do - and it's all good!) I made hills about 15 inches high to plant the zucchini in so it had room for its roots. The zucchini was very happy and provided us with an abundance of tasty food into the fall.


I like the idea that we are recycling materials - carpet, cardboard, wood chips from fallen trees and yard scraps, and horse manure. It is simple and we can do it ourselves without spending a lot of money. We drive around our small village and talk to our neighbors to collect our materials rather than driving to Lowe's or Home Depot and spending money on materials that come from who-knows-where. The manure we use comes from a local horse farm and is not wrapped in plastic; the wood chips come from the local tree guy who has just used his chipper to chop up the neighbor's tree; the cardboard and carpet come from recycling bins all over the village. By using these materials we have developed relationships with a whole network of people that we would otherwise not know. The change in our lifestyle is not only about gardening, but also about relating to our friends and neighbors, using local materials, and doing our own labor. It is quietly radical on so many levels...

Changes in Lifestyle #2: Lawn to Edible Garden

Lawn to Edible Garden

When we got pretty well settled into our new home, we decided we wanted to mow less grass and create a yard that was filled with edible food. It makes more sense to us to have a yard that produces food than to have grass that uses resources to be watered and mowed, but that doesn't serve a useful purpose. We used some of the principles of Permaculture and then jumped in to try our hand at growing some of our own food.

The word Permaculture comes from both "permanent culture" and "permanent agriculture" and is "a set of techniques and principles for designing sustainable human settlements" (Toby Hemenway, Gaia's Garden). We are total novices at practicing permaculture, but what we want to do is develop a yard that is not only beneficial to us, but to the plants, animals, insects - and other humans that we live with. For us that means not using pesticides and sprays, creating interconnections between the plants, animal, and insects in our living space, and using recycled and natural materials to develop the garden. It seems logical to us to create an edible landscape that is both beautiful and useful.


We started by planting fruit and nut trees, as well as berry bushes and perennial vegetables that would become a permanent part of the structure of our garden. We planted apple, paw paw, and chestnut trees, as well as blueberries, raspberries, strawberries, blackberries, serviceberries, asparagus, Jerusalem artichokes, rhubarb, and some perennial flowers and herbs. This gave us the beginnings of a structure for what some people call an edible forest garden. The picture below left is an apple tree (protected by deer fencing) with beans and summer squash growing next to it. We expanded a flower bed that was already developed as a foundational structure to plant the apple trees around as well as to plant vegetables in.




Once we had the trees and bushes planted we went about developing beds to plant our annual vegetables and herbs. We planted butternut, acorn, and summer squash, zucchini, potatoes, parsnips, carrots, beets, tomatoes, cucumbers, sweet potatoes, beans, peas, basil, lettuce, garlic, and a variety of edible flowers. The edible flowers above were a delicious and beautiful way to add color to the bed in front of our house. We planted nasturtiums, Maximillian sunflowers, calendula, safflowers, hyacinth runner beans, scarlet runner beans, hollyhocks, bee balm, marigolds, violets, Sweet William, and flax.


We learned a lot during the last growing season and we had a lot of great food to eat straight out of our garden. It was wonderful to go gather a salad or to create a meal with fresh zucchini or summer squash. I loved picking basil and making fresh pesto, or simply putting a lot of basil in my salads. Sometimes I just foraged through the garden munching on sugar snap peas and cherry tomatoes. It was satisfying to know that the work we put into our yard had a purpose, and that we could eat the fruits of our labor.

That was all great, but we have a LOT more to learn. We had to water quite a bit and our water bill was enormous! We need to learn more about collecting water with rain barrels and about mulching to hold the moisture from the morning dew in the ground. We planted some things that we aren't familiar with and that didn't grow very well like lovage, fava beans, and salvia (I don't even know what that is!) , so we will probably stick with more conventional vegetables that grow well in Ohio until we get better at what we are doing. There was a tomato blight, so our tomatoes were orange and the plants got really brown, and our corn was full of worms. I thought I could leave the sweet potatoes in the ground and harvest them this winter, so I was really disappointed when I harvested them a few days ago for our Winter Solstice meal and they were brown and weird. I was happy, however, to find that the parsnips had grown throughout the fall and were very tasty! I know that Jerusalem Artichokes are a staple of permaculture gardens because they are a prolific perennial plant, but we haven't really warmed up to eating them. I have a bag of them in the refrigerator that I harvested on the Winter Solstice, but I haven't been terribly motivated to cook them along side all of our tasty holiday food. We had a beautiful garden, but we also have a huge learning curve. We want to give ourselves a lot of time to learn so that, in the event that it becomes necessary for more of us to grown our own food, we have some wiggle room to make a lot of mistakes.


We will post more information about how we set up our garden beds, getting the raw materials like manure, wood chips, and old carpet (yes, that's right - carpet!), but I am still struggling to figure out how to upload photos on this blog and put them where I want them with the text, so...another learning curve!

Changes in Lifestyle #1 - The House

Changes in Lifestyle #1 - The Not So Big House

As we began to come to terms with the changes our world is undergoing, the first major change in lifestyle we made was to sell our large home (approximately 6000 square feet) and buy a small home (approximately 1500 square feet). It sounds so simple to write about in one sentence, but in fact, it was DRAMATIC!

I should say that much of this process began when we took a course in Voluntary Simplicity. Richard Gregg, a student of Gandhi's teaching and wrote the following about voluntary simplicity:

Voluntary Simplicity involves both inner and outer

condition. It means singleness of purpose, sincerity

and honesty within, as well as avoidance of exterior

clutter, of many possessions irrelevant to the chief

purpose of life. It means an ordering and guiding of

our energy and our desires, a partial restraint in some

directions in order to secure greater abundance of

life in other directions. It involves a deliberate

organization of life for a purpose...The degree of

simplification is a matter for each individual to settle

for himself.

During the Voluntary Simplicity course it became clear to us that we needed to simplify our life, but it has taken us years now to figure out how to do that in a practical way because life - in so many ways - isn't really simple. As a part of the course, a man named Pat Murphy came to talk to us about Peak Oil and about what his organization, The Community Solution, in Yellow Springs was doing about it. It was a very interesting talk that peaked our curiosity and, to make a long story short, Saul became a board member of The Community Solution. Through Pat, his wife Faith Morgan, and The Community Solution organization we learned more about Peak Oil and Climate Change. This added to the urgency to simplify our lives that we were already feeling as a result of the Voluntary Simplicity Course.

So...what to do? We were 3 people living in a huge house with 2 kitchens, 4 bathrooms, way more space than we needed, and WAY more stuff than was necessary for a life of simplicity. We loved the house and it had a 1000 square foot studio space that I used for my artist studio, so it was not an easy decision to let go of it. Our daughter, Mollie, was born at home in this house, so it was difficult for us to give up that memory and her childhood home as well. Before deciding to sell the house we looked into what we needed to do to retrofit it, but in the end the expense of retrofitting was going to be more than we felt we should spend. Even if we did retrofit it we realized that with the rising costs of oil, gas and electricity the house was going to be very expensive to heat and cool. We finally decided to put the house on the market and went through the painful process of selling it.

In addition to selling the house we went through months of getting rid of most of our STUFF! We sold some of it, gave away some of it, made many trips to Goodwill, put it out at the curb for people to take (a long-standing tradition in Yellow Springs), and threw some of it away. Again, in a few written sentences it sounds simple, but it took months of work to lighten our load. I think we, as human beings, tend to expand into whatever space we live in, so we had filled up our large home. We had to sort through what we really needed, what we wanted, and what we could let go of. Some things were really difficult to give up, we had to sort through lots of old memories, and then we had to let a lot of things go. We did this voluntarily, but that didn't mean it was easy.

I found, once we moved, that I was somewhat identified with living in that large - and very groovy - house. It was quite unique, it had huge rooms and, as I said earlier - a large 1000 square foot art studio. It was a great space to host parties in, and to have lots of kids over to play. We had wonderful toys, doll houses, a puppet theater, and beautiful play spaces for our daughter. When we left the house I felt my identity shifting a bit - but I couldn't really put my finger on the change...

Once we sold the house we then needed to purchase or build a smaller home. Our original intention was to build a passive solar house, so we began to look for lots to build on in Yellow Springs. This was difficult to find, so we also searched for energy efficient houses to buy. In a progressive town like Yellow Springs, we thought it would be easy to find what we were looking for, but we were a bit ahead of our time - this was in 2004 - and we couldn't find homes that were built or retrofitted with energy efficiency in mind. There were a few, but they were too big, too small, or too expensive. It was a frustrating process. Any time our realtor called with a house to look at we asked questions like: "How well is the house insulated?", "What are the heating/cooling bills?", "Is it a passive solar house?" Our realtor became frustrated with us, as well, because there just wasn't that kind of information to be had about the houses in the village.

Finally, in 2007, we found a small house with an extra lot and we jumped on the chance to buy it. Saul had known the owners for many years and knew that it was a good solid house, so we made an offer immediately and bought the property - thinking that we would build a passive solar house on the extra lot and then sell the house. However, life doesn't always go the way you think it is going to go, and after retrofitting the house we began to question the need to build another house. To retrofit, we put in an on-demand hot water heater, we thoroughly insulated the house and put in a woodburning stove (bringing our gas bill to $10/month with level billing). We remodeled the house for aesthetic purposes to some extent and have plans to do a little more remodeling, but in the end it is a good house and we decided that we wouldn't get all that much benefit from building a brand new home.

About my identity...Our new home is much more humble than our huge, unique, 6000 sq. ft. home with beautiful poplar floors and large open spaces. It is a small, brick ranch home in a less expensive neighborhood. People aren't impressed with our new home in the way they were with our other home - and you can't really tell what we have done with it because retrofitting isn't really all that exciting or interesting aesthetically. I think part of what we gave up in our "voluntary simplicity" process was the identity of living in an impressive home. That shouldn't really matter, but in our culture where large homes ARE part of our identity that did mean something. As Richard Gregg said about Voluntary Simplicity, we had to have restraint in some areas in order to "secure greater abundance of life in other directions." We did have to give up a part of our identity in order to simplify our life and to lead a richer life in other ways. I do feel that our life is much richer than it was in many ways, but it took making deliberate and conscious choices about what we wanted.

There is enough in the world for man's need,

but not for man's greed.

Civilization, in the real sense of the term,

consists not in the multiplication,

but in the deliberate reduction of wants.

M. K. Ghandi

A little bit about us...

December 27, 2009 A little bit about us...

We live in the village of Yellow Springs, Ohio, a small, progressive community in the heart of the Midwest and the home of Antioch College. We have lived here for many years and love the sense of community that we find in the village. Yellow Springs is surrounded by the 1000 acre Glen Helen, which is owned by Antioch College, and another 3000 acres in John Bryan State Park. These photos are taken in the Glen where we took a walk on Christmas Day.

Saul has a PhD in Psychology and works as a professor in the Education Department at Antioch University McGregor in Yellow Springs. He is originally from New York City and came to Yellow Springs in 1969 to work for New York Encounter.

I am an artist and I have a Master's Degree in Art Therapy as well as a Master's Degree in Education. I teach language arts to gifted students at Central Middle School in Xenia, Ohio. I am originally from Montana and spent my summers growing up on an island on Flathead Lake - just south of Glacier National Park.

Our daughter Mollie is a 7th grade student at the Miami Valley School, a college prep school, in Dayton, Ohio. She loves to write and is working on a novel. Mollie thinks a lot about the topics in this blog and did a project at school to raise money for a local land trust - Tecumseh Land Trust. She also gave her friends stainless steel water bottles for Christmas!