Jags - 25 April 2008 09:03 AM

Can, preserve, dehydrate your bounty from the garden.

Yeah, that’s another good one.  Bringing in food from a distance wastes energy.  If you can save things for the winter, that can help reduce the need to bring in produce.

One of the early methods of preserving perishable food was to ferment it, by the way

Joe

BrownianHeatingTech - 25 April 2008 09:38 AM

One of the early methods of preserving perishable food was to ferment it, by the way

Joe

I make 100 pounds of sauerkraut ever 2 years.  The old fashion way.

Jags - 25 April 2008 11:19 AM

I make 100 pounds of sauerkraut ever 2 years.  The old fashion way.

I was thinking of other sorts of fermentation, but that’s a very good idea as well

I already made my reservations for the Best of the Wurst.

Joe

Gooserider has bees and makes quantities of Mead.....good stuff. He has all different flavors and vintages.

I think that has a lot of food value as well as other benefits. He claims it was one of the earliest “inventions” of humans in that arena (booze).

I plan on planting popcorn this year, since that’s the big snack food around here. Another good thing about it is that I just have to dry it out to the right moisture level, kinda like firewood.

Mmmm Porterhouse, my favorite piece of cow. Enough tenderloin to satisfy that desire along with enough new york to fill your gut. I’m too cheap these days to include much steak but lots of chicken and pork. Our family eats no seafood at all due to allergies. Rather than buy any ground beef I have been eating off of this winter’s wild game harvest since November. I ground the entire deer and it has been a staple in our meals. Even today we ate spaghetti made with venison.

We are using home energy improvments along with changes in driving styles to save money and reduce consumption.

So what makes anyone think that digesting meat takes any longer than anything else? Isn’t our system kind of like an assembly line? I can eat a whopping huge piece of steak and, er, uh, pass it for sure within a day. Same with anything else.

I think most people digest meat well. After all, it has largely been the reason we multiplied from 2,000 or so (recent news story) to 6 billion!

What is probably new is the quantity that many people eat along with other processed and fatty food, and the lack of activity of modern life.

Pacific ring (and elsewhere) cooking that uses meat along with lots of veggies seem to work well as far as keeping people slim and away from hearth attacks and cancer, etc.

And as far as going green, insulat, insulate, insulate, beneficial winter and summer.  Solar hot water, most cost effective solar available aside from passive heat.  Plant decidous trees to the south of the house (but don’t block solar panels.  Remove the lower branches so sun shines under them in the winter for passive solar gain.  Buy a smaller car.  Stop having children, like we really need more people!

Good health is sufficient reason to reduce meat consumption from all sources, but not eating feed lot meat is even more important because it is a resource extravagant product - corn, fertilizers and pesticides (petroleum based), and all the petroleum energy used from the farm equipment to getting the meat on your plate. Range fed meat would not have some of the feedlot issues, but it still is very energy intensive in processing, refrigeration, storage and preparation, as compared to most grains and many fruits.

Recycle. Set up a system in the kitchen and/or garage to make it manageable. A majority of what you toss doesn’t need to be tossed for good. We have containers for clean things, such as empty cereal boxes that we keep in the kitchen near the trash. Dirty things, tuna fish cans, etc., get rinsed and are stored outside the main living area. Other containers hold glass bottles and aluminum cans.

I’m in the process of helping my father-in-law, who owns a 32-bedroom hotel, swap every bulb out of every chandelier in every room for CFLs. Each chandlier averages 6 25-watt bulbs. The CFLs we’re putting in are only 5 watts each. Multiply that difference by ~200 bulbs and we’ve gone from 5,000 watts to 1,000 watts. I’ll have to run the math on cost savings at some point.

Want to start a brawl just tell someone you are a vegetarian.  I don’t know what it is but it hits the meat eaters in some dark secret place like being a gay grunt marine or biker.  It just irritates them like a tick on a dogs back.  Hell, I never liked meat but I ate it until I didn’t have to any more and as far as I am concerned you can keep it all.  No grand proclamation or bow to be taken me and the family just don’t like the stuff so why eat it.  We all have perfect or nearly perfect cholesterol numbers be it resultant or coincidental.  One thing for sure though you can easily live without it as there is lots to eat out there.  I did hear the other day that being a vegetarian is one of the “greenest” things you can do and that one cow accounts for more carbon than a car.  Of course statistics usually lie more than a US President so take it for what its worth depending on who wants to find what.
You want to cut down on trash here is a really big way that no one seems to notice.  Take a look sometime at all the plastic in your garbage.  It is truly amazing and if you burn pellets or corn you will have about double what anyone else does.  I use pellet bags and stuff them one at a time with all the store bags and plastic wrappings that accumulate.  You will be amazed at how much plastic trash you toss out that you can take in to whatever supermarket in your area takes them.  Here it is Hannaford Supermarket.  I just keep stuffing till the bag is jammed full and then staple the top closed and take it in with my returnable bottles and cans.  I am talking around 5 - 10 LBS of plastic a week which for something so light is amazing.  Pellet or grain bags work well because they stuff well without tearing.  I guess they melt the stuff down to make more store bags. 
When it comes to fertilizing the yard why bother?  Hell if you fertilize it the stuff will grow faster and you have to mow it more often.  My yard is literally a once upon a time in the very recent past a hay field and it gets all the nutrients it needs by mowing it with a 5’ mulching mower deck.  Of course its pulled by a gas burning tractor and any greenie suggesting I get a reel mower can sit on one while its spinning.  My wife once suggested getting one for use when the tractor is dead.  Apparently she never used one or she wouldn’t have asked.  You don’t mow 2 acres with one of those. 
On the electricity side I never much worried about the little stuff like the cell phone charger and I am not going to dive under the bed to unplug and replug it constantly.  The big energy hogs are furnaces, refrigerators and air conditioners.  Knock a tad off one of those and you are getting somewhere.  Put the oil burner to bed and you will see a fairly big drop as will buying a new refrigerator if yours is old.  Get all CFL lights unless it is the ones on a motion sensor that comes on an off a lot.  I have them everywhere for years and they even survive outdoors in -30 well though slow to light up.  Sams Club even has 25 watt CFL flood lights that survive the winter and work pretty well.  Here is one you won’t think of the humble coffee pot.  When yours dies get one that doesn’t have a heating element in the base to keep the coffee hot.  It ruins the coffee in short order anyways and the last time I checked burns a hell of a lot of electricity to do it, something on the order of 1200 watts and who but me thinks to turn the thing off.  The coffee lasts for many hours cold and all you need to do is nuke it in the microwave. Some of the new ones just run until the coffee is through.  For Summer or Winter we make maximum use of shades and drapes to keep the heat in and the sun out.  A ceiling fan in the bedroom takes the place of the window air conditioner much of the time except during the stickiest nights and then just on low often using the fan to draw in cooler night air.
My new trick for this year will be a solar water preheater.  It comes out of my ground at 42 -45 F and its a no brainer that it will take half the fuel oil or less to bring it up to temp if its coming in at 70 - 120.  My garage attic was 117 F at 4PM the other day when it was around 70 outside.  I am going to put a couple plastic barrels up in there and a small circulator pump to serve for the summer months.  Eventually I plan on a full home made solar rig once I get the feel for it all.  I also plan on loading up the attic above the house from its R 30 fiberglass with another 6-12” of cellulose insulation given all the bad properties they are starting to admit fiberglass has.  The poor characteristics in a windy condition is enough for me right there and cellulose is far easier to add afterwards.
Thats about as green as I am going to get for now aside from parking the truck unless needed for trucky sort of things sharing the small car and bringing back to life an old 500 cc twin Yamaha somebody gave me last winter.  I have to confess though I do it because I am a cheap Bas$%#& who is sick of being robbed.  I don’t think for one minute the sky is falling any more than Al Gore invented the internet and I fear more this whole global warming thing is going to take on a cult like life of its own that is going to make some very special people piles of money.  On the other hand its high time to change a few things so why not get right to it?

Driz - 26 April 2008 10:43 AM

Want to start a brawl just tell someone you are a vegetarian.  I don’t know what it is but it hits the meat eaters in some dark secret place like being a gay grunt marine or biker.  It just irritates them like a tick on a dogs back.

Well, I’m a meat-eater (I think that “medium” is the same as “burnt"), and I for one really don’t have any problem with vegetarians.  I have a problem with those who try and demand that I become one, or who freak out because meat was near their food, because that just strikes me as more of a phobia than a life-choice.

I do have to give my vegetarian friends some good-natured ribbing, though (eg,” do you want food, or food’s food?"), but it’s all in good fun.  In the past when money’s been short, I’ve been mostly-vegetarian at some times just for financial reasons.  My wife is actually writing up a vegetarian cookbook at some point, since she tried vegetarianism in the past, until she found out that she was allergic to soy, which makes it much more difficult.  So, she’s going to write up a soy-free vegetarian cookbook to help those who do want to be vegetarians despite soy allergies.

A friend who lives just a few miles down the road is a dedicated vegetarian, because his whole family has major cholesterol problems, and it’s the only way he’s found to keep his in a safe range.  When he built his house a couple years ago, he planned ahead, and actually has a steamer built right into the kitchen counter.  Add a counter-top steamer as well, and you can cook up a lot of vegetables and grains, quite easily.

Driz - 26 April 2008 10:43 AM

On the electricity side I never much worried about the little stuff like the cell phone charger and I am not going to dive under the bed to unplug and replug it constantly.

Each one is small.  It’s just when you add them all up that it matters.  Some will be impractical (eg, cell phone charger, in your case, or the power supply for a cordless phone, since you might want to receive phone calls).  But there are usually a lot that can be dealt with.  For example, I have a good number of chargers for battery-powered tools, given the business I’m in.  I need those to be convenient for charging tools, but I plugged them all into a power strip so I can shut them down when they are not in use.

When I was driving a diesel (next big purchase is to get another - this gasoline-fueled truck I have now is ridiculous), I needed a block heater for the winter.  Plug it in when you get home from the day’s work, then unplug it the next morning.  On a typical day, the heater is running for 12-14 hours, wasting energy.  Just so the block would be warm in the morning.  I put it on a timer so that it came on a few hours before I would leave in the morning (exact timing depends on the particular truck and the weather).  The engine was still warmed-up to start, but I hadn’t been heating it in -10 weather all night.

Driz - 26 April 2008 10:43 AM

Here is one you won’t think of the humble coffee pot.  When yours dies get one that doesn’t have a heating element in the base to keep the coffee hot.  It ruins the coffee in short order anyways and the last time I checked burns a hell of a lot of electricity to do it, something on the order of 1200 watts and who but me thinks to turn the thing off.  The coffee lasts for many hours cold and all you need to do is nuke it in the microwave.

I don’t drink coffee, but my brother is a caffeine fiend, so I got him a cold-brew setup.  It makes concentrated coffee extract, which you dilute with hot water as needed to make hot coffee (or cold water to make iced coffee).  No energy to brew, and you only heat the amount of water that you need for a cup of coffee, when you want some.  I may get one for making iced tea, this summer.

Joe

I’m a member of PETA --- People Eating Tasty Animals !!!!!!!!!

My own plan on the coffee pot, when my current one goes belly-up, is to get one that has no burner at all, similar to this one. It will brew the coffee, then store it into an insulated carafe which is supposed to keep it hot for several hours.  Kinda hard to find one though, not many companies make one.  What I want is one that has no computer in it, when you want it to start you push a button, then it shuts itself off completely until the next time you want to make coffee.  With this one there’s no need to microwave it unless it’s several hours after the fact.

http://www.cooking.com.edgesuite.net/images/products/Enlarge/101663e.jpg

In the meantime though, I’ve got my existing coffee and tea pot on a power strip.  My pot takes 10 minutes to go from on to brewed.  Since most days we brew, drink, then go to work, as soon as the pot hits 10 minutes I just shut the strip off.

I agree on the vegevores, they can be a little on the PC side.  Luckily vegevores aren’t protected so I can still push back just as hard, asking them how they can heartlessly slaughter poor, helpless heads of lettuce.  I mean, lettuce has just as much a right to live as a cow, right?

Yea I am anything but a veggi Nazi.  I gave my daughter hell a few times for bothering others about meat.  I even defend smokers though I never have.  Personallyl I can’t stand people who demand anyone be like them.  I must be a true Civil Libertarian as I just want everyone to leave me alone ( which is a tall order mostly) and I feel the same for others.  I do mention it once in a while to the younger guys I work with who smoke like chimneys.  Strangely nearly all of em manage to quit sometime along the line on their own just because most of us either never did or gave it up.  Something about talking about guys you remember coughing constantly when they were 40 now dead at under 55 that does the trick.  The guidelines on smoking near government buildings are pure bullshit too.  The weenies have it so no one can smoke even in the vicinity of a doorway which is nuts here in the sub arctic with all the wind and cold during winter months.  You know something a few as*&h;(*&$ still complain which is pure lunacy.  Thats the danger of government demanding anything, common sense goes out the window, especially if you work for the government. 
As for that coffee pot just make sure it is easy to operate before you buy one.  We have one at work that got donated by someone and I can see why.  You pay hell to get the darned thing to swing open or closed, the basket jams nearly every time and you often fold the filter when you close it or the jug doesn’t quite push up on the drain block and it goes all over the place.  No wonder it got donated.  I did tear mine open this AM and found its integral to the top heater so you can’t simply shut down the hot plate.  I would buy a timer but since I make most of the coffee and do usually think to pull the plug we will live with it.  Not a problem .