What's in our garbage?

In the past year or two, I have been slowly transitioning into a "Spaceship Earth" mentality. I have become exceedingly aware of how much garbage we produce - both Josh and I as individuals, and our society as a whole.

Until fairly recently, all refuse could be either composted (food scraps, old clothes, bodies of noisy neighbours) or reused/repurposed (broken tools, bricks, only somewhat used clothes). The idea of garbage as we know it surfaced when we came up with things that don't fall into these two categories - TVs, oil filters, car tires...

The amount of waste is just staggering. The average Canadian produces 777 kg of garbage a year (=1713 lbs); assuming 60 years of adult life, that makes 46,620 kg (=102,780 lbs) per person's adult lifetime. The only time we see it, is when there is a workers' strike (see examples from Toronto, Vancouver, Amsterdam, Naples). If you think "oh, I recycle, it's OK", consider the resources required to pick up the recycling, separate it, re-process, send it to the factories, and make things out of it again. Is it definitely better to recycle than to throw it out, but  it is best to either not have it or to reuse it...

As we transition to an off-grid mindset, we're trying to reduce our garbage stream as much as possible. Guesstimating by weight, compost accounts for ~ 75% of our refuse, recycling for ~ 15%, and garbage constitutes the remaining 10%. As a result, Josh and I have about 1 kitchen catcher bag of garbage every 3 weeks or so (21 L bags, we're guessing at ~ 5 lbs when full). That's considered very, very little (annual guesstimate average of 43.5 lbs of garbage or 65.3 lbs of garbage + recycling for each of us, an equivalent of 3.8% of the average Canadian). However, using this average, over the course of our lives together we'll produce > 4 tons of garbage (next 50 years =  2600 weeks = 866.7 garbage bags = 4,333 lbs of garbage for the two of us).

We decreased our garbage output by several steps. Recycling was a given, and composting using our back-yard pile was a huge step forward (composting isn't hard and doesn't require city pickup or much space, take a look here!). We compost anything that isn't meat (= 99.99% of our diet), as well as paper products - Kleenex and paper towels. I moved completely to reusable feminine hygiene products (no, it's not gross, and it's WAY better and cheaper). To store leftovers, we use containers instead of plastic wrap or foil. We stopped using parchment paper (granola and nachos don't stick if you stir/move them immediately after baking). What's left? Mainly packaging from breakfast cereal and nachos (Josh's 2 remaining sources of processed food), packaging from tofu and cheese (about 2 packages / month, on average), packaging from meat or fish that we buy (~ once a month on average), glass jars and bottles from the occasional sauce or condiment (BC, why you no recycle glass??).

While Josh is (rightfully) happy about the huge decrease in garbage output, my ultimate goal is to reduce both our garbage and recycling to almost nothing. How? Use cardboard and newspapers in the garden for sheet mulching, grow, store, and make anything we can, buy in bulk anything we can't grow. The day we stop buying packaged food altogether, I might throw a party. Let me know if you want an invitation :-)

The things we'll eat in the next 5-50 years

Permaculture gardens try to include as much variety as possible. One of the outcomes is that if one crop fails, there are still dozens of others that make it. My combined Russian-Jewish paranoia craves food security (WWII genetic memories, anyone?). The first time Josh saw my (very) long list of plants I wanted to have at our home, he was pretty worried - was this crazy Russian going to waste all of our money on thousands of trees? No, she was not. That said, the back-of-the-napkin calculation of the cost of this preliminary list is ~ $1,600. Considering that I was aiming for $1,500, we're not doing too bad, tree shopping spree or not :-)

The plan is to buy the minimum number of plants from each variety for now, and propagate (by cuttings or seed) the most successful ones. I'm also planning on propagating wild local plants like maples and chokecherries, low-bush blueberries, lingonberries, bunchberries, wild ramps, any amount of wild flowers, and whatever else I can get my little hands on.

The list is long, but the purchase and planting will happen over the course of likely three installments, starting in fall 2014, continuing in spring 2014 and (hopefully) ending in fall 2015. This way we'll have more time to get to know our land and its microclimates and properly prepare planting sites.

So here is the list. If you're curious enough, you can even see where the different trees were planned to go on the preliminary orchard design in my previous post!

Fruit trees -

• Apples (several varieties - yellow transparent, wealthy, Dudley, aurora gold gala, gold russet, and 2 mystery apple trees already present). Most of these (apart from the gala) are heritage varieties. Some are good fresh, some for cooking, some for storing over the winter.
• Crabapples - dolgo and scugog varieties; great for pollination, nectar for bees, and jams and jellies.
• Pears - Ritson and either Northbrite or Clapp or Patten variety.
• Plums - Toka and Superior varieties
• Quince - Cook's jumbo (gotta love the naming!) and Kaunching varieties. Quince are like super-hard apples; they really shine in jams, pies, and stews.
• Chums (a cross of cherry and plum) - Sapalta and Convoy varieties.
• Apricots - EZ pick variety
• Cherries - sour (Montmonercy) and sweet (Stella or some other variety)
• Paw Paw - the best kept secret in North America. It's called a poor-man's banana, is native to North America, and has that distinctive tropical taste to it - a mix of banana, custard, and baked apple, based on what I read.
• American persimmon - the other best kept secret in North America.

Nut trees -

• Butternut - a North American native tree, similar to walnut.
• Black walnut - another North American walnut-like nut.
• Heartnut - a Japanese walnut-like nut.
• Buartnut - a cross of butternut and heartnut; made for resilience and heavier crops.
• Chestnut - both Chinese and either American or American-Chinese cross.
• Hazel
• Pecan - there are cold-hardy varieties, and I can enjoy one of my Mediterranean favourites :)
• Hickory - a North American native.
• Pine - either Siberian or Korean, the best kinds of pine nuts.
• Almonds - there are cold-hardy varieties!
• American beech - a North American native, produces tasty nuts.
• Yellowhorn - a cold-hardy tree that produces nuts similar in taste to Macadamia nuts. Considering that I have actually looked into growing Macadamias in Canada (and no, you can't), this is a huge win for me and Josh. You do NOT want to know how much money I have spent on Macadamia nuts in Bulk Barn...

Small fruit and berries -

• Arctic and hardy kiwi - vines that produce kiwis that are as tasty as the regular fuzzy ones, but without the fuzz. Less work peeling and I can grow them in my yard. Sounds like a win-win to me!
• Currants - red, black, and white. A big favourite in Europe and Russia. Fantastic for fresh eating, smoothies, jams, pies, and just about everything else.
• Elderberries - great for jams and wine, and loved by bees and birds.
• Haskap - I know these from Russia, but they're fairly new in North America. Fantastic berries all around.
• Gooseberries - same
• Raspberries
• Highbush blueberries
• Saskatoon berries
• Highbush cranberries
• Mulberries 
• Sea buckthorn - very popular in Russia for both eating and the medicinal properties of the oil made from the berries.
• Cherry olives - a native North American small tree that fixes nitrogen in addition to making delicious berries full of antioxidants.
• Goji berries - considered a super-food for a while. To me, all berries are super food...
• Aronia berry - also called chokeberry (not to be confused with chokecherry!) - very nutritious berry producer.
• Strawberries
• Hip rose
• And a few native and introduced, small-fruit trees: nannyberry, Cornelian cherry, Cherry silverberry, Sand cherry, Nanking cherry
• Huckleberries
• Cloudberries
• Lowbush blueberries
• Bilberries
• Lingonberries

To seal off this epic list, a few indoor-grown trees:

• Meyer lemon - juicier and sweeter than the regular lemons you buy in the store
• Loquat - a huge favourite of mine from Israel, didn't even know you could grow them indoors!
• And maybe a kumquat, if I distract Josh long enough to make my online order without him stopping me ;-)

Our vision of (NB) paradise

As we were trying to narrow down the list of potential things to do with our land, we were doing a LOT of googling. Orchards, crops, chickens, ducks, bees, herbs, mushrooms, everything sounded like great ideas and was ours to discover. In one of my Google searches about organic techniques and approaches, I happened upon the permies.com forum. Within that evening, three more searches led me to the same site. Reading through the incredible amount of information on that forum, I was soon convinced that permaculture was the best bet for us. A few weeks of excited stories about all the new things I have learned, and Josh joined the permaculture front as well.

What is permaculture? It is a 'science of design', meant to create a truly sustainable living. It is a way to design and implement productive, self-sustaining systems, which do not require drudgery. For a good but short overview, take a look here. If in conventional farming the owners must work very hard every single day of their lives, permaculture farms aim to decrease this modern slavery over time by mimicking nature. With every passing year, a permaculture farm will be more productive and resilient and require less maintenance. The best go-to example is what is called a food forest - a forest made of fruit and nut trees, with a mix of interplanted berries and vegetables. The trees and most of the understory is perennial, and annual vegetables and flowers are allowed to reseed themselves freely, thereby minimizing maintenance. Compare that to a field of wheat that needs ploughing, seeding, and several applications of pesticides to make it through the growing season.

How is this low-work-high-awesomeness accomplished? By a mix of approaches -

• Managing rainwater to provide for future irrigation needs and eliminate soil erosion 
• Not turning the soil (i.e., no digging, tilling, ploughing) and not using pesticides ensures that all soil organisms, whether earth worms, bacteria, or fungi, are alive and well. Successful agriculture requires happy and living soil.
• Mulch, mulch, mulch - both protects the soil from erosion and retains moisture and nutrients.
• High plant diversity (big no-no to monoculture) to ensure ecosystem stability, as different plants provide different services - attracting pollinators, deterring pests, pulling nutrients into the top soil via deep roots, breaking up tough soil using root vegetables, etc.
• And the biggie - observe your own piece of nature and conform to it. Work with nature, not against it her. Arid areas should have mostly drought resistant plants; cold areas should rely on hardy varieties. Growing things that can't make it themselves will mean endless, futile, work for the farmer. 

The principles really appealed to us - planning things well, healing the soil and creating an ecosystem while growing our own food, and ensuring increased yields through decreased work sounded fantastic. I spent a few of the following months reading all I could get my hands on and dreaming about our own Garden of Eden (see below for a preliminary design).