This tasty recipe will not only wet your appetite for more but it will make you want to make your own. And that’s what we are about is sharing and expanding the recipe to include all the zesty additions that you have to contribute.
Ingredients
- Concepts
- Progressive people - not all have to be environmentalists just willing to commit to something progressive and good. Frugality is a bonus as it makes it easy to convince of actions = reducing cash usage
- Frugality - always seen as a stingy norm but this misconception is getting a new come back in Australia with three new released Gold plated albums. In all seriousness frugality is the end result of learning how to actually live with less.
- Creative minds - The more ideas the more you move…
- Stuff
- Buckets - to save water of course
- Jars - bring on the canning
- Timers
- Shovels
- Seeds
Recipe (Preparing the goods)
Taking Stock of What We Have
It seems that over time in this house and I suppose in my life I’ve just been working towards having / building / making more community. Why? Simple really. I just don’t think our world is sustainable without building community, without re-learning old things we used to do (rather than relying on products that others make, emissions needed to make that stuff, and throwing it away in a dumpster for me to find), and because with community we create support.
Mixing Ingredients Thoroughly
I don’t think it’s about adopting heaps of things at once either. Building slowly and definitely put the heat on simmer until your ready to boil. Here’s some funky action:
Water Systems
- Grey water systems - All the shower water (redirected water piping or showering over bucket) is used to flush our toilets - 6 litres per day at least
- Bucket in Shower - Catches our clean water when we first turn on the shower and wait waaaait for it to heat up - used to water our food YEAH!
- All washing machine water saved to water plants
- Dishwater - Towards the plants or toilet you choose!
- Toilet dams - Placing a bottle filled with water reduces your toilet especially when you don’t have dual flush — frankly even with dual flush here it still helps
Electrical — zzzzzzTT
- Unplug from the walls or turn the wall switch off - Believe it or not it still draws electricity from the wall when a computer is off or other appliances
- Use energy efficient bulbs - Way WAAY less zzzT zzT being used
- Timers - Oh this one is coolio to use on your fridge. Set a timer to turn the fridge off for a few hours in the middle of the night and the fridges body mass will still keep food good.
Cooking with Chef Shano
- Canning / pickling (soon) - Great way to store food before it goes off & allows you to can in season food - How come we have started to think that we can get the same food all year round? What happens when we can’t rely on that any more? Not saying we should be scared but think about it though.
- Bread making - oh yeah baby experiment away with sour dough and it doesn’t require a large amount of work
- Hot box - A sleeping bag or insulation is placed inside a plastic box, sheet overtop, and when pot on stove reaches boil place it inside the box and cover. No joke the pot is still quite hot after 40 minutes of cooking = no energy use
- Cook Together - Loneliness sucks yo
- Sunday Breaky - One day a month invite other peeps over (we are dumpstering goods and makin a big cook-up for anyone who wants to come — thanks heaps Trianne for the inspiration yo)
Foody FOod
- Dumpstered (heh it makes for good jams and pickling - you waste and I taste)
- Grow Your Own - This is a big one for us and important to do! Eating healthy and saving seeds
- Buy local / buy ethical - Reduces those good ole’ CO2 emissions and when you can’t get it local you are supporting a closer community. Oh yes and for those far away purchase just consider the ethics and surge ya money into something healthy and good and a fair wage.
- Share - Repeat and then repeat again
Community
- Food Collectives - A good way to actually get more organic food is to create your own collective. We are in the process of setting up a collective between three or four houses where we buy organic dried goods at cost from supplies (like a grocery store) and then distribute that amongst us. It saves money and the envrio yo
- Swap - Clothes, canned food, food you’ve grown, whatever. The foundation of a community comes from what you make not what an institution or a corporation makes you think it is. Seriously!
Got more…bring it on.
Have freakin fun!
Heaps of
Shane
5 comments
Comments feed for this article
Saturday, April 5, 2008 at 7:26 am
Angela from the chilly north
Shane, just curious about your grey water ’system’. Have you actually redirected supply or are you soley relying on buckets? I am assuming you just ‘flush’ by pouring the water in from the bucket or do you have some elaborae system? We are trying to think of a way to harness this crazy amount of snow for grey water or just use on our garden this year. Thinking about just getting some big barrells.
Saturday, April 5, 2008 at 22:20 pm
Shane Bill
Angela - Yeah to the water saving. Ok let’s tackle the snow first. One thing I used to do back home in Calgary was to pile as much snow on the garden and plant areas as I could. A) because it helps create a thermal protection from cold weather B) when it melts it really soaks the ground good yeah!
But yeah I like your idea about getting barrels. Something that is a good option is to look into places that order bulk pickling goods or other things. You can probably do a little google action to find something like that. Or ask around with the people at the farm in the middle of Ottawa (not sure if they are into that stuff but might have answers). I only mention the pickling because it was something I hadn’t thought of before and is common here. But yeah there are good big rain barrel options I’m sure. Nice one hi-fives round’
Grey water - An interesting issue indeed. We have a few methods currently after much discussion. Skanky (read not nice to go into toilet) water from dishes (which were washed in a bucket) goes straight out onto trees preferably as they can absorb things. (this might be a long response)
Washing machine water - (our dream and in progress project is to redirect the water into a rain barrel that has a faucet on the end and turning that would run it into a house and onto the garden. This water is fairly safe to use on garden produce actually. Currently, we opened up the drain that the water goes into from the washing machine and run that straight into buckets on the porch. These are then used to water the garden by hand.
Shower water - In the back of the house (read: outside) we removed the drain running into the sewer and redirected that water into a bucket. Which we then carry around to the bathroom and use by hand to fill up the water tank in the toilet after a flush. We actually turned the water off from the source so it doesn’t start filling the tank. YEAH! Other ways are to shower over a bucket (you can get big ones) and then collect that into bigger buckets near the toilet as my friends all do back home.
Shower water v2.0 - Well what about the pre-heating water. Oh yes teh clean water. Well we use a seperate bucket for that. This water is saved to help water our garden. But ironically after I suggested that to a youth at a recent motivational talk I did he said, “We don’t do that at our house. It’s clean drinking water…we place all that water into a jug and then use it for boiling potatoes and stuff…” - Damn I was inspired!
Most of this stuff just depends on the varying level of mods you can do to your house. And over time it’s amazing not only to see how much water you use showering, but also how much you go through flushing. I feel freakin great conserving so much and seriously it’s more about trying a few things and growing. If I had my own house (not renting) I’d probably create a better grey water system for the toilet and bathroom. My old friend Barb Kinnie used to talk about her house in the East coast where she and her husband had a system that drained all their bathroom water straight onto the garden. Booyah!
Tell me what you are thinkin…or send me an email and we can design some ideas..I’m keen.
Hugs to you both — love your enthusiasm!
Shane
Saturday, April 5, 2008 at 22:22 pm
Shane Bill
PS - Make it fun or you’ll just get frustrated is my moto! Spice it up…add some lemon and zest…YOW!
Monday, April 7, 2008 at 11:41 am
Angela from the chilly north
Thanks Shane, I appreciate the detail. It is good to have ideas. I always seem to think it needs to be more complicated then that. It is nice to be reminded that it can be kept simple. Derek and Elliot are reading up on gardening so that we can hopefully turn our yard into a wonderful food producing place.
Monday, April 7, 2008 at 18:33 pm
Shane Bill
I’m kinda motivated (in whatever time I have) to sit down and write up a few pages about all this business. Mmmm yes I agree - lesson #1 is to look at things and try to make them smaller than you can. It’s how we also work with youth to try and empower them to change - cause when they see so much stuff happening in the world they’ll feel like it’s to much. But when we make it smaller they’ll be inclined to do more.
Yeah!
Shane xo
PS - Food is sooo exciting. I’ll have to post / send pics of our new garden. We’ve uprooted our rental and are making food to feed the masses (ahem - well hungry peeps that come to our house for food)