The Greening of Gavin

Reducing Food Miles Part 1

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I happened to stumble across a great BBC2 TV show called “It’s Not Easy Being Green”. It is hosted by a retired Lieutenant Colonel, called Dick Strawbridge.

Dick and his family embarked on a quest to live a more sustainable 21st century lifestyle without any major impacts to their existing way of life. He still wanted to be able to have his coffee machine, fridge, washing machine etc, and all the other modern conveniences that make up the western lifestyle. He sold the family home in Worcestershire and moved to derelict farm in Cornwall, with no electricity, heating, water or toilets. Crazy or what!

The first series consisted of seven episodes, which took us on a journey of the family for the first year in their new home. Some of the things they did were;

  • Build a water wheel to power their household lights,
  • Grow an organic vegetable garden,
  • Fix and insulate the roof,
  • Install solar hot water,
  • Install a whole house ventilation system,
  • Draw drinking water from their spring by wind power,
  • Raise pigs and chickens,
  • Make bio-diesel from waste vegetable oil, and
  • Had a great time doing it!

It was a very inspirational series and both Kim and I enjoyed our weekly dose of the show. After the series finished, I wanted to be just like Dick! He was, and still is my hero.

As we were already started on our own sustainable living journey, and had kicked off our eco house challenge measurements and reduction campaign, we decided to take one of the suggestions from Dick’s show and try them out at home.

In late April 2007, I began to plan an organic vegetable garden for one side of our house. We had a garden (if you could call it that), that was the main entrance and it was half dead because of the lack of rain. We thought that if we built the garden beds as a feature of the house then we were more likely to maintain it. This was based on permaculture principles (not that I knew this at the time), whereby your basic food needs should be as close to the back door as practical. Well, our patch was going to be at the main entrance, so even better. Everyone who visited it would see the wonder of our vegetable patch in all its glory!

I based the design on the “No Dig Garden” developed by Esther Dean. I read her little book, which was full of great information about establishing a garden for Australian conditions. I modified the method slightly as per “Greeniology” and added raised garden beds to make it easier to work on. The soil in Melton is clay based and is very hard when dry. There was very little organic matter in the first 2 cm of topsoil, so I had to improve the soil before I planted and improve drainage.

I decided to use red gum sleepers as the frame for the beds and constructed them 2100 x 1200 x 100 cm and spaced the beds 70 cm apart. This was enough space to lay some pavers for a little path between each bed. The beds were fastened together with 100 mm galvanised nails with a butt joint, and the wood was so hard that I had to pre-drill each nail hole. During the construction I managed to hit my left shin with the full force of a hammer blow! It swelled up like a melon. Nice and sore for the rest of the day, but some ice helped the swelling go down.

As recommended by Esther Dean’s book, I filled the beds in the following order. The first layer was a cover of cardboard and newspaper about 5 sheets thick. This ground cover was to kill the weeks, grass and provide food for the earth worms. Next was a 10 cm layer of either lucerne hay or pea straw. I chose pea straw and Amy and Megan laid it for me. The third layer was a 2 cm layer of Dynamic Lifter (you can use well rotted manure). For the four beds I finished off an entire 25 Kg bag of very smelly Dynamic Lifter. I then covered the DL with another 5 cm layer of pea straw and then a layer 20 cm thick of mushroom compost garden mix. I think it was a 50-50 mix of mushroom compost and a loam type soil. It was filled with organic matter and was very suitable for the purpose of growing vegetables. I ordered 2 cubic metres and used it all! Adam lugged most of it from the roadside and Kim and I raked it level in each bed. Lastly, I topped it off with a 5 cm layer of sugar cane mulch, to help conserve water by stopping evaporation.

It was a very satisfying feeling to finish all of the beds in one weekend. Read on in Part 2, to see how and what I planted in my first Winter crop.



Eco House Challenge Electricity 1

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After completing the front yard, I begun to look for another challenge. A good friend of mine, Jennifer Treacey, mentioned to me that a new eco TV show was appearing on SBS Australia in the next few days and that it was touted to be informational.

The program was called “The Eco House Challenge” and was hosted by Glenn Hall as the presenter guy and Tanya Ha as the eco host. The synopsis is that two families volunteered to take up the challenge of reducing their impact on the environment by taking a series of cuts to their household consumption. Each week the families had to reduce one of the four environmental hot spots by over 50% and at the same time remain above a baseline set by the presenter. The four hot spots were energy, water, transport and waste removal.

It was a great show over six episodes and it really taught Kim and I a lot about reducing a homes consumption. So much so we decided to take action and see if we could reduce our consumption against three of the four hotspots. We believed that we already had transport licked as Kim’s main mode of transport was walking, I had my Hybrid, and the kids used public transport to get around town.

I knew that before you can make changes to anything, you have to be able to measure the current situation before you start. Otherwise you will not know if your changes have been effective or ineffective. So on the 14th of April 2007, I took the meter readings for our electricity, gas and water. For the waste challenge we would have to measure how much waste we produced by bin volume on a monthly basis. The first weeks readings were as follows for week one:

  1. Electricity daily average – 31.1 KWh per day
  2. Gas daily average – 55.8 Mj per day
  3. Water daily average – 575.4 litres per day

Now only having watched the first show, and not really knowing what was good or bad for the environment, I bought the book “Greeniology” by Tanya Ha. It is full of great room by room ideas on greening your lifestyle.

We started on energy first, mainly concentrating on electricity as we saw that as the easiest to do. Here is a week by week account of what we did for our power challenge;

Week 1. The Baseline Reading.

We didn’t do anything different than we normally did. Lights blazing, computers whirring, and all the TV’s on in nearly every room. The pool pump was running for about 5 hours a day. I did some research and learnt that the average Australian home used only 16 kWh of power a day. To our amazement we were using over 31 kWh a day. Mind you, we have six people living in our home, but our usage had only one place to go and that was down!

Week 2. Awareness.

This week Kim and I began the campaign to educate our three wonderful, yet wasteful children. We continued to watch SBS on Wednesday nights. We also began small and started to replace our incandescent light bulbs around the house with Compact Fluorescent lights (CFL). I also started to turn my PC off at night. Beforehand, I had run it all night downloading TV shows from the US and UK. I now only turn it on during for about 3 hours in the evening. Lights were now turned off when there was no-one in the room. This habit took a long time to form for everyone. We also bought a kettle for our gas stove and retired the electric kettle that was rated at 2400 watts.

Week 3. Standby power.

This week I borrowed a PowerMate meter from work and figured out that my entertainment system was drawing 25 watts of power when everything was presumably turned off. By simply turning off the power board at the wall we saved nearly 4 kWh per week. The next piece of equipment I tested was my PC. It drew 17 watts in Standby, so off that went at the wall. We also replaced some more incandescent lights with CFL’s

Week 4. The Solar Powered Clothes Dryer.

We discovered something that we had forgotten about that was lurking down the back of the house. It was the trusty old Hills Hoist clothes line. We began to utilise this seldom used appliance that dries clothes by the Sun. Amazing technology! As we began to use the Hills Hoist more and more, we saved power by not using the Electric clothes dryer (rated at 1950 watts!). I replaced a few more CFL’s

Continued in part 2…..

What I learned from the Sustainable Living Festival

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Yesterday, Amy and I travelled to Federation Square in the heart of Melbourne to spend the day at the Sustainable Living Festival. To get into the spirit of the event, we decided to make as little impact as we could from when we left home until we returned. We started off by walking and took public transport for the remainder of the journey.

We first of all sat in on a presentation by Associate Professor Geoff Wescott called “Seachange and Sustainability. I personally learned to not to live near the coast in the near future because of climate change induced sea level rises and of the increased chance of storm surge events. Also that the human coastal infrastructure is incapable of handing the growing influx of part time Seachangers and tourists and that State Governments need increase funding and action in these areas. As over 83% of Australians live near the coast, you would expect that this issue would be high on politicians agendas. Unfortunately it is not, and water security seams to be the number one priority.

The second presentation was very interesting and dear to my heart. It was called “Green as Green does” and presented by Greg Donoghue. It was essentially about green waste management and he explained how plants grow, and then decompose, and what are the best ways of mimicking this process at home with food waste. Three examples were given, Composting, worm farming and bokashi bins. Greg described the efficiencies of each method, with composting being 70% effective at trapping the carbon in the processed material, worm farming being 90% effective and a bokashi bin being 99% effective. Unfortunately, only really kitchen waste can be processed in a bokashi bin, so I will still continue with my work with the other two methods of waste management. The other problem with a bokashi bin is that you have to continue to purchase microbes to add to it, which increases the ongoing cost of processing waste. At least with a worm farm the worms multiply by themselves and self regulate their population, dependant on the amount of food available. And the only cost for a compost bin is the construction of it. I did a bit of research on Greg’s business (eco organics) and what do you think he sells? Well you guessed it, Bokashi Bins! All in all a good presentation but a bit bias, I believe.

We then had lunch, and we both opted for a vegetarian meal prepared by the nice gents at the Hari Krishna food stall. A wonderful chickpea curry with rice, with some nice ball things in a tomato sauce and a semolina pudding on the side, all for $9. A great feed and all washed down with fresh Melbourne tap water as provided by Yarra water. The great thing about lunch was that the cutlery and plates were placed in baskets when you completed your meal and collected by the Wash against Waste staff. The plates were then washed on-site with solar hot water! It really impressed me, as did the four type of bins available for recycling and waste collection. This should really be the norm at all events in this day and age.

After lunch it was time for a little lay down on some cool grass under the shade of a beautiful elm tree. My back was a little sore at this time from sitting at two presentations and lunch so we rested for about 15 minutes. We then visited nearly every single stall and had a chat about what service they provided and what part of sustainable living did their product or service impact. I also caught up with the nice guys from Energy Matters, who installed my Photovoltaic system last September. I discovered that I could install another 6 panels on my system if I wanted to. I also put my name down to be contacted by one of the sustainable auditing companies, as I am interested in this type of career.

Then came the highlight of my day. A presentation by eco chick Tanya Ha, the author of “Greeniology”, a book that helped kick start the second phase of my eco transformation (which I will continue to document in subsequent blogs). She presented two talks, one about the theme of the festival which was “Being sustainable like an elite athlete” and how to reach your personal best, and the other was “The Story of Stuff: What makes a product truly green”. Both were well presented with lots of audience participation and humour. She makes understanding the impact of climate change easy, and believes that one person can make a difference by their choices. For instance, we have the choice to save power by turning off the beer fridge in the shed, we can switch to Green Power, or insulate our homes. These all make a difference to your ecological footprint. She argued that the many products claiming to be organic, or green, or “environmentally friendly” are on the increase, but are simply green washing. Consumers should be aware to looks for further evidence of a green products credibility before they spend their hard earned cash on it. To top it off, I managed to get Tanya to sign my copy of Greeniology, and I even got to have a chat and shook her hand. I won’t wash it for a week! She is a great ambassador for the green movement, and is attempting to make it mainstream. Kudos to you Tanya! I hope my work helps as well.

After my excitement died down, Amy and I decided to call it a day and head back to Southern Cross station. We just missed our train, had to wait for an hour for the next, so Amy insisted that we go to Direct Factory Outlet. What an extreme contrast to the festival. The people at the festival were all there to learn and understand how we can save our society and assist the planet in healing itself back from the abyss. It truly gave me hope to see so many like-minded people all in one place and learning about possible actions they could take to avert catastrophic climate change. DFO on the other extreme, was full of people consuming useless stuff that was made in sweat shops by low paid workers in China and elsewhere, that will be thrown away when they find it does not make them any happier, then not recycled and be dumped into landfill. A bit over the top, but that was how I felt. The time of endless consumerism is over, wake up! It looks like the Al Gore effect has not affected everyone! I will now get off my soapbox.

Both Amy and I agreed that the day was educational, entertaining and enjoyable. I can’t wait for next year’s event. Well done on a great festival, Sustainable Living Foundation.