Archive for February, 2010
Composting Revisited
Well, I haven’t done anything with the compost yet, but I am planning on investigating it tomorrow. I asked around on one of the Livejournal communities I lurk on and found out:
- The grubs are black soldier fly larvae, which apparently are very good for compost (some people use them purposefully for composting)
- The spiders look like brown house spiders/cupboard spiders – related to redbacks but non-poisonous (except this site says they can be venomous!)
- My compost may be too dry, too wet, not hot enough or not including enough brown matter, which would have created prime conditions for the larvae
- The spiders are likely there to eat the larvae (which I’m not convinced of – those grubs are bigger than the spiders, quite a lot bigger).
I have options as to what I can do:
- Turn out the compost onto the ground somewhere and let the birds make short work of the grubs and spiders
- Leave the lid on and start a new compost pile outside – in about a year the compost in the bin should be fantastic and the bugs will be gone
- Pour boiling water in the bin and kill all the critters, then continue with the composting
- Leave the critters in there cos they’re super awesome for composting
- Turn the compost thoroughly and try to get the balance better for composting without so many grubs (potentially burying food scraps in the middle of the bin to increase the heat as they decompose, which will keep the bug population in balance better)
- Cover the compost in 2 to 4 inches of brown matter to discourage the bugs, which will, hopefully, discourage the spiders in turn.
I’m not sure which one I’m going to do yet. Suggestions? I like the idea of the birds going to town, but I am not keen to scoop everything out of there and spread it around on my lawn. The bin is under the house, so I can’t just leave the lid off and let the birds come to it – they can’t get to the bin. My gut is boiling water cos those grubs and spiders really kinda creep me out, but if they’re actually good for the compost, then maybe that’s not a good idea either! Maybe trying to work with the balance of the compost to at least keep the population down is the best idea…
I’m also a little scared of opening the bin and having a swarm of black soldier flies come out, even if they don’t bite or anything. I still don’t want them all in my face.
I’ve got to decide something soon; I have food scraps piling up…
P.S. Thanks to everyone who helped me over on Livejournal!
Compost Alert!
This morning I went down to empty the weekly compost (from the ice-cream containers that sit in our kitchen) into the compost bin (which you can see here). The compost has been going for a few months now, no troubles, and I was thinking it might be nearly time to turn it.
However…
After I finished clearing away the spider webs around the general under-the-house walls/ceiling area with the end of the rake, I lifted the lid of the compost to find a bunch of these gross little grub things. They were all through the compost, like everywhere. They were not there last week. Sure, there were a few grubby looking things, but they were black or brown and they were not in these prolific numbers – I thought they looked like they were being helpful, so I left them. These new grub things kind of reminded me of a big pile of maggots, except they’re bigger, not quite so white and if you look really closely, they had something that was like little hairs on them.
Pile of wiggly grubs in my compost - are these supposed to be there?
Then I stopped looking too closely, because I realised there were a bunch of spiders all around the rim of the compost bin… spiders that looked a lot like redbacks. Now, my great-great-grandmother died from a redback spider bite, and I’d like to not add to the family history in that way. Not to mention, I’m a bit arachnophobic. Nothing severe, but I am the squealy, shrieky, stand-on-top-of-the-toilet-while-someone-chases-the-spider-outside kind of person. It doesn’t really go with my pseudo-tough genderqueer image, but there you have it. Spiders make me shudder.
Spiders around the rim of my compost bin. Little males and big mama! These kind of look like redbacks.
I felt very brave in going to get a camera to document the grubs and spiders, so someone can help me identify them and decide whether the compost is salvageable and if not, whether I can get rid of it myself or whether I need pest control. I ain’t messing with redbacks (or red house spiders or common house spiders or whatever they are… my google -fu is failing me in identification of the spiders, even though I forced myself to look at all these pictures of hairy, gross spiders).
A close-up image of the big mama and some little guys. The black thing at the bottom is a dead bug in their web, so don't worry about that. You can see the mama at the top has a huge abdomen, nearly the size of a pea. The males are considerably smaller. I think there might have been some smaller females too - they were kind of in-between sized. I looked at the mama to check the colour - she had a red-brown thorax and legs, but her abdomen was almost black. Where I would expect the red stripe to be though, there were white spots. I didn't look underneath her to see if she had the characteristic hourglass shape on her belly! My gut says atypically-coloured redbacks.
Here’s a video of the grubs and spiders. The video really helps you get an idea of the wiggly feralness of the grubs, but the spiders aren’t brilliantly in focus (I just used my still camera and it doesn’t allow me to re-focus in the middle of a recording). I have included some pictures (above, with descriptions), which also aren’t great, because the compost bin isn’t in the most well-lit position. My first instinct when I saw them was ‘redback!’, so I try to trust my gut.
So what should I do??
[EDIT next day: Jump to this post if you want to read what I have since learned about my creepy, crawly compost.]
Eco Sex Ed
I read about issues outside of concerns for the environment (I know, gasp!), and one of the things I’ve been reading about lately is the efficacy of school sex ed programs. Mr Teeny-bop is right around the age where, although he’s so young it scares me, you gotta seriously think about it. Australia is pretty open-minded about sex (legal age is 16, the kids start learning about condoms and stuff in primary school). In America, however, lots of places rely on abstinence-until-marriage type of advice, which is about as effective as paper parasol in a monsoon. Yeah, I just made that analogy (metaphor?) up.
There’s been some discussion recently, on some blogs I read, about moving towards an abstinence-until-ready style message instead, which is in keeping with growing acceptance of de facto families. (Read Alex DiBranco’s post, Could Abstinence-Until-Ready Programs Work? for more detail.) Adding to the confusion is the way the messages can be interpreted for different cultural groups. For example, Whitney Teal’s post on Abstinence Education, Minority Teens and Religion on the Women’s Rights blog indicates that even in areas where safe sex (condoms, birth control pill etc) is advocated, there is still reasonably high numbers of teen pregnancies among Black and Hispanic populations, likely due to the higher importance these groups (typically) place on religion. Safe sex is pre-meditated sex (you have to plan to get a condom or the pill), which means you willfully had sex outside of marriage, and didn’t just get caught up in the heat of the moment. The latter is considered more acceptable.
So when I saw this post on Endangered Species condoms on ecorazzi, it occurred to me that the environment might just be the one thing that crosses cultural, religious and socio-economic divides. I wonder if anyone has thought about using eco-consciousness as a motivator for safe sex?
The crux of the argument is that condoms reduce unplanned pregnancy, which in turn reduces overpopulation. I talked more about why overpopulation is bad here, but the Centre for Biological Diversity in Tucson, Arizona is specifically making a point about how overpopulation is affecting plants and animals, particularly endangered species. Think of the images of the polar bears on shrinking ice caps and all the stories we’ve heard lately of the demise of wild tigers. Think of the orangutans in Indonesia, dying as their forests are cleared to plant palm trees for palm oil. All of these animals, and many more, are dying due to human influence – influence that would be dramatically reduced if we simply had fewer people living on the Earth.
So their solution is to start their own little safe sex ed campaign, complete with pretty pictures and the opportunity to win a lifetime supply of condoms. I think it’s pretty genius.
Artwork promoting the use of condoms to save endangered animals - sponsored by the Center for Biological Diversity in Tucson, Arizona.
I also think schools everywhere, but particularly in those places with a lot of cultural and religious resistance to the use of condoms, could jump on the bandwagon. The choice of whether or not to have sex before marriage and how you’ll do that is a personal one, but the choice of whether or not to damage the environment is one that everyone has a stake in. Maybe this could be another tool to help kids who struggle with the idea of pre-meditated sex, to justify making the decision to stay safe.
Or you could do what I do. Lesbianism* is a great form of birth control.
*There are condoms and dams same-sex couples can and should use too; there are other reasons to have safe sex outside of preventing pregnancy. You know it, I know it, but I gotta say it…
Piggies.
Completely random, unrelated to the environment, except based on previous posts I’ve made on pigs, farm animals, rescue, compassion and veg*nism. Go look ‘em up. You wanna.
Hamish the pig from Edgar's Mission.
Meanwhile, I want a pig.
Hamish is so cute!
Specifically, I want a pig like Hamish from Edgar’s Mission.
How could anyone want to eat Hamish?
This guy is the cutest EVER.
Check out Edgar’s Mission! Pics from the Facebook page. Alternatively, go have a look at SaveBabe.com.
Compassionate Dairy? Nah.
You all know I’m a vegetarian for environmental reasons, but you’ve probably figured out I’m also all for animal rights and compassion. Just search my blog under the tag ‘veg*nism’. To be fair, I don’t necessarily believe this means having one strict, stringent set of rules that apply universally to all. I’m not that kind of thinker in any arena of my life. For example, I believe you could eat a compassionate diet that included chicken eggs, if the chickens lived as your lovely little pets and the eggs were a by-product. However, I don’t think it’s possible to compassionately eat eggs if they were produced in a battery run.
I’ve been an aspiring vegan for ages – I use soy milk rather than dairy, but haven’t kicked most of the other dairy products yet. In fact, I feel I’ve been slipping. I used to be stringently anti-(dairy)yoghurt and over the last few months it has crept back into my diet after years without it. I can’t even claim that it happened without my knowing it, because I did know it, and I deliberately chose to not think about it. I have real trouble seeing a time for me without dairy cheese and I think I just got to a point where I was like… ‘Why bother? I’m not a real vegan anyway.’ I kinda gave up for a bit.
Well, that’s just slack and not cool and all ‘head in the sand’ style.
I guess the yoghurt thing has been lurking in my mind after all though, because as part of my dreaming on about living on an eco-friendly property with my strawbale house and rescue animals, I started to wonder about keeping a cow or two. I knew there’d be egg-laying chickens (dunno if I’d eat the eggs cos I don’t really like eggs anymore, but regardless), and I started wondering if it would be possible to eat compassionate dairy. Unlike eggs, milk production is stimulated by pregnancy, but I wondered if it would be possible for a cow to have a baby once a year, and to rear it naturally at the same time as me taking just a wee bit of milk for my own devices. I wouldn’t even use it to drink – just for stuff like cheese – so I really would need such a tiny bit. After some research I discovered this was possible, although very few people do it as it’s a bit of a chore to get the milk with a frisky calf around and you end up with less milk.
I started to wonder what would happen to the cows though. I’m not into artificial breeding – all my pets are desexed, there are enough unwanted animals in the world – so it seemed I would be artificially increasing the herd. I mean, the alternative is to kill them off and I wasn’t thinking of doing that. Er, no. Vegetarian herd-culler, I think not. I thought maybe each cow could have just one baby so really all they did was replace themselves, like Zero Population Growth (ZPG), which I’ve talked about before in human terms. I figured male calves would just luck out and get to hang around getting fat and happy, and the females would have one baby each. If a boy calf was born then lucky for his mum, she’d get to have a second one after all.
Then I started to think that I must be a bit naive, and all this seemed like hard work and I knew I was really not grasping all the complexities. Plus the Internet seemed so adamant you should separate the cow and calf ASAP for the calf’s protection (immunity etc). This didn’t seem so natural to me. Then there was the question of whether they could live on grass alone or if they need supplementary food (ultimately – grass is possible, if there is enough of it year round). And how to milk them. Are those milking machines really humane?
So I kept reading.
Then I came across Edgar’s Mission, and a little story by Shirley the calf. Now I think I’m just going to have to bite the bullet and give up milk entirely.
Hansel - one of the newest 'bobby' calves at Edgar's Mission; his life now saved.
Go have a read, and take your tissues. Go have a read of Sadie’s story too, if you are a glutton for punishment.
I know it’s sentimental, and from a human perspective and probably cows don’t think that way really cos they’re cows and don’t have the kind of higher cognitive functions we humans do – but another thing I learned in my research tonight (and on other nights) is that they do have feelings and they do think. Maybe not like us, but they do. Those baby cows miss their mummies and the mummies miss them. Separating them buggers up their health, they don’t socialise quite right, the boys are unceremoniously killed, the girls raised as lactation machines and ultimately, when it comes right down to it, it’s mean!
Rosa - another calf (now a cow) from Edgar's Mission.
So. My plan is to give it all up, one thing at a time down the list below. I know I’ve tried to do this before, ages ago, but I didn’t have a list, and unlike giving up meat and eggs which I wasn’t that big on in the first place, getting past milk and yoghurt were so daunting that I kinda burned out before I got anywhere else. This time, I’ve already started, so it will be easier I hope. There’s a bit of me that wonders ‘why bother, not many other people are doing this, what difference will it make?’, but I’ve unexpectedly read about the story of the old man with the starfish (or little girl, depending on the version) about five times in relation to this very decision tonight, so maybe the compassionate zen God of the universe is trying to tell me something. Besides, that never stopped me making a stand before. Every little bit counts, right?
Most items have replacements, although lots of those things I eat more of now that I will of the replacements, cos I just don’t like the substitutes as much (such as ice-cream – soy icecream just doesn’t really do it for me), or eating that much soy isn’t good for anyone. The first two should be easy as I’ve mostly done them, and the third I just have to remember. Plus, for the fourth, I was eating too much ice-cream so I already gave it up for the month… now I just need to keep going.
- Milk = non-dairy milk (eg: soy, oat, chickpea or almond, as rice milk isn’t good for me and hemp milk is NASTY – sorry hemp-lovers)
- Sour Cream = avocado, guacamole etc
- Yoghurt = non-dairy yoghurt (eg: soy)
- Ice-cream = non-dairy ice-cream (eg: soy, coconut etc, and sorbets like Weis yum yum yum)
- Butter = non-dairy margarine, oil
- Custard = non-dairy custard (eg: homemade soy)
- Cream = some soy substitute for cooking, otherwise probably nothing
- Chocolate = non-dairy chocolate (eg: dark chocolate, soy chocolate etc)
- Cheese = depends on the type of cheese (eg: tofu for paneer, tofutti better than cream cheese for cream cheese, no idea what for haloumi, ricotta or feta, maybe I’ll try some of the Uncheese Cookbook attempts for melty cheese cos I dislike all the commercial fake cheeses).
Cheese is definitely going to be the tough one. Like, real tough. I eat cheese in a lot of meals, and Yankee Elv loves it and probably won’t want to give it up (which is entirely her choice, of course – no pressure!!). All the rest I’ve lived without for certain periods in my life before, but cheese has always been a constant friend. However… I’m thinking of Shirley and Sadie and all the other cows like them. It’s time to bite the bullet and make a real commitment.
Interestingly enough, this hasn’t solved my question about whether it’s possible to consume compassionate dairy. Maybe it will be something I look into again one day. However, maybe when the time comes that it would be feasible for me to do that, I won’t be interested in eating dairy anymore anyway. After all, regardless of compassionate reasons, not consuming dairy is better for the environment and my health too.
Edgar Alan Pig (the first rescue and namesake of Edgar's Mission) with a little lambie friend, enjoying the sunshine together.
Edgar’s Mission is a farm animal sanctuary in Victoria. I wish it was closer so I could go there and have a look myself! Next time I’m in Victoria with access to a car, I’ll be there, for sure. I’m wildly envious of the owner, Pam, and would love to know how she manages to live on, run and fund the place. The idea of doing something similar is not unfamiliar to me – hence the thoughts about my eco-friendly rescue farm that started this whole thing off. I’ve become a Facebook fan. Go check out the Facebook page, and especially the photos in the Around the Farm album; some are just beautiful. The photos in this post are taken from the page.
Unforsaken
Oh wee blog, I have not foresaken thee.
I am just swamped at work (typical) and now feel I have tried everything to get unswamped in my current role. As such, I feel comfortable that I’ve given it my best shot and will feel no regrets to leave. In the past I’ve made efforts to leave in a sort of angry ‘I can’t take this anymore’ kind of way. In contrast, I’m now working with folks to transfer to a different department within the same company. Initially, I think my workload will increase, but ultimately I think it will be better for me, my work-life balance overall, and my career prospects.
Also, I’ve been diagnosed with a reasonably serious illness in my spine. Serious in that it requires a series of day visits to the hospital for treatment (which I’m currently undergoing) and regular MRIs, but not that serious, in that it’s not degenerative or terminal or anything, although it might recur over time. Plus, it’s mild so far, so I’ll be ok… I’m not going to end up paralysed at this point! And hey, I’m re-using my hospital band… it’s loose enough for me to slip off my wrist, so I asked if I could just use the same one over and over and the nurses said I could, since I’m always the same person lol.
By the way, why do hospitals give you nasty sandwiches for lunch? I mentioned I was vego and I got egg and lettuce on white bread… none of which I eat, and all of which were particulary nasty versions of the foods in question. The woman who got them for me though was so proud to offer a meatless meal that I didn’t have the heart to not eat something… so I did some fancy bread slice switching so I didn’t have to eat the egg and then ate most of the disgusting lettuce sandwiches… I kinda hid some under the crusts though. I felt not eating crusts was kinda socially acceptable enough for me to leave them. I never even practiced food hiding as a kid, either… my mum had the eagle eye for food. I got served up peas for breakfast once because I wouldn’t eat them for tea. Mum won the battle but I won the war… she didn’t serve me peas again, but as a compromise, I had to eat lettuce (something green had to be on the plate!). I wonder if the copious amounts of eggs and lettuce I ate as a kid have anything to do with my complete dislike of them now…
Anyway, what with that stuff, Mr Teeny-bop’s birthday (including the last ever sleepover part of DOOM) and starting school, Yankee Elv’s on-going work woes and her own health issues, Loodle the escapee crossing a major road (fortunately in the middle of the night with much less traffic) and organising a bunch of extra stuff at work (such as the local company Clean Up Australia day), it’s been pretty full on.
However, just to show you that I haven’t forgotten you, and I’m still keeping up with all things weird and wonderful and environmental…
Check out these awesomely cool living root bridges! We have trees like this here in Brisbane so bridges like this would definitely be doable.
Root bridges in India
Living Root Bridges can tell you more about why they’re awesome…
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