We decided to try buying this biodegradable kind for a change, to be nicer to the environment. We discussed adding it to the compost bin (although I’ve since vetoed that idea cos I think I’ll use the compost on my vege patch and the nitrogen from cat waste isn’t good for edibles). Ultimately, we thought it would be better.

Well, it’s not; for two reasons.

1. It reeks. The stench is something like four-day old instant chicken noodle soup. None of us even like fresh homemade chicken noodle soup, so you can imagine how much we love this.

2. The cats hate it. Diva, in fact, hates it to the point where she decided to dig up my bathroom pot plant (fortunately devoid of plants for the time being; I was thinking about trying some mint in there again) and pee in there instead. Nice. Have a look at the evidence.

The makeshift litter box. Oh, how delightful.

Diva is completely unperturbed by her actions – in fact, she did it again the next day.

Unperturbed kitteh is unperturbed.

The moral of the story? Not all things eco-friendly are good – it pays to try some different options. Also… if your cats hates the new litter you bought, change it on the first day… don’t leave it for a second day…

I think this blog is my parallel career. Thanks for reading, and helping me stave off brain death.

Uh oh… I think my brain heard me…

In the Elven household, we live in harmony with bugs by:

• Sharing our house with geckos (they eat lots of bugs, but sadly our most common geckos are non-natives – even so, Yankee Elv loves them)
• Letting lots of spiders live in our yard – mostly golden orb weavers (but not in the house, not in the house!)

A female golden orb weaver spider living outside our kitchen window. She moved along herself before we had to move her - she was preventing us from opening the window - but now she's back with her cronies over the front flower bed.

• Stopping the cats from terrorising the local lizards, including blue-tongue lizards (they also eat lots of bugs)

A very pissy adolescent blue-tongue lizard bravely showing us his big, scary tongue. Pou had been trying to toy with him, but he was having none of it! We rehomed him under a bush.

• Keeping all the windows open without screens during the day (only some of our windows are screened, so if we screen those that are and still keep the screenless windows open, bugs come in but can’t get out again – if you keep them all unscreened, they fly in one window and out the other)
• Shutting all screenless windows and closing the screens on all screened windows at dusk (keeps out the mozzies, moths and Christmas beetles)
• Keeping the interior lights off unless you’re using them (bugs are attracted to light)
• Wiping kitchen benches meticulously after food preparation and rinsing all dishes after eating to keep off the ants (I’m still working on this one with Mr Teeny-bop)
• Keeping all food in sealed containers or jars to remove temptation for the ants
• Avoiding leaving still water lying around (mosquito breeding ground)
• Keeping the lid on the garbage bin and kitchen compost containers to discourage flies
• Using a cat food bowl with a moat to prevent ant swarms
• Keeping pet food in sealed containers in the cupboard to prevent ants from gorging.

Our one concession to ‘unnatural’ pest control is flea treatment for the dog and cats – they are miserable without it.

This seems to mostly do the trick (although these darned red ants keep coming and trying to live in my bamboo plant). We really don’t have a bug problem – if you don’t count the critters in the compost, and the cicadas that are loud enough for even Yankee Elv to hear!

Do you have any other natural pest control tips?

Blue-tongue lizards are quite cute when they stop hissing and poking out their tongues. This guy is still pretty mad though - he is all puffed up and flattened out.

[As an interesting aside, golden orb weaver webs are currently being studied in the hopes that something similar can be used in medicine to make things like sutures. The golden webs are so strong and flexible they are able to entangle small birds, although the spiders are not bird-eaters. At the moment, we have a golden orb weaver's web holding up a tendril of the passionfruit vine.]

A passionfruit vine tendril held up by the web of a golden orb weaver spider.

Look closely and you can see the golden web!

The original version of this recipe came from the Post Punk Kitchen, and called for chickpea flour instead of gluten-free plain flour, to give it an ‘eggier’ taste. We didn’t have any on hand though. We  can’t get soy creamer in Australia, so instead of doing half a cup each of soy creamer and soy (or rice) milk as the recipe called for, Yankee Elv just used a whole cup of soy milk. I was sure we had cornflour in the cupboard (called cornstarch in the USA), but when we looked in the pantry there was none. We used custard powder instead.. it’s just yellow-tinted, vanilla-flavoured cornflour anyway, and it worked just as well. Besides, we have heaps of it and it needs to be used!

The French toast was also cooked it in Nuttelex (vegan margarine) in the pan, instead of oil – which, in my opinion, was a better idea; the oil would have given it a funny taste, I think.

Vegan French Toast

Tasty vegan French toast!

Ingredients:

• 6 slices of bread (we used slices from a small, reasonably dense loaf of sourdough)
• 2 tab cornflour (aka cornstarch; we used custard powder)
• 1 cup soy milk (or other non-dairy milk)
• 1/4 cup gluten-free plain flour (or chickpea flour, or regular plain [all-purpose] flour)
• cinnamon to taste (Yankee Elv just shakes some on top of the mixture, dips the bread in, then adds some more – that way each slice gets a decent amount of cinnamon)
• Nuttelex (vegan margarine) – enough to lightly grease the pan

Method:

1. Mix the soy milk and cornflour in a wide, shallow bowl or container until cornflour is dissolved.
2. Mix in the gluten-free plain flour until it is mostly absorbed (some lumps are ok), then sprinkle in some cinnamon.
3. Melt the nuttelex in a pan over medium heat.
4. In batches, or one at a time depending on the size of your pan, soak the bread slices in the mixture and transfer to the pan. Sprinkle some cinnamon on top of the mixture before soaking each slice.
5. Cook each side for about 2 minutes; if they are not brown enough when you flip them over, heat for 1 to 2 more minutes on each side. They should be golden brown with flecks of dark brown.
6. Serve immediately, or keep them in a low oven for a brief time before serving, if required.

It’s my understanding that you want to shear sheep though, even if they are just pets, because in sub-tropical Queensland especially, it’s just too hot in summer for all that wool. That makes sense – we have to shave poor Loodle in summer cos it’s too hot for him too!

So if I’m going to have this abundance of wool, I think I’m going to learn how to spin my own yarn. I’ve been interested in it for a while, but I read this post on Living Naturally in Louisiana and it inspired me! I’m too busy at the moment to try on a handspindle, and our place is too small to have a spinning wheel, so it will have to wait, but I’m anticipatorily excited! (Yes, I know anticipatorily is not a word, but it gets my point across. Why should Shakespeare be the only one who is allowed to make up words that aren’t nouns?)

Homespun yarn with a beautiful spinning wheel. The yarn always seems to be intensely coloured when it's homespun. Photo courtesy of Screw Bronze! blog (link at the end of the post).

I love the idea of having local, eco-friendly yarn though – from happy sheep. I don’t buy wool yarn now because I don’t want to support an industry that isn’t animal-friendly, but I’m not happy buying acrylics either (they’re made from petrochemicals), cottons use so much water and maize takes corn out of the food web. That pretty much leaves me with bamboo and soy (leftovers from making soy products), which are both pretty expensive and often not locally produced. Sometimes I pick up used yarn, unravel a jumper or succumb to some pretty cotton, but I can’t wait til I can make my own pretty yarn from my happy pet sheep. Then I can reduce my dependence on those other kinds of yarn (although if I start making my own soy milk, I wonder if I could make my own soy yarn… and maybe grow some hemp and make a blended fibre…)

Plus I’ll be able to try some of those felting patterns I’ve seen (only animal fibre can be felted).

*Photo courtesy of this post at Screw Bronze!

I”m not going to provide a proper recipe. If you need a recipe to teach you how to make pizza, then you’re obviously no more than 6 years old and you should be getting mummy, daddy or another adult guardian to help you with the knives and the oven anyway. Off you go, sweetheart.

Right, now the kiddies are gone – everyone knows how to make a pizza. Here’s what mine was made of.

Vegan Pizza

Tasty vegan pizza!

• Yiros bread for a base (under the griller [broiler] for a few mins on each side to get it crispy)
• Tomato paste (tomato-y salty goodness!)
• Green capsicum (bell pepper)
• Fake bacon (aka not bacon, aka Sanitarium Deli Rashers)
• Roasted butternut pumpkin (squash)
• Soy cheese with chives.

I stuck everything on, put it under the griller, and voila! Tastiness.

*Technically, the pizza was not 100% vegan. The fake bacon has traces of milk and egg, and the soy cheese has casein (I didn’t realise til after I bought it!) But in spirit it was vegan, so I’m claiming it as a win! I will try other versions of not-cheese and not-bacon once I use up this stuff.

• 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!

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??

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…