5 WAYS TO SHOP GREEN IN 2012

Here we are looking at another New Year.

My favorite part has always been the resolutions.  A fresh start.  Another chance.  Here are a couple of suggestions to improve the odds for 2012 and save some money along the way.

Have you heard of the term buycotting?  It’s the opposite of boycotting.  Instead of refusing to buy something you disapprove of, be sure to vote with your dollars and spend wisely to support green business where ever you can.  With the economy in the toilet, and the government doing precious little to boost sustainable business, wouldn’t it be great if in 2012 the greenest parts of the economy begins to boom because consumers see their value and support them.  In many cases you can get it cheaper from China, but where is that leading us?

1.  Fair Indigo  I first found out about this company when I got assigned to write an article about them a couple of years ago.  This is a clothing store attempting to change the sweat shop horrors of the apparel industry.  Their motto is Look Good, Feel good, Do Good. So when you are thinking about a new outfit, check out their website first.  You may find just what you want assembled under Fair Trade conditions, or make of organic material, or reused material – or all three.  Read what the NYT had to say about them here.

 2.  ReUseIt   It takes very little time to reuse containers and stop leaving a trail of plastic bags and bottles, but it’s even easier if you set yourself up with some well-designed re-usable storage tools.  A really good place to find what you need is ReUseIt – a company dedicated to replacing disposables.  They are having a post holiday sale right now too.  (Who isn’t?)

3.  Learn to Love Lentils!  If you want to save some money and save the planet at the same time, walk past the meat counter, the next time you grocery shop.  I just read this week in Forks over Knives: The Plant-based Way to Health that, according to a 1997 report by the Senate Agriculture Committee, animals raised for slaughter produce 130 times as much waste as the entire human population.

A 2006 University of Chicago study found that the average American gets 47% of their calories from animal products.  That creates 2.52 tons of CO@ emissions per person per year.  If the average American meat eater were to reduce his or her intake of animal produce to 25%, he or she would shave a ton off their carbon footprint!

Truth in advertising – I’m a vegetarian, but many different sources all agree that every burger you bypass is good for your health and slows environmental degradation.

Food for thought.

4.  Recyclebank   I just learned about this organization while perusing The Kitchn.   Danny Seo says Recyclebank is a new, free online community that rewards eco-conscious behavior with coupons.  I had kind of given up on coupons, because they tend to be for cake mixes and prepared foods that I don’t find appealing.

But an assortment of variably green  companies are  offering  the thrill of the coupon chase to their products.

5.  What would you add to this list?  Sound off!  Let us hear from you.  Have you got any green resolutions?

Happy New Year!

TURNING TREES INTO UNMILLED TIMBERS part one

When we got out to our land last Friday it had been transformed into a winter wonderland.

Thursday we had been clearing and burning the tops and side branches of the pine trees that had been harvested over the last two weeks for use as un-milled rafters and joists as well as milled roof decking boards.  Overnight,  the moisture had been squeezed out of the air to form a fantastic coating of hoar frost on every pine needle and tree branch.  It continued to form as we watched, even forming crystals in our boot prints made only minutes earlier into fresh-fallen snow.

closeup of ice crystals on one of our timbers

The magical feeling was fitting because we were meeting with our architect, Della Hansmann and our construction manager, Brian Dalstrom to look at the tree trunks that have been selected, felled and dragged out of the woods and organized on the ground around the barn site.

Della, Doug and Brian confir

We were gathered on this crisp 20 degree morning to look at this arrangement of harvested trees and mentally organize them into the specific pillars destined for each spot that will hold up our house.

An example of forked timbers in another Whole Trees house, Tussen Tak.

Whole Tree Architecture and Construction   works with un-milled, often branching timbers. See my post The First 100 Trees for our House.

It was an exciting morning as we moved from tree trunk to tree trunk listening to Della and Brian  discuss how to fit these wild, natural shapes into the orderly structure of a human habitation.

The natural and beautiful variability of the tree trunks and branches require a lot of “out-of-the-box” thinking to place them where they will provide the most support and also highlight their powerful grace.   Each Whole Trees structure develops an individual character, and I am thrilled at the prospect of watching our house’s character emerge.

We are working with the same sort of computer-generated architectural plans in general use, but these paper plans will evolve as the trees are fitted together.  I feel like we are partnering with these trees rather than just using them.

Over the course of the next few months, these trees will be shaped  into custom-joined timbers and readied for putting in place once the concrete foundation is poured.

I know many of these trees personally.  We considered each one of them carefully before deciding which trees to harvest, and yet leave the woods in better ecological balance after their removal.  I remember standing beside each of them and marking them with a numbered aluminum tag.  I will still remember when I am standing next to them in my kitchen, office and bedroom.

FELLING OUR FRONT YARD

For the past two weeks, two men and a chainsaw have been felling trees all over our 44 acres, winching them out of the woods with a tractor and pulling them down to the barnyard where they wait to be shaped into unmilled timber frame members over the next few months.

All the joists, rafter, posts and beams for our house were carefully culled from the woods – chosen because they were the right dimensions for a part of the house and because they needed to be thinned for the health of the woods.

It’s been an exciting process to watch, and the most dramatic part was saved until last –  the felling of a stand of pines growing to the south of the house site.  Planted by the previous owner about 20 years ago, they were destined for some pulp mill, but instead they will make up the rafters and decking boards of our house roof.

This pine stand was the first shelter we had when we first started coming out to our land.  It provided shade and minimal rain protection.  We kept our on-land tools out of sight in its depths.  But we knew from the time we identified the building site, that they would have to come down before the house went up.  It was a necessary step if we were going to be able to take advantage of an otherwise-beautiful exposure to the southern sky for both passive and active solar gain.

The harvest date for the pine stand was last Friday.  We arrived just in time to see them falling, gracefully, one after another.

It was a bittersweet moment.

I had to keep reminding myself that felling them gives us the greenest possible roofing structure and the sunlight which we will put to good use in our  passive solar design, solar hot water and heating and ultimately photovoltaic power.

What we didn’t think about before the pines started coming down was how much tree is left when we have taken the first 20 feet of the trunk.  In some cases, another 20 feet of increasingly feathery branches towered up there, and was now piled on the ground.

Where the trees were felled in the woods, their tops have been made into piles that will provide wildlife habitat as they slowly go back to the earth, but in the house site, Doug and I have undertaken to clear the area by burning them.

Sunday we dragged pine tops and branches into a burn pile and feeder piles.  Then we burned all day Tuesday and Thursday.

Feeding a fire is an exhausting job, lopping and sawing these young kings of the plant world into branches we can drag and logs we can take between us and toss onto the top of the bonfire.  I’m not thrilled about the carbon that has been released back into the atmosphere, but hopefully it will balance out when we are able to heat with only a tiny fraction of the fossil fuel normally required to survive a Wisconsin winter.  In any event, whatever alternate commercial felling and milling process we might have substituted for this approach would surely have also involved a lot of carbon release.

before

Now the space is open for a portable mill to cut the roof decking boards and for construction equipment to get to the house site.

after

And for the first time, we can see the prospect down to the pond and across the small ravine that has been opened up in front of our house site.  It’s a thrilling step on the path to building our new home.

Hope you had a Soulful Solstice and Wishing you a Merry Perihelion.

WHY WE ARE NOT USING A SAND BED TO STORE THERMAL HEAT

HOW LOW CAN WE GO?

When we first started thinking about designing a new house some eight years ago, I said I wanted a passive solar design and a house that was so well insulated that we could heat it with a candle.

Years of study have taught me that while a passive solar greenhouse may be possible in Wisconsin, the nights and cloudy days would be too chilly for living spaces.  But we have come up with a plan that we hope will offset 50%  to perhaps 70% of our heating needs through a combination  of passive solar design and the addition of solar hot water panels, along with heat storage in concrete and flagstone floors and an interior rock wall to collect and store the heat that we generate  And of course, some good insulation.

For the periods of cold, cloudy weather, we will have backup heat from a small wood-burning stove on the main floor and propane to add heat when necessary to the radiant floor heat system.

SAND BED HEAT STORAGE?

We all know how hot sand can get in the sun. (photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/stevephillips/242665348/ )

We were planning to supplement that heat storage with a sand bed under the house that could collect heat starting in late summer and release it slowly during the winter.  We got the idea from Mark Morgan  a couple of years ago, when we were working at a straw bale workshop he led, and it’s been part of our general plan ever since.  It seemed like an intrinsically good idea to store up heat ahead of time and use it like a battery to provide it later on when needed.  We planned to rest the roughly 900 square feet of our house that will sit on the ground on a two foot deep bed of sand, with a good layer of insulation at its base.

As with a lot of good ideas, the devil is in the details, and now that we have talked with five  area solar heating  installers, we are going to skip the sand bed.

WHY NOT?

Bob Ramlow is a well-known proponent of sand beds.  He has written a book, Solar Water Heating, with Benjamin Nusz. He also wrote an article for the magazine Solar Today, Nov-Dec 2007, Warm, Radiant Comfort in the Sand.  In that article he suggests putting a 2-foot deep bed of sand under your building.  He says, “In my Wisconsin climate the solar energy system begins to heat the sand bed in early to mid-August….It takes about a month to get the sand bed saturated with heat, and then the temperature inside the building is regulated by judicious opening and closing of windows.

Anyone who considers this should be aware of is that if this is the only form of  in-floor heat you will be able to use for that part of your house,  This is a good news/bad news scenario.  Sand beds are slow to collect their heat charge and give it off slowly and as the winter progresses, it will gradually loose its heat.  Then there is a cool mass under your floor.

Some people attempt to get around this with 2 loops of tubing.  One right under the floor to provide quicker heat, and one further down.  This is not a perfect solution because even the upper loop will radiate its heat both up and down.  It’s not like air convection where  heat rises and cold air falls.  Yes there is air in sand, but the idea is that you are trying to store heat by radiating it into the sand particles, so the depth of the bed will slow down the rate at which your room will warm up even from the upper loop.

A sand bed is exceptionally unresponsive.  You can’t crank up the thermostat and get more heat later today.  There will be a lag time of many days before the heat soaked up on a sunny day is available for use in the house.  It might take most of a week – or longer.  After all, it took a month or more to fully heat the sand bed during the time of year when days are long and sun is strong.

Pex Tubing - how that hot water moves through sand and concrete. (photo credit http://www.flickr.com/photos/moosicorn/4546866153/ PEX TUBING )

As we have talked to people who are aware of sand bed installations, most note  that there will be a string of days in the winter – maybe more than one string – that are cloudy and cold during which the heat in the sandbed will be almost fully discharged.  In the middle of the winter, you will not have enough sun to recharge it.  You are left either spending your heating energy reheating the sand bed or living with perpetually cold floors.  It seems like the deeper the bed – the worse this problem can be.  The cases we heard of where people thought two feet = good: four feet = better now have an even less responsive system.

If you want to try to keep a deep sand bed warm with solar panels, you will need a LOT of them.  Everything has its environmental cost, and building and transporting more panels than needed is part of the big picture.  You can’t use solar for the coldest, darkest part of the winter without a lot of waste in the system the rest of the year.

Want the nightmare scenario?  A hydronic heating installer friend told us of an uninsulated four foot deep sand bed under a house he knew of.  The radiative losses downward into the cool earth are immense, and the heat recharging possiblilites are virtually non-existent in the middle of winter – all done with the best of intentions.

So here’s  our proposed plan.  (The details are still being worked out with the solar installer.)

We will have in-floor heating, and we expect that the upstairs concrete slab and the lower level flagstones set in shallow sand will provide heat storage for a few days.  We will supplement with a wood stove for the main floor and a small propane burner that will heat the hot water tank when the sun can’t.

We have been told by several experienced installers that the only way to have any control over the temperature in the house is to keep the heat in the hot water tank and deploy it to a relatively  thin (2” – 5”), well insulated floor as needed.   Again, insulation is a key ingredient.  We’d like to put 4” of Styrofoam under the ground-level floors if we can afford to.  At the very least, we’ll put in 2” of insulation.

We think a well insulated, and not-too-deep concrete or flagstone-set-in-sand storage floor is the best solution.  We’ll update you on the actual solar panel array specifics with a later post, perhaps in January.

PROGNOSIS POSITIVE WHEN NURSES TREAT ENVIRONMENT

I just wrote a about a really upbeat topic for Isthmus.   There is an exciting new trend in public health nursing that really gets at the heart of the problem.

Keeping their candles burning was a challenge in the falling temperature and rising wind as 150 committed Southwest Madison residents gathered in Hammersley Park in late November to walk the half-mile to Falk Elementary School. The crowd assembled in response to racist graffiti spray-painted in red the week before on fences and buildings in the neighborhood.

Neuschel and other members of the health equity team had a dramatic effect in Meadowood after a teen-on-teen murder. Photo Credit:Mary Langenfeld

The march, meal and discussion that followed in the school gym were a public display of the Southwest Community Organizing Committee flexing its new muscle. Strength has always been associated with health, so perhaps it’s not surprising that this community organization owes its existence to a small team of nurses in the Department of Public Health for Madison and Dane County.

Kim Neuschel, one of six nurses who form the health equity team, watched approvingly as people poured into Falk School. She checked with members of the organizing committee to make sure each table had a facilitator, then took the mike to set the agenda.

“They are the key,” Ald. Steve King says of the nurses. “What public health has done is the model for partnering with neighborhood associations and plugging in holistically. They are looking for root causes for what’s going on. Kim has connected the dots for everyone, making people think about the socioeconomic issues in a different way.”

Sheray Wallace, a long-term resident and member of the Southwest Community Organizing Committee, says that other residents have become more involved in the community since the public nurses became a steady presence. “They bring so much positive energy into everything we do,” says Wallace.

The health equity team is the brainchild of Judy Howard, public health supervisor at the public health department. “Public health will always need people focusing on individuals and families,” says Howard. “But health starts where we live and play, and this team can focus on the bigger picture — the neighborhoods. Is this a healthy environment? Does public policy support the changes people need to be healthy?”

Read the rest …

FOUR FESTIVE WEBSITES TO HELP YOU GIVE GREENLY

While we are all celebrating the season of spending money on each other, how about making some of those gifts benefit both the recipients and the planet? It’s a great opportunity to put a little green into the lives of those you love.

Here are a few places you may be able to find the perfect present.

Greater Good Network  This is a family of websites that support a number of  causes from Rainforest preservation to literacy.  On top of that, they have a Shop Green category with 18 pages of environmentally friendly gifts including recycled tire tube wallets to natural banana fiber sweaters.  GreaterGood Network has given more than $26 million to non-profit charities since 1999.

Treehugger Holiday Gift Guide This website is a treasurehouse of green gifting.  Treehugger breaks gift giving into categories like DIY’er,  Foodie, Kids, Green Geek, Health + Wellness, Fasion Buff, Outdoor Enthusiast and Animal Lover.

The Nature Conservancy has an Adopt an Acre program for $50.   Locations include Costa Rica, Africa, the Appalachians and Australia.  The recipient gets an adopt-an-acre magnet set, fact sheet and four issues of Nature Conservancy magazine.

Reuseit  This is your source for reusable gifts for every part of your loved ones’ lives, and like most businesses, they are offering holiday deals that make going green even more efficient.  They have assembled their top gift picks for everyone in one link.

WHAT ARE YOUR FAVORITE WAYS TO GIVE GREEN?

WISHING YOU A SOULFUL SOLSTICE AND A MERRY PERIHELION!

ARE EMERALD ASH BORERS KILLING MY TREE? WHAT CAN I DO ABOUT IT?

Emerald Ash Borer (EAB) is turning up in  the Midwest, and leaving dead ash trees in its wake.  They have got ecologists and entymologists scrambling to understand what this means so that arborists and foresters can be prepared.

The Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, UW- Extension and Dane County combined resources put together a presentation on EAB management strategies last week, and I got to sit in on it because I volunteered as a Master Gardener to help with registration and refreshments.

What I learned was pretty grim.

This deceptively gorgeous green bug is presumed to have arrived in the U.S. from China about 15-20 years ago. They probably made the journey in solid wood packing material

Adults munch on the leaves of ash trees.  That’s not the problem.  The female lays eggs on ash trees that hatch into larvae.  Those larvae chew through the bark and begin to feed.  The wood goes in their front end.  What comes out their back and blocks up the tree’s plumbing.  Pretty soon leaves in the top of the tree are starting to die.  Ultimately they all will. By the time the canopy of a tree is half dead, the party is over.  Turn out the lights, and fell that tree.

Thewhite areas now have EAB infestations, and the red dots represnet actual sitings.

The first EAB sighting was in Detroit in 2002.

In less than 10 years they have killed tens of millions of ash trees, and before they are done, it is likely they will kill every one.

How are these little destroyers getting so far so fast?

Well, the adults can fly.  Though beetles are normally poor flyers, both the Japanese Beetle and the Emerald Ash Borer are good flyers.  Nonetheless, they can only fly about ½ a mile in a year.

They can move much faster when people carry firewood in their cars and trucks.  Many new infestations of EAB in the Great Lakes area are caused by people moving infested firewood.  We need to purchase our firewood near where we plan to use it.  Use iall, or leave it behind.  Never carry your firewood any distance.

The critters can also hitch a ride in infected nursery stock and ash wood products.  Ash is an extremely hard wood often used for tool handles.

If you don't know what ash trees look like, this will help.

Scientists have been working fast, racing to stay ahead of the EAB and form some kind of a strategy to combat it.  They are developing pesticides that can protect individual trees for an unknown amount of time.

At the seminar, about 65 arborists and city foresters were listening carefully.

Tres can be protected by treatment.  It isn’t cheap.  A professional arborist will need to inject pesticide into the tree.  But not every tree can or should be protected.  If the tree is already infected, you are putting money into a sinking ship.  If the tree has structural problems — you need to let it go.

What the arborists and foresters at the session I attended were told is that there is ultimately no way to save their  ash trees, but that they should treat them with the pesticides anyway.

Why?

Because treatment will slow the die off.  If all the ash trees all die at once, it will be a huge economic burden on a community.  Treatment will cost less than just letting the trees all die at once and then having to remove and replace them.

Purdue University has developed an Emerald Ash Borer cost Calculatorto help forest managers make good decisions.

If you have an ash in your yard that you love, you may be able to keep it for quite a while.  You need to be aware of how close EAB is getting to your area.  There is no need to apply preventative treatment before they are getting close.

DOES MY ASH TREE HAVE EAB?

• Is it a true ash? (EAB only kills true ash – not mountain ash.)
• Does it have 3 or more of the symptoms below?

1. Thining crown
2. Bark chipped off by woodpeckers
3. New growth on trunk
4. S-shaped tunnels beneath bark
5. D-shaped holes on the bark about the size of a small lentil
6. Splits in the bark

To learn what you need to know about Emerald Ash Borer, Purdue also offers online self-study programs.  They have study guides tailors for arborists, home owners and privately-owned campgrounds.  Knowledge is power.  Check it out here.

TREE FELLING BEGINS!

Last summer (see my post Peeling Trees for our House) we selected the trees on our land that will be used to build our house, and Tuesday December 5, 20011, our construction foreman, Bryan Dalstrom started felling those trees so they can be prepped for construction, working with Kellen Anderson on the project.

I have discovered that when you start a sustainable building project based on non-conventional building principals, you find yourself working with a people who love their work and throw themselves into it.

Kellen on the left and Bryan on the right.

Working with Bryan is going to be an education in orchestrating all the alternative facets and watching a network form among people who are  committed to  try new materials and methods.  Bryan is going to weave it all together.

And the first thread on the loom is Kellen Anderson.  We are committed to using local materials and services as much as possible on this building project, and Kellen is a wonderful example.  Kellen grew up on farm on a ridgetop we can see from the highest point on our land.  His grandfather Lloyd Anderson owned our land.  It was part of the family farm that Kellen’s father, Jeff helped his father work.  Kellen and his father planted the pines and spruces that will be our rafters.  He told me today that when he was a little boy, his family was cutting their Christmas trees from among this grove that is now providing our rafters.

 Kellen has started an innovative business called Woodland Futures.  Check it out in this video of a local television interview.

Felling trees in this grove is challenging because the trees are so close that a cut tree cannot fall.  Kellen and Bryan are getting around this by wrapping a chain around the trunk after the tree is cut.  Then the chain is winched toward the tractor till it finally comes down.  

Luckily, it was just cold enough to keep the ground frozen today.  It’s ideal to remove the trees from the woods during the winter because the frozen ground is less damaged as the trees are moved.

The rafters are being stacked by the greenhouse for now.  Once they have been collected from all over our 44 acres, there will be about 100 rafters.

A GREAT GIFT FOR GARDENERS

This year I did my required volunteer hours (and then some!) for the Madison Area Master Gardeners Association by co-editing its Wisconsin Garden Journal.  The efforts and expertise of many Master Gardener Volunteers were poured enthusiastically into this volume.

 THIS BOOK WOULD MAKE A GREAT GIFT

FOR EVERY GARDENER IN ZONES 3-5 ON YOUR GIFT LIST!!!!

 My co-editor, Rae Vogeler and I didn’t pick the theme, Celebrating our Past – Cultivating our Future, but we found it easy to work with.  We quickly agreed that the underlying premise would be sustainable gardening – something that past generations took for granted and the only way we are going to get a future.  The photograph for July came from the Wisconsin State Historical Society and features some massive vegetables that I would suspect had been photo-shopped, if I hadn’t held the original print in my hands.

 This 196-page weekly engagement calendar is packed with tips on how to make the most of your garden all year long.  Each month starts with a tip I ferreted  out of an old garden journal or almanac at the Historical Society. ( It’s really a hoot to sit there wearing white cotton gloves and handling catalogs printed 150 years ago.  The contemporary tips were researched and written by master gardener volunteers from around Wisconsin.  I learned a ton editing them.

The Journal includes three commissioned articles:

Gardening in Grandfather’s Time by Jerry Minnich, a Wisconsin author well credentialed to chronicle some of the best and worst of how things used to be grown.

Growing Your Own, by Vincent M. Smith, detailing his Ph.D. research into how much food Madison area gardeners are growing and why.  Vincent broke the mold in his research, reaching out to dozens of citizen scientists to help gather this interesting data.

We Seed into the Future by Janet Macunovich and Steven Nikkila who publish a weekly newsletter for gardeners, “What’s Coming Up?” which you can request at JMAXGarden@aol.com.

This is not flagrant self promotion.  All of the $14.95s that are collected in selling this book are donated to promote gardening projects.  This is gardeners helping gardeners. 

Does it get better than that?

MAMGA has published the Wisconsin Garden Journal since 1984 to share gardening information and raise funds for Gardening Project Grants.

This really is the gift that goes on giving.

In 2011, we awarded a total of $4,758.61 to six community or school gardening projects

and a total of $2,800.00 to five public gardens important to master gardeners:

• Allen Centennial Gardens
• the Dane County Extension Office Teaching Garden
• the Native Plant Demonstration Garden at the University of Wisconsin Arboretum
• Olbrich Botanical Garden
• University Display Gardens at the University of Wisconsin West Madison Agricultural Research Station

THERE ARE PLENTY OF THESE DANDY BOOKS LEFT, AND YOU CAN ORDER THEM HERE.