Fears of the future

This weekend I enter my mid 30s. And even though I am aging, my knees hurt in the mornings and my ten-month-old wears me out so fast, I have so much to be happy about. I am really in a good place as I near the mid point of my life. I have everything I've ever wanted. Yet I can't get over the fact that I worry about my daughter's future. And I worry all the time, and it's not just how will she pay for college or how many times her little heart will get broken. It's bigger than that.

Was it a good idea to bring a little life into this world? As I rocked my daughter to sleep for her morning nap and she clung to me like a little koala bear all snuggling into my chest I started to cry. If I'm lucky I will not live long enough to see the real horrors that will result from how our species has wrecked this planet. But she probably will. I try not to think of the super storms, floods, famines, droughts and plagues that will inevitably occur. I can't stand to think of her suffering. But unless our species makes huge changes, and makes them fast, all our children will suffer.

So as part of my blog makeover I have added to my sidebar shortcuts to my easy green living tips. They are small changes in lifestyle, very small, such as unplug your wall warts (the bulky chargers like the one attached to my lap top). Simple, easy, saves a ton of electricity. Or go organic on your property, it will keep hormones from pesticides out of the environment keeping future generations of children safe.

So for all the children you know, all the children in the world, give them a safe future. Please. It's time we stop whining about how we can't do without that AC turned on high, or our SUV that gets 14 MPG that we need to buy because we just had a child, or the fact that you must spray your lawn with chemicals to kill that one dandelion. It's not worth it. There's too much at stake.

under construction

hang in there followers. I'm playing with HTML.....but YES, this is still the same blog...new look :)

enjoy!

-kate

One thing for the planet: buy cereal in bags and not boxes

I've been eating a brand of corn flakes for about three years now that is packaged only in a bag, there's no box. I chose this brand, Nature's Path, because it's sweetened with fruit juice and not cane sugar (cane sugar seems to set off my Crohn's Disease). The lack of a box is a bonus.

For some reason I've never read much more on the bag then the ingredient list which is pleasantly short: organic corn meal, organic grape and/or pear juice concentrate, sea salt. There's nothing I can't pronounce or that my intestines haven't evolved to digest which I really like. But there's something else interesting on the bag I noticed this morning over my daily bowl: a link to papercalculator.org, a website managed by the Environmental Defense Fund. Apparently, according to this website, Nature's Path's products without boxes have saved more than:

• 437 tons of paper board
• 1,389,323 pounds of CO2
• 7,464 million BTUs of energy
• 826,542 gallons of wastewater
• 248, 383 pounds of diverted solid waste

So next time you need your cereal fix look for products packaged without a box. If you don't want to shell out extra for organic there are conventional cereals out there such as generic brands of Cheerios and corn flakes that come in just a bag. Most regular grocery stores carry them, they're usually on the bottom shelf. Give them a shot and think of all the good you will be doing!

And if you work in and office that uses a lot of paper (which I don't) play around with papercalculator.org, it was pretty fun even though I didn't benefit much. Doing paper work and sitting still is low on the list of my priorities while at the aquarium...but hopefully our paper purchaser is being mindful when they place their order.

Ipswich Farmers' Market, growing mantids, and a teaser carrot

I finally managed to get down to our local farmers' market. It didn't get going until two weeks ago and we've been away so this was the first week I made the three block walk to buy my local honey. Marshview Apiary from right here in Ipswich is always there and that's right where I headed. Processed cane sugar sets off my Crohn's Disease, and it tends to be hard to avoid since cane sugar is in everything. So, I've figured out how to cook and bake with honey and I'd rather get it from Eric and Irene Josephson then from the store. Here's my husband shelling out $6.75 for 16 ounces, total bargain!

We indulged in a pint of blueberries and four amazing cucumbers from the stall next door. Sadly the blueberry bushes at Green Meadows Farm where our CSA share comes from are infected with a fungus and we can't pick any this year. And my one little bush in the backyard has only yielded 25 berries so far (but twice as many as last year!)






The best part about the day was when I got home I played a bit in my Monsanto Sucks, Michelle Obama Rocks Organic Garden. My ten tomato plants are now well over six feet tall and are loaded with little green tomatoes. I harvested a few zucchini, and just for fun I held my breath and pulled up one of my carrots just to check their progress. I was expecting a tiny little root but look! I've never grown carrots before and now I'm wishing I had! My husband and I split it, it was delicious. Only sun, water and Neptune's Harvest fish emulsion went into it and it's was just as good if not better than anything I've tasted from the store.

Then I poked around to check on my mantids and I found one amongst the green beans. It was twice as big as last week and I'm glad it survived the three inches of rain and high winds we got Friday morning. The garden looked like a tornado went through!

I'll pull up another carrot next week, now I'm getting impatient, especially since I have about 100 growing....that yummy baby carrot was such a tease!

For more virtual farmers' markets visit the Farmers' Market Challenge at The Road to Here.

Farm share soup

Squirrel Queen at The Road to Here has posted a challenge to encourage people to buy produce locally from a farmer's market or a local farm stand. The farmer's market down the street from us is regrettably small, last week they only had six stands and only two of them were selling produce. And what they had for sale was mostly what I had already picked up the previous Tuesday at Green Meadows Farm for our weekly CSA farm share, my love of which I shared with you all last month. So for SQ's Farmer's Market Challenge I'm going to focus on what I did with my farm share, and what I do with it almost every week: I make soup.


I LOVE soup. I could eat it every day, even in the summer when it's hot. The first summer my husband and I did a farm share was in 2006 and I was sadly too sick to eat all the produce. I've lived with Crohn's Disease since I was 14 ( lived, I will not say suffered, because if you suffer it's only because you let it get to you) So it's been about 19 years that I haven't been able to indulge in a bowl of popcorn, or smear crunchy peanut butter on a lap full of celery. A salad is often something I gaze at in wonder as other people with "healthy" guts shovel it in their mouths.

Generally I've been healthy for the past 19 years, I've never had surgery, I currently don't treat my illness with anything except acupuncture (the side effects of Crohn's meds are often worse than the disease). But I'm still left with the problem of getting my veggies. So I blend them.

The first time we came home with two full shopping bags of local organic produce from Green Meadows in 2006 I thought, "How on earth am I going to help Brian eat this?" I was having a relapse and had already lost 10 pounds. After experimenting we came up with this recipe for what we call Farm Share Soup. Or sometimes just Green Soup, since it usually comes out some shade of green.Basically the recipe is put in whatever you can or want. My rule is to have a variety of colors, different colors generally mean different vitamins and minerals. This week here's what I did:

-one kohlrabi
-one turnip
-one shallot
-one garlic scape (the curly thing in the photo)
-one sweet potato (not actually part of this week's share, it was purchased)
-a bunch of radishes
-two frozen blocks of spinach from previous weeks.
-a summer squash
-a box of Trader Joe's chicken broth (you can also use veggie, but I like the extra protein)
-about a half cup plain yogurt
-I usually like to add a whole fennel bulb and carrots but I didn't have any on hand.
-pinch of salt
-pinch of pepper
-pinch of coriander

Chop up all veggies and add to pot with broth and spices, boil into submission (to aid in my digestion). Then blend in a blender. Add more broth to thin if you'd desire. Add the yogurt, stir and eat! Yummy! This batch came out a pale shade of green, sometimes it's more orange, sometimes not.

The recipe changes according to the season. In the fall I add more potatoes, turnips and pumpkin. Late in the summer more squash. Sometimes I put in coconut milk since there's evidence it's beneficial for Crohn's disease (and tastes yummy!) There are no rules except trying to add lots of color and coming up with flavors you like. And the best part is I'm getting an insane amount of veggie goodness without the Crohn's-related issues and I freeze a jar from every batch so we can have farm share soup all winter too!

Bon apetite!

Favorite photo challenge: thanks for playing!

When I issued my Favorite Photo Challenge a few days ago I never dreamed how much fun I would have and how much I would learn about some of my followers. The stories behind the photos posted on the following blogs are really worth a read:

DJan at D-Jan-ity: camping solo in Peru

Rae at Weather Vane : a beach pre-911

Squirrel Queen at Through Squirrel's Eyes : camp games with the whole world

AL at Caramel Macchiato : a photo illusion

Susan at Ripples of Kindness : children and wildlife

Thanks to the above fabulous bloggers for taking the challenge! -kate

Sky photo challenge: being put in my place

Ripples of Kindness has posted a challenge:

"Not unlike humans, the sky is often referred to as "angry, dark, blue, cloudy, happy, clear, etc.
If you have a photo showing the sky personified, please post your link. I’d be interested in seeing what emotion you caught with your camera when you looked up at the sky."


I took this photo on Matinicus Rock, about 20 miles off the Downeast Maine coast. I was out there on this tiny island - mainly inhabited by terns, puffins and razorbills - as a volunteer for the National Audubon Society's Seabird Restoration Project, otherwise known as Project Puffin. It was my third summer doing a two-week stint observing puffins, banding them, and trying to dodge angry tern parents while moving about the island. I had witnessed lots of interesting weather phenomenons over the three summers I spent there, including the Northern Lights. However, this photo captured the coolest phenomenon I saw.

A front moved through from the west and this line of clouds in the picture came over us, according to our weather instruments, at about 70 miles an hour. It was so low to the ground I swear if I had climbed to the top of the lighthouse I would have been able to touch it. The emotion I experienced was one of being put in my place by Mother Nature. "Don't be complacent" she was telling me, "never take a peaceful sky for granted."