I totally did my part
It’s Blog Action Day. My action item for the day was emailing Turner’s Dairy Farm, home to ubiquitous Pittsburgh milk (sounds gross), the most delicious, cheap, sweet tea and the awesomeness that is Turner’s tea-shirts, to find out if they had considered reviving their home delivery service. My rationale was that there would be a lot of interest since attention has turned back to the environment, reducing waste, and buying local.
They wrote back.
“Dear Kelly,
No.
Love,
Turner’s”
Well, they weren’t that brusque, but costs are a huge roadblock to this service ever returning, which isn’t surprising.
Okay, so no home delivery of milk. Drat.
Other things that I’m trying to get going with include composting (and if anybody can steer me in the right direction on how to get started with that I would really appreciate it), gardening with said compost, despite the fact that my brown thumb is probably deadlier than any smog, and my latest obsession has been making my own yogurt.
I eat a lot of yogurt nowadays and have been buying it by the quart. However, the quart containers aren’t accepted by the recycling folks here. So, I’ve been saving them…but now I just have a bunch of containers cluttering up my kitchen. It makes sense to me to refill them with yogurt. I know Alton Brown has poo-pooed yogurt makers, but I’ve been eying them. I am lazy and am always fond of a machine that can do for me what I can do for myself in a more low-fi way (see also: my big ass rice cooker).
October 15th, 2007 at 4:46 pm
I haven’t tried it myself, but there is a low tech recipe for making your own yogurt in ‘French Women Don’t Get Fat.” I’ll dig it up and e-mail it to you.
October 15th, 2007 at 5:37 pm
I too am eying the yogurt makers because I too am LAAAAZY. And will never actually make my own yogurt if I don’t have an easy way to do it.
October 16th, 2007 at 6:43 pm
saw this on wisebread and through of you: http://www.wisebread.com/urban-composting-it-can-be-done
October 16th, 2007 at 9:12 pm
you. make. yogurt. ?
(head explodes)
October 17th, 2007 at 10:38 am
I grew up in the middle of nowhere and we had a good 1/4 acre garden and we composted year round.
Easiest way to get started is to keep your kitchen goodies in a “slop bucket”… put all your egg shells, apple cores, veggie shavings (potato peels, orange rinds, carrot skin, etc… anything you cut off vegetables to prep them) into this bucket (a 3 gallon ice cream bucket with lid works great – LID is key, this stuff starts to smell a little rank).
Every week on ‘garbage day’ so that you can remember, you should dump this outside in addition to anything in your refrigerator that you might have forgot to eat in a timely manner. Where you dump it makes a big difference too… if you have limited space, you will want to invest in a composting bin… and follow whatever instructions come with it. since i grew up with a large area, we kept different piles… one that had a lot of grass clippings and soft items, and one that had leaves / twigs / anything that doesnt break down quickly. you want to keep turning these piles every couple of weeks to adjust the ‘heat core’. believe it or not, it gets really warm in the middle of these things due to all the bacteria getting their groove on, this is how it breaks down faster. the bigger the pile and more pressure, the hotter it gets and faster the core breaks down.
if you have any wood burning devices? fireplace / wood burning furnace? or know anyone that does, you should use the ASH left over from that as part of your composting mix. it helps to speed up the process and adds more minerals back into the mix (think more of all the things that are good in fertilizers – potassium, nitrogen, phosphorus)… so when you use the compost in your garden, it is more rich.
that’s all that comes to mind.