The Green Musician

Ask (Another) Abortion Provider: Roe vs. Wade, 39th Anniversary Commemorative Edition

Sun, 29 Jan 2012 02:27:14 -0500

Ask (Another) Abortion Provider: Roe vs. Wade, 39th Anniversary Commemorative Edition:

thehairpintumblr:

“I knew I would like you instantly when I saw that you were wearing a zebra print shirt under your lab coat.”

i got another one up at the ‘pin!

Recycling around me

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 19:38:00 -0500

I am currently living with an older couple… maybe I should say, I am temporarily here until I move into my apartment (with some cool new roommates) on Feb 1 here in Charleston. When I arrived, this older, conservative, tea-party member couple (ok, I have to be fair, only the Mrs., not the Mr. is a nutter… I mean tea-party member) was going though 3-4 trash bags a day in the kitchen. EVERYTHING went in the trash. So I started putting my recyclables in my (reusable) grocery bag, and told my host I would find a way to recycle it. She said, oh we have recycling, I just don’t use the bin.

*SHOCK*

So I have started to get her to use the recycle bin.

*SCORE!*

She now puts her numerous wine bottles, and the newspapers, in the bin, rather than the trash can.

I think I even got her to agree to a compost pile today!! I have already started putting my veggie scraps in a pile in the woods behind her house. No sense in putting them in the garbage! She even put her eggshells in the compost this morning.

*Another Score!!*

Possibly, by the time I leave here, I will have made it old habit for them to recycle and compost. Here’s hoping.

#recycle #compost #sustainable

I believe Laura says it all: lauraolin: I have so much love for...

Wed, 14 Dec 2011 22:56:17 -0500

I believe Laura says it all:

lauraolin:

I have so much love for this Tumblr, I don’t even know what to do about it.

Chickens in the Little River Garden in #Miami. My CSA...

Sun, 06 Nov 2011 10:31:32 -0500

Chickens in the Little River Garden in #Miami. My CSA (community supported agriculture) starts in just 2 weeks and I couldn’t be more excited!! Not only will I get fresh, seasonal produce grown in the heart of urban Miami (in Little Haiti!), but I am also highly looking forward to buying fresh eggs from these little ladies every week! They will lay brown and blue eggs, which I’m sure will be absolutely delicious! When I told my father about the chickens at the farm, and the color of their eggs, he was dumbfounded that eggs are more than white and brown. I told him they can be all kinds of colors, including pink and green, to which he replied (to me, the vegetarian): well, you can’t eat the green ones! And I asked, why not? And he said, because to eat them you would have to have green eggs and ham!

Very Cool!!!!! buynothingnewforayear: Check out Evocative!...

Wed, 19 Oct 2011 01:00:56 -0400

Very Cool!!!!!

buynothingnewforayear:

Check out Evocative! Ecovative GROWS compostable packaging. Mushrooms are the new plastic!

And lastly, rosemary, in addition to other herbs, in the...

Sun, 18 Sep 2011 15:41:18 -0400

And lastly, rosemary, in addition to other herbs, in the planters in downtown Indy. This is next to the new Indy Bike Hub, where I rented a bike all afternoon and rode around in this (actually, who knew?) very friendly bike city! I could actually live here! But who knows how tomorrow’s audition will go. It’s nice to know, however, that there are cities here in the US that are striving to become more… European (?) in their bike cultures, and making it easier for bike commuters, and just weekend cyclists, to get around, safe from cars, buses, and other usual city obstacles.

Hot peppers in the planters outside city market in downtown...

Sun, 18 Sep 2011 15:36:17 -0400

Hot peppers in the planters outside city market in downtown Indy! Very, very cool :)

Thyme and parsley in a planter outside City Market in downtown...

Sun, 18 Sep 2011 15:34:06 -0400

Thyme and parsley in a planter outside City Market in downtown Indianapolis.

Building a compost bin from reclaimed wood

Mon, 22 Aug 2011 16:48:34 -0400

Building a compost bin from reclaimed wood:

Here’s a great link to a project idea to use reclaimed wood for a compost bin- the best of 2 worlds! Not only do you keep old wood from going into the landfill, but once you build it, you keep all your food scraps and yard waste from going in as well!

A Morning in the Garden

Wed, 17 Aug 2011 13:32:39 -0400

I spent this morning working in the Little River Garden here in Miami. I’m going to volunteer as much as possible, so I can learn about organic farming from a first-hand perspective. Today was mainly menial labor, laying out mulch over cardboard that was already down on the grass (the cardboard and mulch kill weeds because the weeds don’t get sunlight). This task was followed by a nice sit down with some water, as it was HOT out by 10 am. Afterward, we sifted compost that was done composting, collecting the super fine dirt to place in barrels. The larger pieces, sticks and such, were put in the garden.

The sifting helps find the pieces of plastic as well. I was amazed at how many pieces of plastic we found in the compost- and not only plastic, but a huge number of produce stickers. I’m sure that many of those came from New World- I often see people put food scraps in our bins with the stickers still on. I try to take off the ones I can, but can’t get all of them. We even found a tiny, single-serving Tobasco bottle, about an inch and a half in size.

My final task of the day was cutting down the Sun Hemp, a cover crop, so it was only shoulder height. Some of it was getting out of hand, well over 6 feet, or closer to 7. The sun hemp is a great cover crop. You plant it before you want to plant your food items. It’s a nitrogen-rich crop, so it returns some much needed nitrogen to the soil before the actual planting. This particular crop will grow for another month or so before being cut down (and left on the ground to decay- more nitrogen!) and the rows planted with the actual food crop. My arms are still shaking from being help up at shoulder level and using pruning shears to cut the sun hemp, but I had a blast! I love learning about organic gardening. One day I will use all this stored up knowledge and build my own garden.

Composting

Fri, 12 Aug 2011 12:28:53 -0400

It’s been a while, but it’s time for me to get back on this bandwagon! I am now back home in Miami and can take my own compost to the garden we use here. And I wanted to talk about how others can compost at home as well.

For anyone here in Miami (Beach) or, especially, in/near the Design District, it’s easy to compost. All you need is a giant orange bucket from Home Depot ($3) and you put all your food scraps in there, and then take it over to Little River Garden when it’s full (I can give you the garden owner’s number.)

For people who need to compost at home there are 2 main types of composting for you to consider. Do you want to do it outdoors, with a pile or tumbler, or do you want to have vermiculture (worms!) in a bin and do it inside? This is a great (and sometimes the only) option for people in apartments with no outside yard access.

First, the outdoors: a pile vs. a tumbler. A pile is the most basic, cheapest way to compost. However, you don’t want to just throw kitchen scraps into a pile and ignore it. In order to control flies and other bugs you’ll need to have some other things to mix in with your kitchen scraps, ie- “browns”. Browns include dead leaves and sticks (in only a short 2 months much of the country will have plenty of dead leaves!) cardboard boxes- PIZZA boxes- that you shred into strips (it helps to leave it out in a rainstorm to get soaked), mulch chips, sawdust, basically anything found in the organic world. It might help to choose an area, about 3’x3’ and dig it out about 6” deep, keeping the soil in there, just so that it turns easily and you can bury your food scraps- this will help control the pests, and keep the pile looking nice. Remember, you’ll need either a pitch fork, or a shovel to help you with this, and to keep the area turned up and aerated. Compost needs 2 things to do its thing- oxygen and moisture. This is why food does NOT break down in a landfill. It doesn’t have either of those things. Now if you’re worried about animals, or don’t want an open pile, you can consider a compost tumbler. They start around $90 at Home Depot and go up (to a few hundred). I found one for my friend for $150 on Amazon, and it’s a great barrel! It’s on a stand, it turns fairly easily, it’s large, and since it’s a black (i.e. dark-colored) barrel it will continue to be active in the winter months. It will soak up the sun’s rays and keep the compost inside composting (ideally.)

Now for indoor options, worms :) It’s not as bad as you think ;-) There is a very specific type of worm used for vermiculture- the red wiggler (or red tigers)- because these worms eat food scraps very quickly. They stay in their bin, they will not escape to the rest of your house, and you can keep a mesh screen on top (or a lid with holes) if you’re still worried about it, or have little ones who might want to play in the dirt. It’s even better if you keep your vermiculture bin in a closed, dark space, such as under your sink, or at the bottom of your pantry. It’s quite easy to make a vermiculture bin (as googling that will show.) The basic idea is to take a fairly large tupperware bin (along the lines of 2’x3’x18”) and drill small holes along the top of the bin, maybe 2” from the top. Drill these air holes all around the outside. Next, shred some newspaper and place it along the bottom, so it’s anywhere from 1” to 6” thick. Wet the newspaper (with a spray bottle) so that it has the dampness of a wrung-out sponge. Place some potting soil in one half of the bin. Add your worms (that you ordered online) and they will burrow into the newspaper. Next you start adding your food scraps, about a half pound a week, until the worms are quickly eating that up (takes about a month?) and then you can add about 1 pound a week after that. A good, basic instruction for building a box is http://www.ehow.com/how_5556787_build-worm-box-red-worms.html

Google anything your are unsure of, or email me at thegreenmusician@gmail.com, and anyone, anywhere, should be able to compost. I won’t even begin to go into why we should all be composting- that’s another day ;-)

Water bottle filing station at Midway airport!! You pit your...

Tue, 19 Jul 2011 21:26:34 -0400

Water bottle filing station at Midway airport!! You pit your water bottle in the correct place and it automatically fills to the top. Very cool. Every airport (or any place with a water fountain?) needs one of these!!!

This is the best idea ever!!! It’s a multi-tiered herb...

Fri, 08 Jul 2011 21:09:40 -0400

This is the best idea ever!!! It’s a multi-tiered herb garden built by using old beer bottles to create the tiers. So creative that I wish I’d thought of it! Seen outside The Green Wagon in east Nashville. I will totally do this when I have my own place! #sustainable

This traffic sign outside Nashville (coming into town on I40, I...

Fri, 08 Jul 2011 21:07:17 -0400

This traffic sign outside Nashville (coming into town on I40, I believe) asks people to consider car pooling because air quality is so bad. What a great way to remind people about the environment when they would least expect it!

Little River Market Garden blog

Tue, 28 Jun 2011 14:40:13 -0400

Little River Market Garden blog:

Little River Garden is an urban garden in the middle of Miami. Murial, the owner and gardener, keeps up a blog about the garden. Her latest post, about composting, features me rather prominently ;). This is the follow up to what I posted last night.

Composting

Mon, 27 Jun 2011 23:12:00 -0400

I recently wrote the following to a friend who has an urban garden, where I take the food scraps we generate at New World. She is going to write a blog post about me, and why I compost.

I think I first got started on the idea of composting because I wanted to cut down on my waste. Even back in 2005, when I was living at home in VA, I would save all the vegetable scraps from making dinner, and toss them out the front door into the little woods in front of our house, rather than put them in the garbage. It wasn’t until 2010, though, that I really got into cutting down my waste. It was my first year in Miami Beach, in a very urban setting. One night a friend brought up the Great Pacific Garbage Dump (I’m not sure if that’s the official name) and I said, WHAT?!?! It’s, of course, a mass of garbage in the pacific, that’s either larger than Texas, or larger than the US. Well, I had never heard of it, and I went home and googled it, and lo and behold, there it was. I was thoroughly disgusted, and decided I had to cut down my own waste. At first I tried starting a compost pile out back, behind our building, with a few other green-minded orchestra people. About half the orchestra loved it, and the other half hated it. Well, the hate won, and it got taken out about a month later. I do realize, now, that we didn’t have the right balance, and of course, we didn’t have anyhting to cover the food scraps with, so it was always just a pile of rotting food (though I did turn it quite a bit!) So when I got back last August, after having composted all summer long, either at my parents’ house (they compost!) or at the summer festival I was at, in our backyard at a beautiful house in the Berkshires, I decided I HAD to find a way to compost in Miami. I refuse to throw away food scraps. So I started googling compost+Miami, and lo and behold, a new urban garden popped up in my search, called Little River Market Garden, that had just posted a blog about composting. Hence getting a hold of you :)

Once I started composting, I cut my trash consumption down incredibly. I throw away about 1 grocery-sized plastic bag every 8-12 weeks. And it’s almost all non-recyclable plastic. I recycle a LOT of stuff, however. And am trying to cut down on all that, by using growlers for beer (I sure hope Whole Foods on the beach starts filling growlers soon, as most other whole foods I’ve been to this summer in NY, Boston, and VA are now doing) and I hope to can a lot of food this summer, as well as freeze stuff, so that I don’t have to buy bags or cans of stuff throughout the winter. I am kind of obsessed with trash reduction.

So in my tiny kitchen, which is really a kitchenette in the corner of my “studio” apartment, which is NWS-provided housing (I guess you could say Fellowship-provided) in an old converted Art-Deco hotel, I manage to cook pretty much every day, and I go through a lot of vegetable scraps, bc I am a vegetarian. I will experiment with a lot of different veggies, and I always have scraps. I have one of those small (1 gallon?) compost pots on top of my microwave, and I can easily fill that while cooking 1 dish. So at that point, I have to take it down to the pool area, where I keep the 5 gallon paint buckets, and empty it there. I probably have about half the orchestra using the compost buckets. Quite a few are almost as fanatical as I am. (Maybe I’ll start a green committee this year to keep this going past my time?) So the communal buckets sit outside, anyone can add to them, and then I drive them over once a week, or every other week. It really works out quite well. There are a few brass players, however, who make fun of me for driving the buckets over, and chide me that I should be pulling them on my bike! (this is all in jest, thought, as they don’t use the buckets.) On one hand I agree, but I usually try to bring them by when I am going to drive north anyway, or go over to my friend Julisa’s apartment (which reminds me, that she hasn’t asked for your number yet, so maybe she hasn’t filled her bucket yet this summer?) bc she lives at ** and Biscayne, so she’s quite close to you.

For people who are new to the idea of composting… well? I guess it’s best to make it as simple as possible? I mean, I gave Julisa a bucket bc she is so close to the garden, and I was always disgusted by how much food we threw away whenever we cooked at her place. But for people who have never composted, or thought of it, it seems to ahve this connotation of “rotting food”, when it really doesn’t have all the negative connotations that people associate with rotting food. I think it’s best to emphasize how good it is for the environment; how it can cut down on how much trash you have, and how often you have to take it out; how the trash will CEASE to smell once you stop putting food scraps down it…. of course, I don’t have any meat or fish scraps, as I’m strictly veggie now. For others, they might have scraps of meat or fish that will smell, and shouldn’t be composted, especially if they’re doing it small-scale at home. (I’m assuming you don’t allow meat or fish either? This is what I’ve stressed to everyone at NWS.) But even in cutting down the veggie ends and extra bits, by putting them in compost rather than trash, it makes such a huge difference. And I just love cutting down my trash. That’s why I do it. And one day I hope to have my own compost pile and make great dirt for the vegetable garden I want to have eventually.

Less Packaging I was pretty happy to find a good new top for my...

Sat, 25 Jun 2011 23:13:00 -0400

Less Packaging

I was pretty happy to find a good new top for my nalgene (the old one melted in my friend’s dishwasher), but even more exciting was the fact that there was no plastic packaging, just a piece of cardboard. And at the bottom it says “Please recycle this paper package card. Pretty please. With sugar on top.”. That rocks!!!! I wish all companies thought more like this one. #sustainable

nevver: Christine Berrie

Thu, 16 Jun 2011 22:25:12 -0400

nevver:

Christine Berrie

A poster at the Met in NYC. It reads something along the lines...

Thu, 16 Jun 2011 19:27:47 -0400

A poster at the Met in NYC. It reads something along the lines of not wasting food, for the [WW1] war effort. I love the “WASTE NOTHING!” aspect of it. How much waste have you created today? How much have I? A granola bar wrapper, a gum wrapper… coffee grounds at my friend’s apt in Queens that he will toss, bc I haven’t quite convinced him of vermiculture yet… Hopefully nothing else today, but it is only 7:30pm…

Solar panels from Google!

Wed, 15 Jun 2011 20:19:16 -0400

Solar panels from Google!:

I actually have a chance, as a poor musician, to get solar panels at some point in my life! Well, there’s probably more details in the fine print that will mean I don’t qualify, but for the moment, I have hope!