Cargo bike article in ReNew magazine. I'm published!

The latest issue of ReNew Magazine features an article by me on cargo bikes. It's great to be able to share the cargo bike love! Here it is:

If you've got any comments or questions fire away.

End of year stats

Well, another year has come and gone. We'll be away for the next two months, so I thought I'd get this out before we left.

Gas and electricity use is up a tiny bit this year. I can't tell what the reason is, but it seems to be due to electricity use rather than gas. Since we've had solar hot water our gas use has dropped from 16kWh a day to between 8 and 9.5kWh.

The chooks are laying less, we're on course for 1,000 egss after 1,400 last year. One of our old Australorps died this year and the old girls are definitely laying less. It also seems that our Hi-lines are laying less. They are one year old now, so I'm a bit surprised at this.

Transport has been a winner this year. I've been riding the Fr8 to work three times a week most weeks. Our aim of halving our car kms from 2010 levels hasn't quite succeeded, but we're on course for 10,000kms this year which isn't too bad.

That's it for now. We're off to Europe to blow our carbon budget for the next few years! But this is the topic of another post...

Have a safe and sustainable Christmas.

Have reusables, will travel

So, we are off to visit family and friends in the UK and Europe in a few days. With blowing all that carbon (18.53 tonnes of carbon for which 111 trees need to be planted, to be precise), the least we can do is try to avoid some single use plastics while we are away.

I've been collecting and making a reusables for a while now but I've also made a few purchases to facilitate travel sans plastic. Most of which will fit in my snazzy new bum bag:

Among other things, I'll keep with me one emergency cloth pad, home made lip balm, a bamboo spork, my lucky Onya bag and a hanky.

Quin also has a new bum bag. He will carry with him his spork, bamboo straw (apparently essential), Onya water bottle, and a minifigure (also essential).

I'm banking on Ads to lug around our big water bottle, keep cups, containers, camera, map books and all the other heavy stuff. Bless him.

I've also given some thought to my toiletries. It's easy to have your home made stuff at home, but I do wonder how they will travel. Glass might break and my deodorant might melt! But I'll try anyway. I'm packing my home made hair treatment, toothpaste, washable make-up pads, deodorant, essential oils and a base oil and my toothbrush.  I've given up my contacts which came in disposable packaging and I'm contemplating going make-up free. I think it will work - we'll find out if our personal hygiene is up to scratch if people ask to move seats away from us on the plane!

Of course, there will be other regular bits like panadol, bandaids, colgate for Quincey etc, some things we can't avoid and I'm certain I will end up with bloody plastic straws at some stage, but we will give it our best shot - by the way, there are a few other good plastic free tips on the Plastic Free July website (just a little plug!)

So, we are just about ready to hit the road - wish us luck!

Beware aircon use this summer

We don't have aircon at home, but Amy's parents do. Amy's Dad diligently records their power readings once a week. Each year I input their PV data to show them how much power they generate and consume. They're pretty good, consuming between 6 and 9 kWh a day on average. Inputting the data this year I saw what I thought was a mistake, a reading that just couldn't possibly be right. Then I looked into it and saw a comment, "heat wave". This made me wonder and I checked with Neil. Yes indeed, the heat had been so bad in late December 2012 that the aircon was on 16 hours a day! Power consumption went through the roof, as you can see.

A whopping 48 kWh a day! Another heat wave in February saw jumps to 20kWh a day too. Now I'm not going to preach about the use of aircon, lots of people have it and that's fine. It's not my cuppa tea, but if you do use it then beware that it will cost you. 50kWh a day equates to $12, that's $85 a week more or less. It also obviously costs the planet in carbon emissions and it costs other power consumers too. At peak times the wholesale price of power goes through the roof, so the more that is used in these times pushes power prices up to everyone. So, here are some tips to minimse your use of aircon:

Turn it up. If you set the thermostat higher (say 23-25 C) you'll use much less power and you'll still be comfortable.

Go outside every now and again, you might just find that a lovely sea breeze is in and you can open up the house and turn off the aircon.

Do the flush. We do this all the time in summer. At night open up the house to let cool breezes in; first thing in the morning we shut up the house on hot days and close curtains, etc. This way we trap the cool air inside and stop heat getting in. Then open up the house when a breeze comes in and it's cooler outside than in.

External shade on east and west facing windows is essential in summer. This is the best and easiest way to stop your house becoming a green house!

Turn on ceiling fans, they use little power and can make rooms feel five degrees cooler than they actually are.

Good luck keeping cool this summer, here's hoping that we don't get too many heat waves...

Summer Fruit

I used to really hate summer in the garden. Everything just goes to seed and dies. It can be pretty depressing. Even though we haven't officially made it to summer yet it has already started here in Perth with a few hot days stressing the garden. We have well and truly eaten the last of our lettuce, celery, carrots, broad beans, sweet peas and barassicas. Any veggies left in the ground have pretty much bolted, all apart from a stoic kale plant a few beans and leaks.

But this is just a part of the cycle and I'm learning to embrace it. I've harvested a good stash of poppy seeds which Ads makes into his famous orange and poppy seed cake, and of course we need to keep what ever seeds we can for next year. We are just learning these skills and still find it hard to resist picking the best specimen for eating, rather than keeping it for seed.

But the truly fantastic bit of the garden at the moment is all our fruit!  We have just finished our apricots. This was our fist harvest of apricots and they were a little bit orgasmic. It was all quality, not quantity. We picked about 1.5 kgs, but they tasted like gold.

The apples have just started and are delicious and fruit fly free, all tucked up in their exclusion netting. And our mulberries have also just about finished. 

Ads made some delicious apple and mulberry leather - to be the subject of another post. Our boysenberries are just starting and we should have a good crop. But they are still too precious for making into leather. 

And no sooner have we eaten our last banana - see the empty stalk...

Than another flower appears! Its a near perfect cycle. We will be away in UK while these ones ripen, so hopefully we will come home to a big thick bunch of bananas.  

 I've just had a quick look at previous posts on Sustainaburbia and noticed a very similar post at this time last year with very similar photos. Maybe it's a little boring to read, but I can tell you that its exciting to experience. The love for a garden just grows as you see it go through its cycles each year and as we as gardeners grow too.

Love miles

I have this brilliant idea that no one else thinks is a brilliant idea. Here it is: you should only be allows to marry someone who lives within a 500 km radius of your birth place. I'm sure you can see the genius in this idea. But just in case it needs explaining...

The thing is that these days people travel so much. Its pretty much a right of passage to take a year off between high school and work/uni to pop over to the UK or South America, work, bum around a bit, have a blast, find yourself and meet the love of your life. This is a grave and terrible scenario because what happens next is that you move back to Australia settle down and have babies without the support of one set of grandparents, siblings and little cousins for the kids to play with. Said grandparents who live on the other side of the world of course feel pretty sad about missing out on seeing their own offspring, let alone their own grandchildren and then have to visit every second summer and on the summer they don't visit it is expected that you visit them. And if you don't, well, you have family that you barely know. Cousins grow up never having shared a Christmas day, Granny's don't know what size cloths to send, and siblings never get to just pop over for a cuppa and do the dishes for each other after sleepless nights with newborns. Its heartbreaking. I know this because Adam is English and we have family in England that we miss terribly.

We foolishly fell in love many many moons ago when I thought it romantic to shack up with a foreigner. I'm not entirely sure I could have helped falling in love, but had Adam never traveled to Australia we would have never met and I would be none the wiser. But he did travel, the rest is history. So we, like many others, find our selves in this position where we would love to visit England and have family visit here but, alas, the carbon.

Its serious, all this air travel and I don't like it. FIFO's don't just travel from Perth to Tom Price now, they come from New Zealand to Tom Price or Perth to South Africa. Kids fly over east ever school holidays to visit their Dads, and geez, do we love to holiday! Traveling overseas is so common - how can it be special if you go overseas twice a year? There is no 'trip of a lifetime' anymore, nowhere is new, everyone has been there before.

All that said, we are going back to England for Christmas this year. It has been about 6 years since our last visit and about 4 years since anyone has visited us so its due. Parents are getting older, babies have been born and teenagers are growing into adults. We are about to spew out some serious carbon. But we call them love miles and while we try to limit them, they are unavoidable.

Offsetting is not the answer to all of this but its a little something that is better than nothing - actually its not better than nothing, nothing is better, as in, not flying is better. Got that? Anyway, I offset our carbon emissions for the three of us for the flights to London and a few internal Europe flights too. According to Carbon Neutral we will produce 18.53 tonnes of carbon for which 111 trees need to be planted. It cost $416, which does seem a lot, but then, I nearly spent that much on a night out to see Beyonce (tickets, dinner, babysitter). I think a contributing to a safe environmental future is worth more than Beyonce - bless her.

I'd be lying if I said I wasn't looking forward to this trip of ours. We are going to exciting places that will be new for us and we will be renewing relationships with old friends and family.We just try for minimal air travel and where we do fly, we offset and we really look forward to it as a special, exciting time because it will be a while until we fly again.

First Apricots

Today we ate our very first home grown Apricots. Tree ripened and fruit fly free. Delicious!

I know we always blog about how great exclusion netting is for fruit trees, but when you taste unadulterated, pure, sweet, juicy flesh of a home grown beauty like this, wah, I just want to tell everyone again! Its true that fruit flies are a huge problem in Perth, but netting seems to be the cure! And I think it looks beautiful - kind of bridal. 

It wont be a huge crop. Unfortunately we choose a double grafted tree and only one side seems to have a good crop - oh well. The other thing to understand is that with a double grafted tree the flowers come at different times, so in this case we had fruit forming and becoming susceptible to fruit fly on one half, while the other half was still in flower and needing pollination. So for a while we had to have only half the tree netted allowing pollinators on to the flowers and keeping fruit fly off the fruit. A bit of a fiddle and I would not ever plant a double grafted tree again, its one of those things you don't think about until you are faced with the situation! 

The other thing to report is that we should have a bumper crop of boysenberries this year - here they are dropping petals and green just at the moment...but just wait...