TKG Sustainable Sunday Newsletter
Its OK not to know all the stuff.
It’s ok not to know all the stuff.
But it’s not okay to ignore our responsibility to lessen the harm we cause to the earth that sustains us. That would be the epitome of biting the hand that feeds us.
I am not a scientist or a rock star of any kind. I am a kitchens gardener and organic farmer. I don’t attend summits or conferences on climate change. I am not a speaker. I am not an expert. I don’t even read the news. I have not written a book. I am one of the people who do the stuff. Ground level. Literally. I grow my own food. Teach others how to grow their own food. Wander the world working in gardens. Organise my home in a sustainable earth friendly manner and teach others how to do that.
I am not a prepper but I think it is sensible to be prepared. Yes?
I am not a politician or a lobbyist or a professor or anything clever - I just do the shit.
Just like you.
has a lovely way of looking at climate change and how to cope - she uses optimism and I love that about her writing.And there are many of us. SO many of us. Who try our best.
There are so many of us out there who are living as carefully as we can, living as lightly as we can. Trying to mitigate the damage. So don’t let them underestimate us - we may not be unilever or BP but we are strong enough to make a difference. If we work together.
But we need to be sensible. And make changes that we can sustain. Although I don’t run a dryer. I do run a washing machine. I don’t have a dishwasher but I do have a dehydrator. I don’t have an air conditioner but I do have a fan. It is ok to trade off modern life with some level of rich frugal living.
My major focus is to cut out waste. Wasted food. Wasted time. Wasted money. Wasted health. Wasted plastic and cardboard and petrol. I hate garbage bags and stuff I have to throw out. It is a huge undertaking but made with many tiny changes.
I make my own cleaning products too which are very easy by the way - go HERE to read more about that.
I think it is critical that we keep our heads up and keep working towards our personal healthy planet goals. Even though it feels like the world is burning down we must still focus on the next crop, the next meal, the next season. The next hug. The next sustainable improvement. The next letter. It is important to be able to feel good about what we are achieving - in our own small way.
Round up of farming in the cold
The cold is here. Two pairs of socks and two pairs of gloves are mandatory. Hats, liner layers, puffy layers, quilted farmers overalls and Carhart jacket. I dress for the cold so that I can stay out a long time. But sometimes I have to make a run for the house because the cold in my hands has become real pain.
The water faucet and the hoses are all frozen now and so we carry buckets and buckets of warm water from the kitchen out to the cows and pigs and chickens. The barn is not plumbed and the rainwater collection has frozen to a stop. So at all times there are buckets of steaming water on the kitchen floor waiting to be carried out.
Every water bowl that does not have a heating component has to be chipped open or dumped out (if you are lucky) in the morning and the afternoon, the ice is thick already and accumulates on top of the waters within minutes.
The ducks are the very best at making me feel bad about the cold. They run along a bit then sit down on their feet to warm them up then run a bit more and set their bodies down again to repeat the process.
The chickens warm their feet by drawing them up one at a time into their feathery bodies. So I have hens and roosters standing about on one leg.
I am working hard on keeping their pond open during this cold snap. The ducks don’t seem to mind floating about in the cold for hours on end and the barn flock and all the wild birds come here to drink.
The weather see saws about - it is very cold then rises sharply above freezing for a few hours and we use these warmer periods to get things back in order again then get ready for the next cold snap. Preparedness is essential to the farmers chess game.
has a lovely farm in Maine (I think it is Maine correct me if I am wrong) she has sheep. I am jealous. But she also has deep cold and can teach us a thing or two about farming in the cold.
The Pond
So far the pond heater is keeping a hole open in the pond and the pump is still running just fine. The bubbler has quit already so when the ice melts on the next warm day I will have someone investigate that. The line may need to be cleared of ice.
As long as there is a hole in the ice the poisonous gases will not accumulate and kill the fish. So I am told. And the fish are alive and swimming so - so far so good.
Cows
I have opened the barn for the cows now - they would be fine outside in this cold but there is not need for them to have to be.
There are two stalls in the barn for cows and they are happy to park themselves in there at night. And leave a mess for me or my farm hands to clean up in the morning!😂
PopPops
Little American Guinea Hogs. Every night as the nights get colder these little black pigs burrow deeper into the straw
Every day I come in and build their mountain of loose straw back up again so they can get as deep as they can.
Big Pigs
Jude and FreeBee have been through many winters so they have a system already. When the cold is coming they are piggy barometers and they can be found grabbing great mouth-fulls of straw and carrying it into their trailer home. Jude spends hours every afternoon placing the straw that FreeBee delivers, plugging any drafts and making sure their bed is deep and warm.
Their trailer home is black and placed in such a way that in the afternoon it gets warmed up by the sun.
Chickens
Going forward I don’t scoop any of the poop put of the chook house -not until spring - I just keep adding to it so the bedding gets deep and warm. We have bags and bags of leaves collected from town that we use as bedding.
A heating lamp hangs over their water bowl to keep it from freezing completely. But it is a running battle.
Tima and Wai
Wai (below) goes deep in winter - very deep - he comes out to eat then returns to his sunroom in the barn that he shares with Tima. Wai is the bed maker in this partnership. Like Jude he spends a lot of the afternoon raking his straw up with his foot.
Tima is a carouser and a trouble maker and comes to bed late, he yells at her for a while about wrecking the bed then they sleep close together for warmth. Tima is his hot water bottle. I place Wai’s blankets in such a way that he can get right under the straw and blanket covers. Tima just lies all over everything!
Like Jude and FreeBee they have spent many winters here and know how to look after themselves.
No walk about today. TOO COLD for my equipment to work. And me. However it is forecast to warm up this Wednesday so I will leave you a walkabout to watch next Sunday while I am travelling!
Coming Up on The Kitchen’s Garden
Travel
To Melbourne. I leave this coming Sunday. So there will be no newsletter this coming Sunday. But the chat will be active as I pop in during my long 24 hours of travel.
Audio book. Chapter One coming Thursday the 5th of December.
Instead of the ten minute videos of the farm, twice a week, I will be reading to you twice a week. Fireside stories. TKG Take Ten was begun so you would have access to the sounds of nature and farm. A soundscape if you will. My intention was/is to allow us all ten minutes of calm in a mad noisy detached world. In a similar vein I have been encouraged to read to you when I am off the farm. We begin with Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
Now, a number of people who love the book have also brought up concerns about the behaviour of the author. We will be talking about this in our chat group as we go along. There is a lot of retrospective speculation about Carolls relationships with girls. If he were a woman this would not be a thing it would be seen quite differently. So I want to be careful here.
But is a literary piece tarnished by the supposed behaviour of the author? Do we stop reading Little House on the Prairie because Wilder depicted white settlers as having a right to the land and Native Americans as obstacles to be overcome. Do we not love the imagery of Gone with the Wind though the novel's portrayal of slavery is peurile and misleading. Are we not to read a certain author’s novels because they are climate change deniers. Or aggressive about our friends gender choices. I don’t know the answer.
It all begs a discussion and one we will have in the chat room.
However I love the characters in Alice, the madness, the rudeness, the mess, the spark of her character. It takes me back to my own childhood reading this aloud to my little brothers and sisters. And I am really enjoying reading it to you.
Please remember that in the chat and in our comments we listen and read and comment. If we disagree we do this with dignity and kindness. Never name calling or cruelty. It is very important to me that we listen kindly to each other. Though we certainly do not need to agree.
The Compact Kitchens Garden
In Melbourne (Australia) I will begin work on the Compact Kitchens Garden including a balcony garden and a windowsill garden.
For almost twenty years now I have been writing about gardening and farming and cooking and storing food out here in Illinois. But many of my readers (20,000 to date including the The Kitchen’s Garden farm blog readers) are in towns and cities without access to acres of good land. So, I have accepted the challenge to help out a member of my family in Melbourne and grow food in a city. To develop some level of self sufficiency in a small urban garden. I have been offered the chance to face the challenges you all face.
I have not even seen the house or the tiny bit of dirt we will be transforming so you and I are in at the beginning. I cannot help but feel a little excited about that!
We are only in Melbourne for a month to help my daughter move to this new house and take measurements and test the soil then back to the farm for the two coldest months of the year and the project starts for real in March.
Carbon Co-Pay. I am making a list.
Is not just for big oil companies. We too need to balance our carbon emissions with careful earth friendly decisions.
is one of the best and most accessible writers about climate change. He seldom travels due to flight shame, a concern that is increasingly relevant given that flights, cruises, and even daily car usage are significant contributors to greenhouse gas emissions. But as I am needed in Melbourne to fulfill a particular familial role (that we will get into another time) and my farm is in Illinois, USA - I will be flying. To balance this I only drive off the farm once a week. I use other machines as little as I can as my carbon co-pay.The burning of fossil fuels for energy, including those used in transportation, has led to a rapid increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide, with levels now at a record high of 419.3 parts per million (ppm) in 2023. We cannot argue with this number.
My other major pay back is I plant trees. I am creating my very own carbon sink. It will take years I know. The best time to plant a tree was yesterday.
I plant as many trees as I can grow. Hundreds of them. (I have hundreds of acres yet to grow shelter belts).
We plant in two areas we call the Fellowship Forests which will eventually join either side of the creek that is really a ditch. Many of my readers have bought trees to plant in there too. I love to plant trees like hack berries and maples and pawpaws and mulberries, native prunus and crabapples, hedge apples and black walnuts and oaks that propagate themselves. So with minimal care a jungle will grow. And a number of these trees feed our birds and wildlife in the winter. And butterflies in the summer. So it is multi functional.
Plus - yeah - a carbon sink. Over its lifetime, a tree can absorb a large amount of CO₂. For example, a 1000kg tree, assuming it is 35 years old, would have absorbed approximately 871.63 kg of CO₂. So yeah. I am planting.
Have a gorgeous day!
I am going to dress back up in multiple layers and go back out to tend the fat roosters. (They have to be kept in separate cages each because they fight like devils - the hen house is so much calmer without them). They are being picked up by somebody’s granny today. And their water is icing up as fast as I can fill it.
Bloody hell it is cold.
Celi
It’s people like you who remind us that real change doesn't come from summits or glossy speeches, but from the ground up—literally. It’s in the small, everyday actions, the choice to grow your own food, reduce waste, and share knowledge, that we find the roots of lasting impact. Appreciate all of it, Cecilia, especially the pics.
Happy Monday to you!
I had the belief farms were quiet places in the winter; nothing to do but maybe go out once in awhile to see on things. Hey! I learned something! Farms do not sleep.