Moving: The Ultimate Test of Living Green

Graduation Day

February 2012 brought with us the culmination of "Five Year Plan." After completing both his Master's and Doctoral Degrees, as well as surviving both a thyroidectomy and a surgery to remove a massive pituitary tumor within 6 months of his defense, Jay was offered a faculty position at East Tennessee State University in Johnson City, Tennessee.  He starts work on my birthday in August.  We'll be living in the Town of Jonesborough.  With all the joy and excitement that come along with seeing a goal met and a dream beginning to coalesce, comes the reality:  HOLY CRAP, we have to MOVE!!! (I'm not the one with the PhD, people, so it took me a while to really have it sink in that we won't just magically appear in the new place complete with chickens and cats.

How does this fit with the theme of the blog?  Well, I try to keep it about living in a 'green' and eco-responsible way.  Apparently moving is the both the Ultimate Test of Living Green, as well as a good opportunity to not only talk the green talk, but also walk the green walk.  Let's start with the basics:  Reduce, Reuse, Recycle.  It turns out that they're all connected.

1. Reduce.  Those of you who know us know that we live in a pretty tiny house.  Less than 800 square feet inside, with a substantially sized glassed-in porch that we don't count as living space. What genius thought that glassing in a sun porch in Florida was a good idea is beyond me. The house we're buying (We've named it "Little Boone") is slightly larger at just over 1100 sq. ft.   We already don't have what we consider to be a lot of stuff, but probably had kept a little more than we might have otherwise because in our minds 'the next house will be bigger.'  Well, yes... but not enough to really count.  So we've been reducing like crazy.  I've gone through just about every room in the house and have found things I think we can live without.  The hardest decisions for me were shoes and pens.  I expected to have some separation anxiety and guilt over the culling of the shoes. I loves me some shoes, people! None are crazy cute heels. All are cute, sensible and comfy. Merrills, Chacos, Keens, OH MY!  I probably should have taken the opportunity to count the ones that made the cut, but I forgot, and now the winter-ish ones are packed. Oh, Darn.  Now we'll never know how many I have (and stop calling me Imelda!) The pens, now, were a surprise.  It wasn't that I was somehow emotionally attached to the pens.  I just didn't want to be environmentally irresponsible and throw out perfectly good pens, and who would buy a used pen at the thrift store?? But how many pens do two people in the age of digital communication really need?  My reduction in pens and other associated writing implements resulted in the use of another of the Three R's: reuse.  I gave them to a school teacher for use in the classroom.  As a former teacher, I get how much of your own money you spend on basics, so I felt much better that my reduction was someone else's gain, and that I didn't have to clog up a landfill with half-used gel-pens from my paper journaling phase.

2. Reuse.  This one was a bit easier.  We had a need to reduce, and we knew a lot of our stuff was re-usable.  One of the girls at our favorite local  Tea Shop, TeBella Tea Company, was getting her very first apartment.  I'm not the maternal type, generally, but if I had wanted a daughter to call my own, Brooke would be it.  She's smart, strong, hard-working and responsible.  She manages to be all those things and also be just the sweetest kid on earth.  She also needed "stuff."  And boy did we have stuff to spare. While I was doing my Reducing, I kept a "Brooke Box," and managed to fill it several times over with all kinds of kitchen supplies as well as our kitchen table and chairs.  By reducing the amount of stuff we were having to move, Brooke is able to reuse some of it.  Warms the cockles of my hippie green heart, it does.

3. Recycle.  I had fun with this one.  I recycled a bunch of old t-shirts into yarn a while back, and realized how many crafty activities can benefit from recycling.  Right around the time we started getting ready to move, a really cool business opened up in Ybor City.  It's called Tampa Upcycle.  Morgan takes in all kinds of supplies that crafters and artist no longer need and provides a place for them to live until another crafter or artist comes by and gives them a home. She puts it best on her website: "Tampa Upcycle is an arts and crafts supplies boutique that collects and offers used (and some new) art supplies such as paints, canvasses and brushes, sewing supplies such as fabrics, notions, and patterns, and craft supplies such as scrapbooking papers and embellishments, yarns and tools with “pay-as-you-wish” pricing. The idea is to have a central location where indie artists, designers and crafters can find materials that can be repurposed and made into something new. Everything from partially used paints to vintage sheets to cereal boxes."   Isn't that just the coolest? It appeals to me on so many levels. Another box was soon filled with Tampa Upcycle stuff.  I took every scrap of wrapping paper, gift bags, little glass bottles, and all kinds of crafty supplies up there and donated them.  I would love to be a part of something community-minded like that when we move.  I recently took a class to reacquaint myself with my decades-old sewing machine at Tampa Upcycle offered by Tampa FreeSkool.  FreeSkool is  community based education in action.  Basically, if you have something you know how to do, and can teach it to others for free, you are encouraged to do so.  Things like beer making, to friend-making, to yoga, to fun with compost.  Recycling your knowledge, in a way, and making it available to those who want to learn for themselves.  This is something else I'd love to get going in Tennessee, if it doesn't already exist. 

Little Boone

We will also be re-using and recycling the Little Boone house.  Built in roughly 1941, it's a bungalow style home at the top of a little hill on Boone Street, across the street from the Visitor's Center, Town Hall and the Library.  Our good friends Terry and Sandy own it, and I've actually been calling it "the house we'll live in when we move to Jonesborough" for close to ten years.  Go figure.  You can't see it in this photo, but it has a green (!!!) tin roof, and sits on a nice big yard that is just waiting for a chicken coop, worm composter, daylilies, a square foot herb garden and a hydroponic farm. Because it's small, we'll continue trying to live minimally, and reduce our footprint.  I love the idea of living in a house with history.  We will be in walking distance of the Old Towne Pancake House, Main Street, with the Farmer's Market, The Storytelling Center, and Music on the Square.  There is a shop called Boxcar Betty's Eco Depot and another called Hands Around the World that feature upcycled and hand made items. Add to this a Lavender Store, a Cupcake Shop and Artisan Chocolates. The only thing I think we're really going to mourn is a cup of really good loose leaf tea.  There are two really good restaurants in town, and another opening soon, but nobody serves good tea. We might have to change that!   

(sub)Urban Farming

This is a reprint of my very first published article in the 2012 Spring Region 12 Newsletter for the American Hemerocallis Society.  I had never really thought I wanted to write for publication before, but I actually had a good time with it, and with writing the local club news article at the back of the issue. My apologies for the redundancy to those of you who have followed the blog.  If you know me, you already know all of this. But I hope you enjoy the recap!

When Greg Crane asked me to write a piece for the newsletter about “Chickens and Daylilies” I was, frankly, stumped. I’m a part-time blogger, and I’ve written about our chickens, and I’ve written about our daylilies on www.cari-daway.blogspot.com. But I 

never really thought about “Chickens AND Daylilies.”  A few weeks were spent with this 

concept rolling around in my mind, and more than a few attempts at writing that were actually spent looking at a blank screen and a blinking cursor. I asked the Facebook universe for ideas. My friend Timi said she understood my block by equating her being asked to write about her jeep and her dogs: two things she loves but don’t really intersect. 

One of our daylily club friends, Kyle Pierson, said that the feathers of the chickens could be like the colors in daylilies, or that going out to see the flowers in the morning is like looking for eggs. All are valid points. But nothing really lit my literary pilot light. I 

flirted briefly with the comparison of my hobby of collecting lists of potential chicken names (such as Magdalena Van der Flocken) with some daylily enthusiasts’ hobby of collecting lists of potential daylily names (I know you’re out there. Terri Jones can’t be the only one who does this!) Then it hit me: Poop! Yes, poop. Not literally, thank goodness. Put a pin in that thought, we’ll return to it in a few minutes.

I realized that the chickens were an integral part of the mini eco-system we’ve created in
our little neighborhood city lot. My husband and I both have green thumbs. I also have a
passion for healthy organic food and a clean environment that borders on the obsessive
(and occasionally annoying.) These qualities combined a few years ago into a 10-tower
hydroponic garden, a square-foot garden for my kitchen herbs and natural pest control
aphid-trapping bed, a worm composter and traditional compost bin, and our chickens:
Phyllis, Pearl and Francine. We also grow about 150 daylily cultivars. Small potatoes in
the daylily world, but when you consider how tiny our house and lot is, that’s about all
we have room for. I believe that in the chemical sense, one should impact the earth as
little as possible, but while doing that impacting, one should get as much out of it as one
can in the space allotted.

In the hydroponic garden, we grow enough produce to feed ourselves, the chickens, the
neighbors, my Pilates instructor, the girls at the local tea shop and sometimes our friends,
family and co-workers. The catnip grows especially well, as do tomatoes, Swiss chard,
onions, carrots, basil, snow peas, broccoli, cabbage, cucumbers, beans and many other
things. The ability to grow 6 times the produce in the same space as conventional
gardening appeals to me, as does the ability to do it without chemical pesticides,
fertilizers or fungicides that leach into the water table or harm wildlife. The only real
challenge we had was squirrels. Eventually Jay caged in the entire structure with chicken
wire, and that has kept out the squirrels, but continues to let in a tiny field mouse with
whom we’ve agreed to share. He doesn’t eat as much as a dozen squirrels do, so it seems
like a good balance. And the structure only looks a little bit like a prison camp….. but I
digress.

  Two years ago, Jay and I decided to get chickens. He spent about two months of
weekends and a spring break building a really nice coop. He is especially proud of its
door. In April of 2010 we brought home Babette, (who later grew into Bobette and had to go back to the farm) Sylvia, Pearl and Phyllis. Sylvia has since passed away, but Francine recently joined our flock. During the construction of the coop, Jay had dug up and potted all the daylilies so he’d have room to work without having to worry about tromping all over them in his many trips back and forth across the yard. When the coop was finished, he built two big (for our yard, about 8’ x 8’) raised beds about 18” high, to put all the daylilies back into. Here’s where the poop comes in. I told you we’d get back to that.

We – and let there be no doubt that when I say “we” it is all “Jay” - filled the beds with 

compost and bagged oak leaves we liberated from lawns and curb sides all over South
Tampa. But what really got the beds ready for replanting for the daylilies were the 

chickens. We finally got brave enough to let our very spoiled, indulged, coddled and
generally over-protected city chickens out of the coop to free-range every afternoon
(supervised closely, of course.) Jay tossed sunflower seeds up into the empty beds and the girls hopped in and started turning over the soil and, well, pooping. Poop = fertilizer = daylilies. Happy daylilies. 2011 was our best daylily season ever. The sunflower seeds in one of the beds did not get eaten as much as the other, so at one point we had a bed full of giant sunflowers with happy daylilies growing in their shade. When it became time to cut down all the sunflowers to give the daylilies room to grow, I dried the heads and gave them to the chickens. Poop = fertilizer = sunflowers = chicken treats = eggs + poop.

Every morning, Jay takes organic brown rice mixed with organic yogurt out to “the
girls,” and in bloom season he deadheads the daylilies and chucks them into the chicken
coop along with some Swiss chard, field-mouse-chewed tomatoes, or carrot tops from the
hydroponic garden. Since we don’t ever spray any dangerous chemicals in our daylilies
or in our hydroponic garden plants, we can safely feed them to the chickens. Poop =
fertilizer = daylilies + hydroponic vegetables = chicken treats = eggs + poop.

Since we have the chickens, and because I’m pretty militant about not spraying chemicals all over the yard that my chickens and invited wildlife and beneficial insects frequent, we do occasionally have to deal with uninvited guests such as aphids or sooty mold in the veggies that are in the squash family. This is where the worm composting and square foot garden comes in. Worm tea is a great anti-bacterial and insecticide that is safe to use in the garden. Gaura lindheimeri 'Whirling Butterflies’ is an aphid magnet. We plant it in a small square foot bed in relative close proximity to other plants that are aphid candy like daylilies or hibiscus, and the aphids glom onto the stems of the Guara and tend to stay off the plant we actually care about. Jay calls the stems “Aphid Popcicles” because I cut them off when they’re loaded up with aphids and feed them to the chickens. In the past, I’ve brought in ladybugs to then eat the aphids, but for the last couple of years, I just let the chickens eat them. If the aphids wipe out the Guara it’s not a big loss since they reseed like crazy, and are only $3 at the garden center. They’re cute, too. Worm tea + castings = Guara = aphid magnet = chicken treats = eggs + poop.

I bet you’re wondering now “What does she do with all that poop?” We make compost,
of course. And the cycle continues. We can use the compost to top dress the daylily
beds, and the butterfly garden, as well as supplement the Guara and my kitchen herb
garden. The compost bin is located next to the door that opens to clean out the hen house,
so I just have to scoop, turn and dump. Of course the garden and kitchen produce waste
that doesn’t get fed to the worms or the chickens goes into the pile, as well as eggshells
and tea leaves we pick up from a local tea shop and coffee grounds we get from Whole
Foods. It’s also located next to the fence by the neighbor’s yard, so they toss their kitchen waste into it as well.

Our chickens give us enjoyment every day, along with the eggs and poop we use to keep
our daylilies growing. Our daylilies give us enjoyment every day during bloom season,
and are good treats for the chickens. They do look a little like bloody dinosaurs when
they dig into a deadheaded blossom from a red cultivar, though. That can be a little
disconcerting. They love to take dust baths underneath my kitchen herb garden, and also
work diligently to keep down the unwelcome insect population in the yard. We rely on
our hydroponic farm to feed the chickens, and ourselves and compost whatever we can in
order to keep the cycle going. So there you have it. Chicken poop is the substance which
binds our (sub)Urban eco-system together.




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