Springfield Locavore

So...

So you might be wondering why I haven't posted anything here since September 7, when I wrote a stimulating piece about the wonderful nutritional benefits of Froot Loops. (Or, more likely, this post has just shown up in your email or feed reader and you're trying to remember what this blog is about.)

It's not that I didn't have anything to write about. (Not any less than normal!) I frequently thought of things to write about, but then I always thought, "yes, but first you need to explain why you haven't posted anything since September 7." And since that wasn't an explanation I particularly wanted to write... I didn't.

But now I will.

We officially started our locavore attempt on May 20. Things went quite well for the first few months. Through the end of July, I estimate that I was eating about 80% local food. In August and September, we got busy for some reason, or perhaps just disorganized, and I would guess that I had slipped to about 50% local food. I was also a bit disheartened when I computed how much food we needed to store to stay local through the winter (answer: lots). And I fell behind on posting here.

Then, in October, disaster struck -- Our septic system died.

Our first clue that there was a problem was when our toilets wouldn't flush. Not even the brand new, ultra-low-flow "rated best flush" one. I went outside, removed the lid from the septic tank, and found that it was filled nearly to ground-level.

If you cast your mind back to October of last year, you might remember it being a bit damp. Actually, very damp. Drenched. We had over 11 inches of rain that month.

We live within the Springfield city limits, but when our house was built in 1973, this was still the boonies and there was no sewer service. There was an opportunity several years ago to get the neighborhood tied into the city sewer, but for whatever reason it never happened.

Anyway, to make a long story short, our new septic system couldn't be installed until mid-December, due to all of the rain. That meant going for a full 2 months without a working septic system.

If your septic system doesn't work, then you must drastically reduce your water usage. For us, that meant doing laundry at the laundromat; taking showers only every few days (and even then keeping the water turned off until it was time to rinse); and flushing toilets according to the rule "If it's yellow, let it mellow. If it's brown, flush it down."

Most importantly from a locavore viewpoint, it meant that we had to avoid washing dishes or using water for cooking. The practical effect of that restriction was that we ate out nearly every day for 2 months! Doing so did very bad things to my attempts to lose weight, of course, but it also effectively killed our attempts to eat local food! It also meant that I didn't have much to blog about here. (I suppose that I could have posted "Ate out again" every day for 2 months.)

By the time we had a working septic system, winter was upon us. No more fresh veggies for us!

However, spring is almost here! I recently received an email from Garrick Veenstra about this year's CSA, and yesterday we began preparing our garden beds for this year's planting. In fact, the strawberry plants that we planted last year are already greening up, which is very exciting!

I'll try to write a "lessons learned" post here soon, discussing what we did well last year and what caused us problems. Stay tuned!

(You can see photos of the septic system installation on my other blog, Talking to Myself Again.)

Not a Good Day

Our lawn desperately needed to be mowed. The grass hasn't been growing very quickly recently -- although the weeds seem to grow at the same pace regardless of the weather. However, it had been long enough that it really needed to be mowed. Actually, it should have been mowed the previous weekend, but events dictated otherwise.

I knew it was going to be hot today (mid-90s), so I planned to start at 9:00 AM. (People who mow their grass before 9 AM should be shot. Well, they should at least be secretly glared at with resentment!)

I fired up the riding mower, cut the first lap of the lawn (enough to make it clear to everyone how badly the lawn needed to be mowed), and then the mower stopped.

By "stopped", I don't mean that the engine quit. The engine ran fine. The blades didn't stop either. They kept turning fine. It was the wheels that stopped.

I could have mowed the grass that was directly under the mower all day, but that was it.

Forward? Nope. Reverse? Nope. Could I push it? Yep.

Long story short: A stick got in a place where sticks don't belong and knocked a belt off.

The good news is, it's something I can probably fix. The bad news is, now I have to fix it.

All I have to do is figure out how to do so. One obstacle is that I have no service ramp to roll the mower on, so that I can more easily get at things from below. I went to Lowe's, but they didn't have what I want. I guess I'll try auto service supply stores tomorrow.

To add to the fun, our Internet service has been very erratic for the last week or two. It will be working fine, then it will stop working for a few minutes, then it will work for a few minutes, then it will be out for several minutes, then it will work for an hour, then it will be out, etc. On, off, on, off. It's very annoying! I'll be calling Comcast in the morning.

The Folks at Food Not Lawns Will Be So Disappointed

I ordered a John Deere LA155 riding mower the other day. I have mixed feelings about it.

At our old place, we had a smallish lawn. Using our Black & Decker cordless electric mulching mower, I could mow the grass in about 45 minutes. It worked quite well, and handled our lawn with few problems. The only times I had problems were when I would either try to mow the grass while it was too wet or when I had let it grow too tall. On those occasions, it would run out of juice before I was 100% finished. If I had to do it over again, I think I would buy a corded version, primarily because it would be much lighter than pushing around the cordless version with its heavy battery. Generally, however, it worked quite well.

The main things I liked about it were (1) never having to drive to the gas station to buy gas for the mower, and (2) it was quiet! That's one thing that I find really annoying: The constant drone of gas-powered mowers every weekend -- and most weeknight evenings! Particularly in the spring, before the weather has grown so hot and humid, it's nice to sit outside and enjoy the nice, peaceful sounds of-- RRRRRooooaaarrrr!!! *sigh* Let's go inside where it's quieter.

If I had the money, I would buy all of my neighbors electric lawn mowers. Failing that, it would be nice if we could all agree to mower our lawns at the same time on the same 2 days of the week -- 2 hours of RRRRROOOOAAAAARRRR!!!! a week, rather than spread out continuously. Oh well.

Unfortunately, our new place sits on a 1 acre lot with lots of grass. We plan on reducing how much grass we have -- vegetable garden, wildflowers, decorative grasses, playground with mulch, perhaps someday a rock garden out front, etc. However, at the moment we've still got nearly an acre of grass to mow. And our 19" cordless electric mower just won't cut it -- literally.

I did try last fall, at the end of the growing season. The cordless made it through the front lawn without too many problems, taking about a full charge and 45 minutes to complete. The back lawn, however, is much larger and has a much tougher type of grass. It took several full charges to finally finish cutting it. During the spring growing season, when the grass needs to be mowed twice a week, there is just no way that I could keep up. (And if I tried, I wouldn't have any time left for, say, planting that garden that I've been talking about!)

So I began seeking a new lawn mower. Before turning to John Deere and gasoline, however, I poked about to see whether there was an electric riding mower. There is: The Electric Ox MP! It looks very cool, but with the mower kit, it runs about $10,000. Okay, not that cool.

Then I discovered that there are several electric robotic lawn mowers, including RoboMow, the Husqvarna Automower, and the Lawnbott. They are all extremely quiet, which I really like! Unfortunately, given the size of our lawn and the cost of the robotic mowers, I decided that they just weren't going to work for me, at least not yet.

So I settled on a rather traditional choice -- a big, loud, gasoline-powered riding mower. On the plus side, it has a 48" blade and a 22 hp engine, so I'm hoping that I'll be able to at least get the lawn mowed quickly, albeit not quietly. Plus, I'll be able to attach a snow blade to clear our somewhat steep and long driveway of snow in the winter, as well as perhaps add a utility trailer at some point for hauling stuff (soil, mulch, compost, plants) to and from the garden.

One nice thing about it: It has a 12-volt electrical outlet, along with an optional fan that I can mount on there to stay cool while I'm mowing in July. Ahh!

Plumbing Lessons

Before we bought this house, we knew that there were a few things that would need to be fixed. For one thing, there were a few plumbing issues to take care of. The kitchen faucet leaked, the garbage disposal didn't work, and the faucet in one of the bathrooms had the hot and cold water reversed. We didn't know much about plumbing, but a friend at work knew plenty and showed me exactly what I would need to do. Great!

Of course, it didn't go quite as smoothly as we hoped.

We had bought the replacement faucets and garbage disposal a month ago. That's also when my friend Stuart told me how to install it. However, what with unpacking boxes and people getting sick, we still hadn't gotten around to it. Last Saturday, we decided to tackle it.

Step 1: Shut off the water under the kitchen sink. "Man! This thing is frozen solid! Hand me that pipe wrench and I'll see whether I can get it to move.... There! That did it. Oh. Oops." Okay, I managed to bend the handle into a twisted mass. It wasn't going to let me turn the water back on. And to add to the fun, the water still wasn't completely turned off! So we needed to get a new shutoff valve.

Step 2: Remove the old garbage disposal. "No problem. All we have to do is remove the U-bend in the drain from the garbage disposal and-- oops! Hey, the drain pipe broke!" That's right. It was old, very corroded metal, and it literally broke in two as Dawn was loosening it. Okay, we'll need to get a new U-bend. "Hmm... I wonder whether the drain pipe for the other half of the sink is also that bad." I took a wrench and lightly tapped the bottom of the U-bend. Immediately water began to drip from where I had tapped it. Like the other one, it was corroded and paper-thin! So we needed to get two new U-bends. On the plus side, though, I suspect the corroded drain pipes were the reason why the water drained so slowly.

Step 3: Disconnect the supply lines. This actually involved an easy bit (unscrew the cold water supply line) and a less easy bit (cut the copper pipe for the hot water supply line). For whatever reason, the dishwasher doesn't have its own supply line. Instead, the hot water supply line goes to a tee, with one line leading off to the dishwasher and the other continuing to the faucet.  Therefore we had to cut the copper pipe above that tee in order to remove the faucet. We did this without any problems. Hooray!

Step 4: Disconnect the supply lines from the faucet. Our first hurdle was figuring out how to get a wrench up behind the sink to disconnect the lines. In addition, there's just no room there to turn a wrench, even if you could get it up there! We fairly quickly realized that we would need to go to the hardware store to find some tool that would work better than what we had. It turns out that there is a tool made for this very task. It's called a basin wrench. Who knew? (Okay, plumbers knew. We didn't.) Once we had the basin wrench, it was much easier to reach, but things were frozen solid. No joy. At that point we began talking about the possibility of just replacing the entire sink! Then we realized that there was nothing holding the current sink down except for gravity, so we could just remove the current sink and perhaps have far more leverage for removing the old faucet. After letting a little bit of penetrating oil work for a couple of minutes, we were able to remove the supply lines. Hooray!

Halfway there!

Step 5: Install all of the new stuff! I put that all as one step because, once we got all of the old stuff disconnected and removed, installing the new stuff was fairly straightforward. For one thing, it was easier to install the faucet with the sink out than it would have been if the sink were already installed, so that was helpful. Install the faucet in the sink, drop the sink back into the counter, put the compression fitting on the copper pipe that we cut, connect the supply lines to the faucet, mount the new garbage disposal, connect the new P traps, connect the dishwasher to the garbage disposal. We're done! Now do a happy dance!

We have a kitchen sink! As you can see, we immediately put it to use.

By the time we finished, it was Tuesday. (Actually, we're only halfway done with the bathroom sink, but all we have left to do there is install the new faucet, so there aren't any surprises remaining there. Really.)

A guy working at the hardware store told us that every plumbing project required 3 trips. He told us this on our third trip to the hardware store, so I guess he's right! (Actually, we made a 4th trip, but that's just because we forgot to get something on the previous trip. *sigh*)

Yes, it would have been much easier to have just called a plumber. However, by doing it ourselves, we learned quite a bit about plumbing. That means that, not only did we save money this time, but we'll save money again the next time we need to fix something, and it will be easier than it was this time.

Next on the agenda: Learning how to do electrical work!