Goin’ to the Country
July 9, 2010

Me celebrating the 4th with new friends Pakshi Raj and Vaj

Last weekend my husband and I were invited to a 4th of July celebration at the home of Claudia Petrick, my editor at the Iowa Source. Tom and I drove a mile or two north of Fairfield, turned onto a country road, and entered another world. Claudia lives on a five-acre spread with organic gardens, a pear and cherry orchard, and horses.

These guys are living in horse heaven

Soon after arriving, I follow my friend Cynthia Arenander to the cob house barn where her impressive dressage steed, Pakshi Raj, boards with Claudia’s handsome Arabian, Vajrashrava (“Vaj” for short, meaning “thunderbolt” in English and “diamond” in Sanskrit, a perfect name since he has a white diamond on his forehead). At first I’m intimidated by Pakshi Raj’s immense size and mythical horse energy, but when Cynthia places a flower on his head I can connect to his playful side. I feel even less intimidated when Cynthia tells me that her husband Alarik plans to film Pakshi in a Mr.-Ed type video for their line of organic anti-aging products.

Cynthia has a mythical force of her own–she was given this spectacular steed when a horse whisperer told its owner that he would prefer to live with Cynthia. “I’ve been around horses all my life,” she says as she slips on the horses’ bridles and leads them to the front yard where they graze in idyllic beauty next to Claudia’s lily and bee balm garden.

Cynthia, Claudia and I relax on Claudia's deck while the horses graze behind us

It’s soothing to spend an evening in the country, and my mind and body relax in a way they can’t even in the low-stress environment of our home on the Maharishi University of Management campus. I wonder again whether we shouldn’t move to the country, despite the fact that my husband doesn’t like to garden or mow or work in the yard. I grew up on a tall oak forest about 5 miles from Naperville, IL, and found solace in nature—but also some loneliness from living so far from friends. Not to mention the work that goes into keeping up a country home. I know my own limitations, and I’m completely in awe of what Claudia has created. The question on everyone’s lips all evening is “how does she do it?”

Back inside there’s a vegetarian feast for the eyes and palate waiting, mostly prepared by Claudia: wild rice salad, mung bean cakes with a tangy tahini-lime juice-tamari-turmeric sauce, a golden quinoa salad, steamed beets, tomatoes with pesto. For recipes, Claudia says, “The wild rice salad comes from Miriam Hospodar’s Heaven’s Banquet, slightly altered. The rest is sort of made up. For the sauce, I started with tahini, and then added the other ingredients and a little water ’till it tasted right.”

Others have contributed: Dolly Donhauser with a creamy potato salad from Martha Stewart, the Arenanders with a green salad from their garden, Maggie Squires with crispy sweet-and-salty middle eastern crackers.

Claudia brings in the boys

After the meal, which ends in a sumptuous homemade fruit shortcake, we trail outside to put the horses to bed. “We treat our horses better than we treat ourselves,” says Claudia with a laugh. They get vitamins, organic food, loving attention, regular brushings.

Shepley, Pakshi Raj, and Maggie make friends

Fireflies spark the sky as Claudia and Cynthia take turns showing their horses canter around them in a circle. When the horses leap we “oooo and ahhh” in unison as if the horses were fireworks.

In the deepening twighlight we stand at the end of Claudia’s driveway and gaze at the fireworks display over nearby Cypress Villages, an up-and-coming eco-development of Vedic architecture homes that are LEED-certified. Beside it the Jefferson County fairgrounds fireworks also light the sky—and soon we spot the golf course display south of town, and in the far distance Mt. Pleasant’s. What better way to celebrate the 4th—with light in all directions.

Sustainable Lawns and Landscapes
March 23, 2010

We’re spending the winter in Vero Beach, Florida, and while kayaking on the Indian River Lagoon, the intracoastal waterway that is home to one of the most diverse plant and animal populations in the world, I found out that many of the dolphins here have tummy aches because they are ingesting so many toxins from lawn run-off and industry waste.

So it was a wonderful coincidence when Justin and Kimberly McSweeny pulled up to the home we’re renting from our very green-conscious friends with an equipment trailer in tow. I knew I was going to like them the minute I saw their company name and tagline painted on the side of their trailer: Oasis Organics—Not Only Should Your Lawn be Green.

I can’t say I completely understood the slogan, but I got the drift. Justin and Kimberly are a man-and-wife team who tend lawn and landscape in the most environmentally safe way possible, so the Indian River Lagoon and the area’s drinking water can stay free of harmful chemicals. They look fresh and young and have the kind of organic fervor that I had in the 60s when I grew my own garden with college friends.

Justin started in the lawncare business 20 years ago when he was a chef by night and mowed lawns by day. (You could say eating organic has definitely given him lots of energy). He says he grew up in Maryland in the 70s and loved the local hippie yurts with gardens growing on them. He says the seeds of his interest in organic were sown then.

“About five years ago I started poking around the internet looking around for a more holistic perspective on lawn care and home landscaping,” he says. “I  knew people up north were using healthier, organic pesticides and fertilizers, and that is always the first step, to wean yards and landscapes away from harmful petroleum products, which I call ‘Satan’s Pantry.’ But I wanted to take it a step further. I wanted to create closed-circuit environments where you feed the organisms in the soil and the soil feeds healthy plants, eliminating the need for dumping gallons of fertilizer and pesticides on the lawns and landscape, even the organic kind. I wanted to use sustainability and permaculture techniques that are used on organic farms and transfer them to lawn and yard care.”

Justin didn’t find many people doing that, so he taught himself. Here he talks about his vision.

Listening to Justin, I’m learning new terms like xeriscaping, which is from the Greek, meaning “dry landscape.” In xeriscaping and xerogardening, you use plants that thrive in the local area without irrigation. It’s popular in Arizona and other desert areas  areas, and could become more necessary as climate change renders other areas dry.  Justin uses principles from xeriscaping, and encourages his clients to save on the environment and their water bills by switching to landscape plants and lawn grasses that thrive on rain water alone, but he’s not a purist about this. Nor is he a purist about using native habitat plants. He encourages his clients to use them, but is also open to using plants from Australia and other countries with similar climates, as long as they aren’t invasive.

“I don’t like to ram anything down anyone’s throat,” he says. “I like to show up, make people happy, and make sure their yard looks good. I give my clients options and explain how using plants that naturally thrive in this area can save so much money in water and helps the environment too.”

For those of you from Florida, check out this video, where Justin points out a number of native plants that require  little water and need little pest control or fertilizers.

He also recommends getting away from water-and-fertilizer-thirsty lawn grasses. In our yard he’s working with the owners to switch to a more sustainable ground cover such as mimosa strigillosa. It’s a native wild flower with powder-pink blooms, much prettier than plain old grass. I’m looking forward to seeing it when we return next winter.

To contact Justin or Kimberly McSweeny, email them at oasisorganics@bellsouth.net.

Cooking with a Solar Oven
February 22, 2010

Probably I’m way behind the eight-ball here, but I’d never really thought much about solar ovens before I visited my sister Cathy and her family in northern California last Labor Day weekend. Cathy took me to a dinner party at the home of Alice Friedemann and her husband, Jeffery Kahn, the webmaster at UC Berkeley. Alice is a freelance journalist specializing in energy and peak oil issues. She is also developing a cookbook on whole-grain cooking, and has experimented with using a manual grain grinder and solar ovens to make truly sustainable and awesome breads.

In this video she talks about using a solar oven. Alice bought hers but recommends building your own.

Alice says she’s still trying to figure out solar cooking. She thinks the plastic on her oven needs replacing and that may be creating less than stellar (solar?) results. But she feels it’s worth the effort because solar cooking is going to become more and more important in the future.

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Besides learning about solar ovens that evening, we were treated to a sumptuous dinner featuring Alice’s homemade whole-grain flatbread along with beets, basil and Early Girl tomatoes from Jeffery’s amazing garden.

I was totally in awe of Alice and Jeffery’s gardening skills. First of all, the way things grow in sunny California, something like rosemary, found in Iowa as a small plant, grows as big as a tree. But it was more than the climate, it was super smart brains at work.

Check out this rather perfect apple tree that grows in Alice and Jeffery’s back yard. A neighbor grafted it with four different strains, so you stroll around the tree and find four types of apples, including Pink Lady and Misui.

According to Alice, most nurseries these days sell apple trees with more than one strain of apples grafted into them, but still, you seldom see such perfect looking trees in someone’s yard.

Says Alice, the trick to getting a lot of apples is to rigorously cut back the tree before spring (in California sometime in January or February) but not snipping off the buds that will produce apples. Later, you’ll get clusters of more than two, and you need to get rid of all but one or you’ll have very small apples and many will fall off in addition if you don’t, wasting the tree’s energy.

After dinner we peer through the telescope from Alice and Jeffery’s second-story balcony, and catch a rare glimpse of the Bay Bridge without any cars (closed for major repairs over Labor Day).

Now I feel inspired to make my own solar oven, but will have to wait until spring as the sun is at too much of an angle now. Will let you know how that goes.

For free directions to make your own solar cooker go to

http://www.solarcooking.org/plans/

Additional links on Alice Friedemann

http://www.energybulletin.net/node/2401

http://www.energyskeptic.com/