Sustainable Living in July - Laundry Goes Outdoors

 

A recycled double sink, an old outdoor-appropriate shelf, a nice location in shade of an olive tree, a drain to the garden - and voila, a garden laundromat is borne! The decision to wash by hand at least some portion of our clothes came when our three year old son developed a fondness for mud and water play. There is no way his clothes could go inside of the house, much less directly into the washing machine! At the same time it became abundantly clear that most of this clothes (and some of ours) don't really need any kind of vigorous, best-performed-by-highly-specialized-and-very-professional washing machine wash. A good number of things needs simple refreshing or spot cleaning.

Eating from the Garden

Part of growing a good garden, naturally, is harvest - at time of strangest things, or things that sound good in theory but may be a bit hard to fit in an established routine of cooking and consuming familiar dishes. Cooking from a garden is a subject of its own, with lamb's quarters, garlic scapes, beet greens, cilantro flowers, Jerusalem artichoke roots, zucchini flowers, purslane, dandelion leaves, parsnip roots, day lily flowers and much more to please the palate and to challenge our under-developed capacity to eat new foods. Of course new foods don't stay new for long and soon become as familiar as a store-bought carrot.