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This site is a member of WebRing. To browse visit here. Tuesday, April 21, 2009 Tidbits I'm over my head in work again, so no time for any kind of significant posting. I did want to pass on a couple of things that friends have told me about. One is a site called One Million Gardens, part of the Ning social network. The stated purpose is to track the growth of vegetable gardening in America. So I joined up and added my location to the Platial map associated with it. There is already a large number of how-to-do-it videos on the site, one of which is something I had planned to try, an herb spiral. I don't know how much time I'll have to update my garden info--others are adding pictures and commentary; I'll be lucky to have time to just tend the garden. But I'm glad to be the 262nd member, at any rate. Nothing like getting in on the ground floor.Another thing I wanted to mention is a documentary that features the Indian food activist, Vandana Shiva. She has been tireless in working against mega-agriculture, especially in the use of poisons, genetic engineering and the increasing attempts by agri-corporations to tie up ownership of seed varieties. This woman is not just a "tree-hugger" (though she has been that as well), but has a PhD in physics, and 300-plus papers in peer-reviewed scientific journals to her name, as well as several books. It's hard to imagine her having the time for everything she has accomplished.The documentary is called "Fed Up! Genetic Engineering, Industrial Agriculture and Sustainable Alternatives." It's available on DVD from most book resellers, but it can also be viewed online, at the Internet Archive site called Archive.Org I strongly recommend it to anyone who wants to know what you've been eating.My latest contribution to my personal Real Food movement has been to start making vinegar. I use large amounts of it for both cleaning and cooking, and as always, one of my concerns is whether it would continue to be available. Years ago, many people had their own family vinegar barrels, but for a long time now, the starter culture for vinegar (sometimes called a vinegar "mother") has been hard to find. You could leave wine out to sour, and hope it was being cultured by the desired bacteria, but you were always taking a chance. Just recently, several homebrew companies have begun to offer the vinegar mother, and I bought both the cider version and the red wine version. Actually, the culture is exactly the same in both cases--the only difference is how it's packaged, in hard cider or wine. A bit of the red wine mother is currently turning some red wine sour at the moment, in a glass one-gallon jug. Like many other worthwhile things, vinegar doesn't happen overnight. Six months seems to be the minimum. I'll post some pictures later.Labels: GMO, Vandana Shiva, vinegar posted by Liz @ 4:21 PM | Wednesday, March 25, 2009 Another use for white vinegar Long time readers of the blog will have seen my mention of our ant problem. For the first few years here, I didn't see a single ant inside. Then the invasion began, and nothing worked. I tried sprays, I tried commercial pest control companies, I tried baits, the ones that are allegedly carried back to the colony to kill the queens. The baits only made the problem worse, as they attracted more ants inside to feed on them. I could see no evidence that the bait was being taken back to wipe out the nest. I read through every ant control forum I could find on the net, but most of them talked about stopping up the places where ants entered. Even in a new and well-made manufactured home, they can be coming in through hundreds of tiny holes. An old mobile home is basically porous to them, so there is no way to deal with entry points.Finally, I discovered Ant Pro, an outdoor bait system that is weatherproof, doesn't attract ants inside, and actually works. For months, as long as I kept the bait stations filled, we had no ants inside. But over the winter, I began to see them again, even though there was bait available outside. During the warmer periods, they would go to the outdoor bait stations, but on the coldest winter days, there they were again all over my kitchen counters and in the bathroom.Finally, I sent an email to Ken Kupfer, the president of KM Ant Pro (as his website suggests), and he not only responded promptly, he actually called me! He asked me to send him a couple of ants, to he could be certain of the exact species I was dealing with, but he also said that I probably had at least one colony nesting in the walls of the trailer. On warmer days they would go after the bait outside, since it was more attractive to them than what little they could find inside. But during the really cold weather, my kitchen and bathroom were far more hospitable."What you need to do," he said, "is mix up a solution of 30% distilled vinegar and water, and spray it on the ants with a really fine mist. This disturbs the waxy coating on their abdomens, and it's an alarm signal to the rest of the nest that this isn't a safe place for them. But it needs to be so fine a mist that it won't kill the ants you spray it on. You want them to go back to the nest, so the rest of the foragers know not to return."And I'll be darned if it didn't work. Yesterday afternoon, I filled my little plant mister with the vinegar and water solution I keep on the counter in a spray bottle, for general cleaning, and I misted the ants in the kitchen and in the bathroom (where the problem was the worst). This morning there were no ants in either location. I've got my fingers crossed that this will continue to work, but at the moment we're ant-free again.Now if I could just find that simple a solution for the mice . . .Labels: ants, vinegar posted by Liz @ 6:39 AM | Wednesday, January 07, 2009 Cleaning with vinegar The other weapon in the non-electric homemaker's arsenal is distilled (also called white) vinegar. This stuff works for so many purposes that it's hard to see how it could have been supplanted by the far more expensive, far more toxic array of commercial preparations (marketing strikes again, but that's a topic for another day).In the kitchen:Soak a cloth in vinegar and wipe the inside and outside of cloudy glassware to get rid of water deposits. Rinse well before using again, of course!Make a paste with vinegar and salt to clean brass and copper pots.Clean white deposits out of tea and coffee pots by letting vinegar sit overnight in them.Wipe down your counters and stove with vinegar after washing the dishes. This will kill germs on the counters and get any last remaining oil or grease off the stove.Many people grew up washing their windows with a mixture of vinegar and warm water, and wiping them dry with old sheets of newspaper. It still works, and you can clean wood stove doors, oven doors, and pretty much any other glass the same way.Add one cup of vinegar to a gallon of warm water to clean no-wax floors. This will help remove stuck on food and dirt without taking off the shiny finish.Clean wooden cutting boards with vinegar (don't let them soak in it, of course).To get rid of fruit flies, put an inch of vinegar in a canning jar and punch small holes in the lid. Set on the counter near where you have a fruit fly problem.Vinegar may help to discourage ants. Spray vinegar on countertops, around door and window sills, and any place you see them coming in. I say may help, because my ants paid no attention to it at all (they just walked around it, or found other ways to get in). But I've seen the suggestion in so many places that it evidently does work for some people. One thing I'm sure will work is to wash off any ant trails you find with undiluted vinegar. Ants leave chemical trails to help them find their way back to food and water sources, and to guide other members of their nest to your kitchen or bathroom. Wiping them away with a more strongly-scented liquid like vinegar keeps the ants from finding their way back. It may not prevent ant problems altogether, but anything that slows down an infestation is good.In the bathroom:To clean a clogged showerhead, unscrew it from the pipe and put it in a bowl filled with enough vinegar to cover the holes. Leave overnight or until all the holes are clear. If you can't remove the showerhead, you may be able to tie a plastic bag filled with vinegar over it and secure with a rubber band.Pour vinegar into the toilet bowl (one or two cups, depending on bowl size), and let sit overnight to soften hard water deposits and generally disinfect and deodorize the toilet.Clean a yucky shower door track with vinegar and an old toothbrush.Clean grout between bathroom tiles the same way.Wipe away mold and other bathroom grime with a solution of equal parts of vinegar and warm water. The vinegar will help keep mold from returning.All around the house:Clean natural wood panelling with a solution of 1/2 cup vinegar, 1/4 cup olive oil and 2 cups of warm water. This will remove fingerprints and crayon marksClean sticky scissors by wiping the blades with vinegar to dissolve tape residue and leave the blades clean and shiny.Wash children's toys with a mixture of soapy water and vinegar.Clean leather and vinyl with a cloth soaked in vinegar.Set a dish of vinegar in the sickroom to reduce odors.This is a sampling of the ways vinegar can be used for cleaning. For additional ideas, try:Vinegar TipsThe New HomemakerCleaning with Vinegar at About.comLabels: cleaning, non-electric, vinegar posted by Liz @ 8:20 AM | The template is set to display 10 posts. To see all the posts for this month, click on the month name in the Archive section RSS Feed PERSONAL Send email toliz at life-as-a-spectator-sport.com Home I'm a mother, grandmother, a computer professional, Democrat, Christian. I welcome politely worded comments and email, my spam filter throws the rest away, so don't bother to flame me WHY 'LIFE AS A SPECTATOR SPORT' "If you're lucky not to live in the gutters of a slum, but still can't afford to take vacations in the Alps, you're part of that enormous middle class who lives life through the medium of the television, further separated from "real" life by air conditioner, by automobile, by dishwasher, microwave and ice-in-the-door refrigerator, by automatic washer and dryer, and all the other appliances and conveniences that make it possible for America to live life at second hand. I'm not sure why Americans decided that televised drama was better than the real thing, that cardboard microwave food containers were an adequate substitute for real dishes, and their contents for real food, or that cooking, dishwashing and face-to-face conversation wasn't worth the effort and time it required. Someone fed this nation a plastic crate of out-of-season tomatoes and told us it was life and we took them at their word, and we're so much the poorer for it that it's hard to know where to start to list the shortcomings." I wrote this a couple of years ago, but I have to admit it's much less amusing than I thought it would be to see the artifical construct falling apart. THE NON-ELECTRIC HOME Cleaning, 1 Cleaning, 2 Cleaning, 3 KNITTING BLOGS Extravayarnza Knitting Heretic Mind of Winter Pie Knits Persistent Illusion See Eunny Knit The Keyboard Biologist Taleweaver's Ramblings TECHnitting Wendy Knits FINISHED PROJECTS -------FINISHED IN 2006------- Peruvian Cap Tutti-Frutti Socks Shelley's Socks Carol's Socks -------FINISHED IN 2007------- Chain Link Socks Baby Surprise Jacket Valerie & Friend Baby Bonnet Rainbow Baby Socks Girls Pixie Hood Mitred Square Heart Red & White Socks Coffee Cup Pot Holder Nubbins Dishcloth Garterlac Dishcloth Suede Booties Kate's Socks Norwegian Sweet Baby Cap Half Thumbless Mittens Red Mittens for Akkol -------FINISHED IN 2008------- SELF-RELIANCE AND THE FUTURE -- Blogs and websites -- Causubon's Book Club Orlov Food Storage Made Easy From the Wilderness In the Wake Listening to Katrina Survival Topics The Modern Homestead The Oil Drum Notes from a Hillside Farm -- Mailing Lists -- 12vdc Power Living on the Land Rainwater Refrigeration Alternatives Old Ways of Living POLITICAL BLOGS and SITES The political sites have moved BOOKS I'M READING How to Grow More Vegetables, etc. Small Scale Grain Raising ARCHIVES February 2009 January 2009 December 2008 November 2008 October 2008 August 2008 July 2008 May 2008 April 2008 March 2008 February 2008 January 2008 December 2007 November 2007 October 2007 September 2007 August 2007 July 2007 June 2007 May 2007 April 2007 March 2007 February 2007 January 2007 December 2006 November 2006 October 2006 September 2006 August 2006 July 2006 June 2006 May 2006 April 2006 March 2006 February 2006 January 2006 December 2005 November 2005 October 2005 September 2005 August 2005 July 2005 June 2005 May 2005 April 2005 March 2005 February 2005 January 2005 December 2004 November 2004 October 2004 September 2004 August 2004 July 2004 June 2004 May 2004 April 2004 March 2004 February 2004 January 2004 December 2003 November 2003 October 2003 September 2003 August 2003 July 2003 June 2003 May 2003 April 2003 March 2003 February 2003 January 2003 December 2002 November 2002 October 2002 September 2002 August 2002 July 2002 June 2002 May 2002 April 2002 March 2002 February 2002 Feedjit Live Blog Stats
I'm over my head in work again, so no time for any kind of significant posting. I did want to pass on a couple of things that friends have told me about. One is a site called One Million Gardens, part of the Ning social network. The stated purpose is to track the growth of vegetable gardening in America. So I joined up and added my location to the Platial map associated with it. There is already a large number of how-to-do-it videos on the site, one of which is something I had planned to try, an herb spiral. I don't know how much time I'll have to update my garden info--others are adding pictures and commentary; I'll be lucky to have time to just tend the garden. But I'm glad to be the 262nd member, at any rate. Nothing like getting in on the ground floor.Another thing I wanted to mention is a documentary that features the Indian food activist, Vandana Shiva. She has been tireless in working against mega-agriculture, especially in the use of poisons, genetic engineering and the increasing attempts by agri-corporations to tie up ownership of seed varieties. This woman is not just a "tree-hugger" (though she has been that as well), but has a PhD in physics, and 300-plus papers in peer-reviewed scientific journals to her name, as well as several books. It's hard to imagine her having the time for everything she has accomplished.The documentary is called "Fed Up! Genetic Engineering, Industrial Agriculture and Sustainable Alternatives." It's available on DVD from most book resellers, but it can also be viewed online, at the Internet Archive site called Archive.Org I strongly recommend it to anyone who wants to know what you've been eating.My latest contribution to my personal Real Food movement has been to start making vinegar. I use large amounts of it for both cleaning and cooking, and as always, one of my concerns is whether it would continue to be available. Years ago, many people had their own family vinegar barrels, but for a long time now, the starter culture for vinegar (sometimes called a vinegar "mother") has been hard to find. You could leave wine out to sour, and hope it was being cultured by the desired bacteria, but you were always taking a chance. Just recently, several homebrew companies have begun to offer the vinegar mother, and I bought both the cider version and the red wine version. Actually, the culture is exactly the same in both cases--the only difference is how it's packaged, in hard cider or wine. A bit of the red wine mother is currently turning some red wine sour at the moment, in a glass one-gallon jug. Like many other worthwhile things, vinegar doesn't happen overnight. Six months seems to be the minimum. I'll post some pictures later.Labels: GMO, Vandana Shiva, vinegar
Labels: GMO, Vandana Shiva, vinegar
Wednesday, March 25, 2009 Another use for white vinegar
Long time readers of the blog will have seen my mention of our ant problem. For the first few years here, I didn't see a single ant inside. Then the invasion began, and nothing worked. I tried sprays, I tried commercial pest control companies, I tried baits, the ones that are allegedly carried back to the colony to kill the queens. The baits only made the problem worse, as they attracted more ants inside to feed on them. I could see no evidence that the bait was being taken back to wipe out the nest. I read through every ant control forum I could find on the net, but most of them talked about stopping up the places where ants entered. Even in a new and well-made manufactured home, they can be coming in through hundreds of tiny holes. An old mobile home is basically porous to them, so there is no way to deal with entry points.Finally, I discovered Ant Pro, an outdoor bait system that is weatherproof, doesn't attract ants inside, and actually works. For months, as long as I kept the bait stations filled, we had no ants inside. But over the winter, I began to see them again, even though there was bait available outside. During the warmer periods, they would go to the outdoor bait stations, but on the coldest winter days, there they were again all over my kitchen counters and in the bathroom.Finally, I sent an email to Ken Kupfer, the president of KM Ant Pro (as his website suggests), and he not only responded promptly, he actually called me! He asked me to send him a couple of ants, to he could be certain of the exact species I was dealing with, but he also said that I probably had at least one colony nesting in the walls of the trailer. On warmer days they would go after the bait outside, since it was more attractive to them than what little they could find inside. But during the really cold weather, my kitchen and bathroom were far more hospitable."What you need to do," he said, "is mix up a solution of 30% distilled vinegar and water, and spray it on the ants with a really fine mist. This disturbs the waxy coating on their abdomens, and it's an alarm signal to the rest of the nest that this isn't a safe place for them. But it needs to be so fine a mist that it won't kill the ants you spray it on. You want them to go back to the nest, so the rest of the foragers know not to return."And I'll be darned if it didn't work. Yesterday afternoon, I filled my little plant mister with the vinegar and water solution I keep on the counter in a spray bottle, for general cleaning, and I misted the ants in the kitchen and in the bathroom (where the problem was the worst). This morning there were no ants in either location. I've got my fingers crossed that this will continue to work, but at the moment we're ant-free again.Now if I could just find that simple a solution for the mice . . .Labels: ants, vinegar
Labels: ants, vinegar
Wednesday, January 07, 2009 Cleaning with vinegar
The other weapon in the non-electric homemaker's arsenal is distilled (also called white) vinegar. This stuff works for so many purposes that it's hard to see how it could have been supplanted by the far more expensive, far more toxic array of commercial preparations (marketing strikes again, but that's a topic for another day).In the kitchen:Soak a cloth in vinegar and wipe the inside and outside of cloudy glassware to get rid of water deposits. Rinse well before using again, of course!Make a paste with vinegar and salt to clean brass and copper pots.Clean white deposits out of tea and coffee pots by letting vinegar sit overnight in them.Wipe down your counters and stove with vinegar after washing the dishes. This will kill germs on the counters and get any last remaining oil or grease off the stove.Many people grew up washing their windows with a mixture of vinegar and warm water, and wiping them dry with old sheets of newspaper. It still works, and you can clean wood stove doors, oven doors, and pretty much any other glass the same way.Add one cup of vinegar to a gallon of warm water to clean no-wax floors. This will help remove stuck on food and dirt without taking off the shiny finish.Clean wooden cutting boards with vinegar (don't let them soak in it, of course).To get rid of fruit flies, put an inch of vinegar in a canning jar and punch small holes in the lid. Set on the counter near where you have a fruit fly problem.Vinegar may help to discourage ants. Spray vinegar on countertops, around door and window sills, and any place you see them coming in. I say may help, because my ants paid no attention to it at all (they just walked around it, or found other ways to get in). But I've seen the suggestion in so many places that it evidently does work for some people. One thing I'm sure will work is to wash off any ant trails you find with undiluted vinegar. Ants leave chemical trails to help them find their way back to food and water sources, and to guide other members of their nest to your kitchen or bathroom. Wiping them away with a more strongly-scented liquid like vinegar keeps the ants from finding their way back. It may not prevent ant problems altogether, but anything that slows down an infestation is good.In the bathroom:To clean a clogged showerhead, unscrew it from the pipe and put it in a bowl filled with enough vinegar to cover the holes. Leave overnight or until all the holes are clear. If you can't remove the showerhead, you may be able to tie a plastic bag filled with vinegar over it and secure with a rubber band.Pour vinegar into the toilet bowl (one or two cups, depending on bowl size), and let sit overnight to soften hard water deposits and generally disinfect and deodorize the toilet.Clean a yucky shower door track with vinegar and an old toothbrush.Clean grout between bathroom tiles the same way.Wipe away mold and other bathroom grime with a solution of equal parts of vinegar and warm water. The vinegar will help keep mold from returning.All around the house:Clean natural wood panelling with a solution of 1/2 cup vinegar, 1/4 cup olive oil and 2 cups of warm water. This will remove fingerprints and crayon marksClean sticky scissors by wiping the blades with vinegar to dissolve tape residue and leave the blades clean and shiny.Wash children's toys with a mixture of soapy water and vinegar.Clean leather and vinyl with a cloth soaked in vinegar.Set a dish of vinegar in the sickroom to reduce odors.This is a sampling of the ways vinegar can be used for cleaning. For additional ideas, try:Vinegar TipsThe New HomemakerCleaning with Vinegar at About.comLabels: cleaning, non-electric, vinegar
Labels: cleaning, non-electric, vinegar
The template is set to display 10 posts. To see all the posts for this month, click on the month name in the Archive section
RSS Feed
PERSONAL
WHY 'LIFE AS A SPECTATOR SPORT'
"If you're lucky not to live in the gutters of a slum, but still can't afford to take vacations in the Alps, you're part of that enormous middle class who lives life through the medium of the television, further separated from "real" life by air conditioner, by automobile, by dishwasher, microwave and ice-in-the-door refrigerator, by automatic washer and dryer, and all the other appliances and conveniences that make it possible for America to live life at second hand. I'm not sure why Americans decided that televised drama was better than the real thing, that cardboard microwave food containers were an adequate substitute for real dishes, and their contents for real food, or that cooking, dishwashing and face-to-face conversation wasn't worth the effort and time it required. Someone fed this nation a plastic crate of out-of-season tomatoes and told us it was life and we took them at their word, and we're so much the poorer for it that it's hard to know where to start to list the shortcomings." I wrote this a couple of years ago, but I have to admit it's much less amusing than I thought it would be to see the artifical construct falling apart.
THE NON-ELECTRIC HOME
Cleaning, 1 Cleaning, 2 Cleaning, 3
KNITTING BLOGS
Extravayarnza Knitting Heretic Mind of Winter Pie Knits Persistent Illusion See Eunny Knit The Keyboard Biologist Taleweaver's Ramblings TECHnitting Wendy Knits
FINISHED PROJECTS
SELF-RELIANCE AND THE FUTURE
POLITICAL BLOGS and SITES
BOOKS I'M READING
How to Grow More Vegetables, etc. Small Scale Grain Raising
ARCHIVES
February 2009 January 2009 December 2008 November 2008 October 2008 August 2008 July 2008 May 2008 April 2008 March 2008 February 2008 January 2008 December 2007 November 2007 October 2007 September 2007 August 2007 July 2007 June 2007 May 2007 April 2007 March 2007 February 2007 January 2007 December 2006 November 2006 October 2006 September 2006 August 2006 July 2006 June 2006 May 2006 April 2006 March 2006 February 2006 January 2006 December 2005 November 2005 October 2005 September 2005 August 2005 July 2005 June 2005 May 2005 April 2005 March 2005 February 2005 January 2005 December 2004 November 2004 October 2004 September 2004 August 2004 July 2004 June 2004 May 2004 April 2004 March 2004 February 2004 January 2004 December 2003 November 2003 October 2003 September 2003 August 2003 July 2003 June 2003 May 2003 April 2003 March 2003 February 2003 January 2003 December 2002 November 2002 October 2002 September 2002 August 2002 July 2002 June 2002 May 2002 April 2002 March 2002 February 2002
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