Author Archives: wendywelch

The Zero Waste Kitchen Blog

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Running a zero-waste kitchen isn’t all that hard. And it’s super-cheap. All it will cost you is your sanity.

Once you realize that just about every green thing in your garden is edible, you will never sleep again. I don’t mean kale, spinach, lettuces, where the leaf is the crop, or even the famous “yes you can eat that” broccoli stalks and turnip greens. I mean carrot tops, the weed known as lamb’s quarter, even the frigging clover.

Caveat: don’t eat rhubarb leaves and don’t mess with pokeweed. After that, you can google it all and see just how easy it would be to spend the rest of your life cooking down all the edibles into stews, soups, and broths redolent with vitamins. Making pestos to hide bitter herbs behind bright cheeses. Mixing that patch of ground elder that escaped weeding notice with cucumber and lemon before canning—and you haven’t lived until your mother has brought down a mason jar from your shelves and read aloud: ground elder, serve chilled, and then looked at you.

Gardening isn’t my forte; I tend to spend March drawing diagrams on graph paper and dreaming of trying wasabi this year. By the time planting starts in May, I’m sick of thinking about it and eyeball plant the whole thing. The results look like someone sneezed while carrying open seed packets.

But once I discovered those weeds that sprang from nowhere were edible, well, hey, even a sad little garden is productive. The radishes grew big as bushes and flowered while I was away for a week. Did you know radish pods are delicious when charred with lemon butter? Radish flowers taste great straight.

The problem is, busy people trying to keep one simple patch of carrots from taking over the world thin the carrots and are done with it. A zero-waste kitchener (also known as OCD) will take them inside, dive to the bottom of the freezer for the black walnuts she collected from her backyard last fall and made her husband shell all winter long, and make vegan pate. She will throw the entire overgrown radish bush into a blender for vegetable broth.

Things that can be bought for $3 (last week, it might be $5 now) can be made at home for about an eight hour time investment. Most days my laptop is running next to my canner or fermenting crock so I can jump up and adjust foodstuffs before I go back to adjusting words.

Zero waste – not even a waste of time, because underneath the “not one pea shall fall” lunacy, I know where my food came from (that crazy overgrown garden) and it was fun to make it. Is it worth it, this zero waste kitchen?

That’s a question with two answers for every person. I’m having fun. Go by, mad world.

Gang yir ain Gait

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Jack just makes it in time this week – –

The heading translates from old Scots as ‘ Go your own way’ or even ‘do it your way’.

So a gait or gate might be an actual physical barrier but often just a path or street or alley leading somewhere. In my hometown of Dunfermline there’s a street just outside the Norman Abbey called the ‘Kirkgate’ and at the Southern entrance to the town is another one called Nethergate.

Shifting to our backyard but still with a Scottish connection – –

Many of the crofts in the highlands have two areas of ground attached to the house – the ‘in-by’ and the ‘oot-by’. In other words the nearest patch (usually for growing vegetables), and the outer patch where a cow or a pig would be raised.

Our back yard is divided into an in-by and an oot-by. We grow tomatoes in raised beds in the inner part and our chickens live in the outer part where we also grow vegetables (no cows or pigs!). So we have a fence with a gate and that wooden gate was getting pretty old and saggy.

I started by putting two 4×4 posts in and hinging the old gate to one of them, but it still sagged and twisted. So it was time for a new gate to the oot-by! We debated and searched the local hardware stores but everything was very heavy and very costly. Then Wendy suggested using lightweight PVC pipe with plastic netting stretched over.

So that’s what we did. Wendy crocheted the netting onto the pipe frame using special string and we hinged it to the post with gardening twine stapled in place. So far it isn’t sagging but we now have to think how it will be more permanently hinged and how we’ll latch it.

‘We did it our way’ or ‘gaed oor ain gait’ – – –