Tag Archives: recycling

The Differences Come Home

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OK, sorry about that blog post lapse. In two words: jet lag. It takes me longer to get over it. Yesterday was my first 9-6 sleep since returning. Slowly back to US time.

But maybe not back to some other US norms. One of the things you can’t help but notice, staying with friends in Ireland and Scotland, is the lack of plastic. Even my friend who lives life in the fast lane doesn’t have an overrun of plastic bags and containers in her kitchen. She merely saves her ice cream tubs for occasional leftovers.

There are fewer leftovers, because Brits invented portion control. Everything is sized to eat once. Brits don’t make nine-day stews, vats of crock pot suppers, or spaghetti for 60 and freeze it. It’s a day-by-day cooking plan. Part of the mindfulness that permeates the culture, perhaps? Why would you need so much all at once?

The kitchen is the first place you’re going to see how differently Brits and Americans live: you don’t need plastic leftover containers because you’re controlling your servings. You don’t need a huge fridge because, same. You don’t need a vast array of kitchen gadgets, because you’re doing a one-time prep of servings for four, so it’s not hard to chop, grind, dice, or juice. And you tend to have pleasant conversations with friends and family while you’re doing it. Meal prep isn’t “get this done so we can get to the next thing.” It IS the thing.

This is pleasant. Even on stressed days, when the chores are divided, it’s a nice thing to sit with someone in the kitchen, pulverizing what you plan to eat while sipping a glass of wine and talking stress factors. It works.

Not that they don’t have shortcut foods, simple shortcuts, etc. Bisto in every meat and veggie flavor is a staple of the well-stocked Scottish kitchen, certainly. It’s a little like bullion. I brought some home with me.

So I’m back in the States, sipping tea in my kitchen, marinating beef in Bisto, and eyeing things I’m getting rid of in order to simplify. This may have crept past the kitchen, because there’s a bunch of Scottish paraphernalia from other spaces that we won’t bother carrying back to the home country. If you want to see what’s on offer, check Jack’s Facebook offerings online. We put them on a bunch of local yardsale websites, although not marketplace. I don’t think any of it is plastic. I put that in the recycling.

Adding Two Rooms to our Home

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Jack and I have a big back yard. We wound up fencing it into two halves because, chickens. The other day, I referred to “the outside room” and Jack didn’t ask what I meant, just said “inner room or outer room?”

Twenty-five years of marriage counts for something in the mind reading department, but we also came to this conclusion out of common sense. The backyard added two rooms to our home. The inner room is for gracious entertaining, has most of my light garden (solar stuff that’s so pretty at night) and the flowers. The outer room keeps the chickens, the main gardens, the fruit bushes and the nut trees. (Black walnuts are why we have two gardens; some plants is juglone safe, some ain’t. Juglone is the stuff black walnuts put out while their roots are down there in the wood wide web talking to each other. Never mind cats; it’s black walnuts as seek world dominance, y’all.)

Neither of us were ever big gardeners. We grew heirloom tomatoes because I love to try blue and purple and green and yellow things that “should be” red. We grew potatoes because Jack is Scottish, and if you’re a gardener in Scotland, you are talking root vegetables. Gardening in that country takes place August 10-15.

Jack and I have always enjoyed turning something into nothing–which is an upscale way of saying “how cheaply can we do this?” We put down leftover fertilizer bags to kill weeds, dug up rocks to weight and drain tomato buckets, and otherwise tried to keep from growing veggies that cost $2.25 each once you tallied all that went into producing them. It’s been fun, not least because it looks so silly. Old chicken wire stuck to poles from a tent we no longer have, bound by an ancient blue polyester dress, make our gate. Someone gave us a wine-making tank and we took a piece of guttering that fell down and made a rain spout to fill it for watering. (Hauling 12 buckets a day will get you in shape fast, kids.)

And we drilled holes in the bottoms of about ninety-eleven-hundred plastic buckets leftover from kitty litter, which annoyed Jack no end. He didn’t mind drilling the holes to give the tomatoes we planted proper drainage. He just didn’t like validating my recurring theme that someday all those buckets we kept piling in the basement (some of which we MOVED with from our former bookstore home) would “come in handy someday.” When it turned out I was right, Jack knew there would be no stopping my future hoarding tendencies on household detritus.

He’s kinda right. We have milk jugs piled up so we can make self-watering drip containers, and an old gate salvaged from friends who said “you want this?” It’s leaning against one of the infamous walnut trees, waiting for its day. Gardeners may kinda by nature (no pun intended) be hoarders. Dunno; this is only our second year having fun with the inner and outer outside rooms of our home. Keep you posted. Meamwhile, we keep the inner room clean for visitors and stash all the stuff in the outer room, guarded by the chickens.