Features
Hello Modernity!
In the last issue of Organic Matters, I wrote about my contented life of Abundant Sufficiency. It’s funny how one’s mind can become so confused, so quickly.
You see, now I have regular influxes of people who come to my courses and on retreat here, I found it necessary to upgrade my electricity generation system. A simple and straightforward affair - a bit of planning, a bit of research, a bit of financial sorting. The firm I was advised to contact, Micropower, was a second and distant (Cork to Donegal) - choice, but I was let down by the local guy.
Micropower’s owner, Jerry Cotter, kept every promise to visit the site, to provide the quotation, and to send the two skilled hands, Paul and Vince, who got the five big photovoltaic panels and the larger windturbine up and running. From initial enquiry – January 7th, to finished job – March 31st.
From the frugality of using lights only in the room in use and no more, with insufficient energy for a fridge, or a freezer, or a washing machine - or any of the appurtenances of a ‘normal’ 21st century home - I have gone to such an abundance of energy that I have been advised to get as many of them as I can - oh, and a ‘whizzer’ for soup - and to use them.
Quite apart from the prospect of the expense of buying appliances I have lived without successfully for the past forty-five years, I find the notion of using them often and freely so alien. My happy frugality is being insulted by the prospect of this new form of abundance! I get giddy and giggly at the very idea.
Appropriate Technology
Now that sweeping the floor with a broom, which is both gently physical exercise and a meditative process, is no longer de rigeur, because I could use a vacuum cleaner, if I bought one, I feel challenged. Likewise a washing machine - and plumbing. Now, that’s a bridge too far! So much of the modest, frugal, physical exercise in the ways I have lived for forty-five years is under threat, if I give in to the seduction of domestic apparatus!
So I am thinking about appropriate technology. Some appliances do not cause me to abandon the physicality of daily work; a freezer, for example. Now, that whizzer for the soup…the hand-turned mouli would be replaced by it and no harm, it’s a temperamental yoke. And in reminding myself of the many ways to preserve food without freezing, I’ve been re-reading a book about just that and I came across a wonderful recipe for bouillon – DIY soup cubes. First dry the herbs, (celery, or lovage, marjoram, fennel, thyme) and the veggies (onion, carrot, garlic) then…it’s the extra attachment that came with the whizzer - (I did, I went and bought one - an offer in a big store,) it’ll powder all those dried things so much more efficiently and quickly that I could in my mortar and pestle. I harvested the herbs straight away. All I have to do is buy the brewers’ yeast and the olive oil…
Decisions
And all that lactofermentation; I’ve got fired up to do some more of that. I first did it a couple of years ago and the products are truly delicious. But then I remembered the raspberries: oh the raspberries; my favourite summer fruit. For years, I’ve made jam from them. Last year, I made sixty-two pounds - and I might use only one jar in the whole winter. I give it all away. How I would love to have raspberry fool, or a raspberry flan in the dead of winter. That’s it: I’m definitely going to buy the freezer! What else? An electric blanket? No, definitely not. The pathological stress of lying on all those wires is a no-go area and a hot water bottle is so much more comforting. An electric toothbrush? No, again; they’re just for lazy spendthrifts! An electric slow-cooker? What, give up my hay box? No way. An electric kettle? But why? I have a kettle on the back of the range 24/7 and boiling water by merely moving it. No kettle, then.
You know, the broad beans are well up now and a bigger area than usual. And the mange-tout peas, there’s loads of them up, too. The early Dwarf French beans are ready to go in and the runners I’ll sow in a couple of weeks.
D’you know - I might buy two freezers oh, the luxury!
Gillian Westbrook has been appointed to the new position of
General Manager with IOFGA. Coming from a background in the regulatory area...
