I live in a two-worm-farm-home.

Remember when I said I was going to be writing some random blog posts? … Well, here is my first official random blog post.

We are now a two-worm-farm-home.  That is: we now have two worm farms that compost our fruit and vegetable scraps.  The worm bin started as a science project in my mom’s 3^rd grade classroom many years ago.  When they changed science curriculums they didn’t need the worms anymore, so my mom brought them home and we have had worms in our basement for many years.   Our worms in the one bin we have had for years weren’t able to keep up with all our vegetable and fruit scraps, so we decided to add another bin.  We set up the new bin and took some worms out of the old bin, and they are doing well- I haven’t heard any complaints.

worm bin #1

The worms still gross me out.  I do everything possible to avoid touching them directly, but I am sure glad to have them around.  They are pretty low maintenance pets and they are excellent composters.  We keep a plastic container in our fridge and fill it up with fruit and vegetable scraps as we create them.  When the container is full, I take it down to the basement, stir up the dirt a little, create a hole in the dirt for the food and then cover the food with dirt.  It’s hard to estimate how many little red wigglers there are in the bin- hundreds though.  All those little guys/gals go to work and break down the food.  They leave behind castings (worm poop).  There is also a liquid that collects in the bottom of the worm farm container that we call “worm tea”.  I get it out of the worm house via a spigot in the bottom of the container.  I put this liquid in my vegetable gardens as an excellent fertilizer.  The worm castings can also be used for fertilizer, but that requires separating the worms from the castings and that a lot of dirty work- I did that once, but probably won’t do it again for a while.

Inside the worm farm

worms chowing down on a banana peel

There are a lot of people out there who compost with a bin/pile outside, but there aren’t many people out there with worms (if you do have worms let me know- I’d love to exchange some worm stories with you!).  With worms we can compost all year round while outdoor composting really doesn’t work well during the cold winter.  The drawback of using worms to compost is that our composting is limited to mainly fruit and vegetable scraps- they couldn’t possibly compost our grass clippings or other yard waste.

If you want to learn more about worm composting or getting a worm farm of your own I would suggest reading this highly entertaining and informative review/essay/short book about a worm farm on amazon.com.  I came across this when I was looking for info about worm farms, and I was absolutely enthralled with the story and info about these worms.  I can’t necessarily recommend this particular worm bin from personal experience, but all the comments from Michelle R. and other people are fascinating.  Trust me, even if you don’t think you would ever want worms, after you read this you will at least consider getting some of your own.

Community and Coffee Shops

A couple of weeks ago, I read The Suburban Christian: Finding Spiritual Vitality in the Land of Plenty by Albert Y. Hsu.  It’s a great book- anyone who lives in the suburbs and cares about religion, Christianity, spirituality, or the Church should read this book.

What I found most compelling in the book was the author’s discussion of community (because I love community and because two of my dreams are about community).  Suburbia is marketed as the perfect “community.”  A peaceful, quite, safe place to raise your family.  A place where you can have a beautiful house, a yard where your dog and kids can play, exceptional schools, shopping malls and strip malls galore within a 10 minute drive, a million options for entertainment, and jobs so that you can buy just about everything you ever needed or wanted. 

But I think we all know that the suburbs are not the perfect communities they are promoted as.   The suburbs have been given a very bad reputation by many who are concerned (and rightfully so) that life in the suburbs creates self-centered, isolated people who are alienated from their neighbors, their family, and the rest of the world.  The suburbs might be portrayed as perfect “communities”, but in reality there really isn’t much true community around the suburbs (there are of course places in the burbs where community can be found, but these places are far too difficult to find).  Everyone is so busy, so scheduled, so consumed with consuming.  Many of us don’t even know our neighbors living next door.  We don’t form relationships beyond our close family and friends and we don’t love and care for our neighbors (our literal and non-literal neighbors). 

The author of The Suburban Christian, Hsu, was writing about how community participation has greatly decreased over the past few decades especially in suburbs.  Socializing has decreased.  People just don’t spend as much time with other people as they used to.  People are so busy, busy, busy.  A lot of the loss of community can be attributed to the loss of what Ray Oldenburg calls “third places” which he defines in his book The Great Good Place as “public places that host the regular, voluntary, informal, and happily anticipated gatherings of individuals beyond the realms of home and work.”  Back in the day, people gathered in the town square, at church, or at the ice cream social, but we don’t have town squares, more and more people don’t go to church, and we don’t have many ice cream socials anymore. 

Then Hsu started writing about Starbucks.  Starbucks started out with one store in Seattle selling only coffee beans and coffee making equipment.  The founder, Howard Schultz, took a business trip to Italy and he noticed there were espresso bars all over the place.  Each espresso bar was slightly different, but each was filled with people who were drinking coffee and chatting with other people.  Schultz observed the espresso bars and saw people meeting up with friends they saw everyday but also meeting people for the first time.  He then had an “aha” moment realizing that he had been doing the coffee business all wrong.  Hsu, wrote Schultz, “had seen coffee merely as a product, a commodity to be sold, not something with the potential to build relationships and community.”  So Schultz changed his stores.  He set up tables and chairs and started serving coffee in his shops.  The stores became “a place where coffee became an experience, where people could meet and talk and linger, where people built relationships and community.”  He created “third places.”  People flocked to Starbucks around the country because these coffee shops filled the need for third places, for places where community can be built.

I was starting to get worried as I was reading this because in my mind Starbucks does not create authentic community- the sort of community that I want my coffee shop to create.  But then Hsu wrote this:  “Yet Starbucks’s success only goes so far.  While Starbucks may provide an inviting atmosphere and a context where people can connect, it’s not truly a public meeting place for civic interaction.  You might go there with your friends, but you don’t necessarily go to Starbucks to meet strangers and engage neighbors.  In the end, Starbucks is still a commercial enterprise, selling lattes and Frappuccinos.”  Starbucks customers are people who have a car to drive to there and drive through the drive through, people who can afford a $4 (or $5 or $6) cup of coffee, people who are educated enough to know and understand words needed to order a coffee drink.  I haven’t spent a lot of time at Starbucks, but I’ve only met up with good friends, I never met anyone new, I never even saw anyone outside my socioeconomic class, and most of the time I got a drink to go or I sat by myself and didn’t interact with anyone.  Perhaps Starbucks brings to the suburbs an opportunity to build community, but Starbucks is not that ideal “third place” where ALL people from a community can gather together and build community and build a better world.

Now that I’m reassured that Starbucks really does not create the sort of community that I want my coffee shop to create, I have to figure out how my coffee shop will have to be different from Starbucks in order to create authentic community?

Here’s some ideas:

The coffee shop will have to be physically accessible to the community (including those people who don’t have cars or can’t afford to use gas to go anywhere that’s not absolutely necessary).  Ideally people would be able to walk or bike to my coffee shop.  Otherwise maybe I could find a location near one of the few bus routes in the ‘burbs.

The cost of coffee, other drinks, and food cannot prevent people from coming to the coffee shop.  Perhaps there will need to be some sort of a sliding flexible price for coffee and food.   Those who can afford to pay more for their coffee and food can pay more while those who can only afford to pay a few cents for their coffee and food can do so.  A few Panera Bread stores have tried out the “pay-what-you-want” model and it has worked well for business and for the customers.  Check out this article.

The food and drinks being served have to appeal to the people that I want to be a part of the community.  I will have to get the know who is living in the area around my coffee shop and then cater my menu so people will be comfortable with the food being served.  Food has brought people together for thousands of years and I hope this will be a strong part of my coffee shop.

It would be awesome if community spontaneously happened in my coffee shop (picture the grand opening where people of all races and ethnicities and socioeconomic statuses gather and instantly become best friends and then leave the shop, go home picking up litter along the way and serve their neighbors, come back the next day with a hundred more best friends of all different backgrounds, etc.).  But as we see with Starbucks, “community” doesn’t spontaneously happen.  Building community takes a conscious effort.  I’m not exactly sure what this might look like but I will have to figure out ways to get people to actively engage with each other and get to know new people who are different from them.  It will be simple things like me encouraging regular customers to say “hi” to a new customer and perhaps more formal things like a night of people sharing their life stories.

The focus and purpose of the shop (especially for me) cannot be selling coffee or other products.  Just because the coffee shop aims to be socially and environmentally responsible doesn’t mean that it’s ok to allow consumption or profit to take over.   The ultimate focus must be creating community and making life better for the Salvadoran coffee farmers.  Of course selling coffee will be a part of this and it will be a business, but it must be more of a ministry than a business- people must come first.  I don’t know exactly how to find this balance, but this is vital.

Dream #4

The Dream: to be a farmer.

Now when I say I want to be a farmer, don’t picture me on thousands of acres of cornfields in a ginormous air-conditioned John Deer tractor harvesting the unnaturally perfect rows of genetically-engineered-pesticide-and-herbicide-and-fertilizer-contaminated-corn.

When I say I want to be a farmer I mean I want to be an environmentally conscious, self-sustainable, small-scale, organic farmer of a variety of veggies, legumes, fruits, and grains.  I would also like to have some hens so I can have their eggs, cows so I can have their milk, some bees for their honey, sheep for their wool, and llamas and alpacas for their fur (and just because they are really cool animals).

I haven’t really decided if I just want to farm to have enough for my family or whomever else I’m living with, or if I would want to produce more food so I could sell it to other people.  Probably the latter.

Where this dream came from:

I’ve had my own little vegetable garden in my backyard for the past few years.  I have two raised beds that are each about 3 by 6 feet.  I cram as many plants in there as I can (which I know I’m not supposed to do, but I do it anyways).  I’ve grown tomatoes, cherry tomatoes, broccoli, red and green peppers, jalapeño peppers, cucumbers, and cabbage.  I love watching the plants grow.  It’s so cool to see vegetable grow from the tiny plants- it’s almost like a miracle to go out to the garden and one day see things that resemble real live vegetables.  And there is nothing better than going into your backyard, picking some broccoli, cutting it up, and then eating it within 2 minutes- doesn’t get any fresher than that.

This year I’m growing my plants from seed (in previous years I bought little plants from a store).  I ordered seeds from the Seed Savers Exchange which is an organization located in Decorah, Iowa that is dedicated to saving and sharing heirloom seeds.  I planned poorly and ordered my seeds too late and thus got the seeds started too late, but the baby plants are doing pretty well (they don’t look as perfect as the plants you buy at the store though).  I planted them in my little garden a couple weekends ago.  I feel like a mother to my baby plants.  Don’t judge me, but I’ve been talking to the little plants and encouraging them to grow.

This year my church started a community garden, which I am SO very excited about.  We planted a whole bunch of different vegetables, fruits, and herbs.   All the produce is going to be donated to local food pantries and to PADS (an organization that works to end homelessness in our area).  I volunteered to plan the planting of the garden and I thoroughly enjoyed planning it all out, learning about the different kinds of plants that we planted, and I am so excited to watch the garden grow over the summer.  (If you want to see the progress of the community garden over the summer, check out this blog.)

A couple years ago I read a book by Barbara Kingsolver called Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life.  In the book, Barbara writes about the year she, her husband, and two daughters committed to eating only locally grown food which involved growing most of their own food.  I loved reading about their adventures, the creativity they had to use to eat locally, and the difficulties and blessings of living off the land.  Just reading the book made me want to have my own farm so I could do what they did- to be as self-sufficient as possible.

Our globalized world is becoming more and more dependent on oil, ever-advancing technologies and machines, and enormous multi-national corporations.  Perhaps not everything about this globalized world is bad, but it has come to the point where we have next to no idea where our food comes from, who grew it, what’s in/on our food, what resources were used to get the food into my grocery cart, etc.  And it shouldn’t be this way.  The less knowledge we have about our food, the less we are able to make good decisions about the environmental and social costs of the food we eat.  I want to be able to make good decisions about what I put into my mouth.  After all, you are what you eat.  If I produced my own food then I would know almost every single detail about the food I was eating and I would be able to ensure that the food was produced in an environmentally and socially conscientious way.

What I would need to do to make the dream a reality:

• Learn more about farming
• Have land to farm on
• Obtain some farming equipment
• Find other people with farming knowledge and experience to help me 

Obstacles to making the dream a reality:

• There’s not much land for farming left in the suburbs so I might have to leave the burbs or make do with less land
• Actually surviving on what I grow
• Finding other people to help and join in my farming