Life Of An Ea-Pea, Episode 6: Apartment Gardening

Some time ago I wrote a Life of an Ea-Pea post on attempting to eat locally. I'm pleased to announce that I still attempt to buy only "locally" produced foods whenever possible, even if I haven't yet started on my Farmers' Market diet plan yet. Knowing though, when I wrote the post, that it would take me a while before I could graduate to that point I decided to do the next best thing: grow my own tomatoes... inside my basement apartment.

Meet EP Tom (short for Tomat - it's a European name), my first ever tomato plant. In this picture, he's a little green, but that's because this picture was taken back in the beginning of summer, shortly after I bought him.

(This was a momentous occasion, as it was EP Tom's first ever ripened tomato. And yes, it was the most delicious tomato I've ever tasted. You can also see my EP research books I borrowed from the public library in the background.)

Since the above picture was taken, EP Tom has produced a remarkable 15 tomatoes, without ever setting leaf outside of my apartment. I keep him growing with plenty of water, crushed up egg shells, and some tomato food pellets (and love). At the time of writing this, he still has some green tomatoes on the vine, which I hope will ripen up before he withers up/hibernates/dies, or whatever it is that tomato plants do in the winter. Next summer I will look to double my operation.

Life Of An Ea-Pea, Episode 5: Found Art

When most people think of "found art" they don't have a clue what I'm talking about. Other people, in the know, might think about a university undergraduate, majoring in art, taking some scrap pieces of metal and welding them together, or glueing pine-cones on some old, painted, paper-mached particle board. However, here in my bedroom, I view "found art" as posters I find on the ground outside, or somewhere else, which I take home and place on my wall with sticky tack.

The practice started as a way to liven up my apartment when I was living by myself and had no money, but has since continued on as a way to further my radical EP-3Rs agenda. I don't just find posters though, I have also furnished my entire living room, and bedroom... and dining room, with items I have either been given by friends/strangers, or which I have found outside on the curbside.

(In the above dimly lit picture you can see a rug, futon/sofa, two captains chairs, and a coffee table I received from friends I met through another acquaintance. You'll also find a TV dinner table, bookshelf and mirror I found outside behind my apartment. And that's just one of my rooms...)

Life Of An Ea-Pea, Episode 4: Bottles and Cans and Toilet Paper

The above picture is of the world's fastest bottle sorter working through my first ever load of bottles, my brother EP Dan and I returned to a nearby bottle depot way back in early September. More importantly than how fast this employee separated my beverage containers though, and even more important than the $14.40 we received for them, was that I didn't pay for a single one of them.

Since I moved into my apartment way back in June, I started thinking that money may not be coming as quickly as I thought it would, and so I might need to literally save up my pennies - in the form of cans and bottles - for some extra purchases at a later date. Every time I walked or cycled or did anything around Halifax, I made an effort to search every gutter, every bush, and the bottom of every garbage can I passed by to see if there were any bottles or cans left lying around. By the end of September, my brother EP Dan, and I, had collected enough bottles to amass a small sour cream container full of nearly $38 in bottle refunds.

Last week we raided our bank, and with the loot purchased a few necessary items for our apartment. Number one on that list of things to buy: toilet paper. The purchase was a sort of fitting in a way, since it was made by cleaning up people's litter, and people who litter deserve to be wiped with a dirty bum.

Life Of An Ea-Pea, Episode 3: Leave No Waste

Regular readers may have noticed that I did not make my usual daily post on August 31st. I apologize, but I was rather busy moving apartments and was too busy/tired to make an entry.

Speaking of moving, this change in apartment was brought about because my brother, EP Dan, came to Halifax for university. For convenience, we decided to move in together and so I had booked a two bedroom, even before I moved in to my original one bedroom apartment, in the same building.

I moved in to my first apartment on June 15th and moved out on August 31st. That makes two and a half months living on my own, and with the recent move I decided to finally take out my trash.

There I am in the above picture taken today, making my first ever trip to the garbage bins outside my home since moving to Halifax, looking like I just came out of the army (I swear it's just the sunlight reflecting off my face). More importantly though, I'd like everyone to do their best to zoom in on the bag and see what I'm carrying.

That's right, after two and a half months all I produced for rubbish was able to fit into one regular-sized Superstore shopping bag. Everything else I used I either reduced (e.g., specifically buying products that use less packaging or buying a product second hand that contain no packaging), recycled (e.g., recycled), or reused (e.g., using plastic produce bags from the supermarket to store organic wastes in an old 2 Litre ice cream bucket I received from someone else until I am ready to send the contents to a compost heap).

Be a good person and a good citizen - follow the 3Rs. Don't pretend that you're too old or too busy; everyone knows that's just not true.

Life of an Ea-Pea, Episode 2: In The Dark

When I first moved to my new apartment back in June, it took roughly eight days to get my power hooked up because of an unforeseen complication. In that time I had no power at all and no lights. I remember one person asked me how I could live in the dark, and then jokingly quipped that surely I didn't plan to live by lighting candles every night. The truth is though, that's exactly how I survived. I did everything by sun light during the day, and by candle light at night.

When I finally did get my electricity connected, I felt that it would be a shame to pollute the environment so unnecessarily by relying on my lights like I used to do before this experience. While I do turn on my lights, now and then, for tasks that require acute vision (e.g., cutting thin slices of cheese, or finding my keys), for the most part I live entirely off of natural light sources.

Furthermore, I remembered from a couple of years back how a friend of mine used to unplug all of his non-essential electronics at night to help minimize "phantom drain" (electricity drawn by a device even when it's turned "off"). While my electronic possessions are minimal, I adapted this technique for my most energy intensive activity: blogging. I run my netbook on battery power until it is nearly empty, charge it up again, and then unplug the power cord from the wall and run the battery down again. I repeat as necessary, every day. At night, or when I leave my home, I unplug all the power cords in my house except for the cord for my refrigerator.

The purpose of my energy conservation techniques are two fold. A) Using less energy costs less money, and B) There's no such thing as "clean energy". Every kWh I don't use is one less kWh worth of carbon emitted into the atmosphere from the coal-based power plant used to produce the electricity in the first place.

One day soon I hope to have the money to have my apartment's carbon emissions offset by Bullfrog Power's "cleaner" energy. Until then I'll help save the planet by opening up the curtains on my window and unplugging my modem at night.

Life Of An Ea-Pea, Episode 1: The 1000 Mile Diet

When I first arrived back in Halifax on June 4, after the conclusion of my cross-Canada travels, I told myself that I would try to buy all of my groceries only from one of the various farmers' markets around the region. In fact for my first three days back, when I was living at a hostel, I ate nothing but beets, beet greens, carrots, carrot greens, and rye bread that I had found at the nearby Halifax Farmers' Market.

I had been inspired by the dedication of authors like Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon who wrote the 100 Mile Diet, about only eating food that had been grown within 100 miles of their home, and numerous other "locavores". I was convinced that eating locally was not only healthier for the environment (think about the damage done by shipping those apples in from South America or cantaloupes from Costa Rica, etc., when they might even be grown in your own province). A problem with my plan arose when I moved further away from the Famers' Market, and realized I did not have the carrying capacity to cycle my groceries back home (or failed to come up with a way to do it). Additionally, the Farmers' Market is only open on Saturdays from 9 AM until Noon, and even though I may be an ea-pea, I just wasn't ready to give up my Saturday mornings when there are four supermarkets within walking range of my current house. (Note: I recently discovered a Thursday afternoon farmers' market even closer to my home than the closest supermarket.)

Enter plan B: The 1000 Mile Diet. I had to be realistic with myself. While eating food only grown 100 miles away might be realistic for middle class yuppies from Vancouver, I was dirt poor, had no capacity to build a garden, and was not mature enough yet in my ea-pea ways to figure out all of my options for buying my food directly from the local farmers. The 1000 Mile Diet involved a pledge to myself to only buy groceries that a) was grown/produced in Canada, and b) came from no further away than Ontario. In a pinch though, I have purchased carrots from New Jersey (roughly 1000 miles away), but only as a last resort.

How do I do it? What does my fridge look like? Well, on any given day I have apples, milk, eggs, potatoes and blueberries from Nova Scotia; delicious, nutritious, organic oatmeal from New Brunswick; and cucumbers, red peppers, and tomatoes from Ontario. On special occasions I even find Nova Scotia carrots, strawberries, cantaloupe, and any of the Ontario vegetables being grown in Nova Scotia too at my local Sobey's, and numerous other Atlantic grown goodies like corn or green and yellow wax beans, or turnips. If I'm patient I can even find peaches from Ontario. In short, I eat a complete diet from food grown/produced only in Eastern Canada.

It's not perfect, but it's a start. By this fall, I hope to be making it to the Farmers' Market on at least a monthly basis, especially now that I have a new bicycle with a basket on the back (more on that in a later Life of an Ea-pea post). Ultimately even, I will eat nothing but hand picked vegetables from my own backyard garden, and hand picked eggs from my own backyard chickens, and even hand squirted milk from my own backyard goat (okay, maybe that last one is a little too ambitious). In conclusion, I am Dave and I am an ea-pea; hear me roar!