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Sprouts

Re-run from last year.

Supporting yourself generally requires land, tools, weeding, composting, practice, and finally the months of waiting for things to finish growing. There is one kind of food, however, that can be grown by anyone, indoors, in any time of year, in a few days – sprouts.

I don’t mean Brussels Sprouts – nutritious as they are -- which are the buds of a certain type of cabbage. I mean seeds or beans – mung beans, broccoli seeds, radish seeds, alfalfa seeds -- that have been soaked and kept moist for a few days and have begun to turn into green shoots, as they would in soil.

The Chinese have sprouted for at least 5,000 years, and many Westerners have found growing sprouts an easy source of nutrition in lean times. Captain Cook used sprouting as a source of Vitamin C to avoid scurvy on long ocean voyages, as did soldiers in World War I and Indians during the famine of the 1930s. Sprouts are also high in protein – seven cups have an average person’s daily recommended allowance.

You can sprout the beans or seeds of most edible plants – the only common ones to avoid altogether are nightshade plants like tomatoes or potatoes, whose sprouts are as poisonous as the leaves of the grown plants. Mung beans -- for sale in most health-food stores for a euro or two a bag -- are a common and easy way to begin. School-children are often told to let them lie on a wet paper towel, but I get fine results just from letting them sit in a bowl-sized plastic tub or (unsealed) Ziploc bag.

Rinse the beans first, and then let them sit in a tub of water for about six hours or so. Then drain the water and let the beans sit in the damp tub for the next few days, rinsing them every eight hours or so -- the beans need to be kept moist but not swimming in standing water. Every morning before work, every day when you come home, and every night before bed, fill the tub with water again and then let it drain out. Take care that the damp seeds do not grow moldy – I found this to be a hazard with broccoli and alfalfa seeds, but never with beans. In three days or so the beans should have sprouted into white-and-green shoots, at their height of nutritional value.

Sprouts can be eaten in salads – I like to mix mine with shredded carrots and beets in a lemon-and-wasabi sauce. Many people eat broccoli, alfalfa or radish sprouts on sandwiches instead of lettuce. Soybean sprouts, popular in Chinese cooking, are the only ones that are better cooked.

As mung beans cost very little and keep for years, you can get all your protein and many of your vitamins for only a couple of euros a week. You might love them, you might not, but you should have them handy for emergencies.

Remembrance Day

Veterans' Day to Americans. Photo courtesy of WikiCommons.

The view from our front gate

The one-lane gravel road curves around the canal.

Heating

As winter approaches, families in our area will heat their homes in a variety of ways – using oil heaters, propane, stoves that burn coal, wood and peat turf, and of course electricity. We will heat our rooms, our water tanks and our food, and the price of this heating seems to rise every year.

We need to think seriously about how we heat our homes, for a few reasons. First, the cost of heating and electricity seems to rise every year, even as we expect to face both more and more severe economic troubles. Second, many of our heating systems rely on fossil fuels, either directly – say, by burning oil in a home tank – or indirectly, by burning fossil fuels to generate electricity. Fossil fuels like oil have gone up and down in price in recent years, but will generally become more precious in the years ahead – and they worsen climate change. We should try to wean ourselves off them as much as we can.

One of the easiest ways to save on one’s energy bill and carbon emissions is to simply turn the thermostat down and use less. I am not a model citizen in this area – I moved to Ireland from land with hotter and drier summers, and am less tolerant of the Irish climate than natives are. I get my own back in the summer, when I happily bask in the lukewarmth and those around me are panting and sweating. Either way, though, it teaches us that we are adaptable --- there are people who live in 50-degree deserts and polar icecaps, and we are perfectly capable of surviving a slightly cooler home.

You can, of course, buy long thermal underwear, thermal socks and multiple layers. You can, of course, keep the heat off when you are not at home, and you can heat only the room you will occupy in the evenings. We also generate our own heat, so families keep warmer when they spend the evenings playing games than when they each stare at their own computers in separate rooms. We can also use hot water to warm us in various ways – holding hot water bottles, sipping hot tea or soup and keeping our feet in baths of hot water in the evenings.

Another simple way of coping with the winter chill is to use passive heating. This can take the form of a south-facing conservatory, or a polytunnel for your garden. Consider putting a polytunnel right up to your back door, to have an inexpensive place to sit outside and keep plants all winter. Consider whether it is feasible to put a half-conservatory on the south side of your home, creating a garden patio and slowing the loss of warm air.

Wood-burning stoves might not seem like the greenest solution, but they can work well if you have a good supply of fast-growing wood. We have dozens of willow trees which we pollard, resulting in piles of firewood that renew annually, along with many fast-growing pine trees. As long as you grow back as much wood as you are using, you are not damaging the environment or the climate.

It’s hard to get too much home insulation, and most of us don’t have enough. If you want to add more insulation yourself, consider using fleece – farmers might have some left over, and a fleece will trap heat without introducing toxic chemicals into the home – and it does not catch fire. Whether you use fleece or the more conventional insulation, however, it will probably help you save that much extra at a time when we all need it.

Photo: me and Girl in Minnesota.

The Girl

Sometimes I just have no idea where she gets things. As we drove to my annual clothes-shopping expedition, The Girl in the back seat covered herself with a blanket, stretched her arms out and said, “BOO! I am the Giant Mushroom Monster!”

Well you’re quite scary, I said, but good to meet you all the same. Is Giant Mushroom Monster your first name?

“Yes,” she said in as much of a booming voice as a five-year-old girl can muster. “My last name is ‘The One Who Eats Papas named Brian!’”

Oh no! I said, not taking my eyes off the road, I don’t want to be eaten. Does Giant Mushroom Monster have a middle name, I asked?

“Yep,” she said. “Sam Donaldson.”

At this point I had to pull over for laughing so hard.

Update

So here’s what’s happening lately:

1.) The Halloween Festival drew dozens, if not hundreds, of people to taste food from local vendors, hear local storytellers and live bands, see workshops on willow-weaving and seed saving. I’m sorry to say, though, that we had quite a few hitches – one speaker had swine flu, one missed his train and dutifully drove through the night across Ireland --and we drew only small numbers of people to our talks on peak oil, climate change, local currency and transition. I will talk at our next meeting about what we might want to do differently next time.

2.) The house should be finished in a few weeks, and we are eager to move in – so many other things, from preparing the garden to setting up a beehive – must wait for the new address.

3.) With the winter nights rapidly growing longer and daylight savings time ending, we have entered the annual long darkness. For those who haven’t heard me mention this in the past, we are less than a thousand miles from the Arctic Circle – it is the Gulf Stream that keeps Ireland from ever freezing, but we are at the same latitude as polar bear country in Canada -- and the depth of winter brings only six or seven hours of dim light.

4.) I have been very busy with the day job for the last few weeks, and unable to devote much time to writing, outside of the weekly newspaper column. It comes in crests and valleys.

Back tomorrow

Just too much happening to blog today.

Self-portrait with Girl

The Girl

Before she went to bed tonight, the Girl and I played a game called “World Ball” – we rolled an inflatable globe of the Earth back and forth, and each time we had to answer a question.

Where do Grammy and Grampa live? I asked.

“Um ... here!” she said, pointing to Missouri. As she rolled the ball to me, she asked, “Where do giraffes live?” and I pointed out Africa to her.

I was pretty pleased with her knowledge. She could point to Antarctica, to the Equator, to where women wear bindis and where families build igloos. She could point out our own island and England. And in-between each one, I answered her questions until she stumped me: How long can hippos hold their breath?

That’s a good question, I said – I don’t know. I’ll have to look it up and tell you tomorrow.

She looked at me disapprovingly. “I thought you knew nearly everything!”