Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
Congratulations Debunix! That makes three happy Can O' Worms users
I've encountered! Is the volume of that couple of pounds of food about
half a gallon? I tend to feed very large volumes of food to my worms,
but I think the average tends to be about 20-25 pounds per five gallon
bucket of scraps.
  

    
I'm actually pretty happy with mine, too. I create pretty large
volumes of tasty kitchen scraps, and they seem to keep up. They look
happy and healthy, and they crank out lots of poop! I just drain the
bottom once every few weeks and dump it on my citrus plants, which LOVE
it.
  

    
I have a small bucket that holds about 3 quarts, and depending on how
much I've been cooking, they get 1/2 to 1 full buckets per week, plus a
few handsful of avocado leaves scooped up from the usually abundant
supply from the tree that shades the bin.
  

    
Should add that I got mine after first trying a homemade bin using
rubbermaid tubs (the OSCR design)--got too stinky too fast; a 'Worm
factory'--too hard to keep the fruit flies out; and finally the Can O'
Worms, which was easy on the odor enough to keep indoors, although
fruit flies were a bit of a problem.  Now, outdoors, I don't worry
about the fruit flies, and they're not too abundant anyway when the
worms are happiest.
  

    

I have the worm factory - 3 rectangular bins. It seems to work ok. they eat
a bunch, can also go 2 months with no attention and survive.
  

    
I have a Rubbermaid tub with holes drilled in. I've lost a few batches
of worms, first with too much food, second with not enough water. I
have a Can o'Worms but haven't tried to set it up yet.
  

    
Let's see... 

My worm bins are indoors, of necessity, here in Minnesota--the odor
problems and the fruit fly problems that plague badly designed bins are
really not acceptable here, so my bins are designed to work well
indoors! Very few people will put up with stench and fruit flies in
their homes. Most of the stacking bins do not have a large enough
capacity for my purposes, and grow fruitflies because of the large
amounts of air that enter the systems. 

The other part of the equation is the instructions. With the right bin
and the right instructions, a bin should run odor free and without
fruit flies.
  

    
Since no one has written anything today, I will write about my dog,
The Amaising Maisie, a one year old Australian Cattle Dog, who is as
cute as a button, as sharp as a tack, and so friendly that we refer to
her as "Miss Congeniality." She loves everyone who is on two legs, four
legs, or seated in a wheelchair.

Miss Maisie and I have been attending puppy training classes since she
was three months old, and she is getting pretty good--unfortunately, I
am a much slower learner than she is, so it wasn't until last Tuesday,
when the instructor told me for the THIRD WEEK IN A ROW, that I needed
to stop giving Maisie a treat every time she performed a trick
correctly, because if I kept rewarding her every time, she wouldn't
want to do the more complicated tricks. Well, I don't need to be told
everything four times, so last Wednesday I began giving Maisie a treat
only after she had performed at least four tricks correctly. The
difference was astonishing! In less than a minute Maisie went from
performing tricks in a rather desultory fashion, since she has been
doing the same four dozen or so tricks, with gradual additions, for
many months, to being wildly enthusiastic, doing her tricks willingly,
speedily, and very, very happily. I believe this technique is called
something like "intermittent rewards," and is the reason that gambling
is so addictive for many people. If you get a reward every time you do
something, that something becomes a job, and is not so exciting.
However, if you perform that same task, and are only rewarded every
once in a while, that task becomes an exciting game of chance!  I'm
pretty sure that this works the same for all mammals.

I really wish I had learned how to train dogs before I had children! 

We plan to put videos of Maisie up on YouTube in the relatively near
future. 
  

    
She sounds like a great dog!  You really should join The Well, Ellen,
since we have a terrific and lively conference called Pets where we all
share stories and pictures and videos of our furred and feathered
friends.  Some of these guys are just about as fabulous as your dog. 
You'd find yourself in welcoming company...

Back to Green Barbarians, though.  The first page of today's San Jose
Mercury News had a front page headline ripped right out of your book:
"Come clean, activists urge manufacturers of household products"!
(http://www.mercurynews.com/bay-area-living/ci_14382845)

"Some studies have linked cleaning product components to asthma,
antibiotic resistance, hormone changes and other health problems. The
industry's major trade group, the Soap and Detergent Association,
assails the research as flawed, says the products are safe if used
correctly and notes that cleaning can itself help stop the spread of
disease."

Sounds like you're riding the crest of the wave!  This article
mentions Seventh Generation as a responsible manufacturer of cleaning
products.  What's your take on them, and are there any others we can
find in local stores that you'd recommend?
  

    
I'm running low on my dish soap, and always find it depressing trying
to buy more.  A lot of the 'green' brands seem to appear and disappear
rapidly, and trying to figure out which ingredients are both likely to
be effective and least environmentally damaging--not just in my use and
disposal, but in the production of the product--makes my head hurt.
  

    
ecover is supposed to be a good cradle-to-cradle brand --- except i think it
is made in europe, so there is the carbon footprint issue...
  

    
Exactly the problem.
  

    
I actually use Ecover products because they have no scent of any kind,
including natural scents. My skin tends to react to even "natural"
citrus fragrance. 

There is no such thing as a perfect commercial product... Anything we
buy in a store will always have embodied transit costs and packaging of
some kind. Unless I grow something myself, or buy it from someone who
has grown it herself using no fuels of any kind, and then walked or
biked over to get that product, and carried it home in my own basket
that I wove myself, there will always be embodied transit or fuel costs
in any product that I buy.  I do grow a lot of food myself, using my
own worm compost for fertilizer, watering it with rainwater dipped out
of my own rainbarrels, and without using any machinery at all, so quite
a lot of our food actually does have very low embodied fuel costs,
until I process it. Our freezer uses electricity, our stove uses
propane.  We all need to just do the best we can. 

CJ, I will check out the Pets conference.
  

    
i default to the unscented stuff from british columbia: bio clear? bioclean?
it seems to work well and as far as carbon footprint, i dont think bc to
calif is too terrible.
  

    
FYI, Ellen, your membership does not expire when your two week stint
here is up. We hope you stick around.  


I use Borax for my dishwashing needs. I don't know how it does in the
dishwasher, but I love it when I wash dishes by hand.  I'll wait around
for all of you to tell me if Borax is sanitizing *enough*.
  

    
Loris,

The stuff from B.C. sounds great! I haven't seen it here.

Lisa,

I will stick around for a while, certainly!

Borax is great stuff!  Actually, anything that gets the grease off,
and removes all the food residues from the dishes and cookware is
plenty good enough, as long as the dishes are allowed to dry completely
before they are put away. Washing dishes in just hot water would be
enough as long as all the residues were removed and the dishes were
allowed to dry completely before being put away.
  

    
Since there aren't any new posts right now, I will put in my political
two cents' worth. Governor Tim Pawlenty, R Minnesota, has just
balanced the state budget singlehandedly by taking the sickest,
weakest, and most helpless Minnesotans off of general assistance and
cutting off their access to health care. He is also cutting state aid
to cities. He has pledged that there will be no tax increases, and he
is, in fact cutting corporate taxes and taxes on small businesses. The
net result is that cities are bleeding to death, property taxes will be
increased enormously, and we will certainly see lots of our most
hapless citizens freezing to death on the streets.

Don't let Tim Pawlenty's Casper Milquetoast looks and demeanor fool
you. He is evil incarnate. If he does make a run for the presidency, I
plan to write letters to the editor to a newspaper in every state in
the Union.
  

    
In another topic on the WELL, there was a recent discussion about
disposable diabers vs. cloth diapers, with the upshot of the discussion
and various cites being that it is basically a tie, which is a greener
way to go. I often think about this kind of thing. 

When I lived in the bay area, I had many more options for locally
grown produce, year round. Here in Asheville, NC, the farmers' market
doesnt even commence till April and then the prices are not always the
best value for my tight budget. I would love to buy the locally grown
and slaughtered chickens, but at about $4.50/per pound, it is way too
expensive for me right now. Sure tastes better though. I have to be
content with buying my eggs from a friend who keeps chickens. More
expensive than cheap eggs, but a little cheaper than the local free
range eggs at the store.
  

    
Ellen, do you have a link to a news story about that?

Julie, I think 'from a friend' is the best source in rural areas. I
can get eggs for $1 or $1.50 a dozen from a friend, compared to $3 in
the farmer's market, and I could get roosters for free from Craigslist
and butcher them myself. I have a meat CSA where I get 17 pounds of
meat for $50 a month, and a veggie CSA where I get a half share for $18
a week, but in practice I get lots of freebies from each because we're
friends. In return, I pass on things I have too much of.
  

    
Here in Asheville, eggs at the farmers Market cost $3.50/doz, $4.50
for the jumbo eggs. In the store the local eggs are $3.70/doz. I get
thme from my friend for $3/doz and the eggs are fresher.
  

    
My condolences on your governor, Ellen.  He sounds like a complete
heel.  There was a very funny editorial in the New York Times recently
about who had the worst legislators, New York or Illinois
(http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/11/opinion/11collins.html), and people
started writing in to talk about how horrible their own states were. 
What a contest!

I did have some questions about your chapter, "Barbarically Healthy,"
which discusses the use of blowfly maggots to clean wounds, doctor fish
to clean off dead and/or damaged skin, and intestinal hookworms to
combat autoimmune disorders.  To your knowledge, has any American
clinic -- perhaps in a university -- undertaken trials of alternative
cures like this, and if so, what has been the reaction of medical
associations and the federal government?  Is there any organization in
any country that is championing studies in this area?  Is there any way
for American doctors to try techniques like these (or even your
amazing suggestion to use kefir as an antifungal agent on the skin)
without fear of being sued?

Finally, the illustrations in this book are outstanding.  Who did
them?  Are they woodcuts?  They match the text beautifully and truly
complement your words.
  

    
(I have not yet read the book but plan to not only read it but also buy a 
copy for a totally green barbarian friend. But -- how different are those 
hookworm, etc, treatments from the totally mainstream use of leeches? It 
seems like if using some little helper animal really works, it gets 
accepted pretty quickly.)
  

    
I was quite saddened by the results of this trial, because I was
rooting for the maggots:

VenUS II: a randomised controlled trial of larval therapy in the
management of leg ulcers.

"CONCLUSIONS: Larval therapy significantly reduced the time to
debridement of sloughy and/or necrotic, chronic venous and mixed
venous/arterial leg ulcers, compared with hydrogel; however, larval
therapy did not significantly increase the rate of healing of the
ulcers. It was impossible to distinguish between larval therapy and
hydrogel in terms of cost-effectiveness."

<http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19925723?itool=EntrezSystem2.PEntrez.Pubmed
.Pubmed_ResultsPanel.Pubmed_RVDocSum&ordinalpos=5>

I have higher hopes for the worm therapy for overactive immune system
disorders, but haven't heard of any clinical trials yet.
  

    
WOW! I go offline for a little while, and WOW!

Okay, let's try this in order:

DIAPERS

Disposible diapers vs. cloth diapers:  I did a lot of research in this
aread, for my previous book, "Organic Housekeeping," and in my 'umble
opinion, there is no contest for the following reasons: 

Disposable diapers must be disposed of, unless you are lucky enough to
live where they can be recycled.This means either they take up an
enormouns amount of space in a landfill, or they are incinerated and
the plastic covers can create dioxin.

Dirty diapers can be vectors of disease, especially soon after an
infant has been inoculated against dangerous diseases (side note: a man
from Duluth died a couple of decades ago after contracting polio while
changing his newly-inoculated infant's diaper). Cloth diapers are
washed, and the effluent ends up in the sanitary sewage system, where
it can be properly treated.

The studies that compared energy use and raw materials use for cloth
and paper diapers made some assumptions about cloth diapers that are
just not true--they compared the amount of resources used for a year of
diapers, but did not factor in that cloth diapers are reusable for
more than a year. Our two children who were born three years apart used
the same set of diapers--our son for three years, our daughter for
just under two years, before they were, respectively, housebroken. My
husband and I are still using those same, 25 year old cloth diapers for
every imaginable cleaning job! I defy anyone to do that with
disposable diapers! When those cloth diapers finally do give up the
ghost, I put the residue in my worm bins.

The cost estimates for how much energy and detergent and water it
takes to launder diapers are wildly out of date--the newer more
efficient front loading washing machines are many times more efficient
than the machines that were used when the estimates were made. 

Researchers have always agreed that the most energy efficient, least
wasteful diapers are those that are rented from a diaper service. The
diaper service picks up dirty diapers and while delivering clean ones,
and yet is still less expensive than disposable diapers, even the
cheapest, most toxic kind. 

And last, but not least, children who are diapered in disposables take
much longer to potty train than do children who are in cloth diapers.
The difference is measured in years, not in months. So, that throws all
the other equations into a cocked hat. 

PAWLENTY STORY:

I couldn't copy the link to the Pawlenty story, but you can Google
"Pawlenty's budget formula meets more resistance by Tom Scheck"


And don't forget that this is the governor who was in office when the
highway bridge collapsed into the Mississippi, and what did he do less
than a week later? HE VETOED MONEY TO REPAIR BRIDGES AND ROADS! 

I'm going to go out and do my chicken and dog chores now. I'll return
soon and resume. 
  

    
CJ,

HELMINTH THERAPY: 

Here are a few current websites:

The U.S. Government is sponsoring clinical trials of helminth therapy
for multiple sclerosis patients at the University of Wisconsin at
Madison: http://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT00645749

Dr. Jean-Pierre Kinet (Harvard Medical School) is conducting a study
on the use of porcine whipworm (Trichuris suis) to alleviate or cure
food allergies, including peanut allergies.


This European company sells therapeutic T. suis :
http://www.ovamed.org
The customer must include a doctor’s letter with the order.

MAGGOT THERAPY:
A retrospective study conducted by Ronald A. Sherman, MD, MSC, was
published in the journal, "Diabetes Care." Dr. Sherman found that
diabetic patients' ulcers healed much more quickly and successfully
when they were treated with maggots than when they weren't.
Unfortunately, maggot therapy is not universally available in the U.S.
http://care.diabetesjournals.org/content/26/2/446.full

DOCTOR FISH
Quite a few American spas imported doctor fish, but they were cracked
down on as "unhygenic" and ordered to stop.

LEECHES
In response to FOM's question: probably the main difference between
helminth and maggot therapy and leech therapy is that leech therapy has
been around for millenia. In contrast, until relatively recently, most
people already had intestinal parasites, thus rendering helminth
therapy completely unneccessary and unimaginable.

When I want to try an "unorthodox" therapy, I contact our
veterinarian, who is always completely up to date on the latest medical
research. Our regular old human doctors never have a clue what I am
talking about. With the vet's advice, I've tried out all kinds of
natural remedies on our dogs, (and occasionally on myself)and very
successfully, I may add!  We've managed to completely control Maisie's
spay-induced urinary incontinence by giving her pumpkin seed and saw
palmetto capsules, which are sold in the herbal store as "Prostate
Formula." The capsules also worked on my son's girlfriend's family dog.

ILLUSTRATIONS:

I'm glad you like the illustrations! They are papercuts.  Each one was
meant to fit in a very specific spot in the text.