Spring is here

Ok, I'm trying not to be too excited but it seems like winter lingered here forever! I think, I hope, trying not to jinx it--spring is here. It's warmer and we're getting those nice spring soaking rains. Not that freezing cold slushy rain. For those of you not familiar with the northwest we have a billion ways to say it's raining.
The arrival of spring has been a good thing for our garden. The strawberries are doing great, I need to start training the beans to climb, and the spinach and radishes are shooting right up.
I get so excited to see this whole garden thing actually work! I mean I put small brown seeds in the dark earth and a little while later they actually grow--and with any luck will produce some tasty edibles. Amazing.
We've been working on a project here at church call the "Live Simply" seminar series. It's a series of four wed. evening seminars that will cover four topics:
1) Global interconnectedness--who's my neighbor and how do I love them
2) Responsible consumerism--how our dollars work in the world
3) Food--what's the deal with local/organic/vegetarian/responsible meat?
4) Going Green--Reducing our carbon footprints together as individuals and congregations.

I'm getting excited about this as the date draws nearer. They will be here at church from 6-7:30pm each Wednesday in May. If you're in the area please join us--it's open to the entire community. There will even be door prizes (good stuff I promise)--can't beat that!

All of the planning for the event prompted me to think about water use. I live in an area where we pay a flat user fee for water, we're not metered. So financially I have little incentive to save or conserve water. Plus it rains all the time here and I live on a lake--water is abundant right? Well it turns out things get pretty dry here in the summer. I can just turn on the hose and water plants, and essentials--we've never planned on watering the lawn. But, what if I could utilize some of the rain water? I did some investigation...I found some rain barrels at our local civic center for $20, barrels that normally cost $100. Awesome. I set it out on my deck to dutifully collect the abundance of rain. No such luck. It takes forever to fill up a rain barrel that way. Then I thought about the gutters on my house. There's a lot of water that goes that way. What if I could hook that up some how? Turns out there are a plethora of inventions to accomplish just that, all available on the Internet. I bought one, http://www.gardeners.com/Downspout%20Diverter/Watering_RainBarrels,33-991,default,cp.html, check it out. I hooked it all up to the side of my house and was a bit skeptical. Last Sunday afternoon it rained a bit and on Monday morning I checked the level of the rain barrel. Chock full, holy smokes. I got 55gallons of water in no time, in what seemed like very little rain. Now I'm going to hook up some more barrels in the system and collect even more.
It's a fun project and I feel like I'm even more off the grid. Next project--a power generator on the stream next to my house!

The funny thing about all this is years ago this rain barrel, gardening, stuff was normal. I'm not inventing anything new, I feel like I'm re-discovering a part of our past that we abandoned for the myth of convenience. The real tragedy is: this is not inconvenient at all, in fact it's a fun, simple, and rewarding project.

Finally, other exciting news, I got some hops plants--that's right I'm taking the next step in off the grid beer brewing. I hear they're going to grow like crazy. I'll post some pictures later.