Brennans Strike Gold!

It's leaf-gathering time again! Yes, I know most of you are raking up your leaves right now and putting them out on the curb to be picked up. And let me take the time to say: Thank you! We are taking advantage of your generosity and whisking away your bags soon after they hit the curb. The reason? Leaves are gold to us. A couple of years ago we bisected our backyard with a dry creek, and decided to convert half the yard to a woodlands. This way we'd have less grass to fertilize, cut and water. We covered the existing grass with wood chips and lots of leaves that first year, and each subsequent year we add at least 6 inches of additional leaves. That's why this time of the year is so exciting for us...free ground cover, packaged and waiting for us to come pick it up. We pilfered 41 bags from our unsuspecting neighbors this year, up from last year's count of 27.

Milkweed in November

Two seasons ago we planted a rain garden with tiny plants from the Native Plant Nursery in Ann Arbor. Greg sold us a rain garden kit, about 50 plants for about $35. These plants were about 1-2 inches - we were mostly buying roots. The first year they grew modestly, but the second year they just exploded in size, with many of the plants getting as high as 5-6 feet.

Last week we were outside doing some late fall gardening and Tom took this picture of one of our milkweed plants, just as the seeds were emerging from the pods. As we looked around the garden, we saw seeds scattered among our other plants as well. The milkweed is such a wonderful plant. It is a host plant for monarch butterflies and produces a beautiful flower mid-summer. As you can see, it has its own beauty in the fall as well.

Cork Flooring

At last week's Tuesday meeting, we heard Denny's somewhat depressing report about his search to find a place to recycle old carpeting. First, he could not find anyone who was willing to recycle his carpeting, and then, after doing a bit of research, he found out that carpeting that goes to landfills takes approximately 20,000 years to decompose! I would say that poses a problem - most of us will replace carpeting at least a couple of times in our lifetimes.

Tom and I were at that point this fall. We own a group of 6 condominiums in Longboat Key, Florida, and the carpets in the bedrooms were stained beyond repair and needed to be replaced. The problem for us was the fact that we have never had luck with carpets in rental units - they are stained within months of installation, and within 5 years or so they need to be replaced. We really didn't want to put more carpeting in, knowing that it would have to be replaced within a short period of time. So what to do? Most people like carpeting in their bedrooms.

We decided to follow the example of the IHM Motherhouse in Monroe and go with cork flooring. We knew, after walking on the floors at the Motherhouse, that cork was soft on the feet and quite beautiful, in addition to coming from a sustainable source [cork is considered a rapidly renewable product]. So the flooring was recently installed and the results are beyond our expectations! We love the look, the feel is soft on the feet, there is no echo-factor in the room. We didn't even feel the need to add scatter rugs. We have to see how they will wear, but for now we are quite pleased. By the way, we bought our flooring online at floormall.com, and the type we purchased was Valencia.

Composting

It has taken us a while, but we finally have our composting routine down, so I thought I would share it with you. The composting bucket, pictured above, is kept under the counter, and is pulled up when we're making meals. We toss any food scraps in it, with the exception of meat and dairy. While in Wales this summer, we also learned that you can put any paper towels or napkins in there too. Once a day, or once every other day, we empty this bucket into the bigger bucket in the garage (this one is just a reused kitty litter container with a snap lid). Then once a week we take the garage compost bucket out to our compost bin at the corner of our yard.

You'd be amazed at how much less garbage you take out every week if you compost and recycle paper and plastic. We are down to 2 bags a week. And somehow the compost doesn't smell...

A Visit

Last week the Brennans and Bradleys headed up north to enjoy the beautiful autumn weather and to visit with Mike and Kate Winnell. Mike and Kate live up in the Petoskey area in a home tucked into the woods and surrounded by sunshine and wildlife. We wanted to visit them because Mike has been doing important work classifying aquatic invertebrates for the past 34 years, and we wanted to learn more about what this process has been like. We learned that Mike receives samples gathered by state governments and private organizations, and his responsibility is to take the sample, examine every part of it, and classify all of the species he finds. What great work! Mike's findings are used in studies all across the country - he is considered a nationwide expert.


Best of all, he and Kate are just wonderful people who were kind enough to share an afternoon with some intrepid travelers. After seeing Mike's work space, we were invited to meditate with them in their meditation room, and then had coffee and cake.