Jenny Jump State Park

Last summer my husband and my daughter went on a weekend trip to Jenny Jump State Park, camping and hiking with some friends. My husband has been spending a weekend camping with some of these friends at various New Jersey (and occasionally New York and Pennsylvania) state parks and forests for almost twenty years, taking our children since they were toddlers. The Parker family is often part of the group, and every year John Parker sends us some of his beautiful photos. There are always photos of the children, and of the whole party at the most interesting parts of their hike, or the most scenic spots, or the highest places they climbed. This year there were some beautiful photos of the park, and I want you to see them and start planning a trip to Jenny Jump State Park for this year. From Montgomery it is a drive of an hour and a half, so you can just go for an afternoon.

The first two photos are the beautiful views from a lookout point.

All the other pictures are lovely things seen along the trail. John says that he likes to photograph "wildflowers and dead trees and things people usually don't notice as they pass by."

The third photo is the woods the hikers walked through, and the fourth is a boulder in the woods.

The fifth photo is a snake found beside the trail. This was very unusual and exciting, and it is not poisonous, so if you are afraid of snakes don't let this discourage you from visiting the park.

The sixth photo shows Virginia creeper and native grasses growing around a rock outcrop. The seventh features the berries of Virginia creeper, blue with red stems. Virginia creeper is a beautiful plant, under-appreciated here in the US, but often planted to grow on stately homes in Europe.

The eighth photo shows the beautiful fall color of red maple leaves, with a few heart-leaf aster flowers and leaves in the background. Next you see partridge berry, a slow-growing native groundcover, in the ninth photo.

Last of all is a picture of a face in a tree trunk. I think it looks friendly, but others may see a different expression.

Thanks for the pictures, John!

Save Energy at Home

Winter is one time of the year when I can't help thinking about energy. I can even hear the furnace working and the pipes in the walls heating up. New Jersey has a great program to help you save energy at home, and you can even save money saving energy.

Visit this website:
http://www.njcleanenergy.com/residential/programs/home-performance-energy-star/home-performance-energy-star-r
to learn about New Jersey's Board of Public Utilities' Home Performance with Energy Star program.

I learned about this program at an energy workshop that Montgomery and Hillsborough Townships sponsored last winter at the Hillsborough Library. It starts with a home energy audit, worth $300, which only costs you $125. It took my husband and me quite a while to get an appointment for an audit, because this is such a great program that there is a lot of demand for audits! We finally had the audit last spring, and it was very interesting. It took about three hours, and at the end we were given a report, telling what we could do to make our home more energy efficient. All the items were chosen for cost efficiency, and the resulting energy savings were estimated. Also, state subsidies and federal tax credits were identified--that's one of the ways you can save money by saving energy.

Some of the suggested projects were ones we didn't want to do, such as knock many holes in our newly-painted plaster walls to blow in insulation. However, there were many other projects to choose from. Then we interviewed three certified contractors, who gave us estimates for the work. Some of them were more experienced than others, and had advice for us on what would work best in our old house. All of these companies are very busy, so it was months before we could get the work done.

Next came the hard part--moving everything out of the closets in our attic so they could be insulated. My husband did most of the work, but I still thought it was a pain. I reminded myself many times that I could complain about it on this blog. We even found some things we don't need any more, and we are still trying to give them away. Need any decorator fabric scraps, anyone? (Don't ask)

We got a new burner and boiler (equivalent of a furnace) and hot water heater in our basement, and new digital thermostats on three floors (now if only we could figure out how to program them!). Next other contractors came. Their first job was a blower test. They close up all the windows and doors except one door, into which they fit an adjustable door with a blower, and see how hard the fan has to blow to suck the air out of the house. That is sort of a measure of how many tiny cracks and gaps are in the house. Then they set to work sealing and filling those little cracks and gaps. They sealed cracks around the windows in the basement and insulated the basement ceiling. They insulated gaps at the top of the basement walls, so air couldn't circulate from the basement to the attic or the attic to the basement. (Later we got a radon test to make sure our radon levels were still OK). They also insulated all those closets in the attic. Then they repeated the blower test, and checked to make sure the improvements were in the neighborhood of the predictions from the initial audit.

Then we had to move everything back into the attic closets. That was a pain, but when the December heating bill arrived, we could already see the improvement! The savings in energy costs will take a few years to pay us back for the work that was done, but the subsidies and tax credits made it several years fewer than it could have been. And what better investment can you think of these days?

Happy New Year!

Happy Sustainable New Year! I hope you all have friends or family to celebrate the end of 2009 and the beginning of a whole new 2010. If not, please join me at Princeton Country Dancers' New Years' Eve Dance at 8:00 (instruction at 7:30) on December 31 at Suzanne Paterson Center in Princeton, for an evening of English country dancing and contra dancing with live music. Admission is $20, $15 for seniors, and $10 for students. Make new friends, get some exercise, share a dessert potluck and help sustain two crowd-pleasing, centuries-old dance traditions! For details see: http://www.princetoncountrydancers.org/events/PCD-NYEdance09.pdf

Sustainable Montgomery has accomplished plenty this year. We have worked with Montgomery Township to pass resolutions and ordinances and produce events that will make Montgomery a more sustainable place, and Lauren Wasilauski, our intrepid coordinator, documented these actions in an application for certification to Sustainable Jersey. We are proud that these efforts have resulted in certification, and we are all determined to keep up the momentum. 2010 will see a Sustainable Montgomery web page on the Montgomery Township website, an anti-idling initiative, and many more new projects. We all hope you will join us in supporting and participating in many of them. Why not make it a New Year's resolution?

Here's a great way to start a sustainable new year: check out the Princeton Environmental Film Festival at the Princeton Public Library: http://www.princetonlibrary.org/peff/
I have seen a few of their offerings in past years and loved them. Among the films are some children's and family films (on Saturday mornings) and some short films, plus live music and other presentations.

Sustainable Holidays!

Whatever holidays you celebrate, you can make them more sustainable. You can save energy by decorating with fewer lights this year, and try to make your purchases organic, all natural, local or fair trade or recycled. Remember to reduce, reuse and recycle, too!

Look for farms and stores in this area that sell locally-produced, sometimes organic, grass-fed or free range meat and poultry. There may even be fresh local vegetables, too. Kale and collards are alive in our garden (along with leeks and parsnips), undamaged by frost and snow (see first two photos). Some say freezing makes the flavor sweeter. Winter squash will keep for the whole winter in a cool place, and I already invented a recipe for some of those extra pumpkins we didn't use for Halloween. I took pumpkin/tomato/rice casserole to a holiday potluck before a dance, and it was well-received.

You could buy a locally grown Christmas tree and support a local farmer and local open space. You could also prune your evergreen trees and shrubs right now and use the trimmings for decorations on your door or porch instead of paying for the electricity for a lot of lights.

Have you ever heard of Fair Trade? It is a category of goods that are made by people who need jobs, who are paid a decent wage for making them. There are charitable and religious organizations that produce or certify food, gifts, clothing etc. as fair trade. The items come from Asia, Africa, Europe, North or South America, from farmers and craftspeople. Here in the USA some fair trade items are produced in inner cities and some by native Americans. Often the organization provides loans, sponsors cooperative production facilities, bypasses exploitative middlemen, or teaches marketable skills. Sometimes they build a clinic, a school or sanitation facilities, or teach classes. To be certified fair trade, a product must use materials that are sustainably harvested.

There are plenty of fair trade items available: gifts; holiday treats; and holiday decorations. You can find them in some local shops, in catalogs and on the internet.

You may also give the gift of a charitable contribution, or buy holiday greeting cards from a charity.

One of my favorite ways to reduce waste for the holidays is to make gift bags (third photo). I sewed them from fabric scraps from my own sewing or found at rummage sales. Mostly I use them for gifts for my own family, because I know we will reuse them next year. They make the holiday gift wrapping go very fast.

To make your own gift bags, you should know how to sew. Start with a square of fabric, not too thick or see-through. Fold the square in half into a rectangle, with the right side of the fabric inside and the wrong side outside. The rectangle should have one edge folded and the other three will be cut edges. Sew an L-shaped seam joining back and front along two of the cut edges (fourth photo). This should make a bag, but it is not yet a gift bag. Before you turn it right-side out, you will have to clip the seam allowance (see fifth photo). Be careful not to cut the stitching. Turn the bag right-side out, and hem the remaining edge of the bag, preferably turning it under twice. Now take a cloth ribbon or cord, and sew it by its middle to the outside of the bag, on the seam, an inch or two from the hem (sixth photo). Now your gift bag is ready. Put a gift inside, scrunch up the top of the bag and tie the ribbon around it in a bow (seventh photo) .

You may make bags in many shapes and sizes, but they should always be deeper than they are wide (eighth photo). If you are lucky, you can find a piece of fabric with selvedge, the woven edge of the fabric that won't ravel, and use that for the edge of the bag so you don't have to hem. While you are sewing the seam, you may insert the ribbon or cord, and save yourself sewing it on later. If the ribbon or cord is narrow enough you may add a gift tag. If the ribbon or cord is too wide, you might like to add another ribbon, shorter and narrower, to tie the gift tag (ninth photo).

Remember to donate to the food pantry for those people who are out of work or otherwise in need, and don't forget to recycle and compost.

Have happy and sustainable holidays!

Recycle an old refrigerator

If you have an old refrigerator or freezer, it is probably wasting energy. Through New Jersey's Clean Energy program (njcleanenergy.com or 1-877-270-3520), sponsored by the Board of Public Utilities, you can arrange to have your old fridge or freezer picked up and hauled away for recycling. This type of old appliance costs on average $150 a year in utility bills, and to sweeten the deal you get a $30 rebate. Please mention that you heard about this program through Sustainable Montgomery, and the town will get something out of the deal, too. If we refer twenty people to this program Montgomery gets $300.

Happy Thanksgiving

Happy Thanksgiving! I hope you are enjoying a wonderful holiday with family and friends.

Today I am especially thankful for my husband, who made cranberry sauce and stuffing and bought a local all-natural free-range heritage breed turkey and stuffed it and put it in the oven. Admittedly I do not eat either turkey or stuffing due to dietary restrictions, but I would still want to make them for my family if he didn't. We will round out the feast with gravy and organic kale, sweet potatoes, and mashed potatoes, plus mushrooms and olives. For dessert we will have a choice of homemade pie from homegrown berries or persimmon pudding from locally-gathered native American persimmons.

I am also thankful to have my children to share the holiday with us, and thankful to know that my other relatives have friends and family with them to celebrate Thanksgiving dinner together where they are.

I am thankful that we were able to donate to a couple of canned food drives for holiday dinners for other people less fortunate than we are.

This morning I read that here in the USA we waste 40 percent of the food that we have. Much of that is wasted in processing, but more than half is wasted by consumers. That is an average of 1400 calories wasted per person.

Producing this wasted food takes one quarter of America's freshwater consumption and more than 300 million barrels of oil per year, about four percent of our total oil consumption.

At the same time, 6.7 million homes in the US sometimes run short of food due to financial problems.

At a minimum we need to "reduce, reuse and recycle" a lot more in our kitchens. After the turkey sandwiches are finished, put those bones in the freezer so you can make turkey soup on some cold winter day.

Streambank Restoration

I hope you are wondering how the stream bank restoration planting went on October 24th at the Village Elementary School in Skillman Village. A small band of dedicated volunteers worked for about two and a half hours in intermittent light rain and planted most of the plants, covering all of the area in the plan. Fortunately, Alyssa Gartenberg (the girl scout who has made this her gold award project) took advantage of the beautiful weather the previous Thursday and Friday to get some planting done after school with a few volunteers who were not available Saturday. Stakes were also placed around the edge of the area to keep lawn mowers and pedestrians from accidentally damaging the plants.

Right after we planted, it rained about three inches, and there has been some erosion. This occurred mostly in the area that was already eroded: a narrow strip where all the water from the parking area and driveway comes pouring down to the stream (see first photo). I recently drove over to the school and placed chunks of sod, which we had removed when we put in the plants, in the eroded spots. I hope they will prevent erosion during the winter and that in the spring the new plants will fill in any remaining bare spots.

I wish I could show you photos of a beautiful stream bank covered with flowering plants, but it is the wrong time of year for that. The photos I have posted show what some of the plants will look like when they bloom. Next spring and summer the stream bank should start to look beautiful. It is unfortunate that some of the plants will bloom during the summer, when there are no students in the school, but a few will flower during spring and fall. Next year I will post photos, and I hope some of you will drive through Skillman Village and stop and take a look.

I want to thank the volunteers who planted and the businesses and friends who donated plants. Thank you! You've helped a girl scout, beautified a school, provided food for caterpillars, butterflies, and birds, and cleaned the stream. And especially, thank you Alyssa, for all your hard work and your vision!