Patterns for waste-free living
How noticing and utilising patterns around you can save you time and money and have a positive impact on the planet. Plus our scrappy apple vinegar recipe and Samhain celebrations.
Sunlight crept across the rainbow flowers, papered onto the walls in the bedroom I (Lauren) shared with my baby sister. At five years old, I’d spent what felt like long hours, looking at those flowers. Pansies and lobelias, I think, in vivid red, blue and yellow, with bright, grassy-green stems. On this particular morning, I noticed a pattern in the flowers. I was a bit miffed about it at first. The flowers weren’t as diverse as I’d first thought. Someone hadn’t painted them on my walls directly, they were on paper, and they repeated! It felt a little like they’d cheated or tricked me. But then, I decided that the pattern probably saved the wallpaper people lots of time, and the flowers still looked beautiful and made me happy, so that was ok with me. I was a practical sort of five year old, after all. I went on to become a textile designer. Making patterns and spotting details, became one of my favourite things.
Patterns are everywhere in nature; intrinsically part of it, making things easier, faster and stronger. Small details that create efficiency, also make life beautiful. There’s so much we can learn from them. So much that many of us have forgotten or lost touch with. From spirals, to seasons, it’s worth noticing patterns and how they work, then aligning how we live alongside and within them. Instead of trying to make the natural world fit in with our routines, introducing technology and products to make up for the excesses and imperfections, we can choose a simpler and gentler path; better design through pattern and nature.
In daily life, noticing and using patterns might look like:
rising with the sun in the morning.
preserving food when it’s seasonally abundant.
washing the sheets on a sunny day.
composting ‘waste’ to support the soil you live on, rather than sending it away.
buying (or bartering or foraging) veggies on the way home, rather than making a separate trip out, and building that rhythm into your week.
growing your own food outside your back door step.
simplifying the ingredients you use for the food you eat, but tweaking them to create diverse flavours.
making your own cleaning and personal care products, with only a few ingredients, prepared in slightly different ways.
Instead of looking for single hacks and tips to make life easier, simpler and better for the environment, perhaps we should be looking for the patterns? The rhythms and habits we design into our lives are the ones that can save us time, money and lead to better outcomes for the planet. A shift in mindset alongside a look at the patterns in our daily life, are what really helped us leap into living waste-free. Designing patterns is an important part of permaculture that goes well beyond the garden and into how we live. We’re big fans of diving into learning about permaculture.
What patterns do you notice and utilise in your life? How can you tap into the patterns around you to make life easier?
This weekend brings Samhain (Halloween) to the southern hemisphere, Beltane to the north. Opposite celebrations of dark and light, death and fertility. Here in lutruwita/Tasmania we’re noticing the dark creep into our days with it’s crisp coolness, and the golden light of deep autumn (aided somewhat by forestry burns).
As we’ve said before, marking the seasons with celebrations is one of our favourite ways to check in on nature’s patterns and make sure we’re aligned with them. There are things we’re learning to do intuitively with the seasons now, after many years tending this patch of soil, and that makes us very happy.
Samhain/Autumnal things we’re doing this week:
Bringing in the harvested pumpkins and apples.
Checking on the garlic, leeks and broad beans we tucked into the soil during the week. Getting another garden bed ready for winter veg and another for green manure.
Putting a temporary fence around the food forest part of the garden and letting the chickens have free access so they can gobble all the weeds for us (we’ll move them off by Imbolc, when the green shoots of dormant herbs appear). This saves us lots of work and makes them happy and healthy.
Tidying up the chicken coop. The girls are moulting and have stopped laying, but will start up again for Winter Solstice (almost to the day). They could do with a little extra nurturing right now.
Making sure our wood pile and resources are organised - it’s got a bit out of hand here this year!
Making apple pies, apple and yoghurt cake, pumpkin soup, pumpkin scones, pumpkin gnocchi… haven’t decided yet!
Using the scraps to make vinegar. One of our favourite little patterns that makes the most of the season to keep us nourished, clean and waste-free - more below!
Watching the currawongs gobble the persimmons we didn’t pick. They always visit at this time of year.
Having warm drinks and food around the campfire.
Dipping into a little learning and exploration around our ancestors, and thinking of family members not here with us or who might have been.
Making lanterns, dressing up, carving pumpkins and apple bobbing (or a version of it) in celebration of deep autumn with our homeschool co-op pals.
Going for a fungi walk and seeing the forest floor and mycelium do their thing.
Making compost!
Recipe: Scrappy Apple Vinegar
Living with children, in Tassie, and with a garden full of heritage apple trees, we tend to end up with lots of apple scraps. By this time in autumn, you’ll usually find us dehydrating and preserving apples, making apple jelly and apple crumbles, leaving lots of apple peel and cores spare. Rather than throw these straight into the compost, we make sure we make the most of them first, and making scrappy apple cider vinegar is one of our favourite ways to do that! This vinegar can be used in salad dressings, cleaning products, and any other place you might use apple cider vinegar.
Here’s what you’ll need:
Apple scraps - peels, cores, leftovers
Cooled, boiled water - enough to completely cover your apples
Sugar - one tablespoon per cup of water
1 large, clean jar
Let’s do this:
Place your apple scraps in your jar until it is about ¾ full.
Dissolve the sugar into your cooled, boiled water.
Pour the water into the jar so the apples are just covered.
Place some fermenting weights, or a smaller jar with water, in the base, to press down the apple. You want to make sure the apple isn’t exposed to the surface because it can become mouldy.
Cover your jar with a cheesecloth or breathable fabric, secured with a rubber band or string. A large beeswax wrap will also work.
Leave out of direct sunlight in a place with a stable room temperature. We use a dark corner of our kitchen bench, but a cupboard or pantry will work well. Now it’s ready to ferment!
Check in on the fermenting process every few days. It can take up to a month, depending on how warm it is where you live. Ours typically takes about 3 weeks to do it’s thing.
The liquid should bubble and form a little foam - if your apples are really sweet, it can bubble over so do keep an eye out! When the bubbling begins to subside, strain the liquid into a large jug and feed the apples to the chooks or compost.
Clean your jar and pour the fermented liquid back into it. Cover and leave for a week or two. During the second fermentation, it’s a good idea to taste the liquid until you get the vinegary flavour you prefer - this can take from a week to a few months. A little note here, we’ve forgotten about our vinegar and skipped the second fermentation, on more than one occasion, and still ended up with a useful vinegar - it’s quite a forgiving process.
You may notice cobweb-like substance floating in your vinegar after a little while. This is called the mother or SCOBY (symbiotic community of bacteria and yeast). It’s a helpful part of the fermentation process, and an indicator that things have gone well. You can remove the mother if you like, or keep it and transfer it with a little vinegar to your next batch, for healthy and faster fermenting.
Store your vinegar in a clean jar, or bottle, with a lid. Store it in a cool, dark place, like a cupboard, until you need it.
This recipe can be found in our book, ‘A Family Guide to Waste-free Living’.
More on patterns and design…
Read: A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander
Listen:
Watch:
Here’s a decade-old blog post about celebrating Samhain with our kids, when they were tiny.
How have you gone with this week’s climate solution, ‘Know Your Neighbours’? Maybe invite them over for a campfire or drop off a big batch of pumpkin soup? We might hand a bowl of passionfruit over the fence to our next-door neighbours and see how they’re going.
Have a beautiful weekend, with what’s left of it. We’ll see you tomorrow for another climate solution!
Much love,
Lauren & Oberon.