Footprint comparison – Queenstown vs. Camerons
June 19th, 2009 - Posted in Kaimata Croft, Queenstown, sustainable living - by Sarah|
In between admiring the view and exploring the cafes I have been considering the relative environmental impact of our new lifestyle here in Queenstown. Many people assume that town life is less eco-friendly than rural life by definition but that often isn’t true.
Food
Croft – Although we were eating a lot from our own garden during the summer at the Croft we were finding that the local climate on the Coast simply can’t be relied upon for many crops (many of our tomatoes and chillies didn’t ripen this year as the summer was so wet). In reality we go to the supermarket once every week or 10 days to get fresh veggies, bread and tins of beans etc. This means making a 15 minute trip by car (each way) and because of the lack of veg producers on the coast we buy food grown elsewhere (could be NZ, could be China – without origin labelling laws who knows?) packed in Christchurch and shipped over by truck. Organic produce is impossible to find in Greymouth.
Queenstown – there is a small supermarket ( the Mediterranean Market ) that specialises in local and organic fruit and veg. Last week I went there on a bus which stops right outside our flat every half hour and takes me right into town. I have started making bread again now that we have a full size oven to bake it in.
I have managed to find a space to squeeze my bean sprouter into so we are still eating fresh home-grown sprouts.
Power
Croft – At the Croft we warm up on sunny days but lose that heat relatively quickly overnight as the workshop has two clearlight panels that break the insulation. We use the combination of an oil filled electric heater with an electric fan heater as a booster. We have a small bench-top oven which uses a lot less power than a full size one while limiting what can be cooked and of course we have our ultra-efficient fridge.
Queenstown – Power use for cooking and heating is one of the hardest things to manage when in temporary accomodation. We get no benefit from sunshine here in Queenstown and have electric underfloor heating (Gulp!) that is surprisingly efficient now that we have heated up the concrete fabric of the building. Power is definately from hydro schemes as generation is nearby.
Our hot water and cook top are run by gas in both locations (bottle at the Croft, pipe in Queenstown) but the shower is certainly used for longer here as it is indoors!
We brought our washing machine with us and have changed light bulbs to energy saver ones so no change there.
The Remarkables
Transport
Croft – Car is the only option as we’re too far from anywhere to cycle or walk and no public transport.
Queenstown – Local buses galore in both directions – Queenstown and Arrowtown. Walk to town or shopping centre in 40 minutes, bike in 20 minutes.
Rubbish
Croft – Weekly collection of rubbish bags from the end of the road. We minimised our rubbish to a bag every 3 or 4 weeks. No recycling collection but we take paper, cardboard and tins to the tip. Glass and plastic has to be taken to the tip in Hokitika as Grey District don’t have any collection points for these. Organic waste is all composted at the Croft.
Queenstown – Weekly collection of wheelie bins – one for rubbish and one for every kind of recyclable.
Daily Activity
Croft – Building is a high impact activity. Most materials are energy intensive and/or produced using noxious chemicals and it makes lots of waste. Minimising this is hard work and you end up compromising all the time in the interests of actually making some progress.
Queenstown – Brendhan flits about town fixing people’s computer networks and wi-fi problems. Uses company van where necessary. At weekend’s he goes snowboarding by bus (from just outside the front door).
Conclusion
On balance I don’t think that our lifestyle in Queenstown is much, if any, less environmentally sound than it would be at the Croft. The main difference is how much more expensive it is. If we are still here in spring though we will have to find somewhere to live with a small garden so that we can grow some of our own food.
Speedy shuffling
March 18th, 2009 - Posted in sustainable living, wellbeing - by Sarah|
When we got back home after our fab Christmas break in Cromwell I decided that it was time to get healthy. This lifestyle has tanned my face and bleached my hair (honestly, it’s not grey) and massively developed my upper body strength but my fitness and weight levelled off early on and were not going to magically improve without my conscious intervention.
I started off with The Food Bible by Judith Wills
This book has loads of good nutritional information about different vitamins and minerals in food and why you need a balanced diet. It has chapters covering weight control, food as medicine and for different stages in life. It also has a small selection of recipes and a really useful section of basic ingredients with their calorie, vitamin, mineral and fat content. I decided that to lose some weight I should be eating about 5,140 kilojoules per day (about 1200 calories) so I started weighing and calculating everything I ate and jotting it down in a diary. We still had the same meals we usually did as my investigations into healthy diet confirmed that we tend to eat all the right things (low meat, lots of veg and fruit, pasta, rice etc.) but our portion sizes went down drastically.
The first week of this I had still got lots of birthday chocolate left and so I incentivised myself to stick to the regime by allowing myself to make up any spare kj in my daily allowance with cubes of chocolate. While I haven’t seen this recommended anywhere I found it a very effective way to ensure that I continued to work out that I’d eaten 33kj of carrot and note it down. The transition when the chocolate had gone was a bit difficult but I switched to rice cakes as my ‘treat’ as I happen to be lucky enough to really like them. I also decided from day one not to include fresh fruit in the calculations as its lack of fat and multitude of good constituents outweighed any calorific value.
After 2 weeks I felt confident that I had formed a good understanding of what 5,000 kj looked like in meal portions so I stopped adding everything up but still stick a plate on the scales occasionally to check I’m not going too mad with things like pasta and muesli.
After another couple of weeks I was ready to start upping the exercise and this led me to another highly recommended book: The Complete Book of Running for Women by Claire Kowalchik
This a great book written in a very accessible style and covers all aspects of running from starting out to training for races. I started at the end of Feb with a fast walk for 30 minutes 4 times per week. This is recommended as a check that you’re ready to start running. Then I began the 10 week programme to go from 0 to 30 minutes running. The weeks so far have been:
Week 1 – 2 minutes running and 4 minutes walking x 5
Week 2 – 3 minutes running and 3 minutes walking x 5
Week 3 – 5 minutes running and 2.5 minutes walking x 4
The book has a good set of stretches to do after each outing including a couple particularly important for women – the shins and the iliotibial band (outer thigh). The one thing that has been a revelation to me is the recommended breathing pattern. This is to breathe in for three steps and out for two. This helps to prevent stitches (I haven’t had any) and also contributes to injury prevention as you hit the ground hardest when you start to breath out and this pattern means that the impact is shared equally between both feet. I found that it gave me something to concentrate on when I first started out instead of being left counting the seconds to go before I could walk again. This last increase to 5 minutes of running (20 minutes per outing) felt like a huge increase psychologically but again, the breathing pattern and the practise from the previous two weeks made it fairly easy. This book has also encouraged me to go as slowly as I need to in order to feel comfortable so while it may look like I am shuffling speedily in my head I am running.
I started having a look at the next book this week, the one that takes over once I can happily run for half an hour: The Non-Runner’s Marathon Trainer
