I’ve been reading the latest set of reader question published by the New Scientist, “Do Polar Bears Get Lonely“. It’s quite good. In fact, it’s seriously hindering my reading of “The Omnivore’s Dilemma“, another Christmas present, which has much smaller writing and is thus less inviting.

The reason I bring that up here is that a couple of questions were close to home. The first was to do with fridge thermostats, something I have mused about before. It would appear that most fridges have very much a ballpark type of themostat philosophy, rather than a precise temperature control. Presumably, this is why we have numbers rather than degrees on the thermostat knob by the light in the fridge. When the fridge gets too warm, the fridge motor kicks in and cools it to too cold to maximize the amount of time that the fridge can be somewhere between too cold and too warm, slowly rising in temperature. This is much more efficient than kicking in at shorter intervals. The question the reader had was why his temperature in the fridge was so cold. What had been happening was that the environment outside the fridge was so cold that it was getting stuck in the too cold stage and not able to heat up. My cheese making fridge is in a room with no ventilation beside a gas boiler so I reckon I’ll be able to sidestep that pitfall.

The second question I found, I couldn’t believe when I read it – (paraphrasing) “Can you feed a family of four for a year with food grown on eight square metres of land?”. Admittedly they had in mind a more allotment style eight metres than a container / balcony package. While not directly answered, it seems that for a good portion of the year you should be comfortably able to get away without buying vegetables. If you take freezing into account, you should be able to do vegetables for a full year. Seems reasonable! It’s also definitely compatible with contemporary thrift trends.

While I always maintained that I wanted to do this as a hobby rather than an excercise in sustainability, there is definitely part of me that wants to examine the efficiency of urban gardening – what can maximize the space to calorie ratio. To that end I hope to be realistic about trying to get a reasonably high yield out of such a small space. As long as eating a hundred bowls of carrot soup of the course of the year doesn’t get to me, I’m very much looking forward to it.

I hope to get some time to get cracking on the cheese making this week. My current concern is how far I will get with homogenized milk. Any suggestions for where I might be able to pick up some unhomogenized milk in the Dublin area are welcome!