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!

In the meantime, I thought it was about time to embark on the next folly: cheese. After much lofty ambitions of fashioning cheese making tools out of things laying around my general living area, I sold out and bought a cheese making kit online. not wanting to quite relinquish all of my stubbornness, I aim to make soft mold-ripened cheese only. For those that don’t know, these cheeses are generally about a 6 to 8 out of 10 in terms of amateur cheese making difficulty. They also happen to be my favourite.

The reason the type of cheese is important for this post is that part of the soft cheese making process involves keeping the cheese at a constant temperature and humidity for a significant period of time (think weeks and months rather than days). Humidity can be controlled to a certain extent through the addition of, well, water to make a space more humid and some kind of material which soaks the water out of the air (salt for example) to reduce humidity.

Temperature is a little more tricky. The ideal temperature for soft cheese making is about 7/8 Degrees Celsius. Any less and the bacteria won’t grow, any more and the bacteria will grow, but alongside other unwanted bacteria. This is higher than most kitchen fridges which are about 4 Degrees. To be honest, purposefully cultivating bacteria amongst the vegetables didn’t seem intuitively like the smartest thing to do anyway. I decided I needed a second, smaller fridge. I didn’t really want a tiny AC one and the under-counter bar-style fridges were a little pricey. I turned my attention to a Freecycle website and managed to rescue a fine big fridge from a landfill-shaped destiny.

It smells a bit odd and is the last thing we need in our 60 square metres, but I managed (somehow) to get this past the committee in my particular apartment and now it sits next to the boiler in the utility room.

It has a a thermostat knob like most not-too-fancy fridges which goes from 1-5, but no indication of what temperature these settings might represent. I used a resistance thermometer to measure the temperature at three different shelves, for five thermostat settings.

While there is an obvious downward trend in the higher thermostat settings (as you’d expect), the readings weren’t as consistent as I was expecting. I did a second experiment where I took a single spot close to what I guessed would be good for cheese and measured it a number of different times. I have also recorded the times associated with these measurements, but they were not on the same day or at regular intervals. (hey this isn’t work – cheese making isn’t a precise science, right?)

There is a much bigger deviation than I would have expected taking a single spot and a single thermostat setting. Perhaps the fridge is being effected by the hot water in the house – it’s right next to the boiler after all – and it can’t keep up with the external temperature changes. Maybe the external temperatures don’t matter at all and the thermostat is just not able to regulate temperature in any consistent manner. That would seem to be good grounds to give away a fridge on Freecycle!

I’m still a bit puzzled but let’s hope that it will do the trick for the moment. Next challenge is to build up the courage to actually make the cheese and unbox that kit that has been sitting on a shelf for the last two weeks.

OK, so I’ve clocked the kale growing at 0.00kph. It might be time for a bit of a diversion…

These blocks include:

• Rainwater collection for watering plants
• Glazed shutters on balconies which turns them into winter gardens
• Built-in Scandinavian-style planters on the balconies
• Fruit trees in common areas

As with all innovations in housing there are a number of things to consider, not least the relative cost of installing such measures which may or may not be used. So whether this is a useful and/or cost-effective thing to do remains to be seen.

From what I can see, none of the items mentioned above are be too expensive, so that begs the question as to why we don’t see similar features in developments for more affluent sections of society.

For me one of the incentives to grow herbs and other food is to save money, selfish as that may be. Yet, I feel that this aspect is often sidelined in favour or more purist notions – carbon footprint, supporting local produce, organic food, etc. I wonder is there a correlation between personal finance and willingness to produce one’s own food. If there were, perhaps starting with families and sections of society who can greatly benefit from economising their food budget is a good way to go.