Catie George

I think that’s a really practical way to look at things – starting with high impact/commonly used items, and things touching hot food, and then considering where there’s diminishing returns for improvement. I also try to prioritize storing acidic and oily food in glass vs. plastic where possible.

I ask myself -would spending the money to replace an item 1) make a significant difference in exposure, and 2) make enjoying/prepping food easier, or harder?  

I’m not likely to reduce my plastic exposure if I were to remove all my convenience appliances that have plastic, and find myself instead eating more prepackaged food!

I have one coated kitchen appliance – a rice cooker that claims to be PFAS free (what chemicals it uses in the coating, and if they are better or worse, is up for debate!). Most of my pots have plastic handles.  

My blender is made of glass, but has a plastic lid.  My food processor is plastic.  I don’t worry about my plastic mandoline, either, despite being perfectly capable of switching to a knife and wooden board, the time savings are worth it for canning/processing, and I use them infrequently.

I have a few plastic food storage containers that sometimes end up in the freezer, but leftovers are stored in glass casserole dishes. I have a silicone spatula I’m unlikely to abandon, and I break out the silicone muffin pans when I have too much muffin batter to fit in my metal muffin pans (or sometimes for freezing individual portions).  I do try to make sure silicone I use is from a reputable brand.

I’m slowly converting my kitchen storage of things like beans, flour, sugar, spices, etc, from plastic containers to glass pickle jars/jam jars/mason jars. I would like to move away from storing things in their plastic bags long term, partially for ease of organization.

I have zero interest in trying to replace my very good kitchen knives, which have plastic handles, with wood-handled versions I’d need to be more careful with.

Freezer bags are definitely the sticky thing I haven’t figured out how to improve yet. I don’t find glass jars practical for freezing vast quantities of vegetables, and I really don’t have the energy/interest to attempt to can more than I already do. My dehydrator is mostly plastic. Would switching to commercial produce in the winter, be lower plastic contact? I doubt it.

And attempting to find low-plastic grocery items feels like a lost cause. I don’t think I could afford to switch to the fancy mayonnaises, sauces, juices, etc, in glass jars. I could potentially commit to canning more convenience foods – things like barbeque sauces, ketchup, mustard, etc that hang around in the fridge for ages. I already make my own hot sauces and relish.

In my experience, cover crops are no match for established perennial weeds. They are useful for maintaining a fallow bed, but not for smothering established dandelions or competing with rhizomous grasses. I have started to use them to CREATE mulch for future crops, rather than in an attempt to smother existing weeds.


If you asked 100 gardeners how to weed, you'd get 100 answers but if it were my bed I would be:
-Removing all flowers before they go to seed. This is my #1 weeding priority - never letting weeds go to seed.

- Adding some sort of mulch - likely paper held down with sticks and stones to give me a fighting chance

-Hand weeding the rest - 15 min a day is enough to make a big impact in such a small space. Expect to have to re-weed, but the goal is to keep the above ground portions of the plant from having time to feed the roots below that the weeds resprout from.

If I wanted to plant something fine seeded, I'd probably fork the bed, hand pull what I could, and disrupt the rest with a hoe, wait a week, hoe it again, then plant.

I am a big proponent of mulch, but don't think there is any system that is truly zero weeding required.

Jay - I have two wooden spatulas/scrapers similar to what you describe and I LOVE them. One is called a 'wok Turner' and great for scraping frying pans/woks. The other was I think an 'angled Turner' and is perfect for scraping the corners of pots.

When I packed up to put my things in storage, years ago, I threw out all the kitchen utensils that I hated. Basically everything plastic, and anything 'coated', many things I'd bought as a cheap university student, and been too cheap to replace because they worked well enough. Several years later, after buying a house and unpacking, I discovered I had almost no kitchen utensils and went on an emergency buying spree at IKEA,(while refusing to buy plastic). I have slowly rebuilt my kitchen and am very happy with it.

I've attached pics of my favourite/most used plastic free kitchen utensils. They don't feel like 'settling', I am genuinely annoyed not to have them when I go to other people's houses and cook with their utensils, the metal and wood work better than plastic.

Avoiding plastic in my cookware and kitchen has been an ongoing goal of mine. When I talk about it, I have often been told that it's not worth doing, as there are so many other sources of plastics in our lives that avoiding plastic contact with food isn't worth the effort, or that the plastic in food is an insignificant source of plastic in the human body.

Anyway, a study in Nature Medicine just came out showing that avoiding plastic in your diet/kitchen can reduce the plastic compounds (phtalates and bisphenols) in your urine in just 1 week!  (By 30+%, depending on what intervention/compound was tested).

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-026-04324-7

Other interesting take aways:
- Plastic packaging upstream matters - including things like buying produce in plastic packaging, or that produce previously being handled on plastic (so! Grow your own whenever possible if avoiding plastic matters to you!)
- Both avoiding plastic packaging/plastic touching food, and avoiding plastic in your kitchen made a difference, independently of each other - so achieving 'perfect' avoidance wasn't necessary to reduce exposure (by 30+%!).
- Almost 60% reduction in bisphenols was possible
- individually packaged items are significantly worse for plastic contamination than bulk packaged.
- plastic in food prep appliances matters - possibly also in dishwashers...
- Avoiding plastic tends to lead to a healthier diet
- Even researchers attempting to provide a non-plastic diet struggle to provide plastic free food thanks to upstream contamination
- Researchers speculated some plastic compounds may be stored in adipose tissue.
- Avoiding plastic contact in personal care products (shampoos, soaps, etc) also made a difference
- Study participants who had the lowest levels before the study were those who 'rarely consumed fast food, highly processed foods, foods in plastic packaging or microwaved foods in plastic'


This study has definitely reaffirmed my decision to avoid plastics in my food choices and refuse to microwave items in plastic. I'm now seriously considering my remaining food contact plastic usage, the largest of which is freezer bags for storing vegetables in my freezer. I'm also considering my personal care products which I tend to buy in bulk but are stored long term, in plastic...

My understanding is most commercial pie fillings are made with moschata squash too.

Honeynut is a hybrid  moschata variety known for being sweet + small. Might be worth a try? I haven't tried it personally but keep stumbling on rave reviews for it.

Not sure where you are in Canada, but I had a boss who had worked in various tropical and subtropical jungles, and northern Canada, who said northern Canada wins for mosquitos.

You may be able to manage them in an urban location, but for a remote/rural location, good luck. Mosquitos are uniquely evolved to thrive in Canada. The more untouched the land, the more untouched the mosquito population.
(And possibly also the black fly, deer fly, and horse fly population. And no-see-ums)

I advise investing in bug nets. And screened in gazebos. I had a bug net on my bed as a child because our house had holes mosquitoes would enter.

A strong fan can also help, as does keeping areas open with lots of wind.  Orient any unscreened decks or porches for max wind, and keep trees away from the house.

Treasure and use the early and late season before and after frost to do as much as possible, then learn to love working in the rain and sweating in long sleeves.

In better news, I can normally get my first 150 bites of the year over with in a couple days, and not really notice mosquito bites for the rest of the year, plus mosquito bourne illness is rare.

Edit: I have now moved to southern Ontario, where mosquitoes are a mild nuisance, not a life style.

Sweet potatoes rot every time I try to sprout them. I suspect it's either 1) too cold in my basement or 2) some sort of treatment on the potatoes.

A friend, at my request, gave me a blackberry plant a few years ago.

He just bought a house, so I showed up with raspberry plants, rhubarb, chives... And some of the same blackberries he gave me.  The raspberries were a gift from me to my mom, years ago, which have now migrated to my house, the rhubarb came from my grandmother's, and the chives I started from seeds a few years ago.

Perennials are pretty amazing.

Mike Haasl wrote:Nice set-up Catie! That's how I got started.  A couple ideas to help that cook faster if you're interested:

- Raise the warming pan up so it isn't blocking off the chimney airflow as much
- Add a couple more cinder blocks to the chimney.  More height really helps the fire roar
- If ash/coal build up is limiting the amount of firewood you can fit, add another course of cinder blocks and put a grate under the fire. Getting air under the wood really helps

Good idea on the grate! (And the taller burn area).  I don't have a pic, but I eventually raised the warming pan on a couple bricks which did help.

This was pared down from last year due to a bunch of my cinder blocks breaking, and me being too cheap to buy more with how short the season ended up (I boil on electricity in my garage if my trees produce less than 15L/day).  Last year it was more of a j tube rocket design and definitely boiled faster.

 I'll either need to buy more bricks next year, or invest in a barrel stove kit, I think. And maybe, gulp, split my wood finer.

William Bagwell wrote:

Catie George wrote:
My experience is that the general trend is native plants do better with juglone than European/Asian species.

Likely true, however two exceptions I have noticed are privet and bamboo. Both seem to thrive under black walnut.  

I believe it! It's a very general trend I've seen, certainly not universal.

Any particular bamboo species you have had success with?