In the February issue of Working Waterfront, there are some really interesting articles. And I thought I would pass them along. Working Waterfront is one of my favorite local papers here in Maine, and I always make a point to pick it up when I see it. Luckily, they also maintain a pretty good website, with most of their content online.

Water from Above: How a roof can provide all of a house’s water by Muriel Hendrix describes a home rainwater catchment system installed by Laura Sewall in her new house in Phippsburg. The system includes 4 2100 gallon tanks in her basement and supplies all of the water (plenty for her and a few guests) all year round. The cost was about $4000, less than most wells.

Meanwhile, on Vinalhaven locals are hoping to take advantage of their natural water resources through the construction of a tidal power station. Ben Neal writes about the initiative, funded in part by Efficiency Maine, as well as a bit about the history of tidal power in Maine. Apparently, there were once dozens, if not hundreds, of small tidal mills along the coast of Maine. If all goes well, the project on Vinalhaven will be the first of a new generation of sites taking advantage of this “clean, twice daily, and never-ending resource”.

And finally, I really enjoyed and identified with the short column by Sandy Oliver, Journal of an Island Kitchen: The Late Unlamented Pigs, about his yearly ritual of butchering his pigs. This year, partly as a result of Micheal Pollan’s book Omnivore’s Dilemma, a few friends and neighbors joined him in an informal pig co-operative. They bought three Tamworth Pigs in the Spring, and then “did the deed” in late December, after the pigs spent a rather idyllic Summer and Fall in a large, probably scenic, pen on an island in Maine. Not a bad life.

When an observer commented “It sounds like such a lot of work” in response to a talk Mr. Oliver gave in Boston, he thought to himself:

that my four days or so of meat processing, 30 to 40 hours of effort, filled my freezer with pork for a year. I don’t have to get in my car and commute through terrible traffic for 48 to 50 weeks a year, to work for 40 hours or more each of those weeks in an airless building, doing something perhaps of questionable value to myself or society, for a paycheck that would enable me to go to a grocery store to buy pork processed from nervous, heavily medicated pigs who never breathed fresh air, lay in the sun, or shoved their snouts into grass and mud, much less adventured down an island road. For a few days, converting three rascals into many meals is my job and it is a good one. I do not lament their life — or mine, either.

I confess to a similar thought process when I am considering the time and preparation required in the tomato canning, veggie freezing, and gardening Peter and I commit ourselves to every year. But it is awfully nice to have a freezer full of veggies, and a pantry full of pickles (my favorite potluck contribution) all winter long. Not to mention the lamb in our freezer from my grandmother’s flock in Blue Hill. In my accounting, a few hours over a hot stove in August, as unpleasant as it may sound (and sometimes be), is always time well spent.