Loyal Homegrown Revolution reader Ken M wrote us with a challenge for us to figure out what can be done with old rags. Ken says that he’s made a rag rug once and proposes the intriguing idea of “patching a pair of jeans with rags for so many years that eventually every single thread from the original has been worn away and replaced by rags.” This sounds a bit like a poetic inversion of Yoko Ono’s “Cut Piece“, in which she sat motionless on stage and invited the audience to slice off bits of her clothing.

So what to do with the rags?

1. Compost them–cotton rags will decompose just fine.

2. Mulch–a layer of cotton will make a good first layer. We’ve used newspaper in the past with organic material on top, but in our dry climate here in LA the newspaper can actually prevent water from getting to the soil when it rains. We’re guessing that cotton might work better.

3. Household cleaning–this is obvious, but we do go through quite a few rags with our too few household cleanings, not to mention keeping the bicycle chains clean.

4. Paper making–one traditional method of paper making begins with fermenting cotton rags in water for a few weeks and then beating them to a pulp with hammers. The rag and bone man pictured above is collecting rags for paper making (the bones went to make glue and other things). The contemporary version of the rag and bone man are the thift stores that ship our old clothes to the third world putting local garment makers out of business.

Ken also speculates about weaving rags, which as this website shows, yields some attractive results. The thought of weaving with rags reminds us of the late “Slim” Sirnes, a resident of the bizarre ghost town of Goldfield Nevada, who Homegrown Revolution was privileged to have met up with a few years ago. Sirnes found a way to shred aluminum cans and weave them on a loom of his design creating a unique metallic fabric that he used as a building material and to make art. Watch Slim in action here.

Some time ago the folks at the FDA and USDA recommended that we replace our wooden cutting boards with plastic ones (such as the fine Elvis model on the right). This injunction rose out of rising fears of salmonella and e-coli poisoning in our food, which are, by the way, the signature bacteria of our deplorable factory farming system. But that’s another rant.

This rant is about the boards. So as we were saying, it was out with the nasty, old-fashioned, disease harboring wood boards, and in with the shiny space age boards. We fell for it. The Homegrown Revolution compound boasts a set of plastic boards (though not Elvis ones). And now what do we find out? Researchers at both UC Davis and the University of Wisconsin, Madison have discovered that plastic is not only quite good at harboring bacteria, so good that the small cuts in a cutting board are uncleanable by any means but also, and this is the kicker, wooden boards actually kill bacteria.

Researchers inoculated plastic and wooden boards with raw chicken juice fortified with bacteria. Within three minutes 99 percent of the bacteria on the wooden boards had vanished, while the bacteria on the plastic boards remained healthy. Puzzled, the researchers left the boards to sit overnight. The next morning the plastic boards boasted a healthy and increased bacterial population, while the wooden boards tested bacteria free.

FDA Bastards! Could they not have run this simple test before scaring us into buying the plastic boards? Did the plastic industry pay them to make that recommendation?

This just drives home what we already knew, and what just proves more true every passing day: plastic sucks. It is a dreadful mistake of the last century which has to meet its end this century–though of course the plastics we’ve already made will haunt us for all eternity. [Editors note: Mr. Homegrown Revolution is not crazy about plastics either but not quite as zealous, noting that Mrs. Homegrown Revolution typed this missive on a device made almost entirely of plastic. Steve Jobs has yet to come out with an iBook made from bamboo and corn husks. That being said, this haunting video about the impact of plastic on the ocean drives home the point that we need to drastically cut back our consumption of plastics and only use them for essentials]

Okay, these are the new rules. We are going to phase as many plastics out of the homestead as we can. We won’t toss what we have in the landfill right now, but when it is time to replace it, this is how it’s going down:

Wood and metal utensils instead of plastic
Glass storage containers instead of Tupperwear
Wool blankets instead of Polarfleece blankets
Down filling instead of polyester filling (even for allergy sufferers)*
Silk and wool fabrics for athletics instead of petroleum based technical fabrics
Sigg bottles instead of plastic water bottles
Sturdy reusable shopping bags instead of disposable shopping bags
Washable dish cloths instead of cellulose sponges
General avoidance of plastic packaging at the supermarket.

*Dust mites breed in much greater profusion in synthetic bedding than in down.