Whole Living on a Budget
Resources for a more natural, balanced, and sustainable life.Archive for green living
Win a Free One Week Bike Tour
A few years ago I really really wanted to go on the Sustainability in Motion Bike Tour. It is about as dreamy as a bike tour can get. You get to ride through the beautiful lands of Oregon or Hawaii with some hip, treehuggin’ peeps. The tour will take you to organic farms, intentional communities and other cool places on the way where you get to study and apply the philosophies of permaculture, green building, small-scale economics, sustainable energy and intentional living.
The reason I never took up such a great opportunity before Motherhood became my vocation? The price. It seems pretty reasonable now, at about $500 per week, but in my memory it was several thousands and the tour lasted about a month or more.
Anyway, who cares about the price because you can win a free week! You can enter at the Common Circle Expeditions Website. Good luck!
Green Your Life With Your Tax Refund – Part Two
Last week I introduced three things you can purchase with your tax refund check to get you on your way to a more sustainable lifestyle. If none of those suggestions struck a chord, I’ll be adding more each week to give you more ideas.
This week: How about growing a small kitchen garden?
With some extra money, now all you need is a little time and work and you’ll soon be having fresh organic food right from your backyard or porch. The easiest method I know of is square foot gardening. Here’s what you’ll need:
-boards of untreated lumber
-scraps of wood or small rocks for a grid
-organic potting soil and compost
-deck screws
-seeds of the plants you want to grow and eat (Seed Savers Exchange has some super cool heirloom seeds)
-some gardening gloves are good too
1) Pick an area that gets about 6-8 hours of sunshine daily, away from trees and shrubs and close to your home for convenience. Make sure it is an area that doesn’t puddle after rain.
2) Use the boards to build a 4′ x 4′ box. Alternate corners and used the deck screws to keep it together.
3) Fill the box with a mixture of potting soil and compost.
4) Use the extra wood or rocks to make a grid of 16 square foot boxes on the top of the soil. This helps keep everything organized and easy to take care of.
5) Plant the seeds in the soil according the package directions. Check out CompanionPlanting.net to see which plants go best next to each other.
6) Take care of your garden. Water and weed as necessary.
7) Harvest, enjoy, and replant!
“But the greatest change we need to make is from consumption to production, even if on a small scale, in our own gardens. If only 10% of us do this, there is enough for everyone. Hence the futility of revolutionaries who have no gardens, who depend on the very system they attack, and who produce words and bullets, not food and shelter. It sometimes seems that we are caught, all of us on earth, in a conscious or unconscious conspiracy to keep ourselves helpless. And yet it is people who produce all the needs of other people, and together we can survive. We ourselves can cure all the famine, all the injustice, and all the stupidity of the world. We can do it by understanding the way natural systems work, by careful forestry and gardening, by contemplation and by taking care of the earth.”
-Bill Mollison
How to Recognize Conventionally Grown, Organic and GM
In the Ideal Bite email I recieved yesterday, they shared that there is a simple way to tell if your produce from the Grocery store is conventional, organic, or genetically modified.
Just look at the sticker on the produce:
-A four-digit number means it’s conventionally grown.
-A five-digit number beginning with 9 means it’s organic.
-A five-digit number beginning with 8 means it’s GM.
Dude, I never knew that. Now I’m going to look when I’m at the grocery store next time.
If you want updates on similar Green info and topics, subscribe to Ideal Bite to get daily emails sent to your inbox Monday through Friday.
Green Your Life With Your Tax Refund – Part One
It’s tax time again. If you don’t owe Uncle Sam and you can claim credits too, this is a happy time for you. With some extra cash at your disposale, you have an opportunity to ramp up sustainability in your lifestyle. Here are a few of my top picks on how to spend Tax Refunds to Green your life:
Buy a share of Community Supported Agriculture! A new farming season is upon us, and it’s the best time to purchase a food subscription of from a local farm. I’ve mentioned Community Supported Agriculture a few times in this blog, so you probably already know that I’m a big fan.
What is Community Supported Agriculture? It is a way for you and me (the folks who don’t farm) to buy a share of a whole year of produce from a local farmer upfront. When growing season is at it’s peak (usually late April through October), you will get a weekly or monthly basket of fresh farm goods including produce and often even milk, eggs, cheese, meat or flowers, depending on the farm.
Prices vary and from my experience a share can cost anywhere from around $100 for a small weekly vegetable basket to up to $500 or more for organic meats. To find a CSA farm, visit LocalHarvest.
Get a Bike! Remember how fun an afternoon bike ride used to be when you were a kid? It can still be fun…if you take it slow and build your stamina up again.
Bikes are the most efficient form of transportation in exisentence and a safe, low-impact way to exercise. Plus, with the cost of gas prices steadily up to $3/gallon or more, using a bike for small trips here and there will save you some big bucks in the long run.
Buy a Moped! Okay, so the bike thing didn’t turn you on. If you’re too lazy to bike (like I am these days), a moped is a nice alternative.
First of all, it will save you tons of money if you use it for most of the trips you would normally use an automobile for. Most mopeds get around 120 miles to the gallon! That is crazy wonderful for saving gas money and lowering your environmental footprint. Just as nice: in most states you don’t have to buy auto insurance to drive a moped, so no more insurance payments.
The price for a new moped starts around $700. To be even more eco-friendly (and frugal), look for a used one in a local classifieds ad or on Ebay.
Frugal Living from the Oklahoma City Catholic Worker
Robert Waldrop is defiantly one of my idols. He has been the central force behind the Oklahoma City Catholic Worker for years, has brought a local food movement to central Oklahoma, and taught me innumerable things about social justice as well as sustainable and frugal living. His website, Better Times: the Webzine!, has a wonderful variety of resources to help everyone live better on a small budget. I highly recommend visiting the site and venturing through it thoroughly, but here are some good links to get you started:
Saving Money on Energy in Winter
Making Your Own Snacks
Make Your Own Baby Wipes
Cloth Diapers: Best for Baby
Family Food Security
Getting Into Permaculture
Permaculture is a term first coined by Bill Mollison and David Holmgren in the 1970s. It is a contraction of the words “permanent” and “agriculture” and refers to the use and design of land in a sustainable manner, modeled after nature. For anyone who is interested in living a more green lifestyle, Permaculture is a valuable subject to learn and practice.
Here is a good YouTube video that gives a little introduction to the topic. There are lots of good videos on the subject on the internet, and I’ll be posting some more soon.
Spider Plants for Inexpensive Air Purification
When I first moved to Kentucky, I was living in a old apartment with synthetic everything and a freeway right outside my bedroom window. Being overwhelmed with the poor indoor air quality and too broke to buy an electic air purifier, I purchased my first spider plant. Three years later, after many moves and lots of neglect, my first spider plant is still with me and a companion to several more that I have aquired that clean my air and add a touch of nature to my home.
Why did I choose spider plants (Chlorophytum comosum)? Well first, they are cheap and easy to find. Second, in my experience, they low-maintenance and nearly impossible to kill. While I was attending Massage School, working full time, and dating the crazy person who became my husband, I was basically never home. So my spider plants were extremely neglected, left in a fairly dark house and almost never watered. And they might have looked pretty ugly for a while, but they are alive and flourishing today. But the best reason for owning a spider plant is that there are numerous studies that prove that they contribute to good indoor air quality. Not only do they eliminate carbon dioxide like all plants, but they remove other toxins including benzene, formaldehyde, trichlorethylene…and that’s important if you’re aiming for a healthy home.
Now if the spider plant isn’t your style, there are other house plants that filter indoor air as well. The list includes (with links to wikipedia):
English Ivy (Hedera helix)
Golden pothos or Devil’s ivy (Scindapsus aures or Epipremnum aureum)
Peace lily (Spathiphyllum ‘Mauna Loa’)
Chinese evergreen (Aglaonema modestum)
Bamboo palm or reed palm (Chamaedorea sefritzii)
Snake plant or mother-in-law’s tongue (Sansevieria trifasciata ‘Laurentii’)
Heartleaf philodendron (Philodendron oxycardium, syn. Philodendron cordatum)
Selloum philodendron (Philodendron bipinnatifidum, syn. Philodendron selloum)
Elephant ear philodendron (Philodendron domesticum)
Red-edged dracaena (Dracaena marginata)
Cornstalk dracaena (Dracaena fragans ‘Massangeana’)
Janet Craig dracaena (Dracaena deremensis ‘Janet Craig’)
Warneck dracaena (Dracaena deremensis ‘Warneckii’)
Weeping Fig (Ficus benjamina)
Gerbera Daisy or Barberton daisy (Gerbera jamesonii)
Pot Mum or Florist’s Chrysanthemum (Chrysantheium morifolium)
Rubber Plant (Ficus elastica)
NASA recommends 15-18 plants to purify the air of an 1800 square foot home. So go out and get some and relish in the green foilage and clean air.
Whole Living in the Ghetto
Ten reasons the ghetto is not a bad place to be if you’re aiming for a progressive lifestyle:
Public Transportation. Lack of money usually means lack of a personal automobile. So most predominately low-income neighboorhoods have great access to the public transit options of the city. Beyond that, there tends to be a bit less traffic and a lot more people on foot or bike.
Brown Spaces. These are lots abandoned by owners and the city. They are a beautiful opportunity to create community gardens or other community development projects.
Second Hand Stores are Easy to Find. And second hand is as green as it comes and often much hipper than new crap.
Mom and Pop Businesses are Everywhere. In the city I live in, the ‘hood is the only place that chain stores haven’t overrun. It makes it a really nice and refreshing place to be despite other negatives that might be there. And if you live in such an area, it is absolutely simple to keep your money within the community and boycott big faceless corportations for the most part.
Energy Efficient Habitat for Humanity Homes. Habitat has begun in the last few years to build with green features including passive-solar design, beefed up insulation, solar-heated hot water tanks, and energy star appliances. The ghetto isn’t such a ghetto anymore.
Lively Churches. If you want a spiritual experience, this is the place to go. Great music, passionate preachers, and miraculous healings abound and may just save your soul.
Old School Architechure and Design. Every ghetto I’ve ever seen has been in older parts of cities, where streets are warmer and the buildings have more character because they came about in a less commercialized time.
Catholic Worker Houses of Hospitality. These are awesome places where people live in community and practice the works of mercy. They usually consist of activists with progressive views who work for environmental and leftist causes locally.
Cool and Interesting People. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, take a walk (preferrably in the daylight) and see for yourself.
Cheap Rent. With the money you save, you can buy a share of community supported agriculture and eat fresh, local food all year long.
