New Lifestyle Changes

Toby and I have been making some changes to our lifestyle that will hopefully result in us being healthier and reducing our carbon footprint. These are extremely important to us (especially with Toby getting into the environmental field) that we felt we had to make some changes. We recycle quite a bit already but we have decided to compost. This will be better for the landfills and also help our garden. We have also decided to do raised garden beds this year. We did this when we lived in Nashville and had pretty good success.

Since we are living in my grandma's house, we don't want to tear up her yard so this is a good option for us. That being said, there are a few things we want to eventually do that we just can't do now. Mainly, that is raising chickens for meat and eggs and goats (for fun??). We went to buy a compost bin today and apparently they only sell them during gardening season and the lady questioned why we would want to compost now. If we start composting now then we'll have some good dirt ready when we plant our garden. If we wait til the stores carry them, then we can't use it til next year (or at least later in the gardening season)...make sense stores?? We have done a great job at making homemade foods and we have barely eaten boxed food in the last year. In fact, the few times we have out of necessity or time, they have tasted so salty and nasty to me that I can barely eat them. I still coupon and I am able to find ways to eat cheap without eating that crappy boxed food (hamburger helper, etc). I meal plan around what I have in the cupboard and what's on sale. We bought a bread machine and plan on making healthier homemade breads and pizza doughs. We made our first "bread" tonight in it...it was a pizza dough. I included a pic of the finished pizza. It was soooo delicious. I am definitely looking forward to making more breads in it.


I also bought a book with my xmas money called "Building Green". It discusses 4 alternative building methods, earth plaster, straw bale, cordwood and cob. I have a dream someday that we put down some roots (where, is still the question), have a little bit of land, a big garden, a few farm animals and an off the grid house. That would be the dream for both Toby and I.

We are very excited about our little changes we are making that will make a big impact on our health and earth.