Happy New Year 2012!

Happy New Year!

Thank you to all of you who continue to follow my blog! Life gets busy and I don't always do a superb job of keeping Eat What You Grow consistently up-to-date with new content and information. Keep up with me though, there are some exciting times ahead in 2012!

I continue to think more than ever about doing what I can to make more sustainable choices in the way I live my life. I have become inspired by the urban homesteading movement where people in cities everywhere are finding creative ways of living simply that involve more time spent at home, in the garden, and on projects that involve relaying on their own ingenuity, time, and talents. In the year ahead, I plan on jumping aboard this train in my own small ways. Over time, I hope to build my knowledge in the fine art of making things, growing my own food, entertaining, and cooking from scratch that originates from a deep desire to be closely connected to the place I call home and to the community I live in.

For me, this desire to live simply is a mindset. It's a mental challenge. It embraces the ways of the past and carries them into the future to help us meet our current and future social, economic, and environmental challenges with grace. It comes from a practical, down-to-earth, common sense attitude adopted by generations of people, mostly out of necessity, to meet their everyday needs. My everyday living, though, has swelled beyond a life of necessity (which I am grateful for) to a life of convenience and abundance (which I do enjoy), even with my modest income. However, living an abundant life of convenience has its downsides too to me and to the world around me. It involves me using more, consuming more, and it pulls me away from my community. I am busy, I am less healthy, more sedentary, and more stressed. I drive more, pollute more, and throw away more. I see my family less, my plants dry up, and my house is dirty.

Life is a fine mix of balance and trade offs. We work hard for the things we want thinking they will make us happy, yet we are too busy to enjoy them. We work to own things and they end up owning us, and our time. We love our families and grandparents, yet we hardly get to see them. Choosing to live simply is forever a mindset, a mental challenge, and a choice that I continually revisit. How can I return and embrace the basics? How can I choose to adopt the lessons of past generations yet create a hopeful future for me and for others? How can I redefine happiness so it's less dependent on the amount of money I make and the things I accumulate and more dependent on the quality of my time, relationships, and passions. The best part is, it can be fun and rewarding!

For instance, this year I want to sew this dress, take this sewing class, bake this bread, and grow my own small patio herb and vegetable garden. I also would like to start an urban homestead-minded group to get together with regularly, get involved in the local farming community, and save money for my future goals.

For inspiration, I am going to continue following a few blogs I really enjoy reading including Northwest Edible Life, The Self-Sufficient Gardener, Sew Weekly, and Local Kitchen.

Thanks again to all of you! I look forward to greeting 2012 in each and every moment and finding my own balance of living simply in a very busy world.

Do you share similar goals? If so, what are they?

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle ... plus One More!

Reduce, reuse, recycle. Which order do you go in? We've all heard of the slogan. In fact, in elementary school I use to go to assemblies teaching us kids the importance of recycling. I also remember traveling to the recycling center with my Mom with a big bag of aluminum cans and actually getting money for them. Amazing. More and more people are recycling and most of us Washingtonians have not only caught on but have a good track record. But we can do better.

I learned last year that the majority of our recycling is shipped overseas to be recycled. Now what is the point of that? I thought recycling would be a bit more cost effective and efficient! Recycling is an important step to minimizing waste but, I would argue, so is reducing our consumption so we have less to throw away, period. It is often the hardest and most often overlooked of the reduce, reuse, recycle trilogy. Sick of all those plastic grocery store bags? Bring your cloth bags. Tired of using produce bags (we all end up with at least five of them every time we shop and they just get tossed anyway)? Use mesh produce bags instead. They are sold at many stores (try Fred Meyer or Sur La Table). Most of the time we can reduce our consumption, and thus our garbage, by simply buying less, eating in, or holding on to things longer.

In our daily lives, before even beginning to think about recycling and after we've reduced our waste, we can also choose to reuse plenty of items. For instance, do you recycle all those glass spaghetti jars you buy at the grocery store? Clean them out and save them. Swap out your Tupperware containers and put the jars in their place (glass lasts longer while chemicals in plastic containers leach out into your food). Also, instead of buying paper napkins, think about cloth instead. That goes for paper towels. I've stopped using both and I don't miss them. Convenience items are the most wasteful.

The reduce, reuse, recycle trilogy is a very useful mantra to follow. And I believe it is in the right order but there is a very important step that is missing, and that is composting! Composting yard waste and food scraps is perhaps one of the best ways to reuse or recycle our "waste" and turn it back into something useful right in our backyards. Not interested in producing your own compost? You can still compost your yard waste and food scraps by using one of the City of Seattle yard waste bins. This is one of my new years resolutions. So yesterday I wandered over to the hardware store, bought myself a gallon bucket with a lid (that's important!) and a box of biodigrable compost bags (made of corn) and placed the bucket under my sink. All of my food scraps now go in the bucket and, when full, out to the yard waste bin. As time goes on, I may consider creating my own compost for my own garden but for now this is a good first step (compost materials are sent to Woodinville and not to the other side of the mountains. The final product, the compost, will be sold in stores for gardeners and the like). There are lots of resources for composting.

Our Puget Sound area trash that makes it into a landfill is shipped 250 miles away to Arlington, Oregon, and, if we're not careful, includes our food waste and recyclables mixed in. It's carried by garbage trucks, semi trucks, and trains using vast amounts of oil and energy to transport it. Seattlites generate 600 tons of garbage a day! Can you believe it? We can do better. You'd be amazed at how much less you throw away if you only change one habit from what you are already doing and that is beginning to compost.

In 2009, the City of Seattle released its Zero Waste Strategy (the Seattle PI wrote a great article about it). If we can all do our part to reduce, reuse, recycle, and compost our waste we will be making a huge difference for our city, for our planet, and for our pocket books. We will actually save money. Here's to a new year full of less trash!

p.s. Still unsure what to throw away, recycle, or compost? If you are a nerd like me, play this recycling game. It is fun for about 30 seconds and is complete with catchy music!

New Years Resolutions

Happy New Year 2011!

I can hardly believe another year has gone by. With a new year, I feel new excitement for the possibilities ahead to do more with local food, to get to know my community better, and to live a more sustainable life for the planet, for my pocket book, and for my well being. I find it a daily challenge that I meet with eager motivation. In the past several months, I've been reading a Barbara Kingsolver book called, Animal Vegetable Miracle. It is about a woman and her family who try and grow their own food for one whole year and their adventures along the way. As I read, most of the time I am pleasantly envious of their return-to-the-land experience. They garden, raise chickens and turkeys, make cheese, and can and preserve their food. Their evenings are spend as a family making dinner or during the day they are active and outside. Their connection to the land leaves me wondering how I can have that feeling in a city? It is possible. So here I begin with a renewal in the new year to find my way toward this way of life. Here are a few ways I plan on creating this urban homestead experience throughout the year.

• Cook meals (so I eat out less)
• Buy food, when possible, from local sources (farmers market, produce stands, etc).
• Buy local, seasonal foods in bulk and preserve (so local food can be eaten throughout the year).
• Start a garden.
• Visit local farms.
• Go berry picking.
• Get involved in community groups.
• Start potlucks with friends or neighbors.
• Budget money (so I spend less and save more).
• Buy staple foods in bulk (rice, beans, pasta, grains, etc) so pantry is home cooking ready.
• Learn how to make cheese and bread.
• Ride my bike more
• Buy more clothes at thrift stores
• Make my own beauty and cleaning products
• Learn local flora and fauna
• Go urban foraging
• Listen to food and farming podcasts
• Read more
• Have canning parties
• Compost food scraps

If any of these interest you too, take the journey with me. Cheers!