3 Crackers-Worth

The Great Harvest of 2012 yielded a grand total of ONE perfect cherry tomato:

Yep, just one. On the entire cherry tomato plant that I was convinced would sprout a bumper crop of precious red orbs. You can see in the corner of this picture that there is, in fact, a brand new little green tomato baby on the scene. She came out of nowhere, around the same time that I realized that Little Red was totally ripe. So perhaps I'll get two tomatoes this summer. But there are no other buds to be found.

I felt a lot of pressure to do something totally awesome with the globe-y little miracle. I had grown this tomato FROM A SEED! My very first gardening success. It got off to such a rocky start. I was sure it was doomed. But I was also determined. I faithfully watered it with water rescued from the shower drain and  inspected its leafy nursery every day for bugs; giving quiet thanks for the delicate spider webs that seemed to be doing a great job of that for me. This tomato grew out of a labor of love, and chugged along even though all of my other garden hopes and dreams fried in the ridiculous heat. This tomato was the lone survivor.

So I thought about what to do with it, and concluded that the only reasonable thing to do would be to transform it into a tomato's highest calling: fresh salsa.

Left over organic cilantro from a recipe last week, the tiniest garlic clove you've ever seen, and a tidy pile of onion bits, left over from the nubbin of onion we didn't use in last night's dinner.

Add some Lime Juice and a dash of salt, and you have the smallest portion of salsa I have ever eaten!

Exactly three perfect crackers-worth.

No-Buy July: Some Parameters

We're 4 days in to this year's No-Buy July, and so far so good. That might not sound like much of a feat to you, but I've already kicked down the impulse to buy several things that I would have otherwise tossed in my  actual or virtual cart.

I'm excited to see that a couple of you are up for joining us on this adventure, and we've already had some questions about the boundaries. Where is the line between "need" and "want"? What's the difference between buying something this month versus buying it on August 1? What if something I've wanted for a long time goes on sale? What about yoga/tennis/knitting/basket weaving lessons that I pay for every month?

First let me go on record with a disclaimer: I'm not a financial expert, I've never seen your family budget, and I don't know where the line between need and want will be for you. The line is wobbly, and I for one can rationalize just about anything.

This ability starts young. At my previous job, I helped arrange for volunteers to participate in a program called Junior Achievement. JA teaches grade school kids about money, the economy, and job skills. Adult volunteers to go into classrooms with visual aids and fun activities and help kids think and talk about the hard skills and soft skills of financial responsibility. I've accompanied volunteers on some of these classroom visits, and one 1st grade classroom exercise stands out in my memory as a TERRIFIC example of how early we start to recognize that the line between need and want is a blurry one.

The volunteer holds up a big card with a picture on it, and the kids are supposed to vote "NEED" or "WANT" with their own little cards. Some of the cards are straight forward, like a plate of food. But others can start up some pretty complex cultural debates, even among the Crayola set. For example, the picture of a car may be an obvious need to a suburbanite child, but inevitably in Chicago Public Schools, lots of kids will recognize a car as a WANT. They and their parents are getting along just fine without one. A home is a need, but the standard line drawing of a single family house with a fence and a yard is, in reality, more of a luxury than a need, especially to a city kid. Then you get into some rationalization. The picture of a Dog, for example. An adult can pretty easily talk a kid into recognizing that a dog is a "Want", but every stinkin' time I have seen this exercise, kids will come up with all kinds of reasonable arguments for Dog as Necessity:

• A guard dog keeps us safe.
• Some people need seeing-eye dogs to get around.
• Our dog makes our family happy. We need her.

And of course, now that we have Auggie, I put a pup into the "Need" category. But you see where I'm going with this. I can't really tell you where the line will be for you.

That said, Les and I have talked a bit about what we will and won't buy this month. For one thing, we're teetering on brokesville, so there are practical limitations. But this month is also supposed to be challenging, and reign in our impulse control. Here's the simplest way I can illustrate the parameters we are going to try to keep this month:

Things we need to pay for/spend money on this month:

• Fixed expenses: rent, car insurance, student loans, cell phone bill, internet, donations, etc.
• Food: a pared-down, realistic, well-thought-out menu of food we will cook at home, with a few limited but inevitable restaurant meals. No more than one "out" meal per week.
• Personal care necessities: we'll replace tooth paste, shampoo, dental floss, etc if we run out.
• Limited personal habit cash: I have my $15 Starbucks card, Les has a limited budget for wine and beer. Because we really weren't prepared to go cold-turkey on these liquids.

Things we will forgo:

• Stuff: new clothes, books, magazine, iTunes, notebooks, kitchen gadgets, craft supplies, garden stuff, pretty much anything one would buy at Target.
• Tennis Lessons: we had planned to sign up for the next round of classes, but we straight up can't afford it, AND I'm a bit wary of committing to twice/week classes for the next 6 weeks of inferno heat. If we budget for it, we'll sign up for the fall session.
• Food that we just "want" but is not on the meal list. No ice cream, random snacks, etc.
• Eating out more than once per week.

That's just where we are right now. If I were, say, taking zumba classes every month, I probably wouldn't skip a month if I felt that the classes were essential to my well-being and physical/mental health. But even if tennis classes were cheaper, I could probably still talk myself into a break from formal teaching and just try to commit to playing with Les twice a week. Still good exercise, and keeping up our newly-learned skills for free. But you'll have to look at your own lists and make the necessary tweaks.

If I learned one thing from trying this last year, it's that I buy WAY MORE CRAP than I ever realized. It honestly did not occur to me how often I let myself just buy things until I feel like my checking account has dwindled past the comfort zone. That's not a great way to live, and certainly not simple, green, or really even within my values.

So, there you have it. The beginning of some boundaries. Let me know what you think, how you're doing, and if you have any advice. Only something like 4 weeks to go :)

Mid-Year Do-Over Declared!

I hereby declare July 1 the start of our family's new fiscal year.

Like my money clip art? I'm not totally clear on the legal rules for  using google images on your blog, so I figured I should stick to the generic clippy art!

We have, ahem, been spending like mad this year. When I go manically through our online bank statements to figure out exactly HOW we have gotten where we are, I see only a couple of big, unplanned-for purchases: new tires on my car (Ouch. But crucial when tires are precariously worn.) and a vet visit for AugDog for some annual blood work that we should have budgeted for but did not.

We haven't been out buying lots of stuff (some stuff, admittedly, but not loads). The tale of woe that you can glean from our bank statements is that we spend $10 here and there (lunch, bottle of wine, fig tree, Starbucks, blah blah) and a whole WHOLE lot of money on food. Food we cook and food we grab on the go. Like, a staggering amount.

In reality, our spending troubles boil down to two main personal glitches: failure to plan and poor impulse control.


We have all these great ideas for healthy food to cook and we go to Whole Foods, the Farmer's Market, and Trader Joe's with Good Intentions Goggles on or something. We THINK we will totally make all 6 recipes for which we just gathered ingredients. We are SURE we will go through an entire bag of organic spinach. No matter how many times we toss out a slimy bag of half-eaten greens or scoop underwhelming leftovers into the trash, we still think we can and should shop to our ideals rather than our reality.

That, and we buy a lot of wine and beer. Summer nights on the back porch have ratcheted up our alcohol consumption.

Anyway, this accidental spending spree lifestyle is not gonna work. "No Buy July" was a great exercise last year, I'm going to do it again this year and rope Les into it as well. We've gotta get it together, people. We're regrouping. We're looking at our family budget as the moral document that it is: I spend money on things that I value. If I value generosity, simplicity, and debt-free lightness, then I gotta put my money where my mouth is. Oh, and "where your treasure is, there will your heart be also". I don't want my treasure or my heart to be in my closet or my fridge.

No Buy July will be a good entry point for reworking our finances and enacting some of the other principles from 7. We're not going to bring home any non-essentials this month. No magazines, no books, no clothes, no random cosmetics or hair junk or cool pens or house-prettying stuff. AND we're going to force our brains to figure out the actual amount of food we can cook and eat per week and not buy any more than that. Period.*

If you've never tried a month-long life experiment, I encourage you to give it a shot. I know it is kind of lame, but going for one whole month without ANY pop was kind of empowering, and it encouraged me through tiny impulse control successes that I really can make better choices. All those little decisions ramp me up for Bigger and Better choices. It's a start, anyway.

* Coffee is considered an essential in our house. However, Les bought me a $15 Starbucks gift card last week which we decided is a reasonable monthly latte budget. But other than that card, I gotta make home-made coffee work.

Tiny Orchards

I'm still hopeful that my lemon tree will have some buds soon. Les assures me that he saw bees up in her lemon blossoms several times, so, fingers crossed, I hope I will soon be updating you with some lemon buds. But I haven't seen any yet.

As I reported a couple of weeks ago, my gardening successes have been a bit underwhelming so far. One green bean (now shriveled from the heat), one cherry tomato (still green) and a handful or so of surviving herbs. The green pepper plants are still chugging along, but so far no sign of fruiting.

So, I was getting a bit antsy about a "harvest". I decided that if I saw an established plant at that farmer's market that looked promising for a payoff, I would buy it.

And so, I lugged this beauty home last weekend:

A Fig Tree! Whoo-hoo! For $12!

With starter-figs on it! Just a few weeks to go, said the farmer, and these little nubbins would be ready to eat. And if you're asking yourself "Does she really eat enough figs to justify a whole tree?" the answer would be Yes. I love dried figs and I'm learning to love fresh figs. And they are not cheap. So, I thought that if I can 10 or 12 fresh figs from the tree this year, that would be a good start. Plus, it's just a pretty tree. Kind of swooping and sturdy and almost bonsai-ish.

But I am, in fact, trying to grow these guys in North Carolina. It is supposed to be 105 degrees today. And it almost hit 100 yesterday. I've been watering my new little tree every day, but it still looks a bit scorched and sizzled when I get home. Those plush figs in the photos are looking a little worse for wear in this nasty hot spell.

Oh well. They're trees, right? So if I can keep them alive we can try again next year. They are still young. They will live to see another figging. In the mean time, I can do more research about container orcharding.

Blast You, Green Washing!!!

I feel like an idiot every time I tote something home full of greeny, earth-happy confidence, only to discover I have been duped yet again by packaging.

Here's a run-down of some recent goofs and semi-goofs.

* Remember that on the Good Guide, a high score is GOOD. A 10 out of 10 would be a perfect score and the site averages a score of Goodness for your health, the environment, and society. Conversely (and annoyingly, if you are using both to compare) on the Environmental Working Group website, a low score is better. A ZERO would be perfect, and the higher the score, the more toxic the stuff.

OK, let's begin.

Tiny orange bottle of Kiss My Face sunscreen, purchased with a coupon at Whole Foods:

It only scores a 3 or 4 on the Good Guide, meaning that it really is not that awesome for me, the earth, or the people on the earth. BUT, the Environmental Working Group rates the ingredients with a low score of 1, meaning quite non-toxic.  Boo, and weird, for conflicting information. I guess maybe the ingredients are relatively safe, but perhaps KMF doesn't have a great track record of environmental or social stewardship. OR, maybe they just don't make a lot of that info public. Either way, Kiss My Face is a pretty well-regarded brand, so I'm disappointed.


Next up is one of the most bone-headed impulse buys I have made in a while. A long long while. I was at the salon, feeling good about my new hair cut and wanting it to stay cute. So I perused the ridiculously overpriced salon products and was drawn to these bottles of Bamboo Shampoo and Conditioner from Alterna:

The labels were full of suuuuuuper exciting words like "Eco-Certified Ingredients", "Grown Responsibly and Traded Ethically" and a long list of bad things that they were "Free!" of (parabens, petro chemicals, etc). Hooray! So exciting. Took them home and they worked like a shiny-haired dream.

But alas, I should have known better. They score only 4.6 and 3.9 on the Good Guide, respectively, and a shockingly TOXIC 9 out of 10 for the Environmental Working Group. Oh and they cost $15. Each.

Please hear the sound of my palm smacking my forehead repeatedly.

I've grown to trust, perhaps OVERTRUST my local Whole Foods with helping me to narrow my purchasing decisions. At least some part of me thinks things like "Whole Foods wouldn't stock really bad-for-me stuff, right?" Well. Maybe that is at least partly true.

I love love LOVE the Everyday Coconut Conditioner from the Alaffia brand.

Read the back of the bottle and you can read about Alaffia via headings such as Handcrafted and Unrefined, Gender Equality and Community Empowerment, Certified Fair Trade, and ingredients that include an impressive list of Certified Fair for Life and Social and Fair Trade components. Gotta be awesome, right?

The Good Guide didn't have a listing for this particular product, and their line had a lot of great high scores. The closest I could come to this conditioner, however, scored a mediocre 4.0 on the good guide. The EWG didn't have a listing for any Alaffia brands or products. So I guess we'll have to go with the packaging for all our info.

Good ole' Burt's Bees is made right here in Durham, which I love, and their products run the gamut from Rock Star to Craptastic on both the GG and EWG. This particular body lotion scores a 6 on the GG (decent) and an "Eh" 5 on the EWG. Not strong enough to keep buying it. I'll use it up and look for an alternative.

Yesterday I finally bought a couple of bars of this "CP Soap" at the Farmers Market that I had managed to walk past every time. But I'm out of my bar soap, so I gave them a sniff. It's hand made in Raleigh, and wrapped simply in some brown paper. It's made with 95% organic ingredients, and most of the varieties were "100% natural" (which I now know of course can include nasty things that occur in nature, like petroleum and phalates). BUT, this bar was listed Phalate Free. And even though I have no idea what "Hydrogen fragrance oil" is or what hydrogen is supposed to smell like or why it is good to have in a soap, I love the silky texture and the rosemary and "hydrogen" scent.

Of course, there are no listings for this home-made beauty bar on either site, but the ingredients sound like things I could eat: saponified organic olive, coconut, and palm oil, hydrogen fragrance oil, and rosemary oil.

SO. I still make biff after biff on the stuff-buying. Which sucks. Because we have limited dollars and I have limited tolerance for stupidity.

I finally took the next step and downloaded the Good Guide app to my phone. The EWG doesn't have an app yet, but you can donate $5 and get a Pocket Guide to safer shopping. I haven't done it yet. I might. I'm tired of doling out cash for fake-green products that are killing me softly behind pretty packages.

Super Unrelated Aside - It is June 24, and I haven't had ANY pop this entire month. The tiny but solid feeling of accomplishment may spur me forward to tackle a much bigger addiction next month....

You Win Some, You Lose Some. Or Why You Should Never Ask Me for Gardening Advice.

I decided it was about time to check in on my little garden for an update. It ain't so pretty.

For reference, here's the shot I took last month when I had just happily plunked my little plants into the vertical garden:

So cute, so green, so promising!

Well, friends, some combo of too much/too little water, too much/too little sun has turned my plump little basils into these straggly yellow miscreants.

They're still kickin', but I'm less hopeful that they will live to see themselves star in my "Totally Made From Scratch Tomato Basil Mozzarella salad" (yes, my plan is to make my own mozzarella from scratch to see that dream come true).

But speaking of tomatoes, I was delighted to come home from a long weekend away to see this little baby hanging out all round and chubby-cheeked when I returned!

Is it normal for your tomato plant to have only ONE tomato on it after several months? Don't get me wrong - I grew this little baby FROM A SEED, and I will eat it like it is the Most Amazing Tomato That Has Ever Been Grown. Because after it's inauspicious start, it will definitely be that incredible to me. 

Anyway, tomato baby is looking good. The green beans, on the other hand, have had their leaves chewed off and are sporting only ONE faintly green-bean-looking appendage:

It looks like I'm going to be making a pretty pathetic garden melange. Contents: One green bean, some droopy basil, and a cherry tomato. 

Even my mint, which I hear is supposed to grow like a weed, is suffering under my unskilled gardening thumb:

 Great. I kill weed-herbs too. I rock.

Besides my hopeful tomato, the only other plant that seems to have inexplicably thrived with me at the helm so far is.... drum roll.....

The Lemon Tree! Hooray! It's bursting with lovely pink blossoms just waiting to open up and get all good and pollinated by some of our frisky neighborhood bees. It's like prom season over here. My little girl is getting dressed up in her flirty frocks to bat her eye lashes and get smooched by some eager pollinators. That visual quickly turns my lemon tree into a trollop when I try to make the leap to her producing some sweet lemons, so I'll just end it right there.

So, this little porch garden is full of hope, pathetic vegetables, pink blossoms, and some too dry/too wet herbs. And it is still my favorite place in North Caroline so far.

Suggestions welcome for my brown-thumbed failures.

7 : A book Review with a warning label

I just finished the book 7: an experimental mutiny against excess by Jen Hatmaker.

I'm pretty sure that this is the first time I have ever prefaced a book recommendation with a warning:

If you like the clothes in your closet and the food that you eat and the way you spend your time and money or the way you interact with media, don't read this book.

I first heard about this book via the Flowerpatch Farmgirl blog, which I linked to via my friend Roxanne's blog. You know, one of those "Let's see what's new on the interwebs" ramblings that accidentally changes your life.

Jen Hatmaker lives in Austin, Texas, where she and her husband planted a funky little church in 2008. She has written a number of Bible study books and a couple of other books about their life of faith. I had never heard of her until I wandered through the Flower Patch Farmgirl blog a few months ago and read her review of the book, but as soon as I finished reading the review, I emailed co-conspirator Jackie and told her we should read the book ourselves.

And I did, and now I can't sleep. Thanks, Jen Hatmaker!

Each month, Jen focused on one theme (clothes, shopping, waste, food, possessions, media, and stress) and did crazy stuff like eat only 7 different foods for a month or wore only 7 articles of clothing for a month. It sounded a little gimmicky to me at first, but I resonated with the idea that she was trying to explore. She wanted to get a better handle on how all the excess in her life was distracting her from the Lord, and to see if by cutting away the junk to get back to core necessities she might make space to hear Him, and for His work in her life.

I laughed and cried and prayed and got really really marvelously uncomfortable reading this book. Because even though I could lounge back and say "I've made good progress on the green stuff! I'm buying less junk!" Blah blah, the truth is, I have a long way to go. Especially on the Grace part of this G3 experiment. If I'm just buying less stuff to feel better and lighter and to have more space in my apartment or more money for something else, but my heart hasn't changed, then what good is it?

I'm going to be lazy and use the same excerpt that Flower Patch Farmgirl used in her review, because it really sums up the heart of the book and why it shook me so deeply:

7 will be a tangible way to bow low and repent of greed, ungratefulness, ruined opportunities, and irresponsibility. It's time to admit I'm trapped in the machine, held by my own selfishness. It's time to face our spending and call it what it is: a travesty. I'm weary of justifying it. - 7 Jen Hatmaker

Yes. Weary. This book gave hope to my weariness. The months of simplicity and fasting were all challenging and energizing, but the chapter that really smacked me hardest was the chapter on Stress. I wasn't sure how she would approach it through the 7 theme - if I tried to set a limit that I would only engage in 7 stressful things per day, I wouldn't get past 10am at work. But her Stress month was beautiful and dazzling in its simplicity: she practiced a weekly Sabbath and the Seven Sacred Pauses, also called things like the Prayer of the Hours or Liturgy of the Hours. Pausing seven times per day to pray:

The Night Watch

The Awakening Hour

The Blessing Hour

The Hour of Illumination

The Wisdom Hour

The Twilight Hour
The Great Silence

I honestly think I might print out the whole chapter and re-read it every day. It felt like a stack of heavy boxes sitting on my chest as I tried to squirm around in this chapter last night. I cried at least twice. Because I have been wondering what happened to prayer in my life lately, and it was one of those joyful/angsty moments when you sit up and realize that your prayer for a way to get back into prayer has been answered. With a set of prayers written right out for you. And a list of times to pray them.

You want to get in shape? This chapter on stress actually swooped into my life like a hand-delivered meal plan and exercise schedule for my flabby faith. I couldn't sleep last night because I wanted to get started. With prayer.

Now that I've read this book and Radical, I'm a little afraid of what might happen. Les is going to start 7 next if I ever let him have the book. Even now that I've finished it, I want to carry it around and read it again. Beware, friends, what could happen when you read books that scramble your lazy brain and slam you into reading the Bible and praying. Crazy shit could go down.

I'll keep you posted.