Several years ago, I got rid of nearly all of my plastic food storage containers.  I have several pyrex dishes with lids and lidded casserole dishes that I use to store large quantities of leftovers.  But most of the time, I use empty glass jars. 

My freezer is full of repurposed glass jars holding things like flax seeds, chia seeds, and hemp protein.  I order stuff like that online in bulk and it comes in big plastic bags that can be a bit unwieldy.  So when it arrives, I dump the bags into several jars and stash them in the freezer.  Much easier to dump chia seeds out of a one-quart jar than a five pound bag. 

My fridge is also full of glass jars.  I buy nuts and seeds from the bulk section of our grocery store, and store them in the fridge in glass jars.  When I make salad dressings and smoothies and soups, they get stored in glass jars (if they make it as far as the leftover stage!).

I use empty glass jars to store stuff in my pantry too. 

Remove the labels, wash out the jars, and glue on new labels.  Easy and free and much better for keeping track of everything than it would be if I kept them in the bulk bags from the store. 

Jars are also a great way to shake up protein supplements or any other powdered drinks.  I mix things like powdered greens, probiotics, spirulina, protein, etc. with water every day.  I use my blender for smoothies, but when the ingredients are powdered, shaking everything together in a jar is a quick and easy solution.  Much faster and more effective than stirring them in a glass with a fork (always ends up chunky.  Spirulina chunks?  Yuck.) and less expensive than one of those purpose-made “shaker jars” that some of the protein powder companies sell.

Another way I love to use empty glass jars is for giving edible gifts.  I enjoy cooking and baking, and food is always a welcome gift.  I don’t ever want to give people food in containers that they feel they need to return.  And I don’t like the idea of buying disposable food storage containers just for the purpose of giving food to someone – seems like a waste of money and resources.  So instead, I save the nicest of my empty glass jars for this purpose.  Large, wide mouth jars make great containers for soup.  Smaller jars – especially if they have interesting shapes – look great filled with bite size cookies (or dough balls!) or spiced nuts.  Fill jars with layered ingredients for “soup in a jar” or “cookies in a jar”.  Use your imagination!  spruce them up with some pretty fabric glued to the lid.  Tie a ribbon around the top with the recipe attached.

One caveat.  Please don’t use this as an excuse to have 100 empty jars cluttering up your shelves!  I have a lot of jars in use in my pantry, freezer and fridge.  But that means I don’t really need any more.  I save the nicest ones these days to use for food gifts, but I make liberal use of the recycling bin for most jars we get these days.  Save the jars you can use right now or in the immediate future.  Recycle the rest.  And enjoy your recycled, frugal, plastic-free food storage!

I know you guys have plenty of other ideas for repurposing glass jars around the house.  Please share!

When I asked recently for reader feedback in terms of what you wanted me to write about, one reader asked for a post about drying laundry in the winter without a dryer.  We’ve been in our current house (sans dryer) for more than two years now, and the last year we lived in our old house we didn’t use the dryer at all.  So we’re heading into our fourth dryer-free winter.  I agree with Penny that dryers are a want rather than a need, although for me personally, I don’t want one.  I honestly prefer to live without one.

The one and only downside that I’ve found to not having a dryer is that our bath towels aren’t all nice and fluffy when I put them on the towel rail.  But after one or two uses, they feel about the same as they did back in the days when we dried them in the dryer, so I can live with that.  There are several upsides to not having a dryer:

• Our clothes last longer
• We get to take advantage of the free stain-bleaching provided by the sun (I love this!  It’s especially amazing for diapers).
• No need for dryer sheets (that nice “spring breeze” scent?  It’s a bunch of nasty chemicals).
• No need to spend money on a dryer, anti-static sheets, or electricity to run the dryer.
• It’s a chance for us to “walk the walk” in terms of teaching our boys about living lightly on the earth and conserving natural resources whenever possible.
• Stains don’t get accidentally baked into our clothing by the heat of the dryer.  Nothing ever shrinks (we always wash in cold water).

Continuing on the grapeseed oil moisturizer theme, let’s talk about sunscreen.  I have mostly Irish ancestry, with blue eyes and fair skin that freckles (and burns) easily.  The up-side of being a burner instead of a tanner is that I learned very early in life that baking myself in the sun wasn’t a good idea.  I’ve never been to a tanning bed, and while my friends in high school were covering themselves in baby oil and lying on sheets of aluminum foil, I was sitting in the shade or wearing sunscreen.  For several years, I was diligent about wearing sunscreen all the time (late teens, early twenties).

Just before my husband and I got married, we bought wide-brimmed Columbia hats, which have turned into one of our best purchases ever.  It’s been more than eight years and the hats are still going strong – and we wear them nearly every day.  Pretty much every time we leave the house we have our hats.  The brims are wide enough that they cover our faces, ears and necks.  I’ve noticed that my freckles are a lot lighter than they were in my pre-hat days.  For several years now, we’ve been focused on making sure we’re getting enough Vitamin D from the sun (we supplement in the winter when UVB rays are in short supply, but get it naturally in the summer), but we make sure we’re getting sun exposure on our legs rather than our faces, since facial skin is so much more delicate and prone to sun damage.

For about the past four or five years, I’ve taken the hat concept one step further.  Most of the time, I try to wear a cover-up when I’m in the sun.  I bought a light weight linen zip-up jacket at a thrift store years ago, and I keep it by the back door all summer.  In the house, I’m usually wearing a tank top, but I grab the jacket before I head out if we’re going to be outside for more than a minute or two.  My shoulders and chest have always been prone to reddening easily in the sun, but that hasn’t happened at all since I’ve been using my cover-up jacket.  I do the same thing with our sons:  lightweight long sleeve shirts are great.  Yes, it’s been a hot summer, but I’ve actually found that my arms feel cooler in the jacket than without, if the sun is beating down on us (it’s an off-white jacket – don’t do this with dark clothes in 100 degree weather!)  As an added bonus, long sleeves also work well to keep mosquitoes at bay.

With my hat/jacket combo, I rarely wear sunscreen anymore.  But sometimes it’s a must.  Last weekend, we met up with a bunch of my husband’s family to take all the kids to a nearby water park.  Our three-year-old wore a long-sleeved rash guard, but a hat wasn’t very practical, so he had sunscreen on his face.  I thought about just wearing regular clothes, but I wanted to get in the water with our son (my husband and I took turns staying on land with our baby), so I wore my bikini and slathered on the sunscreen.

Back when I ditched all of our personal care products with questionable ingredients, none of our sunscreens made the cut.  They were all loaded with toxic crud and there was no way I was going to use them on myself or my family anymore.  I switched to mostly being in the shade or covering up, but I knew we needed some sunscreen for times when neither of those options was practical.  By the way, I have never liked the idea of spray-on sunscreen (even back when I was using drug store sunscreen), simply because they stink so much and it was obvious to me that putting them on would likely involve inhaling toxins.  I have since settled on two sunscreens that our family uses:  Dr. Mercola’s Natural Sunscreen, and California Baby.  Both work well and I don’t have concerns about the safety of their ingredients.  My fair, sensitive skin approves of both of them too.  They’re more expensive than regular sunscreen, but since we don’t use them every day, we don’t have to purchase them nearly as often as I did back before I stared covering up instead.

In addition to covering up or using a non-toxic sunscreen, we also eat tons of vegetables – antioxidants help protect our skin from the inside out, so load up on the veggies!

What are your favorite sunscreens and/or natural ways of avoiding sunburns?

Several years ago, I went through all of my personal care products and tossed nearly everything.  Anything with parabens, phthalates, artificial fragrances, dyes, sodium laureth sulfate, etc.  I kept just a few items, and it’s made my daily routine much simpler too.  Not to mention the fact that the air quality in our bathroom is much better without all of the fragrances from the products I no longer use.  After I got rid of my conventional body lotion, I switched to using coconut oil instead.  We live in a very dry area, and humidity here is usually non-existent… some sort of lotion is a must, even for those of us who are very careful to get lots of Omega 3 fatty acids in our diet.

I liked using coconut oil because of how simple it was – only one ingredient, and it’s edible (I prefer to avoid inedible body care products, since our skin absorbs whatever we put on it… why would I want to put something on my body if I wouldn’t be willing to eat it?)  But it was a bit greasy.  After putting it on, I would have to be careful to not let my skin rub against stuff for half an hour or so while it soaked in.  I figured it was a good trade off though, for not having any nasty gunk in my lotion and for not having to pay an arm and a leg for fancy organic lotion at the health food store.

When we were getting ready for the birth of our second son earlier this year, our midwife brought over a little supply bag of stuff that she likes to have on hand for new babies.  It included a tiny little bottle of grapeseed oil, labeled as a moisturizer.  She told us to rub it onto our baby’s bottom at each diaper change in order to keep the initial tar-like newborn poop from sticking to his skin.  She also mentioned that it would be a great all-over moisturizer for him.  We used it on our son, and it worked great.  I noticed that whenever I would rub it onto his skin, my hands would absorb it very quickly and didn’t feel greasy afterwards.  So I decided to try it on myself, and I’ve been hooked ever since.

I have been buying grapeseed oil at Costco for quite a while now – I love it for cooking as it has such a high smoke point.  And now it’s my daily moisturizer too.  A little goes a long way, and it doesn’t leave my skin feeling greasy or sticky at all; it soaks in within just a few minutes.  It has a very neutral fragrance that pretty much disappears once it soaks in, and best of all, it works!  No more dry skin.

Instead of buying a tiny little bottle labeled as a moisturizer, I just refill the one I have from my giant jug in the kitchen.  Definitely my current favorite personal care product: inexpensive, easy to use, no greasy legs, and no questionable ingredients.

On a completely different note, I love this post about saving bugs instead of killing them.  I have always been a rescuer of creatures (so are all of my siblings – it’s just how we were raised).  I can remember my little brother being afraid of the spiders (harmless, but big) that were in our farmhouse, and my mother sat on the floor with him and let a spider crawl all over her to let him see that there was nothing to fear.  We grew up in an area that had lots of copperhead snakes, but also lots of other non-poisonous snakes.  Rather than teaching us to fear snakes, my parents taught us how to tell the difference between the copperheads and all the other snakes.  (They also taught us to be careful – to never put our hands or feet somewhere we couldn’t see, for example.)  Same thing with spiders – there are very few spiders in the US that can actually cause serious harm to humans, and they’re pretty easy to recognize… the rest are only a concern if you’re a fly.  So my siblings and I all have a healthy respect for creatures that can harm us, but no irrational fear of bugs, snakes, mice, etc.  And we have all been known to go out of our way to rescue bugs from drowning, squashing, or being encased in concrete.  Anyway, I loved Gena’s post about catching bugs and taking them outside, so I had to share it.

Confession time:  We’ve lived in our current house for nearly 20 months, and until today, I had never cleaned the oven.  I use the oven maybe 3 or 4 times a month, and the bottom of it was looking pretty grubby.  Cleaning the oven is not particularly high on my list of things to do, but with the possibility of both my mother and my mother-in-law using our oven to cook for us after our baby arrives (for which we are very grateful!), I decided that it probably needed to be cleaned.

Ten years ago, I would have headed to the grocery store to buy a can of oven cleaner and a pair of rubber gloves.  But since I no longer use any sort of toxic cleaners (or any cleaner that requires rubber gloves), I decided to see if my trusty baking soda and vinegar solution would do the trick.  I sprinkled baking soda all over the bottom of the oven, and on the open door.  Then I sprayed vinegar all over the inside of the oven and let it sit for half an hour or so while I worked on other tasks.  I used a razor blade knife (designed for cleaning ceramic stove tops) to gently scrape the stuck-on gunk out of the oven, and it came off with very little effort.  Then I rinsed everything a few times with water and clean rags.  It took me about 10 minutes of actual scrubbing/cleaning time to get it done.

So we have a clean oven.  Our son was able to hang out right next to me while I worked on it, and neither of us inhaled any nasty fumes.  For a while during the oven cleaning process, the kitchen smelled like vinegar.  Now it smells like nothing at all, which is what clean really smells like.  I didn’t have to go buy oven cleaner or rubber gloves (I buy baking soda and vinegar in bulk at Costco, and always have plenty on hand).  I’m convinced that there’s nothing in our house that can’t be cleaned with baking soda, vinegar, hydrogen peroxide and water.  For laundry, all I need is soap nuts and hydrogen peroxide.  A simplified arsenal of cleaning products is not only less expensive and easier to keep stocked, but it’s also a lot better for our bodies and the environment than a bunch of bottles of toxic cleaners.

Anybody have any other tricks for cleaning an oven without using commercial oven cleaners?

When our son was born, we bought an organic crib mattress for him.  He slept in our bed for a few months, and still comes in from time to time to sleep with us during the night, but most of the time he sleeps on his crib mattress.  Last year, we got a wooden toddler bed and moved the mattress into that, which had been working perfectly.  But with another baby on the way, we knew we needed either another crib mattress for the baby, or a twin mattress for our son so that we could take his little mattress and put it back in the crib for the baby.

My first thought was to just get another crib mattress.  The organic ones are available for a couple hundred dollars, and we’ve been very happy with the one we have.  But I knew that would be a relatively short-term solution.  Our son is going to outgrow the toddler bed and the extreme firmness of a crib mattress before we know it.  So although they are a lot more expensive, I started looking at organic twin mattresses. 

Given that a standard twin mattress can be bought for a couple hundred dollars, the price tags on the organic mattresses were a bit hard to swallow.  But I reminded myself that we’re frugal for a reason.  It’s not so that we can hoard money and just save it aimlessly.  Instead, we want to make sure that we use our money mindfully, on things that really matter to us.  There’s a lot of controversy about mattresses and the chemicals that are in them.  I don’t claim to know everything about the issue, but my gut instinct is to err on the side of caution when it comes to exposure to synthetic chemicals.  That’s why the only cleaning products that make their way into our home are baking soda, vinegar, hydrogen peroxide, soap nuts, and Dr. Bronner’s soap.  It’s why we don’t use any synthetic chemicals on our lawn or garden.  It’s why we buy organic food. 

In general, I try to balance my desire for a toxin-free home with both our budget and with our efforts to be as environmentally-friendly as possible.  That means that we’re not going to replace stuff we have that is still in good shape (like our living room furniture, for example), just to get toxin-free versions.  But when we need to replace something or get something new, we try to choose the most environmentally-friendly and toxin-free version we can afford.

And that brings us back to searching for a mattress.  We wanted to get something that would last our son for a long time.  We looked at mattresses at a local organic bedding store, and of course the solid latex ones were divine.  They were also $1500 for a twin size.  We decided to go with an innerspring instead, and add a latex topper to it in a few years when our son is heavier and needs a softer bed.  The Green Baby Guide has addressed the fact that there aren’t a whole lot of choices available for reasonably-priced twin mattresses, and I agree.  I looked at both of the ones they mentioned, but didn’t buy either one.  The $600 Naturepedic is waterproof and from what I read, it’s just about as firm as the hard-as-a-rock crib mattress our son already has.  I know that’s perfect for babies and small children, but not as likely to be a good long-term solution.  While I liked the price tag on the $400 Natura Kidz mattress, it looks like soy-based polyfoam isn’t really that much of an improvement over regular polyurethane foam, and to get a truly “organic” mattress from natura Kidz bumps the price tag up to $1100.

I liked what I read about Naturepedic mattresses and their non-toxic fire protection system (another alternative to toxic fire retardants is wool, which is naturally fire resistant, but adds a lot more to the cost of the mattress).  Eventually I settled on their quilted organic cotton deluxe mattress for $700.  I felt that would give us a mattress that could be used long-term (with the addition of a latex topper as our son gets older) and was a good compromise in terms of price.  I ordered it from The Clean Bedroom because they offer a ten percent discount if you become a fan on Facebook.  That allowed me to get an organic waterproof mattress pad ($79) essentially for free.  There was also no tax and no shipping charge.

Since we were spending so much money on the mattress, I wanted to find a good deal on a bed frame.  We wanted a bed with a solid support under the mattress (so that we wouldn’t need a box spring) and we were looking for something with drawers so that we could move our son’s dresser into the baby’s room.  I also wanted something made of solid wood instead of particle board and veneer.  Happily, Craigslist rarely lets me down.  After a few weeks of searching the listings, I came across a bed that was exactly what we wanted.  Solid wood, drawers underneath, a solid platform for the mattress, and in excellent condition.  We got it for $160.  It looks a little odd right now, because we have the crib mattress on it while we wait for the new mattress to be delivered:

We moved our son’s dresser into the baby’s room, and all of his clothes are now under his bed.  In addition, the big middle drawer holds all of his stuffed animals, so they aren’t crowded all over the bed anymore.

All in all, I’d say we did pretty well.  We ended up with a solid wood bed/dresser, an organic mattress that should last a long time, and an organic waterproof mattress pad, for a total of $860.  The mattress should be arriving any day now, and our son is very excited about his big boy bed.  The price was more than we usually spend on stuff like this, but in the nearly three years since our son was born, we’ve spent very little money on supplies for him.  And I feel good knowing that he’ll continue to sleep on a toxin-free mattress. 

The only thing that bothers me about this whole process is how unaffordable non-toxic mattresses are for a lot of people.  We’re thrifty and careful with our money, which helps us budget for larger purchases.  But we’re also fortunate to earn a good income and be able to afford something like this if we want.  For many families, a $700 mattress for a child is out of the question, no matter how carefully they budget.  It shouldn’t be that difficult to get non-toxic products.  I do feel like the tide is turning a bit in terms of people understanding that “better living through chemistry” might not be better after all.  Hopefully as time goes by, non-toxic products will start to be the norm rather than the expensive exception to the rule.

Yesterday, we harvested the last of our garden.  We’ve had a beautiful, warm fall so far, and were able to put off the final harvest quite a bit later than we’ll usually be able to.  We got our homemade cold frames situated over the beds of greens last week, and they’ll keep producing throughout most of the winter, although at a slower pace.  We harvested about half a wheelbarrow full of beets yesterday (and that’s after harvesting about five beets a week since July), and enough carrots to fill a giant plastic storage container.  Since I purged so much stuff over the last few months, we have several empty storage containers, and they’re perfect for storing root vegetables that need to retain moisture, since they have tight fitting lids.

Our onions and potatoes are stored in simple cardboard boxes, but the carrots and beets were a bit more complicated.  This is our first year doing this, so we’ll see how it goes…  For the carrots, we layered them into a big plastic container with layers of the soil they were growing in.  We had augmented that soil with lots of compost and sand, and it will help to keep the carrots from drying out and shriveling in storage.  The beets are in two shallow plastic storage bins, with lots of peat moss around them.  I sprayed the peat moss with water, which should help the beets retain their moisture too.  For both the beets and carrots, I trimmed the tops off to keep them from sucking moisture out of the root during storage.

In addition to having somewhere between a third and a half of our food coming from our garden since about the end of June, we do have a good amount of food stored for the winter:

• 34 quarts of thick tomato sauce
• 14 quarts of diced/crushed tomatoes
• about 20 quarts of frozen corn
• about 10 quarts of frozen green beans
• several quarts of frozen shredded zucchini
• 15 bell peppers that I stuffed with a black bean/rice/Daiya cheese mixture and froze
• about 20 more bell peppers that I diced, froze on trays, and then transfered to storage bags in the freezer
• about a quart of dried parsley
• 55 lbs of potatoes
• roughly 20 onions (I use one nearly every day, so these have been disappearing rapidly)
• lots of carrots
• lots of beets

All in all, I’d say that our first year of major gardening was a success.  Not everything worked perfectly.  I am seriously peeved at the aphids that destroyed our Brussel sprout crop and seriously hampered our cabbages and kale.  Our zucchini did great the the beginning of the season, but then I think the plants out-competed each other and started to die well before the end of the season.   I wish we had half as many beets and about four times as many onions.  But overall, it went great.  We’ve learned some things for next year… we’ll be buying lady bugs at the first hint of aphids.  We’ll plant half as many beets, a lot more onions, and add some additional things like pumpkins.  We’ll use shade cloth over the more heat-sensitive greens and herbs (our arugula and basil went to seed so quickly that we barely had a chance to use them at all this year).

We have our garden set up with four sprinklers that are on an automatic timer system, but some areas get more water than others.  This year, our peppers were in an area that didn’t get as much water as the rest of the garden, and we frequently had to give them supplemental water.  Next year, we’ll plant the thirstiest crops in the beds that get the most water, since we now know which beds those are.

Our berry bushes started to produce a little bit this year, but not enough to preserve anything (or even make it into the house – all the berries were eaten in the backyard!).  We didn’t allow any of our fruit trees to produce fruit this year, as we wanted them to focus their energy on growing their roots.  It will be exciting to see what next year brings with the fruit trees and berry bushes.

Gardening will be a bit more of a balancing act next year, since we’ll have a new baby.  But we did the really hard work this year, double digging our 27 garden beds, augmenting them all with tons of compost, and putting in the watering system.  Next year will be quite a bit easier, so hopefully we’ll be able to juggle it all.  For now… let it snow!

The following is a guest post from Mrs. Money of the Ultimate Money Blog.  Mrs. Money and I have a lot in common, and our beauty routines are pretty similar too.  When I was pregnant with our son, I purged everything from our bathroom that contained suspect ingredients.  Lotions, nail polishes, hair products, fake tanners… I got rid of all of it, and opted for simple things like baking soda, coconut oil and Dr. Bronners soap.  They’re less expensive, much better for my family’s health, and much easier on our budget.  Plus, I no longer have a bathroom counter cluttered with bottles of chemical goo.  Read on for some great ideas from Mrs. Money.

When I first was interested in natural living, one of the first things I did was go through my bathroom cabinets and rid them of anything toxic.  I didn’t want to be putting anything with parabens, silicones, sodium lauryl sulfates, or fragrances on my skin.  Parabens have been linked to cancer, silicones coat the skin and don’t allow it to breathe, and sodium lauryl sulfate is a dangerous irritant.  I knew everything I put on my skin was going to be absorbed into my bloodstream, so I wanted to seek safe alternatives to the conventional products I was used to.  The only bad thing about purchasing all natural body care products is that they are expensive!  I had to come up with a solution that would fit our budget and be healthy all at the same time.  Here are some of my favorite body care routines:

1. No Poo.  Despite the name, no poo is actually a method of cleaning your hair with just baking soda and water.  It only has one ingredient: baking soda.  If you desire, you can also rinse your hair with a vinegar rinse, which ups the ingredient list to two.  It’s super simple and so cheap!

2. Oil cleansing method.  Using oil to clean your face sounds like a bad idea, but it works so well!  When you use the oil cleansing method, your skin will be soft and supple and it’s all washed with natural oils.  I used to suffer from acne, but now with the oil cleansing method I haven’t had better skin in years!  It’s awesome.

3. Making soap.  I have learned how to make my own all natural bar soap with lye and oils.  I use a blend of vegetable oils and make my own bar soap.  When I feel like adding a little fragrance, I add a few drops of essential oils.  They are all natural, and I don’t have to worry about weird chemical fragrances irritating my skin.

4. Make your own toothpaste.  Toothpaste contains flouride and sodium lauryl sulfate, which both are not very good for your body.  I know Frugal Babe uses just baking soda to brush her teeth, and that works just fine too!  I use my toothpaste recipe to get minty fresh breath.  If you don’t want to fool with making your own toothpaste, you can just dip a wet toothbrush in a small amount of baking soda and brush as normal.  Your teeth will be just as clean as if you used normal toothpaste!

When you go green, it’s easy to want it all.  There are many areas you may want to spend more money on green items: for example, you may want to buy all organic produce and start making a lot of your body care products.  Whatever you do, any step you take to be more green will help you in the long run.  It’s better for you and better for the environment.

What steps have you taken to go green that also help you save money?

For years, roasted veggies has been a favorite fall and winter food for us.  But we’ve never had the experience of roasting vegetables we grew ourselves, until now.  I found this recipe for a great roasted veggie marinade and wanted to try it with the day’s harvest.  Our son helped me in the garden, and we ended up with a huge bowl full of veggies:  potatoes, carrots, beets, onions, and red and green peppers.  In addition, I had a couple portabello mushrooms in the fridge, and I always have a big stash of garlic in the cupboard (we didn’t grow our own garlic this year, but it’s on the list for next year’s garden).

I washed and chopped everything, and then whipped up Gena’s marinade, using garlic instead of shallots (what I had on hand), and raspberry balsamic vinegar (again, what I had on hand).  The whole house smelled wonderful while they were roasting!  Since I had root veggies in the mix, I cooked them for about 50 minutes, but if you’re using mostly softer veggies it will cook faster.

The rest of our lunch consisted of a rice and lentil mixture that I like to serve when the main dish is veggies.  Since veggies and rice alone don’t have a whole lot of protein, I often add lentils to my rice when I’m cooking it.  I always use brown rice, which takes roughly 50 minutes to cook.  I start with rice and water (two cups of water for each cup of rice), add a bit of salt and coconut oil, and bring it to a boil.  Then reduce the heat to low and put a lid on the pot.  After it’s been cooking for about 20 minutes, I add washed lentils and some extra water (roughly 1.5 cups of water for each cup of lentils I add), and turn the heat back on high for a couple minutes to get everything boiling again.  Then I set the heat back to low and let it finish cooking until the rice and lentils are done.  Lentils only take about half an hour, which is why I add them part way through the cooking process, although I’m sure it would be fine to just dump everything in at the beginning and let it all cook together.  After they’re cooked, I add whatever seasonings we’re in the mood for.

Organic lentils and brown rice are both things that I buy in bulk from our food co-op.  If you have any space at all to store food, these are good things to buy in bulk – they’re less expensive that way, and I always know that I have plenty on hand.

The roasted veggies were amazing.  Knowing that they were growing in our garden this morning and on our plates at lunchtime was pretty sweet.  Obviously they aren’t free – there’s a lot of work (and water!) that goes into gardening.  But for us, it’s a labor of love, and we enjoy every minute that we spend out in the garden.  Lately at least half of our meals are coming from our garden, and it’s making all the effort we went through to move here feel very worthwhile.  I can’t even imagine how great it will be when our fruit trees get a little bigger and we’re able to harvest our own fruit too.

Next year I want to plant more varieties of squash (we just did zucchini this year, and had a few too many of them!), garlic, and additional herbs (rosemary, dill).  We’ve started tearing out plants from some of our beds that are finished for the year, and planting red clover as a green manure crop in those beds.  Pretty soon it will be time to put the cold frames over a few beds where we’ll be able to keep growing greens long after it frosts, and the rest of the garden will go to sleep for the winter.  We’ll be harvesting root vegetables soon, and storing them in our basement.  I like the simple storage ideas described here for root veggies.

So far, I’ve canned 24 quarts of tomato sauce and seven quarts of diced/crushed tomatoes, and there are still a lot of tomatoes that haven’t ripened yet – I think we’ll be set for tomato products for the winter!

All in all, I have to say that our first year of serious gardening has been even more successful that we had expected.  Not everything has worked perfectly, and we had a few crops that didn’t do much or went to seed much too soon.  We’ve had epic battles with aphids (best thing I’ve found to defeat them is a jet stream from the hose, which washes them off the leaves.  They really like to hide under the leaves of curly kale).  But overall, we’ve harvested huge amounts of food, and still have lots more to harvest in the next few weeks.  And we’ve learned a lot and had a blast in the process.

Everyday lately we’ve been harvesting a good chunk of our food from our backyard.  I’ve noticed that our grocery bill is less than half of our usual total, and the cart looks pretty empty when we get to the checkout stand. 

Here are a couple of pictures that show most of what we harvested yesterday:

We got our first peppers yesterday, and our first broccoli.  We also found a few zucchinis that had been hiding… oops!  They are huge!  The pile of green beans in the top photo came from one plant, and we have about 50 plants out there, so we’ve been eating lots of beans lately. 

Nearly all of that food was gone by the end of the day – everything except the tomatoes and the four biggest zucchini.  We have the tomatoes in a bowl on the counter for snacking, and there are still a few left.  The big zucchini are all shredded and in the freezer – our first preserving of the summer! 

Now that we’re getting so much food from our garden, all the work that we put in early in the spring to dig beds, add compost, and tend to our little seedlings seems very much worth it. 

Hope you’re all having a great weekend!