Welcome to the second installment of our Gardening Primer. Today we’re looking at how to read your seed packets. (If you missed our first installment on how to buy the best seeds, go check that out now.)
Now that you’ve purchased your seeds and have them in hand, you might be wondering how best to plant your seeds. Should you start them earlier indoors? Should you plant them directly outside? How do you plant the seeds?
We’ve talked about some of our favorite online stores to get the best deals for natural products, but we haven’t often covered Vitacost. We don’t shop here QUITE as often as others like Soap.com and Drugstore.com because Vitacost tends to be more uniquely geared toward natural products (where as Soap.com and Drugstore.com we can order something like a dish brush, etc. that isn’t necessarily “green”).
This particular time, I headed over to Vitacost because they currently had the BEST price on Redmond Trading Company’s Earthpaste. And, when this particular product is inexpensive, it seems to fly off the shelves! (the Wintergreen flavor is already out of stock!)
Earthpaste toothpaste has been on my shortlist on new products to try, but at $7.99 a tube, I wasn’t about ready to switch from my normal Tom’s of Maine toothpaste that I can get for around $4. Luckily, Vitacost is selling Earthpaste for $4.59!
I hate paying for shipping, so I spent the next couple of days figuring out what else to add to my cart to get to the $49 order for free shipping. This is what we ended up with:
This post is one of our more personal posts – which you won’t see around here very often. We stick to facts we can find and results of our “experiments,” and while it’s all fairly light-hearted, there’s a deeper meaning to what we do.
This particular post, delves into a little bit of why we started this blog and why we changed our eating and lifestyle habits. Sure, we watched documentaries and that spurred us toward more research and more changes, but in reality, all of our changes came down to one thing:
The People We Love.
I’ve wavered on this post, wondering if we should really post something so clearly personal, but in reality, this post kept coming back to my mind. I kept realizing that this was the CONTEXT to everything on this site.
Just over two years ago a dear family friend was diagnosed with an aggressive form of cancer. It shook my world.
There are people and friends and family that you just expect to be outside the realm of Disease and Cancer, but when people really close to you start being diagnosed, the reality sets in: we HAVE to do SOMETHING.
We can’t sit around and watch our families and friends and loved ones struggle and become ill and pass away. It’s becoming a more and more broken world – and it’s just not something we believe God ever wanted.
So just after we heard the news of this family friend, just over two years ago, we started thinking about the little things we could change. Sure, the cure for cancer is a worthy cause, but we’ve GOT to figure out how to stop it or at least curtail it at the beginning.
Our research and our blog started to become our way to “help” the cause. We may not be finding a cure, we may not be changing our chances, but we are proactively trying to help the world we’re in. IF the food we eat and the products we use can increase or decrease our likelihood of contracting disease, wouldn’t you want to change – even if it’s not a guarantee? Wouldn’t you want to give your family and friends and loved ones the opportunity to live a healthier life?
Just over a month ago, our family friend passed away. As I struggle with the loss, I struggle even harder knowing that this family’s world has been shaken to its core. We believe that above all, God is in control, and He can work through these situations.
But, let’s take a moment to stop and consider what we can do, what miniscule steps can WE take TODAY to help curb the loss of people much too soon.
Howdy, again, Everyone.
I do apologize for how absolutely non-organized I’ve been and how that has equaled virtually zero posts in the last errr…six months or so (ouch!)
The good news for you, though, is that as lackadaisical as I’ve been with posting, that doesn’t mean that we haven’t been experimenting and changing and growing while we’ve been absent from the blog-o-sphere.
We’ve been especially focused on changing our diets. Where before we’ve focused a lot on lessening processed foods and incorporating whole foods, we’ve now taken the (more-drastic-for-us) steps at sourcing the BEST whole foods that we can get. This has meant trading conventional meats for pastured, rBST free milk for whole, grass-fed milk, and trying new recipes and techniques to add even more fruits and vegetables to our diets. We’ve switched out regular salt for Real Salt and are looking toward converting our white sugar to less processed varieties. There’s been some significant changes in our ingredients/diets in the last six months, and we will hopefully be covering some of our reasoning for changes in our diet, as well as encourage you to consider what changes you could make. (Mini disclaimer: we have no intention of completely switching to being a whole food blog. It’s just not who we’ve set out to be, and instead we will sprinkle in recipes and info and refer you to blogs that have real food as their focus, if that is what interests you.)
We also have planned a mini garden primer series in which we will cover topics such as how to choose the right seeds and when to plant these seeds based off of where you live, how to care for seedlings, how to deal with pests, and how to build a raised bed (which we will be doing ourselves for the first time this year). While these topics will be old-hat for you old-time gardeners, we have had a few requests for basic information and feel like this could benefit some of the newbies.
We also will be continuing to dabble in homemade cleaners and beauty products and how to create the best products with the most natural ingredients, for the best price.
Please bear with us as we get back into the habit of blogging, but we hope that you’re as excited as we are to get back into the swing of learning new things!
See you soon!
Do you remember when we mentioned Soap.com? (here and here)
Well, if you haven’t taken the plunge with them, now’s the perfect time!
Can I first start off by saying that this year has whizzed by? I can’t believe it’s almost Christmas (but, I’m totally excited about it because I LOVE Christmas). But, as we’re ending the year, I realized that it’s time to start doing our favorite kitchen items list for 2012. (You can read about our Top Ten 2011 Baking Essentials here and our Top Nine 2011 Cooking Essentials here.)
This year I wanted to break it up into a few more categories, so I could add a few more of my favorites. So, without further ado (and in plenty of time for in-store buying for Christmas), here are our favorite kitchen utensils and gadgets for 2012.
I’m sorry I’ve become such a woefully spotty blogger, and I will probably be that way until January when we browse through seed catalogs again. Not that there’s not a lot to talk about during the upcoming holiday season (I’m a Christmas junkie), I just like soaking it up rather than stopping every five minutes to take a picture 
But, I had to drop in today and tell you what a huge nerd I am. I LOVE new cleaning supplies. When I get a box in the mail of them, it’s like Christmas for me – especially when I get a fun new shower scrub brush. Sadly, yes, I am really that ridiculous
In one of my earlier posts, I told you all that we had no clue what we were doing in terms of moving, so we didn’t have any tips for you. And, really, besides getting a lot of help and packing like things together, we don’t have a lot of advice (we just moved to a different unit – so we just moved across a parking lot!).
BUT, to satisfy those who we couldn’t give advice to, I thought we’d share some of our small space organization strategies with you.
And today we’re tackling the bathroom cabinet.
We like to check our labels around here. We want to know what we eat, and we are pretty adamant about it.
One of my favorite beverages is hot tea, and I bought Good Earth’s Sweet and Spicy because I love the flavor and saw on the side of the box that there were no “No artificial flavors, colors or preservatives.” (See first picture.) I assumed that was the truth.
Now, understand my surprise when I turned to the ingredients and the THIRD ingredient of the tea is “artificial flavors.”
I’ve posted this picture on Good Earth’s facebook page, and we’ll see what they have to say about it.
And if you feel so inclined, go over and let them know what you think about their misleading packaging.
