Container Gardening Experiment: The Saga Begins

According to the chart that Burpee published and Home Depot hung in their garden center, today, May 25, is THE BEST DAY OF THE YEAR to start planting seeds in Northern Ohio. So, I have duly planted a host of seedlings and am settling into the waiting game to see if any of them actually work their magic and, you know... grow.

I know some of my readers are fortunate enough to live in areas with a fair amount of available land to them. Mr. Scrimp and I, however, have a postage-stamp front lawn, a front step with a foot or two of space on it, and no back yard at all. So, traditional gardening just isn't really an option for us. We have a couple strips of rocky, weedy ground off to one side of our driveway, that gets just about the right mix of sun and shade to be perfect for growing plants in. That's it.

So? Container garden!

CSA

This week, Mr. Scrimp and I did something new--we signed up for a CSA delivery.

The way this works is that for 22 weeks, we will pay a weekly fee and in exchange, we'll get a big box of local produce from area farms, sometimes even including milk, eggs, and meat! The box is not delivered to our house, but to a pickup location about a 30 minute walk (or 5 minute drive) from here on Friday afternoons.

I would like to recommend looking into a CSA if you are trying to eat more fresh produce. We will be paying the same amount we already pay for groceries, but with an added guarantee that everything we get will be fresh, local, and newly harvested, and that our money is going to support farms and small businesses close to our home. Community supported agriculture, people! It's super!

As an additional plus, because you don't choose what gets delivered to you from week to week in your CSA box, you're pretty much guaranteed to eventually get something you don't usually buy, don't like, or have never cooked. This means you're either going to have to get creative and try something new, or be generous and give food away to your friends and neighbors. Either way, I approve. 

Sadly, because of our local climate, 22 weeks a year is the most we can get for our CSA. If you live in a place with a year-round growing season, however, you can probably find a year-round delivery.

If you are in the Cleveland area, our CSA still has spots available. If you aren't, try looking for a CSA in your neighborhood either just by googling it (which is how I found ours) or checking on Local Harvest. If you follow the link, it will take you to a page with a function where you can enter your ZIP code and they'll find local CSAs. Bear in mind, that website did not find the CSA that we ended up deciding to use, so I'd try several search methods.


Image Credit: "First CSA Delivery of the Season" by Flickr User sharynmorrow

Spring Cleaning

The spring thaw seems to be here. It's in the high 50's out today, there are birds everywhere and the sun is shining. I feel like I've come out of a cave or something--everything is so beautiful. I'm so excited just to sit out on our front stoop and enjoy the sun!

Today, I spent about two hours scrubbing the baseboards in our living room. I got a trusty spray bottle full of Mrs. Meyer's Clean Day, an old toothbrush, and a rag, and went to work spraying, brushing, and wiping clean. Dirty baseboards seem like a small thing but having them clean makes such a difference! I don't think the baseboards in this apartment have been cleaned in.. well.. a long time. Definitely years.

I also read the newest issue of Martha Stewart, shopped online for heirloom vegetable seeds (so that we can start container gardening this year!) and washed the windows.

What are you doing to greet the spring?

Sanctified Space

Sanctification. It means "setting something apart."

We all have things in our lives that we sanctify, whether it's that one outfit that you only wear for extra-special occasions, or something more abstract, like the exact way you feel about your significant other when they give you that one look that makes your knees go a little weak. You know exactly what that feeling is like, but you don't share it. Those things are set apart somehow, to a greater or lesser degree, and their set-apartness gives them a kind of reverence, a kind of holiness.

But what about an actual place? Have you ever thought about sanctifying a space?

Mini-hiatus

Blogging has been light for me these last few days, I know. Partly this is a money issue--we had some car trouble, so we don't have extra funds this month for buying the items I need to complete craft projects, leaving me with less to blog about.

It's also a health issue. While I am generally healthy in the sense that I'm rarely sick via contagion, I do have a chronic illness (endometriosis) that frequently leaves me tired or in pain. We've just started dealing with a new issue connected to that, so I spent a lot of time at the doctor's yesterday and was so emotionally exhausted by it that I didn't do anything last night except curl up in bed with Mr. Scrimp and watch TV.

Tonight is our weekly game night with friends, so I expect I'll be ready to go back to regularly scheduled blogging tomorrow morning.

In the meantime.. leave a comment and give me one link to YOUR blog and at least one link to another blog you read so I can have some fresh inspiration!

Theme Songs

I was reading the Blah Blah Blahger today in my feed reader. First of all, I realized that I haven't really done any blog reading since Wednesday. Oops! Well, I've been busy not procrastinating, so there's my excuse.

On Wednesday, JJ talked about theme songs, and how finding and applying a theme song to your life can really help you get a sesne of purpose or calm. Odd as this sounds, because I think the concept smacks of the sort of self-help-y nonsense that normally drives me crazy, I have found this to be totally true. I've always had theme songs over the years, although I tend not to trumpet the fact. There just always seems to be a song that fits how I feel about myself and my life at a given point in time.

I'm going to admit right now, my theme song is one that you may think is hackneyed or over-used. You might think it's totally trite to pick this... but, well, I don't care.

Anyway, it's really Mr. Scrimp's fault.

Three Excuses for Procrastination.. and why not to listen

I didn't write a blog post yesterday, because I had a lot of things to do off the computer. I drove Mr. Scrimp to work. I worked out. I drove me to work. I worked. I came home and we made dinner and then I spent hours cleaning.

All in all, sounds pretty good, right? Well, no, because...

Friday Mornings

Fridays are a late-start day for me at work. I don't go in until 1pm, but Mr. Scrimp still has to be at work by 7:30, so I have Friday mornings completely to myself.

Generally I write a Five Dollar Decor post if I haven't finished one for the week already, tool around on the Internet, maybe go to the gym,and just generally take it slow.

This morning, I had to drive Mr. Scrimp to work because my car is in the shop having its computer and brake lines replaced. I thought about going to the gym, but I wasn't feeling great. I thought about going back to bed, but I'd had a cup of tea when I got up. I thought about watching a movie, bu that's never as fun without Mr. Scrimp.

So instead, I made a loaf of challah, cleaned my kitchen and pantry, and tidied the dining room in preparation for the weekend. Normally, we just do our big cleaning jobs during the weekend, but what inevitably happens is that I get to Monday and feel like I didn't really relax. There's nothing relaxing about coming home to three days' worth of dishes, a dirty floor, and five loads of laundry.

The challah is baking, I have an hour before it's time to go to work, and now I can take my apron off without feeling irresponsible. Tomorrow, we'll have a day off the way we really ought to, with the chores and worries of the week set aside and nothing to do but get back in touch with what it means to be quiet.

Five Dollar Decor will be up, but tonight, after I get home from work and we pick up my car from the shop, probably.

In the meantime, think about planning a real day off, from housework as well as job-work--doing chores ahead so there are none to do except the most basic ones of cooking and tidying up after yourself as you go.

Shabbat Shalom!

Winter Blahs

The weather here in Ohio has been pretty crazy this year. We've gone back and forth from balmy mid-40's to bitter, bitter cold (windchill -2) in the space of a day or two.

It was warm yesterday, and I had hopes that maybe it would stick around, but instead I woke up to this out my front window:

 

It's not that it's snowing very heavily, or that there's been a lot of accumulation (yet), but just the pyschological impact of yet another day with steadily falling snow and no sunlight. Blah.

I'm stuck in the doldrums, people. All I want to do is mope about the weather and the fact that it isn't spring yet, and that's no good.

What are you doing to beat the winter blahs? Leave a comment and give me some ideas for how to fight it off!

Why to Cook at Home

I'm no superwoman. I'm easily bored and tend not to finish everything I start. So, how do I keep going with making homemade meals in the face of cooking fatigue and general flakiness?

There are lots of ways to answer this question, but I don't think I could express them much better than Kristen of The Frugal Girl did this week in her Monday Q&A post. Go read it and be encouraged.

Recipe: Zucchini Bread

I had this one friend in college who made amazing zucchini bread. When Mr. Scrimp and I got married, I knew I had to get her recipe and make some, because we both love it so much. I altered it here and there (for instance, I added grated apple for a little extra sweetness and because I didn't quite have enough zucchini), took a bunch of pictures, and made two batches. It was the first thing I ever baked in our house. You can tell, because in the photos everything was mixed by hand in a salad bowl. What can I say? Everything else was still packed.

Recipe: Pain au Chocolat... sort of

We lived in France when I was little, and it shaped a lot of things about me. I haven't been back, although I often wish we had the means to go. There was a fair amount of pidgin French spoken in my house when I was growing up, and we ate a lot of French food, watched French movies, and read French books.

I think my dad has never quite gotten over having to leave behind the pâtisseries of Paris. He'll occasionally go out early in the morning and pick up croissants or pains au chocolat and bring them home to have for breakfast with a strong cup of coffee.

I woke up this morning with a sudden urge for pain au chocolat (often just called chocolate croissants in America). Now, I've tried to make croissants before, and never done particularly well at it. Puff pastry is a finicky, time-consuming, demanding thing to make, and I didn't feel like putting in all that effort for a breakfast that would be, as a result, way after breakfast time. But there was a roll of puff pastry in my freezer left over from some brie en croute that my mother-in-law made for a Christmas party we threw, so I pulled it out and started improvising. They aren't real, as I said to Mr. Scrimp while we gobbled them up, but they're delicious.

Wearing the Uniform

Pretty much the only gift I specifically requested for Christmas this year was an apron.

Many years of life experience have taught me that sometimes it's a lot easier to do a job when you're wearing the right uniform. For me, those jobs are cleaning and cooking, and the uniform is an apron. I love aprons--partly because I tend to get things all over myself when I cook and clean and prefer to keep my clothes clean, but partly just because they are a uniform that add psychological ease to a job I don't always want to do.

On Food

I am a big fan and proponent of eating healthy food. It's part of why I started this blog, in fact. Food is, to me, one of the most important facets of our lifestyle. But I realized today that, apart from posting recipes, I've done very little talking about food and what we feel it ought to be.

Put very simply, it's this--we don't eat "health food," we don't eat processed food, we do our best to eat local and/or organic, and we try not to eat a lot of fat or sugar. We've been doing that for six and a half months now, and we've both lost weight. More importantly, though, we have more energy, fewer aches and pains, I sleep better (I used to have terrible problems with insomnia), and we both feel just generally better.

I spent about two hours walking around the grocery store today. It normally only takes me about 30 minutes to get all my shopping done, but Mr. Scrimp was at work, and I didn't have a list with me, so I took the time to browse and really enjoy myself.

Normally I shop with a list, but even when I don't, I try to be guided by a few simple and easy-to-remember rules:

• Don't buy pre-made food. It will almost always be better if you buy the separate ingredients and make it yourself, even though it will be more time consuming. You will also have the benefit of knowing exactly what you're eating, all the time.
• Don't buy food with ingredients you can't pronounce or find at the grocery store. Chemical additives in food are a relatively new addition, and are mainly present (or have been up until recently) in American diets. There aren't enough data yet to solidly lay the blame for the terrible health of Americans on chemical food additives yet, as far as I know, but the circumstantial evidence continues to mount up, especially as highly processed food begins to make its way into Europe and previously healthy countries experience similar spikes in their rates of certain health problems. I am simply tired of putting things into my body that have only been eaten by humans for the last 20-40 years. It strikes me as folly.
• Don't buy foods that are artificially low-fat, fat-free, or "lite". This is especially true of things like "fat free half & half" or "fat free sour cream". Half & half is half milk, half cream. Sour cream is, well, sour cream. By their very nature, those products have fat in them. What that means is that in order to make them fat-free, they have to be so chemically tweaked and altered that what you're really eating or drinking is asoup of seaweed, starches, sugars, thickened skim milk, chemicals, and sugar, sugar, sugar. Fat is one of the things that makes food taste good. Sugars are one of the others. Diet food products might be low in fat, but they almost always have huge amounts of added sugars and sodium to make up for it--otherwise you'd be able to taste all the chemicals you're eating. 
• Don't buy imitation foods. This is sort of an addendum to the last rule--margarine, tofurkey, American "cheese product", and all those other bizarre foods are terrible for you. They are unhealthy. They are heavily processed. They are full of sugar and chemicals that are probably someday going to turn out to be toxic. And they don't even taste good. 
• Don't buy canned when you can get fresh or dried. There's evidence coming out that food stored long-term in aluminum cans gets chemicals leached into it. I was actually advised away from canned foods and beverages by my doctor a few years ago because most of the cans are lined with soft plastics in order to keep the food from developing a metallic taste, and the plastics can leach into food over time. Instead of canned beans, buy dried. Instead of canned tomatoes, buy fresh. Or at least buy foods canned in glass, or frozen.
  

 It's been long enough now that Mr. Scrimp and I can both tell the difference. Maybe not every day, but when we have occasion to eat processed foods or foods that contain a lot of chemical additives, it takes him about 30 minutes and me about 2 hours to start to really feel unwell as a result.

During some of my Christmas vacation, we didn't have time to go grocery shopping and so ended up eating a lot of pre-made, restaurant, or even fast-food for a few days. By the end of it, I felt terrible.

"Did I used to feel like this all the time?" I asked Mr. Scrimp, staring in the mirror at my puffy eyes and wan face as I downed a couple of Advil to kill the headache that I couldn't seem to get rid of. "Why did it take me so long to stop?"

He shrugged. "We were just so used to it that we didn't notice anymore, I guess."

You might read this and think, "You know, that's true for you, but I feel fine eating processed food. I don't feel like it's affecting my health or my sense of well-being. I've lost weight on my lite-foods diet and I think it tastes delicious."

I challenge you to cut those foods out completely for two months (it takes about that long to get over the food cravings and feeling constantly hungry), and then tell me you don't feel better.

Maybe you're just so used to it that you just don't notice how you really feel.

Pondering

Before we got married, Mr. Scrimp and I talked a lot about our philosophies on pretty much everything--from small things like haircare to big ones like food, religion, housekeeping, and life itself. We talked about these things because we were getting married, but also because we like to think and we like to talk. We are always refining and considering the ways in which we want to define ourselves.

When it comes to keeping a home--and I think the philosophy can be extended to the way I live life in general--I've long been inspired by William Morris's advice to "have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.”

A defining tenet of the Arts & Crafts movement, this guideline is what I keep in mind before I purchase, reorganize, make, or otherwise do anything that is going to impact our home. I don't always do the best job of following it, but I try.

As we get ready for the new year, I look around our little house and feel pretty satisfied with the job I've done of filling it with things that are either useful or beautiful--preferably both. I think it's good to remember the philosophies you want to live by as you quiet your mind after the holidays in preparation for the new beginning that we all get a chance at on January 1.

It's time for Mr. Scrimp and I to pack up and put away the cares of this past year and begin to think about the year that's coming, and how we want to live it.

How about you? I'd love to hear what you're thinking of as you prepare for 2010.

Five Dollar Decor - Organizing

Organizing is simultaneously my favorite and least favorite thing. I love to sit down and organize things. I hate and am terrible at keeping them that way.

I'm often struck by the huge change that can be made in a space by doing very little. This week, I'm going to continue with the getting ready for the new year theme by talking about some quick and inexpensive ways to make dramatic changes in cluttered spaces around the house.

1. Use a Hanging Shoe Organizer

...and I don't mean for shoes. We have a shoe rack in our front closet that my mother-in-law gave us. Because we tend not to buy shoes unless we have a repeating need which none of our current pairs can fill, all the shoes we wear can fit on that one rack with a couple of spots left over.

We also have a hanging shoe organizer in our bedroom closet. After months of being frustrated by overstuffed dresser drawers, socks on the floor, and sweaters taking up most of the hanger space we had, I hung an organizer in our closet. Ours has several sizes of compartment, some larger and some smaller. In half the smaller compartments, I tuck all of Mr. Scrimp's clean, matched socks, and in the other half I put all of his folded undershirts. The larger compartments are big enough to hold sweaters, either rolled or folded.

Organizers run the gamut in both price and quality. Ours was from Bed Bath & Beyond and cost about $15 (I already had it on hand, it was a gift), but I've used the cheap ones in the past in the same way and had no problems. You could try using this one from Organize2Fit.com, which is only $4.99.

2. Sort Your Mail

Mr. Scrimp and I throw our mail into a basket on a small table,and it inevitably ends up in a pile that needs to be sorted through before bills can be paid or letters can be read and replied to. Apartment Therapy suggests buying a small plate rack/organizer and sticking it on your desk or front table to hold letters. Because it's designed to hold plates, it will hold larger, sturdier envelopes just as well as small ones.

The photo at Apartment Therapy uses a $10 rack from the Container Store, but you can get a similar one from Ace Hardware for $4.58.

3. Bottle Things Up

I spent four hours today deep-cleaning our house. I scrubbed floors, sorted papers, reorganized things, and wound up, like I always do, with little piles of things that don't really have a specific place to go--pins, thumbtacks, twist-ties, spare buttons, and the like.

I also have, in my medicine cabinet, a fairly large assortment of accumulated pill bottles, most of which have one pill left over from treatments finished or forgotten, painkillers unneeded, or cough medicine gone bad. I'm heading to the craft store tomorrow or Monday to pick up a couple of sheets of scrapbook paper and put into practice this fabulous idea over on Curbly, which involves covering prescription bottles with scrapbook paper and nice labels, and using them to hold all those little odds and ends that don't have any other home.

Even if they just end up back in a junk drawer or stowed on a shelf, I'll know where to find those things the next time I need them, and where to put them the next time I go on a cleaning jag that turns up half a pound of doodads that I have no home for but can't throw away.

And, as an added bonus, all those prescription bottles that I never throw away will also get sorted and dealt with!

4. Boxes in Kitchen Cupboards

I will admit, there is one exception that I allow when it comes to our rule about never storing food in plastic. We have a very small closet/pantry space for our dry goods, and for quite some time it was a horrific mess. Things were sorted more or less by category of food (baking, canned goods, spices, etc.) but the shelves, while narrow, are deep, and every time we cooked we ended up making a mess of things that, more often than not, never got cleaned up. After a while we were just tossing things on top of other things and it was a disaster.

Then I remembered that I had a couple of plastic shoebox-sized totes from my dorm room days that were sitting unused in our guest room. I recruited them for kitchen duty, spent 45 minutes reorganizing, and ended up with a closet that was unrecognizably different from its former self.

This is a great way to bring an immediate visual change to a small pantry space while also organizing it for easy access to whatever it is you need at the moment. With all your spice jars in one box, all your teas in another, a third holding bags of flour and sugar, and so on and so forth, you'll not only be able to locate all your food, but you'll be able to fit even more inside.

My boxes are Rubbermaid that I think I picked up at CVS a few years ago. I also recommend these ones from The Container Store, at $1.29 apiece.

5. Creative Shelving

Our lack of shelf space isn't just a problem in the pantry. With the exception of our kitchen, which has far more shelving than it ought to have given its tiny size, Mr. Scrimp and I can never seem to find enough shelves to hold all of our books and knicknacks. The next time I find a guitar case at a thrift store, I'd really like to have Mr. Scrimp bolt it to the wall in our guest room so that I can turn it into a bookshelf like the one pictured here, which was a project featured on RecyclArt. Seriously, how completely cool is that? (Come to think of it, I might have mentioned this on the blog before. I just continue to think it's an incredible idea.)

If nothing else, I feel like this should inspire you to look at objects around your home as having new potential to become an organizational aid, and you'll end up with a house that is clean, decluttered, organized, and ready for a new year to begin.

Score!

Sometimes I think the best type of bargain is the one you stumble across unintentionally. I was at Marc's yesterday (a local discount type grocery and odds-and-ends store, for those of you not in Ohio) and found a king size "down alternative" comforter for $19.99.

It's not the highest quality thing ever, but it's definitely warm and not an eyesore. Mr. Scrimp and I live in an old house with steam heat, and the radiators are fab except in our bedroom, where they are non-functional. This makes blanket number four to go on the pile we sleep under.

This winter, experiment with keeping your heat a little lower than you might like. It's a lot cheaper in the long run to wear a second layer, buy some house slippers, and sleep with an extra blanket than it is to burn all that energy keeping your house at 70 degrees all the time.

And remember, kids--always keep your eyes open for a good deal.