I don't know why, but this song keeps running through my head.

It has been a VERY busy first quarter of 2010. In February, we took a trip to visit Phil and Nancy in Florida and when we got back, we looked at a piece of property that Bryan’s aunt and uncle had found listed in the Bedford newspaper and we made an offer the same day!!

As of April 12th, we are the proud owners of eleven acres in beautiful northwestern Monroe County. This property has a main home, a rental property, a large barn (big enough to hold the RV) and LOTS of cleared/wooded land.

Currently, we are sleeping in our RV with our two kitties while we do some minor repairs and renovations to the main house. Our goal is to move into the house sometime in mid-May.

I just hooked up the wireless internet at the house last night, so I will post some photos soon. Here is a list of our current projects:

• Create and till 40 x 60 foot garden- done.
• Plant garden- work in progress. (I have the peas, beans, beets, carrots, spinach, lettuce and radishes in, after this patch of rain clears I will be planting potatoes, sweet potatoes, strawberries, sunflowers and create an asparagus and rhubarb patch)
• Remove all old carpet and pad from the three bedrooms, living room and laundry room-done.
• Prep and paint walls- almost done thanks to the superior painting skills of our friends Bryan and Lyndsay. We painted with Dutch Boy Refresh, which is a no-VOC paint with odor masking properties. It is great!
• Enlarge “my” closet in bedroom-done. Bryan did this for me out of the goodness of his heart. He loves me so.
• Clean, clean clean. Mow, mow, mow. Clean some more, mow some more. Repeat.
• Install new and additional light fixtures-not yet.
• Remove old wood stove, create a laundry room, fix dishwasher, install new storm door-soon, very soon.
• Install carpet and vinyl- my dear dad and his friend Darryl are coming down next week. Hooray!

This is just the beginning of a wonderful adventure. Lots of pictures and posts coming soon!!

We are so happy that you have joined us. Creating this blog has been really fun and we hope that you enjoy it. Most of the posts are written by Jessika, but Bryan chimes in every once in a while. Please browse through the older articles and post comments if you are so moved. If you would like to learn more about why we started this blog, check out the Our Story link at the top of the page. More exciting posts are on their way soon!

   

 

 

 

Good for you!

Why do people buy organic food? Because it tastes better? It feels good? It’s healthier? To avoid pesticides and growth hormones? For those of us over here at yuppieenvironmentalist, we think that all of those are good reasons to buy organic food. So we try to buy as much of it as our “food dollar” will allow. 

But let’s face it. Organic food can be quite a bit more expensive than conventional food. The question comes up often- does everything I buy have to be organic?

Maybe not. Especially if your primary reason for buying organic is to avoid pesticides. It turns out that certain foods contain very high levels of pesticides. These foods are often referred to as “the dirty dozen.” Research from the Environmental Working Group (EWG) indicates that people who eat the 12 most contaminated fruits and vegetables consume an average of 10 pesticides per day. Obviously, it would be wise to buy the organic version of these foods, if possible. There is also a group of foods known as “the clean fifteen.” The EWG reports that folks who eat conventionally grown fruits and vegetables from this list consume an average of 2 pesticides per day. You could then infer that if you had to buy some conventional foods, your safest bet would be the ones on this list. 

Bryan and I have altered our organic purchasing habits because of this list. We now try to buy the organic version of all of the dirty dozen (and try to grow some of them ourselves). These foods include bell peppers, apples, strawberries and lettuce. We were also happy to know that some of our favorite foods, like bananas, broccoli, corn and sweet potatoes are among some of the “cleanest” foods. We don’t by organic bananas anymore, but we always buy organic strawberries. Knowing which foods to focus on when buying organic has really helped us save money when we needed to. 

You can download a free, wallet sized version of the Dirty Dozen/Clean Fifteen here. Print out a copy for you and some extras for your friends.

This was a really interesting year for our garden. We started spending lots of time away from the house (in our RV at the Hickory Hills Campground) and then we closed on the sale of our house at the end of July, so we were not able to experience a full year of gardening. After we accepted the offer on our house (mid May) I stopped making new plans for our garden and just hoped that I would be able to pull the last of what I had already planted before we moved out completely in July. We also tried our hand at some container gardening in large barrels at the RV park. I kept a pretty good garden journal this year- below is a brief excerpt of the last few months. For a glimpse at the seeds that we started, check out this post, this post and this post. Oh, and this one too! 

March 21st, 2009

Big day! We scored a couple of free half barrels from my work, which means we will be able to try out some container plantings at the house. I added two cubic feet of organic garden soil to the garden and we bought a couple more bags today at Lowes. (I also bought some spinach seeds and LOTS of organic potting soil for those barrels.) Tomorrow we will fill the barrels and hopefully grow- 3 barrels of yukon gold potatoes, 1 barrel of sweet potatoes, 1 barrel of strawberries (transplanted from garden) and 1 barrel of sweet peas (yum!). 

Waiting to be filled.

Don't forget to drill some drainage holes in your barrels before filling them with soil.

March 22nd,  2009

After filling the wine barrels, Bryan helped me dig up the mess of strawberry plants and transfer them into one of the barrels. I have had this particular “plant” for about eight years and it still bears some fruit each year. Baby radishes are sprouting today!

March 23rd, 2009

Started a “seed” sweet potato today. Going to try to grow some slips in water like we did when we were in school. I got a Jewell organic potato from Bloomingfoods. I also put my seed potatoes in the window with our seedlings. They need at least a week or two in the sun to sprout. I bought 3 yukon gold and 2 red ones from Bloomingfoods. They were conventional (same as last year). Next year I hope to order some from an organic catalog with my sister in law, Kay. 

Yukon golds starting to sprout.

Also bought some shelling peas today from Menards (Burpee Dark Seeded Early Perfection Peas). I read about a variety of shelling peas that worked great in a container because they did not need to be trellised, but could not find them today. 

This first spinach tasted so good!

April 26th, 2009

First Harvest!! 7 radishes and a cup of spinach. Hooray!

May 2nd, 2009 (notes taken while waiting for customers at our garage sale)

We transplanted some peppers and broccoli from the indoor seedlings on April 16th. Some of the broccoli looks like it is going to make it, but only one pepper plant. I think that they were all a little too small when we put them out, but we had to as we were having an open house on that same weekend. Forgot to write that I planted the potatoes in early April. We are trying to hold off on the red potatoes and some of the yukons because we are going to be moving to the RV park and would like to try and plant them in barrels at the park. So I have cut and dried them and have planted them very shallow and loose in two pots in the garage. Sweet potatoes just got a slip or two on them about a week ago. I swear I bought an organic potato, but maybe it was treated to retard sprouting. Next year we need to buy from a catalog. 

May 10th, 2009

The lettuce has been coming up nicely. The Salad Bowl variety I have just been picking leaf by leaf. The Buttercrunch, I picked leaves today, but I think that I can also wait for loosely compacted heads and pick those. Updates:

• Strawberry plant is doing well. Small offshoot is going with us to the RV park. 
• Original potato plant-2 plants, look good about 4 inches high. 
• Container peas are up and starting to wind around the trellis.
• Thinned some of the carrots today. Sweat Treat seems to grow the fastest. 
• Spinach is about done. Need to plant more next year. 
• First batch of radishes=yum. Second coming soon. 
• 2-3 broccoli plants (from seed) might make it. 
• 1-2 pepper plants (from seed) might make it. 
• I bought 3 pepper plants for $1.50 each (organic) from the Farmers Market yesterday from Harvest Moon Organics. They will go with us to the RV park.           
  

  Peppers, yukons and sweet potatoes.

May 13th, 2009

Planted rest of potatoes at the RV park and the sweet peppers.

May 31st, 2009

We missed the last of the spinach while we where in California (May 15-22). And one last round of radishes were picked when we got home. They were a bit old, too big and had a woody/corky taste. 

Both lettuces varieties are doing great! We have been eating a lot and today we filled three big ziploc gallon bags and took them to Sunday breakfast to give away. The lettuce is great, washing and spinning it is a PAIN. But worth it. Bryan saw a special about prewashed/bagged salad greens. They are washed in a chlorine solution and bagged with gas to stay fresh. Yum. Note for next year: we planted the second row too close The leaves of the lettuce shade and cover the seedlings of the younger lettuce. Updates:

• Spinach- gone to flower, needs to be pulled. 
• Radishes- done by May 20th. 
• Carrots-looking good (should be ready mid June).
• Broccoli-one plant is surviving!
• Peppers- my seedlings seem to have almost disappeared. Too early! The three pepper plants are doing well at the RV park. 
• Sweet Peas- look wonderful and are started to swirl their way up the makeshift trellis. Should be ready in late June. Should have started them a bit earlier. 
• Potatoes at home- they are reaching for the sun! The new shade structure that Bryan and Chris built last summer has officially shaded out most of our garden and porch. (Good thing we are moving.)
• Potatoes at RV- We planted them all in the rain before we left for California. Might have gotten a little moldy. Not sure if they are going to make it. 
• Strawberries-Look pretty, a few flowers, but not enough sun. 

October 2009 Update

We had a crummy potato crop. A couple of pounds at home before we moved out in July. They never made it at the RV. The carrot crop was AMAZING. Lettuce and spinach were super easy. Broccoli and peppers start from small plants, not seedlings. We had some tiny sweet potatoes, next year they need more time and probably a real garden, not a barrel. 

Not bad for a year of transition!

We are really spoiled. Bloomington, IN has wonderful grocery stores.

Can you truly fill your basket in most small towns?

Our favorite is the local food co-op, Bloomingfoods. We have been members for a few years and enjoy the great value and selection that our store offers. They have organic milk, local eggs and produce, local baked goods and a new favorite-locally made tofu. They have three locations around town, so it is very easy for us to shop there. Even if we didn’t shop at the co-op, it would still be ridiculously easy for us to buy organic food in Bloomington. So easy, that we have started taking things like the beautiful Bloomington Farmers Market and large organic/natural food sections in our chain stores like Kroger and Marsh for granted. 

That is until we moved into the RV park this summer. Hickory Hills Campground is just north of Spencer Indiana. For Jessika, it is a 40 minute commute from work. Because I work 10 miles north of Bloomington, I can’t stop by our beloved Bloomingfoods on my way home from work. I try to stock up on the weekends and always carry a cooler in my car so that I can tote my purchases home with me in the evenings. I take small country roads home. It really is a pleasant drive, but my only “grocery store” along the way is the Paragon Country Market, in Paragon Indiana. They sell gas out front and pizza in the back. Between these, the store is stocked with basic “staples” like corn dogs, ketchup, mac n cheese and canned meat. They do have a produce “section” which consists of one cooler in the back that holds two heads of iceberg lettuce, some celery and the occasional bag of oranges. This place is always busy and the people are nice. Everytime I am in line, someone is buying beef jerky, frozen dinners or corn dogs. 

On the way home from work one night, I decided that I was going to make vegetarian sloppy joes. I had all of the ingredients on hand, except for the hamburger buns. I could have called Bryan to see if he could pick some up on his way home from Terre Haute, but he doesn’t pass any grocery stores either. So, I pulled  into the Paragon Country Market. Surely they will have a wheat bun option, I thought. Remembering from earlier excursions that they had a “bread aisle.”

Oh...such crust on these buns!!

No luck. The bread aisle was just as utilitarian as the rest of the store. They had one brand of buns. Such Crust. I took a picture of the ingredients label so that you could see that the third ingredient was our friend High Fructose Corn Syrup.

Flour, water, SUGAR!!!

Desperate, I bought them. And darn it, they were really good. That guilty pleasure good, where you know you are going regret it later. They were soft, squishy and addictive (like corn dogs and cheese doodles and Hostess cupcakes). The one thing that they were not was healthy. Nothing in this store is. If we lived in Paragon, IN we would be hard pressed to fill our shopping cart with wholesome, whole foods. Unless of course, we grew/raised them ourselves. But that is what is frustrating. I take it for granted that wholesome, organic foods are just a few minutes away from me in Bloomington. This summer, it has been a whole different ballgame. 

I am sure that many of the folks in these small, rural communities do grow some of their own food, but after that they are left with little choice. Spending my summer in an area where “real” food isn’t a convenient purchase really helped me appreciate the food that I am able to purchase on a daily basis. 

By the way, the most popular item seen in peoples carts at the market? Corn dogs. (I know, I have mentioned them a couple of times in this post.) If only I still ate meat…

We have been living full-time in the RV for a few months now. Many of our friends expressed great surprise when they heard that we had bought an RV. “It’s a gas guzzler!”-they would exclaim! “Aren’t you guys environmentalists or something?” We have only taken a few small trips in the RV, so we will leave the “carbon footprint” discussion for another time. Today, I want to share with you some of our observations about living in the RV. As a home, a tiny 250 square foot home. 

It turns out the the RV is a super efficient, green-living machine. 

Here is why:

• Small, slightly uncomfortable shower=water conservation.
• Small stove, oven and microwave=less dishes to wash. 
• Our special RV dish set is used Corelle Diningware from Goodwill. It doesn’t break! It is plentiful and cheap at Goodwill, so there is no need to buy disposable plates. 
• Manual flush on the toilet=much less wastewater wasted. 
• Easy to heat and cool (especially in the shade).
• We had the choice between using propane or electricity to heat/cool/cook. Choice is great!
• Small fridge means that you buy only what you need. Space scarcity=food that gets eaten instead of hiding in the back of the fridge. 

This is our shower!

Our super efficient kitchen

We have lived really inexpensively at the park. Our July electricity bill was $64.34. Add onto that the $100 monthly rental fee that we pay and we have lived for $164.34. Water and internet are included and since there is no such thing as a home phone in the RV (we use our cell phones), we are living on the cheap this summer. Green and frugal!

We have also observed the following on the few trips that we have taken in the RV.

• What you use in gas on your trip, you save in hotel fees and food that you can cook yourself instead of eating out for every meal. 
• Traveling in the RV allows you to eat locally as you can stop at road side stands, farmers market and stock your fridge as you drive. 
• Most RV parks recycle and offer other “free” perks like internet and cheap laundry machines. 

Well, it was a great experiment. Ultimately, I ended up transplanting a few sweet pepper and broccoli seedlings on April 16th. They were probably a little small, but we had to plant them. We had a open house that weekend and I didn’t want to distract any potential buyers with the mini-greenhouse that we had set up in our master bedroom. It was probably about two weeks early. A couple of the broccoli plants made it and produced a modest amount of broccoli (but nothing like we got off of the small plants we started last year.) And one pepper plant made it, but it wasn’t producing by the time we sold our house at the end of July. Hopefully the new owners enjoyed some lovely organic California Wonders. 

Notes for next time-

• The egg cartons worked great as a cheap method of started the seedlings, but they need to be transplanted to something bigger for the last couple of weeks (second half of April). 
• You can overwater your seedlings. Too much moisture seems to breed some kind of fungus. 
• Starting flowers from seedlings seems to be a big pain. 
• You need to invest in real grow lights to simulate sunlight. At the very least, a super sunny window is a must. 
• If you are going to do it, be prepared to stay close to home from March-May, unless you have dedicated friends who will come over and tend to your babies!

I haven’t given up, but will probably not start seedlings again until we have a dedicated space for them.

These are the rain barrels that graced the front of our old house. We really enjoyed have them. Our roof is shingled so the water was not suitable for watering our vegetable garden, but we were able to use it to water our flower beds. We really only needed one barrel, but I wanted two for symmetry. We got lots of compliments from our neighbors. I thought Bryan did a really nice job building the pedestals for the barrels and developing a way to drain off the excess water so that they would not overflow. 

What happened to May?

We took possession of our new RV, a used 2002 Winnebago Adventurer, the first weekend of May and moved into our new “summer home”- the Hickory Hills Campground in just north of Spencer, IN. 

We are just starting to run the numbers on the cost of RV living (different from actually traveling in the RV) and will post about that soon. 

We have an accepted offer on our home!! Knock on wood, we close on July 31st. The plan is to sell the house, live in the RV (and stay with friends/inlaws when the campground closes) and look for land. We want to buy land in Monroe County to build a house (totally green, probably more of a compound than a home). We envision a modest home, root cellar, wine cellar, giant garden, outbuilding for Bryan’s projects, chickens and of course, a place to park the RV. 

Selling our house and getting rid of our mortgage will enable us to save, save, save for the land and the house. 

There is a real, ‘green’ element to this post. I promise!

In mid May, we took a vacation out to wine country with our dear friends Jessica and Clint. We had a blast! We rented a house in Santa Rosa and used it as our home base for the trip. We were able to cook all of our meals at home, which saved us a tremendous amount of money (which we later spent on more wine!). 

One of our favorite wineries that we “discovered” on this trip was Benziger Family Winery. They have been a sustainably producing winery for years and are leaders in the biodynamic movement. All of their grapes are at least sustainably, organically or biodynamically grown. Look for more posts about all of these topics and more in the weeks to come!

(Jessica, Clint, Paul from Benziger, Jessika and Bryan)

As we have changed our habits and started to recycle more, we found it necessary to set up a dedicated area to organize our recyclables. This really helped us get motivated to recycle more. Bloomington, Indiana were we live has a great recycling program. The accept almost everything, including plastics #1-#7. This is excellent! Unfortunately, we live just outside of city limits so we take all of our recycling to Monroe County Solid Waste Management District Recycling and Reuse Center. They have a large central location and a couple of smaller rural centers. We can drop off almost all of our recycling (and our trash) there. MCSWMD only takes #1 & #2 plastic bottles. So our solution to this problem is to cut down on our use of products that come in #3-#7 and to drop off our #3-#7’s at my in-law’s. They live it the city.

So we are down to less than one bag of trash per week!