Almost Organic and Becoming Self Sustaining

Before Kevin and I were married, we agreed to do all we could to eventually have an organic household.  We’ve been on the journey for over 3 years now, and although we are not completely there, we’ve come a long way.  The majority of our produce is organic, either purchased from Whole Foods or sent to us from Door to Door Organics.  We’ve ordered a half a cow that we should get in December that was grain fed and free of any antibiotics and hormones.  Most of our meet is purchased either organic or natural, and we do our best to stay away from processed foods. 

We use mostly natural hygiene and cleaning products, with a few exceptions.  We still use un-natural deodorant (which really should be the next to go), shaving cream, laundry detergent, and fabric softener.  Those will all be hard switches when the time comes.   We’ve also switched to using glass containers rather than any plastic and switched from our Nalgene bottles to Klean Kanteen bottles made from stainless steel. 

Anyway, we’ve been working our way to become debt free, but we really don’t want to sacrifice our good eating habits or the use of natural products. So, we’ve decided that our next step in the process is to become self sustaining.  We’ve come up with a few steps to start the process, and many more that we’d like to achieve over time. 

1.       To start with, I’m in the process of finding a good bread recipe – the more basic you buy foods, the less expensive they are, therefore, this will cut our bread costs from about $4 something a loaf down to under a dollar. 

2.      We’re also working on getting a garden started in our basement.  Hopefully next spring we’ll be living somewhere with land and be able to harvest a large garden, but for now, we’re going to do our best to work with what we have.  All it takes is a grow light, some containers, seeds and soil – and hopefully we’ll be off to growing our own produce.  We’ll probably start off with some herbs and maybe some tomato and pepper plants, but hopefully it will grow from there.  We’re also trying to start some fruit trees – starting them off as container plants in our house that we will hopefully be able to transfer to land that we purchase in the spring.  I’ll have pictures to share in the near future!

3.      We’ve also got to make the switch to cloth diapers… I’ve been talking about doing it before Harbor was even born, but I just haven’t gotten around to ordering them yet.  I’m going to do my best to make that happen in the next few weeks.  She’s in a size 3 now, and they get more and more expensive with each increase in size! 

As for the future, hopefully we’ll have some land and we’ll be able to do the big garden, compost pile, chickens to produce our own eggs, etc.  For now, we’re just starting small.