Feeling all self-sufficient again.

Last year, shortly before getting pregnant, I found a way to live pretty naturally on a budget.

But baby girl made me EXTREMELY sick and I got away from almost everything.  I let my garden go, couldn't handle the smell of vinegar and just got too lazy to do most things from scratch.

Now that I'm ready to go all organic, I have no choice but to get back to this stuff.  But this time around, I am loving it like crazy!  It feels so cool to be self-sufficient and to score awesome deals when I just can't make something myself.

So far, we have the garden (ALL credit goes to hubby on this):

 

Our little zucchini babies

 Our awesome grapes that will hopefully produce this year (it takes 3 years)

 

These are our herbs that have since been planted: basil, chives, parsley and cilantro.

 

Our whole line-up goes like this: peas, spinach, lettuce, strawberries, grapes, LOTS of tomatoes, oregano, zucchini and the aforementioned herbs.  :)

I went back to toothpaste makin' and it's fun stuff!  I got this recipe here.

And I am so digging this oil cleansing method.  I've heard so many people rave about it, but you just can't understand how awesome (and not insane) it is until you do it yourself.  Clean your face with oil?  Yep.  That's right.  My face has never been healthier or glow-ier.  :)

I still have a love-hate relationship with the No 'Poo thing.  First, we have to talk about the name.  I can think of 8,022 better names, but someone had to coin the term No 'Poo.  I try to do this.  I really do.  I succeed about 25% of the time.  But then the yummy smelling shampoo calls out my name and I cave.  The smell of vinegar has just NOT set well with me since my pregnancy with Addie. 

So I obviously can't make everything. It'd be cool if I could and I have my eye on owning a cow and some chickens and, you know, a small farm someday, but that's probably a pipe dream that won't ever come to fruition.  So I make do.  I joined a CSA (and today is my first pick-up, YAY!) but I supplement with really good deals when I can find them.  Like when Whole Foods had organic strawberries on sale for $1.99/lb a few weeks ago.  I was out of town so hubby did the dirty work for me and picked up 12 pounds.  We're trying our hand at growing some this summer, too, so between what we grow and the 12 pounds that are now hulled and flash frozen in the freezer, we should be set on strawberries until next summer.

What I can't grow or make or get really cheap locally, I like to buy in bulk from Azure standard.  It's a co-op that delivers all over the place (maybe by you?).  Their prices are good for lots of things.  I get pretty much ALL of my baking supplies here.  The organic produce is pretty good, too.  They deliver once a month to a parking lot near me and we pick up and haul all our goodies home.  It's kind of fun.  :)  I store my bulk goods in our "pantry" (I don't really have a pantry, sadly) in Ball canning jars and it works for me.  I get everything from sucanat to beans to flour here, and the prices on things like these can't be beat. (Also, a quick side note that I got my FAVORITE dishwashing detergent in the whole world - Biokleen automatic dish powder - cheaper than you can get the chemically-laden stuff at Target by buying in bulk through Azure last month.)

My friend Heather shared with me a good recipe for homemade laundry detergent.  Woot!  The jury is still out, but she swears by it AND she cloth diapers, so I figure it must work!  I made my first batch today and have a load of towels running as we speak.  Can't wait to see if it works, because it is about 1,000 times cheaper than the Tide that is my guilty pleasure.  What?  It smells SO GOOD.

 

Terrible picture, I know, but my camera cord is on the fritz and the cell phone is all I have right now.

And on a kind of related note, I also tried my hand at making some non-food or household product related things.  I made some baby headbands!  I'm so not crafty at all, but I'm trying to be.  I'm working on it.  So I found some DIY tutorials for the rosette headbands that I am so in love with and I tweaked them to my liking and wound up with these little babies:

 

Again with the bad quality, but I'm excited because I made those bottom three on clips so that I don't have to commit to a headband.  How fun is that?!  I felt all crafty and original even though I'm sure everyone and their sister has already made interchangeable rosette clips.  But don't tell me.  Let me think I came up with this all on my own.  :)

  What's funny is that you can see from left to right that they get better each time.  That one on the bottom left was my first rosette and it kind of sucks.  The one of the bottom right was my last and it's not too bad.  

Anyway, I just felt like sharing because sometimes as moms, we don't get recognition for things we do.  It's nice just to put it out there and be all, "Hey, world, look what I did!"  So there it is, world.