Stay At Home Mom - Going Green

When did you start? What does it mean? Sustainable living? How do the Bakers do it? 

My husband and I have slowly been heading down a greener path. To be perfectly honest, the idea began as a joke. My husband Eric likes to think & talk about a zombie apocalypse or end of the world as we know it. It's a guy thing I think. He thinks up different scenarios and comes up with ways to overcome the end of the world situations. I laugh it off and go about my day. Then he started getting interested in square footage gardening. He looked into all the ways to grow a ton of food in a small space. Again, I tend to laugh these wild ideas off and go about my day. The funny thing is, some of his wild ideas must have stuck because we revisited these ideas and have been slowly making them a reality. It all started with buying our home on an acre in the suburbs.

Going green for us has meant eating as organically as we can and managing to create our own food source through raising animals and gardening. We are water conscious as well and Eric has drawn up plans to use a rainwater catchment system to not only water the garden but also to flush the basement toilet. 

Our garden this year was the test drive and next year will be a big job with hopefully an equally big return. We have 4 laying hens (Cinnamon, Mrs. Weasley, Alice, and Nugget) and next spring we will be expanding our flock. Caring for the hens and eating our organic free-range eggs has been extremely gratifying. Believe it or not, caring for the hens has been my favorite job around the house. They are even starting to like me. ;)

We have room to pasture one small dairy cow (BettyLou, yes our future cow has a name) but we don't have the funds to fence the pasture yet or sow the pasture grass.

I bake my family's bread, churn our butter, can soups and stews, make jam, make cheese, and make soap. We have a lot to learn still but we have come a long way! I have talked about it before but not having cable has been vital to our more sustainable life. TV sucked up so much of our time and we are happy to be rid of it. 

What steps have you taken to go green or live more simply?

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