Welcome to the Friday open thread for the Living Simply group. If you are not familiar with our group, the basic idea, from our profile, is:
A group to explore and share sustainable, simple living ideas among fellow progressives. For the urban, rural, or wannabe homesteader, this is a place to share information to simplify everyday life. Sustainable skills such as gardening, food production and storage, do-it-yourself projects for the home or farm, and backyard chickens and other livestock, as well as eco-conscious philosophies such as cooperative living, eco-cities, the Slow Food movement, and being a mindful consumer are but a few potential topics of interest here.
Happy Friday, folks. If you missed it, check out cordgrass's Living Simply: Zero waste in frugal times, posted earlier this week. It's a great piece that opened up a lot of discussion about the idea of zero waste (and reducing your household waste in general). Cordgrass is expecting to post a weekly diary series on the subject and I, for one, am looking forward to it. While I feel that I am fairly mindful of the amount of waste I produce, I know that there is a lot more I could be doing to reduce it.
Personally, I'm also working on being more frugal and living more simply not just because I want to, but because I need to, having lost the income of my significant other (not that we didn't need to be mindful of spending before, we did--it's just a bit more of a necessity now). Yes, we've always lived simply, and have always lived within our means, but I've realized just how often I splurged--and usually, it was on food. So the single greatest thing I've done to make sure that we have enough to pay the bills is to get organized about my grocery budget. This has the added benefit of directing us to eat more healthfully, with a minimum of processed foods. It isn't the first time I've tightened my belt and gotten serious about eating better on less (though it's something that I've often slipped out of the habit of doing), and I'd love to go into more detail and lay out my strategic tips on making a little money go a long way at the grocery store--so if anyone is interested, and if I get the time, I'll put up a diary on that very subject in the coming week(s). Kind of boring, I know, but I do actually find it enjoyable to take a certain budget and see just what sorts of fun and interesting meals I can come up with while staying within said budget. I like to call it my "grocery game," and it never ceases to amaze me what I can do--and how well we can eat--when I get serious about spending less on food.
I'm sure plenty of you folks have garden news! My pole beans are going strong, as well as the nasturtiums I planted among them. I love the look of the twisty vines climbing up their wooden trellis. My lettuce is attempting to take over the world, though I'm afraid our hot, humid summer weather is upon us and it will all be going to seed shortly.
I'm also up to my elbows in fluff--chick fluff, that is. I breed a couple of different breeds/varieties of rare breed chickens, so my spring hatching season is well underway. Gratuitous chick pic:
And before I open the floor, I want to give a big thanks to la motocycliste, who generously offered to post (and posted) an open thread for the Living Simply group last Friday. For those of you who may have noticed the missing open threads in the weeks prior, my laptop decided to leave this plane of existence, and I was unable to post diaries. So thanks, la motocycliste!
Open thread's all yours!