A "Whole" new magazine...

I may have a new favorite magazine! Whole Living, a Martha Stewart publication (I have always secretly, or not so secretly, loved Martha...) may be my new mecca!

Apparently Body+Soul magazine changed to Whole Living in June 2010 but the former publication has been in print since 1974. I think I picked up a copy of Body+Soul on a plane trip once or twice but was never convinced that its content was anything more than fluff until I saw its rebirth as Whole Living... and now I have a subscription! I just received September's issue today so I thought I would share a little about the last issue before I dive into a new one...

After perusing the Whole Living website, I found their ten tenets of Whole Living and you can see why I like the magazine's content (at least the content that adheres to these tenets!)

Ten Tenets of Whole Living

1. Happiness is a choice. Make that choice today and every day.
2. Good health isn't a gift; it's a habit you cultivate.
3. A healthy, fit body is not enough--true fitness engages the spirit.
4. Think more about what you should eat than what you shouldn't.
5. Laugh at yourself. You're funny.
6. Nurture your spirit. It's your source of strength.
7. Stay connected to the natural world. It will feed your soul.
8. Believe in yourself. Your intuition is rarely wrong.
9. It's never too late to take the first step toward your aspirations.
10. What you pay attention to will thrive.

Here's a quick rundown of what I loved and disliked from the August 2010 issue of Whole Living:

LOVED: Cute little blurbs on low-VOC paint, gardening, healthy snack foods, etc.; barefoot running; article on cutting out sugar (though, the author eats packets of raw sugar... that's a little more excessive than most); blueberry recipes; summer canning article; healthy sustainable eating tips and recipes (even if some of the tips were a little obvious...)

NOT SO MUCH: Ads (not more than usual in a women's magazine, but still... ads...); first person editorials posing as articles (not terrible, but not amazing...); working out outdoors article (it was just your average Cosmo workout article... we know how to work out triceps on a bench/chair/couch/curb now... thanks... they look awesome...); several articles/blurbs on lack of self-esteem (maybe we could focus on self-actualization instead of hating ourselves? Or skip it all together?); a financial horoscope (Ugh...) and again... ADS! For things that have nothing to do with health or whole living! Annoying...

Overall, 3 stars out of 5 thus far... I will post an update after I read September's issue. Happy Reading!

Home Composting: Common Problems & Troubleshooting Tips

Now you have a compost pile and it is up and running... but is it successful? Here are a few common problems and some troubleshooting tips...

#7. My pile has a strong odor, what am I doing wrong?
There should always be an earthy smell to your compost (due to the decomposing matter) but the smell should be livable and shouldn't "hit you" until you open the lid. If you can smell it outside of the container, you have a problem... Turning your pile can do a world of good, but determine what type of "bad smell" is coming from your pile before turning it.

Rotting Meat: If the smell is a disgusting rotting smell, animal proteins or fats have probably accidentally gotten into your pile through meat scraps, cooking fats & oils, butter, dairy products, peanut butter, etc. If the item isn't on the top where you can see it and pick it out, it's best to just scrap the pile and start over, because rotting animal proteins will draw scavengers like flies, rats, raccoons, etc. Then of course there will be snakes to eat the rats... and eventually your yard is overrun by pterodactyls picking off the neighborhood pets... just kidding - sorta. Seriously though, depending on how big the item decomposing in there is (a pat of butter or a full raw T-bone) is going to effect how long the smell lasts... leave the pile for a few days before you decide to trash it and if the smell has lessened, use your own judgement on waiting longer or scrapping the pile completely.

 Ammonia Smell: If the smell is more like ammonia than rotting meat, it is most likely a nitrogen problem in the pile. Nitrogen is produced by the "green" matter decomposing in the pile (veggie & fruit scraps, grass, coffee grounds, pretty much any of the wet, moist material that you place in your pile). Even out your pile with more "brown" matter (such as dry leaves, paper, straw); experts recommend 30 parts carbon ("brown") to 1 parts nitrogen ("green") but I feel like that is a little excessive and a little over analytical. It's an art, not a science... and when in doubt, tinker around with the parts a bit to see if you can fix the problem easily without pulling out a calculator to figure out what to put in.

#8. I want to keep my compost 100% organic so that I can use it on my vegetable garden... how do I make sure that it stays pesticide/chemical/contaminate free?
Creating 100% organic compost is relatively easy if you eat organically, because most of your wastes will already be organic. If you have a mixed diet (i.e. some organic and some conventionally processed goods) you can create two compost piles to keep one 100% organic and still not trash your non-organic food wastes. Some other items to consider are the non-food items that you put into the pile... if you are putting in paper and fabric scraps, ensure they come from organic sources as well. If you (or your neighbors) use pesticides or fertilizers on their grass or trees, those chemicals will be in your compost if you decide to place those in the pile as well. I have read that most pesticides will decompose in an active compost pile in one year, but I have no proof that this is the case. Now, this blog and my lifestyle is all about moderation, so this risk may be negligible for you and if so, your compost will still turn out wonderfully! But if you are trying to ensure 100% organic compost, the key to success is thinking through every item that enters your compost pile before you toss it in.  

There you go, you've started your compost pile, you've kept it going and you've solved all of its little compost problems (which were all just petty decomposing drama anyway). You are a sucessful compost pile parent! Congratulations!

Watermelon and Cucumbers and Squash... Oh My!

Though I was trying to wait for these cucumbers to darken into a deeper green, the little critters were starting to munch on them already so today became harvest day! YEA!! As you can see we had quite a bountiful little harvest for this round of cucumbers! With the hot weather here in the South, we should have another round in a month or two (judging by the weather and the dozens of tiny, spiky little baby 'cumbers that are already starting to grow in the garden!) so I've decided to make this entire batch into pickles and relish. The canning posting for those suckers should be coming very soon!

Next on the harvest list are the butternut squash who look amazing (if a little early... I think of those more of a fall treat, but Mother Nature bows to no man... or clock...) Cardinals are also out in force right now too and I think of them as winter birds... am I crazy or are there just no seasons in the South?

Finally, my "little watermelons that could" are finally coming in slowly but surely. Last year my UPS man mocked my efforts in the front yard because our lemons were bigger than our melons! I don't know that we are outpacing last year's melons for size, but putting in bird netting this year led to some ambitious vines and some interesting fruit placement, like this watermelon perched on top of the fence rail! I'll keep you posted on the harvests as they come!

Green Groceries on the Cheap?

We were out of town all weekend driving to Virginia and back visiting family, so with so few hours of sleep this week, I am reposting a comment on the Green Baby Guide that has plenty of content for a beginning-of-the-week blog post. Thank you so much to Joy of the Green Baby Guide for giving me the idea for this post! Enjoy!


How to Lower the Grocery Bill while still staying Green?
Good for you all for looking at your spending this closely and knowing where you put your "food dollars!" So many Americans don’t pay attention and we all know where that leads our nation… Anyway, I agree with Joy, that to go organic, a food box through a co-op weekly or bi-weekly (for a two person family, bi-weekly is enough for us) and then planning meals around it is the way to go. We get whole chickens from a local farmer and those have gone up (to nearly $12 a chicken!! Sweet heavens! This economy, I tell you what!) but between that and organic meats from our local grocer (Publix here in Florida) we keep the grocery bill at about $200/mth for two people. Now, that’s not awesome, but I share your problem that I make recipes set to serve four and they serve me… and three servings for my husband!! But here are a few super basic, but easy to overlook tips:


#1. Are you including toiletries or other houshold items in your “grocery” bill? A regular $40 grocery checkout can soar to $140 easily with a month-plus worth of shampoo, toothpaste, dish soap, paper towels, etc. in the checkout aisle. Look at buying these items in bulk through “Subscribe and Save” on Amazon.com (especially if you buy Seventh Generation, Alba or other “green” brands that can be super pricey in the super market!) where not only do you get bulk prices but you receive an additional 15% when you subscribe for a regular shipment (which you can cancel anytime without penalty! Bonus!) Drugstore.com has more items in bulk but no subscription discount that I know of.


#2. ALWAYS make a list, NEVER buy anything not on the list. Ever… ever… seriously, I know we are all grownups and we think we can walk around Target without a case of the “gimme-gimmes” (a great Bernstein Bears book, by the way!) but we can’t. Make a list with literally EVERYTHING you need and buy off the list and not a single item more. Seriously, it works. This is after considering what will be in your CSA box and knowing what is in season, but don't just wander around mindlessly picking up high fructose corn syrup products wrapped in ten layers of plastic packaging. Gross...

 #3. Become a substitutioner… I used to be a Martha Stewart recipe fanatic but dinner parties through her regularly cost $200+ because of her exotic ingredients. Even everyday recipes that call for mushroom soup when I don’t have it necessitate a trip to the store. So I am “The Great Substitioner”… I google first the item I need and substitutions for it (if something useful comes up, I go with that) but generally I just think about the item “Mushroom soup is thick, creamy, and salty” and then add accordingly with what makes sense (milk, cornstarch/cream of tartar to thicken and salt). And voila! A meal! Now, my husband is not at all picky (and he’s never had a bad meal) but in our three years I cook nightly and several times a weekend (we never eat out) and I’ve only made two meals that weren’t edible to me (none that weren’t edible to him!) One was bean soup that I reheated from the freezer and burned (it tasted like cigarettes… BLEH!) and a crockpot recipe that I followed by the book and it had no consistency and smelled like dog food… the dogs wouldn’t eat it, but my husband loved it!


#4. Use up EVERYTHING in your pantry. Challenge yourself for a month to use EVERYTHING in your pantry. It puts your cooking skills to the test and uses the Economics ideal of “sunk cost” at its best. Old canned pumpkin is not only delicious in June, but everyone loves a quick pumpkin pie cobbler because they haven’t had one in ages!


#5. Create your own standby meals and always have the ingredients on hand for them and then add in what you’ve got. Mine are quiche, vegetable soup and crumble. For quiche I either need to make a pie crust (flour, salt, butter) or have one in the freezer; eggs; milk; and whatever is leftover and soon to "go off"… meat, veggies, spinach/greens, bacon, cheese, etc. Quiche takes whatever you’ve got a little of and makes it into a meal for a family. Crumble takes whatever fruit you have that’s about to go off tomorrow, sprinkle it with lemon juice and a 1/2 cup sugar, and then put together equal parts flour and brown sugar with enough butter (a few tablespoons) of cold butter cut in to make a crumbly texture. Put that on top of the fruit and bake at 350F for about 45 minutes or until the inside begins to bubble... VOILA! Instant dessert and no one even requested it! Congratulations, you’ve just won four more wife gold stars!

Hope those help! Here is to Going Green in a bad Economy! Thank you to Green Baby Guide for the idea for this post!

Aphid Death

Since we bought our house two years ago, I have attempted to make all of my gardening organic, natural and sustainable and have had mixed results on all fronts. To be honest, I have never really tried using chemicals or pesticides on plants so I have no real experience with how much better or worse my natural and/or organic methods are than conventional gardening, only which natural/organic methods work and which do not. For all I know, I am battling Goliaths that agri-farming hasn't seen in decades. If so, I can only hope that my heirloom, pesticide free fruits & veggies taste better and help me live longer, and that all this isn't in vain!

    Anyway, in addition to my herb, fruit & veggie garden, we have a full yard of all sorts of plants leftover from the previous owner. My favorite is the towering magnolia tree who I am most impressed by after seeing the FEMA records on our home and knowing that she was quite a few feet under salt water on at least a dozen occasions and yet she keeps on plugging on strong. A close second in my romantic Southern fantasy garden (I dream it will look like the gardens in Charleston one day and I have desperately planted a half dozen hydrangeas out my back steps in the hopes that they will one day cascade heady blooms over the rail of my porch... the sandy soil and extreme heat have succeeded in keeping them only about a foot high and two feet wide for two years... a girl can dream, can't she?) are the two fabulous gardenias that flank my raised bed garden. But, the bane of my existence, are the aphids who frequent said gardenias like they are a biker bar serving free liquor. Last year I spent the entire summer (and it's a long one in Florida) spraying both plants daily with a diluted mixture of dish soap & water and the results were minimal to say the least. This year, while wandering around Lowe's on a paint color scouting trip, I saw that Ortho (the usual pesticide folks) also had an EcoSense line and that they touted their Insceticidal Soap as able to stop aphids in their tracks.

    On May 12th, I started an experiment to see which was better: my dishwashing mix or the insecticidal soap. Was this $5 spray bottle full of nothing more than what I was mixing up myself at home? Or was there a secret to what made the little buggers fly away and never return that I hadn't mastered yet? Anyway, I was going to spray one bush with insecticidal soap and one with my dishwashing mix (I didn't have a control... my apologies, it's a small garden) and see who did the best after two weeks. My experiment stopped after Day Two, the insecticidal soap won. Hands down. No contest, no second judge... my dishwashing mix was a pitiful pop-gun compared to the bazooka of the insecticidal soap.

Now, I know $5 a bottle is pricey (and I hate that there weren't any refills available at my store or even online it seems) so the waste potential is enormous. I have two good size (4ft wide x 4 ft tall) gardenia bushes and I generously coated them on the top and bottom of EVERY leaf until the tree was pretty much dripping with soap. The one bottle, with this level of coverage for two bushes, only lasted me one use. Thankfully, the aphids stayed away for nearly a week before I had to use a second bottle to try again. That lasted just as long, but then my husband did some overzealous pruning and cut both gardenias way back and the aphids haven't returned, so I'm not sure if the weather changed somehow to run them off or if the pruning cut back on their numbers. Either way, I am happy!
    Previously, with my dishwashing soap solution, I would spray the tree off with water (to disturb the aphids and encourage a lot of them to fly away) and then coat each leaf just as thoroughly with the soap solution. The next day the aphids would be much fewer (as you can see from the first photo of the gardenia above, the plant was just lousy with them. They would rise in great plumes when you rustled the leaves and even took off and started eating my tomato plants, which I didn't even know they liked!) But there was never a real elimination of the aphids, just a decrease in their general numbers. I got so angry toward the end of the summer and I was so ruthless toward the little buggers, my husband started to make fun of me (hence the title, "Aphid Death," though I still maintain that would make a great band name for the right group...). The next day after spraying the insecticidal soap, the aphids were gone. Not one little flying creature for an entire week!
    Overall, I give it 3 stars out of 5. Now, I can't in good conscience give this product too many stars because #1. The packaging is so small (even for a spray bottle, it's a small spray bottle) and doesn't appear to have refill available to reuse the bottle; #2. Though the company statement says:

“Formulated with specially selected active ingredients, Ortho® EcoSense™ Brand* offers sensible effective solutions for insect control, plant disease and rose care. Kill bugs and control disease to help flowers, vegetables and roses thrive.”

I feel like (and perhaps it is just the environmental skeptic in me) that this product can't be 100% natural when coming from Scotts/Ortho brand who makes their living on lush, chemical laden lawns at all costs (though, to be fair, I couldn't find any compelling evidence one way or the other that this branch of the company was actually "green." All the reviews I found were far more anecdotal than scientific). Otherwise, I love this product for the results I had. I was so frustrated by aphids and this completely eliminate my problem. Now, if your aphid infestation is not that bad, the dishwashing soap trick may work for you (two tablespoons liquid dish soap in a spray bottle and fill the rest with water) and save you a bundle of cash in the process. But for the length of my frustration, this product is currently well worth the money for me... now if I could just find it in a larger bottle...

Hump Day Happiness

I found an amazing chocolate bar at Fresh Market last week and may have fallen in love... it is not your "everyday of the week" kind of chocolate, but for a decidedly indulgent afternoon treat (especially in the bathtub with a glass of wine and a stack of magazines) this one is my new favorite...

    I gave a bite to a friend and he said it tasted "like a cup of tea" but I think that was all of the orange flavour and spices that tickle your tongue... Really, it is amazing, it is organic... who could want for anything more? Hehehe...

    And though, I promise to avoid politics as much as possible on this blog, I did want to share this op-ed article with you all because of how much I love the author's conclusion... I don't know if we have to be paranoid about letting our children out to play in the public places of the world but how much better would it be for the entire family if we were out there playing with them?

"Sure, it would be nice to uncage New York's children so they can feel the ecstasy of free play. But it's no less fun if we watch over them. In fact, it might be more fun. Tag, you're it."

Enjoy tingling your tastebuds and engaging your mind... Happy Wednesday!
Photos courtesy of http://www.chocablog.com/

Hump Day Happiness

     Wednesday is upon us, "Hump Day" as we always called it in college, and to celebrate being halfway through the week I have decided to begin a tradition (we shall see how long she shall wave!) of sharing something that has made me happy this week and hopefully will do the same for you... a bit of mid-week indulgence, like lighting taper candles for a Monday supper or eating an entire red velvet cupcake in one sitting... or two cupcakes... with that delicious cream cheese frosting... Mmmmm... smile...

     So this week, our debut is... drumroll please... silk pajamas! I spent all day Tuesday home with my husband wearing only silk pajamas (I didn't even sleep in them... I got up, showered and then consciously chose to dress in pajamas for the rest of the day...) from sunrise til bed. Delightful. They are warm when you are chilly, cool when you are hot, and they make you feel divine, etheral and decadent as you float around the house, whether you are doing dishes or picking out paint colors for your bathroom. My pajamas are covered in giant hibicuis flowers in a variety of shades of sunset and were a splurge after a college breakup, but here are a few that I thought you might love and appreciate in your life...

Chi Silk Loungewear

A fair trade option with a chic Asian inspired top... you could totally have friends over and still wear these...

Organic Silk Satin Pajama Sets

This camisole top and bottom set is so pretty I may need to put this on my own wishlist for the future! I love the edging that looks like rose petals... sexy and adorable... score!

Pretty Plum Sugar
Gorgeous pajama sets and robes from a favorite Etsy seller... makes me want candlelight baths, hot tea & time to journal... simply divine...

The dreamer Satin Pajama

And because moderation is key in all things, even indulgence, here is a significantly less expensive option in satin from Victorias Secret... it is neither fair trade nor organic, but if you reduce your footprint elsewhere you can still splurge a little and share in the experience... Enjoy!

Photo (Header) from ultra-health.org