Tiny Improvements

*This is one part in a series of posts about what I’m doing to improve our lives this year. Not New Year’s Resolutions, just a few Tiny Improvements!


3) Cutting Down Our Carbon Footprint (and Grocery Bill!)

Check out when we made bagels!

This year, we really want to focus on the idea of homesteading- reclaiming our self-sufficiency at home. Gardening (and actually eating what we grow), kicking the boxed food habit and focusing on sustainability. A few easy ways were doing this:

• making at home what we usually buy: whole wheat bread, stocks and broths, laundry detergent and whatever else we possibly can.
• eliminating processed foods completely from our diet (with a few exceptions- mainly Girl Scout cookies)
• buying in bulk at our local food co-op: this will save on both cost and packaging, since we’ll bring our own containers!
• growing a large vegetable garden and canning/freezing the excess produce

• making an earnest effort to buy most of our other produce at the farmer’s market. We’ve found that by buying locally and seasonally, we’re able to save money AND eat more nutritiously.
• composting: we’re planning to set up a small compost bin this spring!

What are you doing to live more sustainably? Got any tips for us? Leave us a comment!! 

Thrifty Tips- Cleaning House

Oh housecleaning. While we wish we could just call a cleaning service or have a robot-maid ala The Jetsons, it's just not in the cards at Tiny Wallet Headquarters. So, we're doing the dirty work all by our lonesome.

The problem is, I'm slightly addicted to cleaning products (I blame my mom- hi Mom!). I buy anything with a brightly colored label that promises to make my job as easy as possible. Now, I know it's all marketing, but I'm a sucker. So, one of my new year's resolutions last year was to green our clean. Cut out the chemically heavy (and expensive!!!) cleaning products and figure out how to do it ourselves to save some bucks and live more green! Here's how our little experiment went down in 2010.