A virtual playdate with the Homegrown Mama

From the laundry basket of the Homegrown Mama...

Hello!  I'm so excited to be sharing my journey to sustainability from the trenches of motherhood in Ohio!  As a long time reader of The Green Phone Booth, I cannot tell you how much fun it is to don my own cape and participate with everyone!


I grew up in a home that was eco-friendly in the sense that it's often the most frugal lifestyle.  I often laugh that we didn't use paper towels until I was in high school!  I have a Bachelor of Science in Biology and after my graduation from college, I became a Biologist for the Toxicology department at a contract research lab.  Many of the studies I worked on required that Tyvek suits and respirators be worn at all times.  At some point during the first year of my employment, I experienced health problems and became curious about the studies I was working on and a possible connection to my health.  What resulted was an intense desire to rid my home of chemicals and a personal need to become less reliant on conventional products.


So now, here I am, 5 years and 2 kids later.  My determination is to live a natural life.  This desire for a life that is as free from waste and toxins as possible is fueled by my hope to make sure my children get the benefit of a healthy childhood to be the cornerstone for their amazing lives.   We cook from scratch and cloth diaper.  We play outside and are a little antsy to get our garden started.  We live the way we do because my husband and I truly believe it's better.  Not better in the I'm-awesome-and-you're-not-sense, but better for our lives, or children and our world.  And if I'm really being honest, I like living this way!

This year, I'm working my way through a list of Eco-wishes:

• Plant our garden!  I'd like to produce a sizable amount of our food both for consumption and preservation, so I'm working on plans and writing out my seed orders.  Since I am hoping to keep the garden producing up to the last frost, I'm going to have to learn a little bit about succession planting, too!
• What we don't produce in the garden, I hope to find from local sources.  Sometimes, it takes some work, but I love knowing that the food on my table was produced within an hour of our home!
• Host another Low Impact (First) Birthday for my daughter in April.  We will be hosting it at the local Children's Museum, so I will have to plan ahead since everything will have to be transported to the site.
• Successfully switch our food storage over to glass or stainless steel.  This includes the containers for my freezer cooking and the kids' dinnerware.
• Since we moved to this house, there's been no landscaping and I hope to plant some native shrubs and ground cover in addition to some fruit trees!
• And finally, starting this spring, I plan to line dry all our laundry (with the exception of disaster laundry loads or laundry that gets caught in a rainstorm).  Last summer, I only used the dryer 5 times in the month of August (considering that I do roughly 7 loads of laundry a week, this was huge) and the impact on our electric bill was significant enough that even though I had been running the stove daily for canning and we had fans and the air conditioner running due to the miserable heat, our bill only went up 2 dollars!  

This year, I'll be checking in with you twice a month with my updates on the garden, new ideas for our natural homes and hopefully have some posts that give you a new or interesting perspective on our everyday lives!