I may have lost some of my zeal for thrift and the environment lately. I don’t bake my own bread (anymore) or make my own cheese (ever). But as far as saving money on food and cutting back on packaging waste, there are some lines I will never cross. I may have given in on the individually packaged cheese sticks, but there are five prepackaged foods that just aren’t worth the expense or the plastic:

Bagged salad greens. Buy heads of lettuce at the store or grow your own. Triple wash everything. Yes, you will need a salad spinner. It will pay for itself in due time.

1 lb.  tub of organic baby lettuce at Whole Foods: $6

1 lb. head of organic red leaf lettuce: $2

Money saved: If you go through 1 lb. of lettuce a week, you’ll save $208 a year washing your own.

Packaging saved: One non-recyclable plastic tub and lid

Cinnamon sugar. Mix together ½ cup of sugar and a tablespoon of cinnamon and keep it in a spice jar.

India Tree cinnamon sugar (7 oz.): $8

Homemade cinnamon sugar with organic sugar and cinnamon (7 oz.): about $.65

Money saved: If you go through 14 oz. of cinnamon sugar a year (and we do!), you’ll save $14.70 a year by making your own.

Packaging saved: one glass or plastic jar with a lid every time you make a batch.

Microwave popcorn. Read our homemade popcorn post from way-back-when to learn our corn-popping secrets.

Microwave popcorn: $.30-.90 a bowl

Homemade popcorn: less than $.10 a bowl

Money saved: If you pop 208 bowls of  popcorn a year (a modest estimate for us), you’ll save up to $166.40.

Packaging saved: To quote ourselves: “If your family goes through one box of microwave popcorn (4 large bowls) each week, you’ll save a whopping 52 boxes of cardboard trash, 208 cellophane wrappings, and 208 paper bags by switching to homemade.”

Salad dressing. Once you stock up on good oils and vinegars (and a few herbs and mustards if you want to get fancy), you’re all set.

Whoa! This vinaigrette costs $34.74!

Bottle of Whole Foods balsamic vinaigrette (16 oz.): $4.69

Homemade vinaigrette (with olive oil and balsamic vinegar): $3.28

Money saved: You’ll save $8.46 a year by making your own vinaigrette if you go through six bottles.

Packaging saved: One liter bottle of olive oil plus a pint of balsamic will make about three bottles of vinaigrette. So in a year you’d keep two bottles from a landfill . . . which I’ll admit is not too significant.

Refrigerated cookie dough. It takes only three minutes (I timed it) to make homemade chocolate chip cookie dough.

Cougar Mountain chocolate chunk cookie dough (18 oz.): $4.39

Homemade cookie dough using organic sugar, flour, etc.: $3.75

Money saved: If you bake 24 batches a year, you’ll save  $15.36.

Packaging saved: a plastic tub. (To be fair, I did throw away a butter wrapper for the homemade version.)

Savings in Review

So how does it all add up? First I’ll note that I did all my price comparisons at Whole Foods. Now obviously you can find better deals elsewhere, but remember that prices are inflated on both the pre-packaged and DIY sides of the equation (i.e., I calculated the cost of homemade cookies using Whole Food’s ridiculous sugar prices). I estimated the amount I’d save in a year based on my family’s eating habits. Here are those savings again, broken down:

52 pounds of lettuce a year = $208 savings

14 oz. cinnamon sugar a year= $14.70 savings

208 bowls of popcorn a year= up to $166.40 savings

6 bottles of salad dressing a year=$8.46

24 batches of cookies a year=$15.36

Total saved: $412.92

Avoiding just five prepackaged foods amounted to saving more than a dollar a day. With $412.92 we could buy a salad spinner, a set of glass storage containers, and a dishwasher to help avoid more packaged foods in 2013. Yes!

All right, so the savings on salad dressing and cookie dough wasn’t as dramatic as I had hoped. But look at the savings in cinnamon sugar! What convenience foods are almost as convenient to make at home for you?

Here at Green Baby Guide we’re focusing on eco-nomical solutions this month and bokashi composting is the best one I’ve run across all year. My efforts at traditional composting were failing due to mice, fruit flies, and general laziness. Now I’m enjoying bokashi composting and finding it’s a far better solution for a slacker mom like myself. Still, most people have no idea what bokashi is or how bokashi composting works. Here are some simple questions and answers just to get you started.

How much Bokashi bran do you need? The key factor is that you don’t want the waste to smell. If you sprinkle some into the bin each time you load in food, you should be fine. Remember to pack down the bin and close the plate tightly on top each time. (It’s an anaerobic process so air is your enemy!)

Can I let the fermenting bin sit longer than two weeks? Yes! It could sit in the bucket all winter and be fine. The only reason I have to empty mine out is that we produce enough food scraps to fill a second bucket in two weeks. The bokashi bran will prevent smells and speed the composting process.

What is the weirdest thing you can toss in the bokashi bin? Pet waste. That’s right! Bokashi will neutralize odors and compost pet waste.

How much money does it take to get started with bokashi composting? If you make the bins yourself, it can cost as little as $30 or less. If you invest in a bokashi system it ranges between $50-100.

How Do I Make My Own Bokashi Bin?
Yes! Using simple buckets that you may already have and a hand held drill, you can be ready to begin bokashi composting in less than an hour. I’ll be putting up a post next week with more details so stand by for more bokashi support!

“I am just too vain to wear my husband’s jeans and bulky sweaters for the sake of anti-consumerism and the environment, but it would have saved me $277 in maternity clothes,” I wrote in The Eco-nomical Baby Guide. Now, I know what you’re thinking: “I can’t wear my husband’s clothes! I have to look professional!” Obviously, I never managed to pull off the pregnant Annie Hall look myself.

The point was (and there was a point . . . I think) that, if we had to—like say we truly had no money or if we went into anaphylactic shock upon contact with stretchy elastic waistbands—we could avoid spending money on maternity clothes. Now, there’s nothing wrong with wanting cute maternity clothes. Your body is expanding in every direction at an alarming rate; is now the time to start dressing like an overstuffed Raggedy Ann doll? And there are professional appearances to consider, of course. I was lucky (?) enough to work somewhere without much of a dress code: an art college. One of my students made his one set of clothes himself out of raw deer hide. Another doesn’t wear shoes, ever. But I digress.

Assuming you do want to reduce the amount of maternity clothes you buy, here are my top tips:

1. Low-rise pants. I managed to wear one pair of regular jeans all nine months of pregnancy.

1. Rubber bands. Extend the life of those waistbands my looping a rubber band through the buttonhole. Attach the rubber band to the button. Voila. That should hold your pants up for a few more weeks, at least.

1. Long-torso tops. Regular long-torso tees will see you through those first months. Regular maternity tops were always much too loose for me, as I didn’t “pop out” so much as thicken through my midsection.

1. Long-torso camisoles. A variation on tip #3. With a few long camisoles, you should be able to extend the life of your regular clothes. The bottom of the tank will cover your belly, and you can wear regular tops or unbuttoned tops over them.

1. Hand-me-downs. Obviously borrowing maternity clothes is the most affordable way to get through a pregnancy in style. Unfortunately for me, I didn’t have anyone to borrow clothes from. Boo-hoo.

1. Bella bands. I never got one of these, but they’re a great idea if you want to extend the life of your regular clothes.



2. Belly-bearing fashions. If you got it (a big belly, that is), flaunt it. Admittedly, this is not an appropriate corporate look.

1. Your husband’s clothes. Ha, ha. No, don’t do that.

So, if you do want to buy maternity clothes, go for it! We recommend scouring the consignment shops and thrift stores for the best deals. But if you want to reduce the overall amount of new clothes you buy for this short-lived bodily state, you now have my tips to guide you. Do you have any secrets for cutting down on the amount of new clothes you have to buy during pregnancy? Or ways to extend the life of your regular clothes? Let us know!

January is a great month for reorganizing your bathroom or decluttering the kitchen counters but I remember that both my pregnancies spurred my (limited) organizational tendencies into overdrive. At the time, our house was a thousand square feet and we wanted to evaluate how we used every inch in the days before our babies arrived.

But instead of rushing out to buy hundreds of dollars of bins, shelves, and baskets to hold our stuff, we started with what we had. (This is mostly due to our green ideals, but our tightwad tendencies were a factor as well.) So where do you start if you are overwhelmed, without an organizational system, and pregnant? With tiny, tiny steps.

Start small. It gave me great happiness to attack the medicine closet or a spice cabinet. I simply pulled out everything, tossed it into a box, and was very selective about what we put back in. Having these small, but really important areas organized spurred my motivation to move onto the next zone in my home that was driving me crazy. (We are currently living in a much bigger home and I am not pregnant, but I had the pleasure of sorting through my medicine cabinet and bathroom shelves last week. I still have to open them regularly just to admire the neat, labeled pull-out tubs made out of empty kleenex boxes. One is for cold and flu medicine, one for first aide, etc. Order, even in small spaces, is bliss when life with kids is such chaos.)

Play Furniture Tetris. A friend of mine with a similarly sized home coined this phrase and I loved it instantly. For awhile we kept baby in our bedroom and gave up the nursery altogether. Then we shifted the office contents into the living room and moved everything about once more. We were constantly asking ourselves how to repurpose what we already had. Could the baby’s dresser also work as a changing table? Could our small shelf be a spot to stash towels in the bathroom?

Recycle for profit. Taking boxes of rarely read novels to the used book store or selling our loot on craigslist earned us the money to buy what we really wanted for our home. Plus we scored space on our shelves to display what we really love.

When in doubt, donate. Even if I think I just might someday use that ugly turquoise fish pitcher, I’ve learned to toss it in the donation pile. I feel it improves my personal thrift store karma and of course it scores us a lovely tax write-off as well. Also, by recycling something I loathe we recover precious household space.

When I was in the midst of parenting a newborn, any change in our environment took approximately sixteen times longer than it normally would have. But when I was pregnant, I could organize three cupboards of tupperware in less than fifteen minutes. (I so wish that crazy organization drive was still with me today!) Where are you in the parenting spectrum? What do you plan on being able to organize this month? Stay tuned for upcoming posts on tackling your closet…maternity jeans and all!

As of last June, it became illegal to sell new or used drop-side cribs in the U.S.   So Joy asked, “What should you do with your drop-side crib?” and readers came up with solutions. Joy, for example, plans to pass her drop-side crib on to another family–along with information about the ban and the crib immobilizer kit that makes it impossible to lower crib rails.

These sides don’t drop!

Commenters have chimed in with offers to donate their sturdy drop-side cribs to other readers free of charge. Today I approved a comment from Megan, who says, “So glad everyone is just giving away drop down cribs despite the ban. Way to think of others and their children.”

Do you agree? Is it wrong to pass along those banned cribs? Or would you accept a secondhand drop-side crib from a friend?

While I loved that traditional composting turned old onion skins into rich soil, I did not enjoy the colony of mice who had taken up residence in our compost bin. They waited with entitled patience for me to deliver their daily meals of table scraps by sitting atop the heap, not even scattering when I opened the bin. It was gross. It was unsanitary. But it was also impossible to quit. How could I possibly toss corn cobs into a plastic trash bag with a clear eco-consience?

Now maybe if I would have had a turning bin, or if I was less of lazy composter, I wouldn’t have had this rodent infestation issue. But for years mice kept popping up in our compost bin while I wrung my hands over a solution. Finally, I discovered bokashi bins and life became infinitely easier.

The word bokashi sounds like a type of sushi or a kitchen appliance, but it’s actually Japanese for fermented food waste. Developed in Japan, bokashibokashi is a substance made of rice bran, microorganisms, and molasses that greatly speeds up the decomposition process. And since you can toss anything in a bokashi bin including meat, dairy, eggs and fruits and veggies, it’s far easier to slash your overall trash production while producing beautiful soil for the garden.

So how is Bokashi different than traditional composting?

1. You can compost anything, including meat, dairy, eggs and even pet waste!
2. The bokashi compost bin stays in your kitchen or garage for two weeks before you take it out.
3. You need to have bokashi bran to sprinkle on the compost to make sure that it breaks down quickly without smelling bad. It essentially pickles the food waste to eliminate rotten scents while the contents disintegrate. (Honestly, a bucket filled with a chicken carcass, bacon fat, old casserole, and scrambled eggs smells lightly of pickles—and nothing else. It’s amazing!)
4. It’s an anaerobic process, so you must pack it down and seal it rather than trying to turn it regularly.
5. Ideally, bokashi compost is buried in the ground after two weeks
to help it finish decomposing.

Overall, I find bokashi composting easier and more gratifying than traditional composting. It’s a little more hands on, but I love that none of my food waste goes into the trash. And I’d much rather bury the contents of a bucket every few weeks than trek to the compost bin on a daily basis. I’ll share more about my bokashi revelations in some upcoming posts–including how to make your own bins and get started on a very small budget.

No kindergartner rides to school in a stroller. That’s what we told our daughter last summer, in a desperate attempt to shame her into walking. Cue a Rocky-style training montage complete with red-faced grunts, tears, and anguished cries. And then!—“incentives” like popcorn and (ha!) new shoes. Step by painful step, she managed to work her way from zero to .7 miles. By the time fall rolled around, she was ready.

Audrey's very first stroller ride

10 weeks old: acceptable.

And guess what? We were right: no one rides to kindergarten in a stroller. They ride in cars. Now, we live in a geographically compact neighborhood of Portland. Every kid lives within a mile of the school. While I’m glad we finally Rocky-trained Audrey to walk to and from school every day, I can’t help but rail against the stigma “advanced stroller riders” face in this car-centric world.

There’s even a website devoted to making fun of bigger kids in strollers: toobigforstroller.com. Too Big for Stroller: Why Carting Your Big Kids Does a Disservice, an ABC article published last year, discusses the website’s popularity and cites experts who claim that stroller-riding kids will never develop their muscles or imaginations if they’re pushed around past the age of two or three. Please. I don’t understand why giving a child a daily stroller ride to run errands is so damaging, but chauffeuring them around in cars is never mentioned.

Age 4: Unacceptable!

Yes, it would look funny to see someone push a kid to school in a stroller—but why? Environmentally, it’s certainly better to push the kid  that half mile in a stroller than to drive him in a car. And at least the parent is getting a workout, even if the kid is kicking back like a little prince.

Now that we’ve retired the stroller, we take public transportation to places I used to walk. (Audrey still hates walking, never managing more than 1.5 miles in a single day.) It seems wasteful to ride a bus to get somewhere a mile or two from our house. It costs more, it damages the planet, and it takes longer. And no one bats an eye. No one posts a picture of us and posts it on a site called walkinsteadoftakingthebus.com. Experts don’t swoop in to chastise me for letting her lazily ride on public transportation.

Driving a half mile in a car: perfectly normal.

I’ll admit it: I wish it were socially acceptable to push my almost-six-year-old around in her stroller. I miss the walking.

P.S. If you want to avoid my sad fate, try Carfree with Kids for tips on How to Raise a Walker and pray for a robust child!

This month Rebecca and I are focusing on reducing household consumption and waste. As we’ve both shared, we’re probably considered tree hugging hippies by many, but our thrifty, green fervor has slacked off a bit over the years. Even though I no longer hang out every load of laundry, I have to say that giving up composting altogether wasn’t an option. I simply couldn’t dump moldy melon rinds into the trash without chest pain caused by eco-guilt. Plus, since we’ve had kids our household production of half eaten macaroni, expired yogurt, and soggy grapes has drastically increased.

So why did I want to stop composting?

1. Often there were dairy products, eggs or meats mixed with food waste, which meant it couldn’t be composted.
2. Our compost bin is a huge distance from our kitchen.
3. We were constantly besieged with clouds of fruit flies.
4. MICE! Lots of them, who happily nested in the bin while food was delivered to them on a daily basis.

The last factor eventually grossed me out so much that I began researching another solution. Bokashi Bins have been fantastic and greatly lessened our overall family garbage. (And fruit flies, and mice, and the trek to the compost bin!)

You can read my post written nearly three years ago entitled, Do Bokashi Bins Work?, to find out more. But also, stay tuned to my series of upcoming posts on how to start your own bokashi system, how to build your own bins, and how to rapidly change table scraps into rich soil.

Despite the fact that my eco-nomical efforts may have slacked in some areas, I feel like bokashi composting is a huge victory that actually makes my life a tad bit easier. Do you use Bokashi? Have you ever even heard of it?

Last summer I spent half a day organizing my child’s toys. This involved boxing some of them up and banishing them forever. I also took out at least half of her toys—particularly the messy ones with a lot of individual pieces—and put them in an upstairs closet. The craziest part is that while Audrey, a normally observant five-year-old, was thrilled with the cleanliness of her bedroom, she did not notice that half of her toys were missing. Weeks went by before she even asked about anything.

Using that upstairs closet as a kind of toy library really cut down on the amount of tidying we had to do each evening. No longer was the living room littered with five-thousand Barbies and wooden food sets. Closeting the toys gave them a new appeal, too. When the old block set or baby books come downstairs for a while, Audrey plays with them enthusiastically.

In the comments of that post last August, Angie says she learned about the concept of a toy library from the book Simplicity Parenting. In it, the author asserts that kids are happier without so many toys cluttering up their space. I’ve found that to be true for my own daughter.

How do you manage your child’s toys—or do you bother? For years I never implemented any sort of system, though I always vaguely aspired to working out a toy rotation scheme. Now I kick myself for not doing it sooner.

Yesterday Rebecca wrote about losing her zest for diligent green living. I have to confess that I too have slipped when it comes to eco-pursuits and my tightwad lifestyle.

In college when Rebecca and I first became frugal buddies, I gave up store-bought calendars. Instead I made my own with a ruler and a pencil every year to save money. (If I would have shelled out cash for a calendar, it probably would have been the one pictured above–so that I could have become even thriftier!) Years later my husband joined my tightwad pursuits as we regularly hung loads of laundry around our 500 square food apartment with bungee cords to save approximately two dollars at the laundromat. It was fun, it was adventurous, and I relished every crazy moment.

But frugality requires attention to detail, focus, and the ability to delay gratification. Now, with two children under the age of six, I feel that we’ve entered a rather slipshod period of fiscal life.

If we need something, I buy it far sooner, just because I don’t have as much time to shop around. Things in the refrigerator die more regularly because I don’t keep track of all the odds and ends and come up with creative recipes like I used to. We buy more convenience foods and throw away more stale graham crackers than ever before.

My new goal for 2012 is proactive focus, which can quite easily be applied to household consumption. My husband and I plan on sitting down for 30 minutes each week over coffee and cookies for a kitchen table meeting. Our agenda? Planning a daily menu, talking about what we need or want, doling out tasks and assigning responsibility, and typing notes on the laptop to record exactly what we decide. A week later we can sit down and see how we did.

A few years ago we held kitchen table meetings and marveled at how good it felt to be ahead of the game instead of always reacting. In fact, it was so effective that we didn’t seem to need it and stopped doing it altogether….which brings us to the randomness of today.

In my life thus far, I’ve found the combination of proactive focus and accountability are pretty amazing. We’re looking forward to bringing that energy to Green Baby Guide as well. Please keep us accountable by letting us know what you’d like to see and how we can bring you more fresh content.

This month’s theme here at Green Baby Guide is “Reduce! Living With Less.” Stay tuned to learn how you can save money going green, and perhaps have a few thrifty green adventures of your own!

What are your goals for 2012? How do you plan on staying accountable?