Organically Inclined

by Melanie Bowden
Everyone’s heard of recycling, but what about precycling?Also known as source reduction, precycling is reducing the amount of trash you generate in the first place.Not only can you lower trash going to your local landfill, but you can save money to boot.
You can save as much as $3,000 a [...]

Once in a while I get the bug to be more organized - particularly in homeschool matters. I start to feel like maybe I’m not doing enough to keep everything together, especially after I read a few homeschool blogs or go to one of any number of sites that have all sorts of organizational pages [...]

I am in love with olive oil. No, really. In fact, my buy everything local plans are often dashed because of two things - olive oil (which I’ve never heard of anyone producing in Vermont) and bananas. I’d rather do without bananas…but don’t take away my evoo!
Here are 10 ways you can incorporate olive into [...]

I just took my $600 a month grocery store budget and cut $164ish out of it. And we didn’t lose anything. We still eat breakfast every morning! How cool is that?

Or none at all. While I, personally, am trying to eat none, I will admit that it is a difficult habit to break. And not because I’m a big steak eater but because of two small things - hot dogs and bacon! I have a lot of baseball games to go to this time of [...]

Mamas on the Compact have made the commitment to refuse buying new items, consumables aside, for a period of 2, 4, 6 or 12 months.
This is my pledge:
1. I am pledging to not buy anything new for a period of twelve months that began January 1, 2008.
2. My reasons for doing this [...]

I am particularly bad about this because I grew up on cold cereal. I still love it. One of my favorite things to do is eat cereal at night before bed while watching a Star Trek or BSG. But I also know that my cereal budget is $40 every two weeks. Not to mention the [...]

I’ll admit to a not very frugal or green side of me. I like magazines. I have been known, when a little luxury spending cash comes my way, to buy five or six magazines at a time. Granted, this only happens once every three to six months - but it’s still not very frugal of [...]

It took four of us to lift it into the truck. The evaporator. The spinning wheel that would turn the sap from my maple trees into gold. Or rather, amber. Pure Vermont amber-colored maple syrup.
It looked rather benign on the showroom floor, but it was, in reality, a beast of black metal and bolts. Attractive [...]

Make a Rain Barrel
Even though there is still a few feet of snow on the ground here in central Vermont, I know that soon spring will come - and when it does, the rain will start. We always get bucket loads of rain in April around here. For several years, I have wished that we [...]