Self Sustaining

Like probably everyone else, we're trying to find ways to save money. A big reason that we've sat down and gone over the money we spend with a magnifying glass is we ended up owing on our 2009 taxes- awesome. Fortunately the government allows one to pay in installments instead of demanding the full amount by April 15th. 


After adjusting our withholdings yet again (We already both claim zero, but now have to take additional amounts out every paycheck. It's Fucking. Retarded.), we've found that the thing we spend the most on is food. That's not terribly surprising- when you're allergic to the things found in most prepared foods and have to make most of what you each from scratch, those raw ingredients rack up the grocery bill pretty quickly. I wouldn't be eating egg and dairy anyway, but not being able to include wheat in my diet is the real killer- it's used in just about everything as filler (and holy FUCK do I miss bread. I haven't found a decent wheat free bread yet, and it makes me crazy. You know how much cheaper my lunches were when I just made sandwiches? A LOT. An average of about 10 bucks a week if I got real fancy, and now I spend about 6 a day.).

So, in an effort to cut our grocery costs for at least the summer, we're attempting to turn our balcony into a garden. I grew up having all our of our summer fruits and vegetables grown at home, and I miss that. Three different types of pears, grapes, apricots, apples, melons, potatoes, tomatoes, beans, peas, zucchini, cucumbers, several varieties of squash,cabbage, lettuce, herbs galore....my childhood home was a veritable paradise.

Last weekend, inspired by the 71 degree weather, we loaded up on seeds and a mini greenhouse to get us started. We began with two different types of lettuce, spinach , green onion, green pepper, peas, cucumbers, chives, and corn (we thought it'd be funny, I don't know.). Yesterday, we moved over everything but the chives, green onions and green peppers to their new homes (the chives and green onion are growing sooo slooowly, and the green peppers haven't even started shoots yet), and so far, the cats have left them alone, and this morning everyone was still upright and perky. We won't be able to move them outside anytime soon, so I'm not sure why we thought March was a GREAT time to start growing things. They are taking up all available window space right now, and we aren't even done yet.

Buoyed by our early success at not killing the little tender shoots, we're still planning on getting more: tomatoes (but specifically Jetstar, because they're low acidic and I love them, but can only find them online so I'll wait till mid-April on those), a squash, dill, and carrots. We've run out of planters but have been turning juice bottles into self watering planters, and my gram gave us the idea to put some of them in hanging planters to give us more room on the balcony. We're lucky, in that our balcony is long, and we get afternoon sun (hot and happy for plants), we'll just need to maximize our space to give everyone room to grow.

I really hope this endeavor works out. I hope that we are so overwhelmed with successful plants that we end up having enough to give away. In fact, if it does work out, we've decided to invest on an indoor green house (something like this) so we can potentially keep some veggies going all year.We've thought about the air garden but...no. With all it's crazy chemicals and the size (we could seriously clear one of those things out in a day, so...) it just wouldn't be practical.