I found out that you can get the old tires for free, because otherwise they have to pay to have them hauled away.  We happened to pick a truck dismantler place.

If you live in the Sacramento area, Subway Truck Parts is a great place to go

So we got some pretty big tires.  Lots of growing space!

Dutiful hubby, loading up ginormous tires

The awesome thing about growing potatoes in tires is that it’s easy to do, it saves space, and you (allegedly) get a high yield.  You’ll want three tires for each stack.  First tire goes on the ground, in a place of your choosing.  Fill the tire with dirt.

Shovel your dirt into the tires

Next step – take out your seed potatoes.  Cut the potatoes into pieces, two eyes to a piece.  We skipped this step since our seed potatoes were, ahem, very obviously clearance potatoes.  They may live, they may not.  But this way you’ll get more potato plants.  Plant them into your tire.

Clearance seed potatoes! At $0.50/bag we weren't really going to say 'no'

Next step – once your potato plants come up, a few inches high, put another tire on top and add more soil, leaving the very tops of the plants bare.  As they grow higher, repeat, up until the top of the third tire.

When the plants brown and wilt, it’s time to harvest your potatoes!  I’ll let you know how this works out for us.

COST: $3-5 for seed potatoes, check your local hardware store.  Tires are free, and I’ll be posting about how to cut down your costs for gardening soil.

TIME INVESTMENT: 30 minutes to pick up the tires, 30 minutes to plant.

In other news, we’ve transitioned from winter into spring.  Our tomato plants are going strong.

Flowering! Can't wait for fresh tomatoes

We also purchased a dwarf peach tree.  For those with little space, dwarf fruit trees can be a great investment.  $23 for this one.

Growing a lot of peaches for such a little tree

I’ll be back soon to post about what happened with our sake brewing – start to finish, and whether or not it’s a sustainability win or fail.

Our winter garden is growing well.  We’ve got lettuces, cabbage, mustard greens, bok choy, onions, kohl rabi…lots of stuff!  The green beans lived out their life and withered with the chill, and we had a bit of a fail with the spaghetti squash.   The spaghetti squash ended up getting powdery mildew, we thought we’d take care of it when we got back from vacation, and…it was dead by the time we got back.  I’ll post on powdery mildew later.

Two out of our three garden beds. We're planning to build one more.

Bok choy, ready to pull out of the ground and eat!

For the first couple weeks of winter, our quails stopped laying.  Quails depend on light as a queue to lay eggs.  Less light, no eggs.  So once it starts getting dark, we plug in some Christmas lights and leave those on for a couple hours.  Pretty AND functional!

We moved the quail hutch closer to the house.

A full day's haul from our quails.

We’ve been eating out of the garden nearly every day now.  The mustard greens are a quick producer.  Instead of uprooting the plant, we’ve been clipping the leaves off, one by one.  They’re great in stir fry and in soups.

Burgers made with produce from our garden - chives, quail eggs, and lettuce.

We’ve been working on a new, fairly involved project recently.  I doubt it will save us much time, but it will save us money…

What do sushi rice, rice koji, and sake yeast have in common? HEY, get out of the picture, sake bottle!

We’re going to be homebrewing sake.  The hubby and I love sake, so this will be a fun experiment.  I’ll keep y’all posted.

Cute little greenhouse!

This weekend, we planted lettuces, mustard greens, and bok choy.

Ready to go into the ground...

Our new garden beds are working out really well.  They get more sun than our side yard.

YUM! We've got leeks, mustard greens, lettuces, broccoli, cauliflower, bok choy, and cabbage =)

Here's our second garden bed. Green beans and spaghetti squash on the right.

We're getting quite a lot of green beans. They're super-tasty.

We also started pulling up the summer plants from our side yard.  They had a bit of measly production left, as we harvested a tiny butternut squash and itty bitty eggplants, but overall, they’re done.

Pulling up cucumber plants.

A couple of weeks ago, we had a big storm here.  Our big, beautiful eucalyptus tree fell over.  Thankfully it didn’t land on our house, but did damage our spa cover slightly.  We found out later, from our neighbors, that the tree had already fallen over once before!  The people that lived in our home before us propped it back up.  Clearly, a poor idea.  When my hubby was digging out the roots, we saw that the largest root had been broken off from the trunk long ago.  Once a tree falls over, it’s pretty much said “Goodbye, world”.

So we bought a loquat tree and put it in the spot where the old eucalyptus tree was.

We bought it from our neighbors. At a garage sale. Score!

Loquat trees grow very quickly, are evergreen, and produce tasty fruit.  Three wonderful things that both the hubby and I desired.  My mother actually grew her loquat tree from seed.  These trees are very expensive in the hardware store or at the nursery (~$60-$75), so this may be the way to go for those looking to guard the pocketbook.

For everyone else…

A miniature red banana tree! A little worse for the wear for being in a box for two day and shipped, but should recover quickly!

Since I’ve started this blog, I’ve been looking at different aspects of my life and trying to figure out how to be nicer to the environment as well as save myself some money.  One of the things I’ve looked at is birth control.  You may have seen some recent articles concerned about the effects of birth control pills on our ecosystem.  Women on birth control pills excrete progestins, sythentic versions of natural progestogens, with their urine.  These eventually make their way out into our water systems, and are making the male fish…well, less male.

Artificial Progestins in Women’s Drugs Affect Fish Reproduction

Male Bass in Many US Rivers Feminized by Birth Control and Hormone Treatments

Just look up “birth control” and “fish”.  Now, I’m not advocating no birth control (yikes!).  But rather, an inspection of available choices.  I did some research, and besides the effect birth control pills have on the environment, it’s a pain to remember to take them every day at the same day.  The cost for me is fortunately not significant ($5 for 3-month supply).  I know it’s not always so cheap for everyone.  I finally decided on getting a Paragard IUD.  An IUD (Intrauterine Device) is a little thing that’s inserted into your uterus to prevent pregnancy.  Here in the US there are two main kinds – the Paragard and the Mirena.  The Paragard is T-shaped, and relies on copper wire to prevent pregnancy.  The Mirena is likewise T-shaped, and releases a small amount of localized hormones.  Much smaller than with birth control pills.  I’m not entirely sure, but I think it does not cause hormone to be excreted in the urine, since it is localized and not going through the digestive system.

Both IUDs are over 99% effective.  The Mirena is effective for 5 years, and the Paragard is effective for 10 years.  Without insurance, it costs ~$300.  With my insurance, the appointment and IUD cost me $15.

So…the birth control pills were $20/year for me.  The Paragard will cost me $1.50/year.

As a disclaimer, everyone’s experience with the Paragard will differ.  However, mine has been very pleasant so far!  I won’t lie, the insertion was fairly painful, but well within the realm of bearable.  It lasts a few seconds, at most.  I felt it poking me a bit once in a while for a couple weeks.  It does tend to make your period heavier and/or longer.  At this point, I don’t even know it’s there.  Worry-free birth control that I don’t even know is there?  Love it!

Another thing I wanted to address – menstrual cycles.  I’ve recently become converted to menstrual cups.  I purchased the Moon Cup – Size B MoonCup.  There’s the Keeper and the DivaCup as well.

The Moon Cup is made out of medical-grade silicone.  You won’t need to throw out tampons or pads.  It’s comfy once inserted.  You can keep it in longer, and there’s no risk of Toxic Shock Syndrome.  It’s non-absorbent, so it won’t dry you out.  You won’t need to keep BUYING tampons and pads.  The Moon Cup is about $30 with shipping.  It’s medical-grade silicone, so it’s reusable until you break it.  It can save you a lot of money and garbage!

This video explains this well.

A video showing different folding techniques.

Hope this helps you ladies!

Here’s what a typical bought lunch looks like.

Teriyaki chicken, an eggroll, and a soda. Yes, I eat at my desk...alone! *sob!*

Yum!  But all of that packaging goes into the trash.  The cup and straw – trash.  Bag of chips?  Trash.  Napkins…?  Well, you get the idea.

Not only that, but this is a huge punch to the financial gut.  Let’s say you buy your meals at work, and you’re fairly frugal about it.  Say…an average of $5 a day (and I KNOW it can go waaay over this).  Let’s make it four days a week to be generous, and two weeks off a year for vacation.

$5 x 4 days a week x 50 weeks = $1,000/year.

YIKES!  Considering that many people spend more than this (you know who you are, Starbucks coffee drinkers…), that is a huge chunk of cash!  And lots and lots of garbage that gets carted off to landfills to rot…very…very…slowly.

I bring my lunch most days, in tupperware, but on a whim I bought a Laptop Lunch System Bento Box – Primary.  And then I ran through the pages over at Lunch in a Box.

The wonderful thing about the bento box is that it creates no waste, and I LOVE that this one has utensils that fit right into the box.  I’m always losing/forgetting utensils.  It looks like it’s for kids, but it fits plenty of food for me, and the insulated carrying case looks adult enough.  If you browse through bento boxes though, you can find some really adorable ones.

My first lunch:

The upper left container has a leakproof lid. It must be removed for microwaving.

Leftover pizza in the lower right, mustard greens and green zebra tomatoes in the lower left, pasta with homemade tomato sauce in the upper left, and carrots and bread with hummus in the upper right.

My second lunch:

Can you tell we had lots of leftover pizza?

Peas in the lower right, leftover pizza in the lower left, Plain yogurt with peaches and honey in the upper left, and carrot sticks and hummus in the upper right.

COST: $60 with shipping for two bento boxes.

TIME INVESTMENT: Cook enough dinner for leftovers, keep fresh fruit around, and it takes five minutes to pack yourself a lunch.  Ten to fifteen if you want to get fancy!  Look up “bento box” on flickr if you wanna know what I mean…

I sold my old TV and used the $$ to buy sooo many seeds!

Lettuces, broccoli, carrots, spinach, spaghetti squash, cauliflower, kohl rabi, onions, leeks, celery, cabbage, brussel sprouts, chinese cabbage, bok choy…and so on and so forth!  I’ll try to cover some techniques later for you folks that live where there’s a killing frost.  Here in West Sacramento we get a light frost in the winter mornings, and that’s it.

True to my first post on growing from seeds, we used the biodegradable pots this time.  They’re $2 for 50 at Lowe’s or Home Depot.

We're reusing the miniature greenhouse trays from spring

And, now here are our seedlings!

Green beans in the front are actually a summer veggie...I'm pushing it a bit.

Even though we don’t have a huge yard, I know others have an even smaller space.  I was wandering around Instructables.com when I came across this wonderful little tutorial.  So, of course, I ran out and grabbed a hanging shoe pouch thingy ($13 at Target).  I filled it with potting soil.

I put mine on our fence.

I planted a number of different herbs in it, as well as some mesclun mix and arugala.

Oregano, Tarragon, Catnip, Dill, Basil...and some more I can't remember =)

I made a little hole in the soil in each of the pouches.

About the same size as a little seed starter pot.

And then I poured some seed starting mix into it, and patted it down.

I planted the seeds into the seed-starting mix.

Hopefully this will get them going!  I’ve been watering them every day, so I’ll let you know how it works!

TIME INVESTMENT: 1 hour

COST: $13 for shoe rack, $5 for seed starter (I already had some lying around), and $5 for potting soil (already had some of this too).  You won’t use all of the potting soil or the seed starter.  $23, without seeds.  Seeds run $1.50-$2.50 a packet.

My husband just put together a cute little greenhouse.  We’re working out some kinks, but I’ll show it to you next time!  We’ve also got some quails that we hatched from our quails.

YIKES!

Why, build a solar oven, of course!  I used the instructions/plans from The “Easy Lid” Cooker and “Minimum” Solar Box Cooker with one or two modifications.

Find two boxes, one slightly smaller than the other.  My smaller one didn’t have flaps, hence the modifications, but ideally yours would.  You’ll want at least a 1/2″ margin on all sides.  Check to see if you can fit the pots you plan to use for cooking in the smaller box!

My two boxes for solar oven use!

MATERIALS:
-2 boxes, 1 slightly larger than the other, plus some extra pieces of cardboard – FREE
-a pair of scissors or a serrated knife (for cutting the cardboard) – FREE
-Elmer’s white glue, non-toxic and safe for use in a solar oven! – ??  I had it lying around, let’s assume $3
-lots of aluminum foil – $2
-turkey-sized oven bags – $2
-a wire coat hanger – FREE
-newspaper or newsprint – FREE
-black spray paint, non-toxic when dry – $3

TOTAL COST = $10

Your basic supplies

First step – cut the larger box in half.  Glue the hanging flaps down.  Take the side you intend as your bottom, and line it with a big piece of cardboard.  This is what is going to allow the top part of your box to act as a lid.

The lining should be tall, taller than the other half of your box

Take your lid, and hold it up to the liner.  Cut the liner down to the height of your lid, leaving the four corners up to form tabs.

Like so! You can see the corner I left up as a tab

Using your Elmer’s Glue, line the inside of the outer box with foil – all four walls and the floor.

Shiny! Better view of the tabs too

Now plunk your inner box in the outer box, and line the space in between with crumpled pieces of newsprint or newspaper.  This is the insulation for your oven.

We overstuffed ours a little, but we were able to squish it all together later

My outer box was a little too tall for my outer box, so I cut my outer box down to match the inner box.  And since my inner box didn’t have flaps to fold over, I took spare pieces of cardboard, glued them to the inside of the inner box, folded the over the insulation, and tucked the remainder in the space between the outer box and the liner.  Didja get that?  If not, here’s a picture =)

I scored the cardboard with sharp scissors so it would fold in a precise manner

As for the tabs, I found it easiest to tuck them under the flaps.  Cutting them in half down the middle (from the top) helped me maintain the corners.  I wanted the top to fit snugly.  I think I missed one tab and ended up gluing it on the top.  Oh well!  I weighed everything down with a couple of books while I was gluing things, to get it to better stay in place.

Devin shows me exactly what she thinks of my methods...

Done!

Line the inside of the inner box with aluminum foil.

Starting to look (sort of) like an oven...

Make sure your lid still fits, in case you were over-zealous with the paper-packing.  A snug fit is good – less heat will escape.  Since I cut down my liner to fit my inner box, I had to cut down my lid as well.  You don’t want any space between your lid and the top of your oven.

Measure the thickness of your walls.  Draw a rectangle on the lid that matches the dimensions of the open part of your oven.  Cut it on three sides and score the last side with your scissors/knife.  This will be your reflector.

Glue one of the turkey oven bags shut (prevents moisture from accumulating inside).  Glue this to the underside of your lid, over the opening.  Line the reflector part of your lid with aluminum foil (just on the side facing the oven).

It should look like this

You’re almost done.  Now to make your drip pan.  Take a piece of cardboard that will fit inside your oven, flat on the bottom.  Cover it in aluminum foil.  Spray paint it black.

Fancy fancy drip pan!

Cut a piece off of your wire hanger, and use this to prop up the reflector.  The ends of the wire can go into the corrugations in the cardboard.

I ended up propping mine up higher than this to get more reflection

Put the drip pan in the bottom, put the lid on, face the reflector towards the sun, and you’re ready to cook!  Of course…don’t forget the pot with the food in it.

Mmmm...beef stew...

I cooked some beef stew.  The oven DOES work, a fact I am very excited about!  It will get to a temperature of about 300 degrees.  Food inside does not require stirring and will not burn.  It works something like a slow cooker, so you can pop food in it in the morning, and come home from work to a meal.  Prime cooking hours are between 12 and 2 (or so I’ve read).

Best of all?  Cooking in a solar oven takes no power and will not heat up the house!  Make those hot summer months work FOR you.

TIME INVESTMENT: 3 hours

Just so you know, we’re expecting more quail babies later this week!

In a quick aside, I’ve installed a hummingbird feeder in our yard.  Not only will they help pollinate our flowers, but they are awfully fun to watch!

We built ours 4′ wide and 8′ long.  22″ tall to keep the puppy from jumping up and rooting through our veggies.  It’s entirely unnecessary to have yours quite so tall, unless you have a small dog that loves to dig!

PARTS (per garden bed):
6 – 8′ long 2×8′s
1 – 8′ long 4×4′s
24 – 3″ long wood screws

TOOLS:
circular saw (or get the wood cut to size at the hardware store)
power drill/screwdriver

We had the hardware store cut some of our wood to size, and we cut some of it at home with a circular saw.  Three of the 2×8′s need to be cut in half.  The 4×4 needs to be cut into 4 22″ long sections.

Cutting the 4x4s into 22" long sections

Put 2 of the 4×4 sections on the ground, and line up 3 of the 4′ long 2×8′s.  Pre-drill two holes on each piece into the post.  Make sure the drill bit is slightly thinner than the screws you are using.

If you're doing this alone, it might be best to do on a flat surface

Screw the 4′ long 2×8 pieces into the post.  Line up the 22″ long 4×4 post on the other side and do the same.  You should end up with a piece that looks like this.  Three 4′ long 2×8′s and two 22″ long 4×4′s.

Devin in a most un-ladylike pose!

Repeat for the opposite side.  Then stand those up, and start putting on the 8′ long 2×8′s. Two screws for each end of the board.

Put your back into it, kid!

A very short time later…

We had the long ends overlapping the short ends for a neater look

Now we have a raised garden bed!  We’ll have to dump dirt in it, and raise up some seedlings, but you get the idea.  Since we have it in our lawn, I’ll probably be sealing the outside to protect the wood from our sprinklers (though we turned off the one that was inside the bed.  We have a hose from our sprinkler system coming up this side of the yard, so we’re going to put our garden beds on automatic sprinklers as well.

DON’T MAKE MY MISTAKE:
Build it where you plan to have it lay, or close by.  It is heavy!

COST:
$43 for the wood + $6 for more screws than we needed = $49

TIME INVESTMENT:
If you include the hardware store trip and the cutting, about 3 hours.

The next day, I saw Devin pawing at the deck and whining.  I had the feeling there was something under there.  I took a look, and sure enough, there was a quail stuck under the deck boards.  She must have popped over our sprinkler hideaway, gotten down into the hole, and slipped under one of the support boards to get completely and utterly stuck.  You may not have understood that, but I barely do either!

How did she GET under here??

After some mental anguish, we decided we HAD to get her out.  A quail slowly dying under our deck?  No thank you!

Hubby got the drill, and we started taking out one of the boards.

Out comes the board...

She was a thirsty thing, so we were able to tempt her out with some dripping water.  Dripping water is very attractive to quails.  If you’re trying to get them used to using a rabbit/guinea pig waterer, just squeeze it until it drips.  It gets their attention right away!  And shiny things.  They will peck at shiny things.

Closer...closer...wait for it...!

Success!

For a trapped quail, she didn't seem too happy to be rescued.

So…this is one of the reasons we’re hatching some more (due date of 8/20).  We’re a little short on quails these days, thanks to the puppy.  BAD PUPPY.

We started building our raised garden beds this evening, until the drill ran out of juice.  I wanted to work on the A-frame to show you, but it looks like the raised garden beds will come first!  I bought a ton of seeds at Home Depot for our winter garden, so I’ll show you what we’ll be planting there.

DON’T MAKE MY MISTAKE: For goodness’ sake, make sure to shut your doors after you collect quail eggs!  Yes, quail can fly, but they are not very good at it.  Once they haplessly wander out of their cage, they’ll be only a hop skip and a jump away from completely helpless.  Add a cat or dog into the mix, and you’re short some quails and up some fairly useless carcasses (unless you feed your pets a raw diet.  Then they’ll still be handy).

When I got home, the garden looked like this:

Too much tomato growing...too little support

What a nightmare!  I think I’m going to try pruning the tomato plants a little bit next year.  Right now we’re getting lots of tomatoes of a medium size, and the plants just went wild.  Fewer tomatoes of a larger size with more manageable plants would be a good thing.  I used the last of my bamboo stakes to prop things up so I could walk through here.

Phew! You can *almost* see a pathway through now...

Cucumbers were a great success as well.  I built a nice little a-frame for a support.  It worked really well (though could stand to be bigger), so I’ll show you how to make one of those.  Took about 20 minutes.  I’d also like to address flower planting.  After much wheedling, I’ve convinced my hubby that planting flowers will help us attract more pollinators to our garden.  We have some sunflowers, and with these, I’ve actually seen some honeybees in our yard.

This sunflower is nine feet tall and has a flower as big as your FACE. Yes, YOUR face...

This is our haul of tomatoes so far, with the two of us eating at least two tomatoes a day.

The beans in the middle are for the chili to be made tomorrow with our homegrown tomatoes and homegrown bell peppers =)

So stay tuned!  We have a new set of quail eggs in the incubator, raised garden beds to build (to better feed our family), a winter garden to plant, a solar oven to construct, and much more!

P.S.  Gratuituous photo of a monkey from our honeymoon trip.

Gratuituous Monkey Photo