Flats Challenge Day 2: Supplies and Preparation

It is Day 2 of the Flats Challenge! Today we are talking about the supplies needed and the preparation we made for the challenge. I began preparing for the Flats Challenge a few months ago, actually. I tried to get a little bit of everything so that I could compare and review the different types I am trying. Once I started trying flats, I really fell in love and have actually started to switch the bulk of my stash over to a flats and prefolds stash. This is why I have a relatively large flats stash right now! For covers I am using a mix of wool wraps, one size covers, and sized covers.

My flats:

• 5 flour sack towels - $4 for the set, purchased from Meijer on clearance. The regular price for these is $5 for five flour sack towels.

• 4 receiving blankets - I pulled these out of of my newborn baby clothes box. I had quite a few that were given to me when Ava was a newborn, so I chose 4 cute prints to become diapers.
• 2 Sweet Bobbins bamboo fleece - I paid $10 for these on a diaper swap page in EUC. I bought these especially as a nighttime solution. If you bought them new they run $9 each.
• 3 Geffen Baby hemp jersey - I bought these new from a website where I found a flash sale price of $13 total, though usually you would find three of these for $21.
• 3 Rebourne Cavewomen flats - I bought these new from Rebourne Clothing for $11 for three.
• 3 Diaper Rite large - I bought these used off of a swap page for $6.
• 2 Diaper Rite unbleached smalls - I bought these used off of a swap page for $5.
• 6 Imagine printed flats - I bought these used off of a swap page for $13.
• 2 Imagine Bamboo flats - I bought these used off of a swap page for $4.
• 2 Flip flats - I bought these used off of a swap page for $4.
• 1 Baby Monkeys Bamboo Terry Flat - I received this diaper at no cost to review (reviews will be posted once the Flats Challenge is over).
• 2 Orange Diaper Company Bamboo Terry Squares with doublers - I received these diapers at no cost to review (reviews will be posted once the Flats Challenge is over).
• 1 BumbleBeeBum Daddy Flat - I received this diaper at no cost to review (reviews will be posted once the Flats Challenge is over).
• 1 Urbun Sprout Fitted Flat - I received this diaper at no cost to review (reviews will be posted once the Flats Challenge is over). 
• 1 Brown Cow Cotton flat and cover - I received this diaper at no cost to review (reviews will be posted once the Flats Challenge is over).

My covers:

• Four Rebourne Woolie Wraps - I received one to review, three purchased by me later for about $30 each.
• 1 Gordy's Girl wool soaker - I received this to review. 
• 1 Flip cover - I purchased this used for $5.
• 3 Blueberry Coveralls - I purchased these new (seconds) a long time ago for $10 each.
• 3 GroVia covers - I purchased these used for $10 each.
• 3 Bummis Super Whisper Wraps - I purchased these new a long time ago for $14 each.

My first load of hand washed flats, covers and wipes!

My other supplies:

• 5 gallon bucket with lid - $5
• plunger - $5 (you can get this cheaper, but I wanted the blue one to match my bucket.)
• I use Soft Bottoms detergent which is around $10 for a 32 oz bottle. A bottle this size typically lasts me about two months for normal washing, and I think if I was to exclusively handwash flats I could make a bottle last four months. So the cost for this week should be about $1.
• I am not using a wet bag this week to see if I could in fact get by without one!

So my total flats stash cost is: $70 for flats, $102 for covers, $90 for wool, and $1 for detergent. Now, if I was just setting up a stash and not thinking about reviews I could definitely do with fewer covers and fewer flats. In fact, if I was on a tight budget I could easily have gotten my whole stash for $100 or less! Even so, with this larger stash that includes wool, the grand total is only $263. Compared to the $1500 - $2500 that most families spend on disposables during the diapering years for ONE child, this is still a huge savings!

Flats Challenge Day 1: Why Take The Challenge?

I am so excited to start the week of posts about the Flats Challenge! I am blogging along with Kim Rosas of DirtyDiaperLaundry this week while we and over 430 others use exclusively flat cloth diapers and hand wash them. I first heard about the challenge last spring when Ava was about 3 months old, but I was really new to cloth diapers at that time and flats were very intimidating to me. The thought of hand washing as well? It just didn't seem like something I could do. Now as I have cloth diapered for 15 months, I have started to realize just how manageable flats are. The hand washing part? I think it will be just fine.

My primary reason for taking the Flats Challenge is to show that flats are not as hard to use as people think. Learning the folding technique is what makes most people nervous about flats, and I am hoping to show that anyone can learn it! As many as 1 in 3 families struggle to afford to diaper their babies, and I hope that this challenge and series of blog posts can be a useful resource to help families be able to learn about how they can save money by using flat diapers. 

A messy Origami fold - Ava didn't want to hold still today.

An additional benefit to learning to hand wash diapers is the ability to take cloth on the road very easily. I love that I can take my camp washer and flats camping now or on a road trip and not have to spend money on disposables! Learning to hand wash diapers (or clothes!) in a camp washer is also great in case of power outages, weather emergencies, or instances where a washer breaks down. Many families don't have their own washer or dryer and can't get to a laundromat, so I hope that this series will also show that hand washing diapers is doable for anyone and can be a great cost saver!

My camp washer! I've never been so excited about a plunger before.

I started using my flats occasionally a few weeks ago to practice the folds, and I have fallen in love with the simplicity of them! They are so easy to get clean since most are only one layer of fabric and they dry lightning fast on the line. For anyone who has struggled to find a washing routine that will actually get their cloth diapers clean, flats are a great option to try. It is hard to mess up a flat diaper!

First flat of the challenge: Geffen Baby flat pad folded in a GroVia cover.

I hope you all will follow along this week as I learn and explore flats and hand washing! Follow along on Twitter and Instagram with the hashtag #flatschallenge. 

My Green(er) Kitchen

I used to be a paper towel addict. They were used for literally everything you can imagine in our house and we went through a ridiculous amount each week. I knew there were cloth alternatives, but since that involved more laundry I wasn't too interested. One day it just clicked for me though. I was standing in the grocery store staring at yet another package of very expensive paper towels and I realized... I was quite literally throwing my money away on them. That was when I decided to kick my habit.

Going in to the switch from paper to cloth I knew that my system would have to be easy in order for me to stick with it. I did a bit of research and ended up finding these fabulous unpaper towels from Athena Creates. I bought a family pack of 56 because I knew I wasn't going to want to do laundry too often, and then I bought a cute bamboo organizer to set them in on the counter. These unpaper towels have been amazing! They are made from cotton birdseye fabric and are about the same size as regular paper towels. They clean better than paper, wash up well, and we use them for almost everything that we used to use paper for. (Dog messes still get paper. Yuck!)

The next thing I had to figure out was what to do with the dirty ones. I found this wet bag at My Beautiful Girl and just had to have it! I have an accidental rooster theme going on in my kitchen, so this wet bag was perfect. It has the perfect amount of space for my unpaper towels and washes up beautifully each time.

My favorite reusable kitchen products, though, are these washable bowl covers that I got from MBG to match my wet bag. They have elastic to fit snugly around all shapes and sizes of bowls and casserole dishes. The adorable cotton print on top has a food safe nylon hidden under it. If they don't get too dirty a wipe with a damp cloth is all they take, and if they happen to need a wash they go right in with the unpaper towels. We absolutely love being able to reduce our use of aluminum foil and plastic wrap in our kitchen with these!

I also bought cheap microfiber cloths from the auto cleaning section of the hardware store for cleaning around the house. They get tossed into a laundry bag in our basement and washed separately from everything else.

So that's my green kitchen set-up! I love how much I have reduced our paper towel usage since switching to cloth and my purchases have already paid for themselves a couple times over with the cost savings of not buying paper towels.

I'm linking up to Your Green Resource this week. Check out other blogs via the linky at SortaCrunchy!

*Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with the shops mentioned in any way and they did not sponsor my review. I purchased products from them of my own accord and all opinions here are my own.

Baby steps toward a greener life, or how I became an earthy-crunchy mama

It all started with cloth diapers.

My initial interest in cloth diapers has led me down a path toward being counter-cultural and "earthy-crunchy" in many areas of my life. The more I learned about how cloth diapers would save me money, keep waste out of landfills, and keep chemicals off of my baby's bum, the more I realized that those were goals that could be achieved in other areas of my household as well. Through wonderful bloggers who I respect and read faithfully I learned about reducing waste in my house, using natural solutions instead of products with chemicals, and saving money by reusing things or re-prioritizing what is truly important.

My home has less toxins, we waste less, and throw away less since I first heard about cloth diapers. I've become passionate about things like extended breastfeeding, natural childbirth, cloth diapers, baby-wearing, un-paper towels, reusable alternatives to disposable products, natural alternatives to chemical-based products, and real food. Every little change takes us one step further toward helping our environment and our budget, and every time I fold a load of cloth diapers I am so thankful that I discovered this wonderful doorway to a more eco-friendly lifestyle. I'm going to start writing a few posts here and there on some of the things I've changed around my household to be more environmentally conscious and I'll occasionally post reviews on some of the products I've found that I just love.

After all... how do you not fall in love with a cute fluffy bum?!

Let the eating begin!

Our garden is just starting to let us in on its bounty. Our pepper plants are struggling a little, but everything else is flourishing. Note for next year... less is more. I don't think we realized how much a single plan can produce when planted in good soil!

So far the harvest has been: 2 yellow squash, 6 zucchini, 4 pickling cucumbers, 1 salad cucumber, 2 grape tomatoes and 2 yellow cherry tomatoes. No, the grape and cherry tomatoes did not make it inside the house! They were happily consumed in the garden while searching for zucchini in the other bed.

I found two quick refrigerator pickle recipes to use up my cukes, and I must say they turned out delish!

The first recipe I made comes from Aarti Sequeira, last season's Food Netword Star winner. This was my favorite of the two pickle recipes... slightly sweeter, and the cilantro with the salad cuke is so perfect and summery! The only modification to Aarti's recipe that I made was that I substituted white wine vinegar for rice vinegar. Turned out great even with a substitution.

The other recipe I used was actually a Rachael Ray dill pickle recipe. While I am definitely not a Rachael Ray fan, this recipe was easy and really good. It has a good mix of spices and herbs with the white vinegar, and the addition of garlic added really good flavor. The longer these sit in the fridge, the better they taste, too!

From the ground up...

We tried to garden last year... tried and (mostly) failed. The soil at our new house is solid clay so aside from grass and weeds things don't grow well here. We did have some very successful green pepper plants though, and we were motivated to try harder this year. I decided to take up blogging again to journal about our garden adventures and our journey toward a simpler life.

Since the clay wasn't friendly toward the plants we tried to grow in it last year, we decided to cart in some better soil and build a better growing environment from the ground up. Over a month ago Ben and I built ten garden boxes to hold the soil we were planning on getting. Our boxes are just build out of pine 2"x6" boards with 2"x4" pieces as the connecting supports. We built two 30'x2' boxes, two 4'x8' boxes, and six 4'x12' boxes and laid them out in their places.

Fast forward through many rainy weekends until we finally had a dry(ish) day to have soil delivered last week. Of course the day we were going to borrow a tractor to distribute our dirt to our boxes it started raining for two days. Thankfully by Saturday of Memorial Day weekend the rain had cleared up. Saturday and Sunday were spent hauling and spreading dirt, picking up more dirt at the distributor, hauling and spreading more dirt, and finally hauling and spreading dirt in a thunderstorm! Yes, that's right... it started storming mid-task Sunday afternoon, so we decided to buck up and finish the job. Finishing the soil left us all day Monday to spread landscaping fabric down between all the boxes and get our load of pea gravel spread on the paths. Once done with the boxes and paths, we were finally able to get our seedlings and seeds in the ground!

Lest you think that this all went smoothly, rest assured that box gardens are a ridiculous amount of work and we had plenty of issues along the way. The tractor got stuck in the soggy clay a few times, and once got stuck for quite a while. The remaining grass back there will take a long time to come back and some of the tractor tire ruts are there for good. I already mentioned the pouring rain that we spread soil during, but then on Monday the temperature hit at least 85 with full sun, giving us some fantastic sunburns. Not to mention the fact that we initially tried to get these gardens in about a month ago!

After all of that, I'm just thankful that the gardens are planted. If we get even half of what we planted to produce, then we'll be eating like kings all summer! We'll have: seven varieties of tomatoes; summer squash and zucchini; strawberries; three types of beans; three varieties of peas; several kinds of lettuces and spinach; radishes; celery; six kinds of peppers; six kinds of winter squash; potatoes; three kinds of onions; cucumbers for eating and pickling; carrots and parsnips; rutabagas and turnips; and that's not counting the herbs in my deck boxes and herb garden! We should be stocked on herbs: basil, cilantro, oregano, thyme, marjoram, dill, sage, rosemary, lavender, beebalm, mint, parsley, chives, and chamomile.

I'm looking forward to finding ways to use and preserve our harvest this summer!