Ms. Patmore stole my toilet paper

My soul-sister Kari and I joke sometimes about how pets sort of require that you keep a roll of paper towels in the house.

Because there is just something about cleaning up a handful of regurgitated garbage that makes you super grateful that you can just throw it all back in the trash and never see it again.

Hopefully.

So the truth is, I use paper. I try to be conservative. I recycle like Ed Begley Jr's slightly obsessive Midwestern niece.

But there is an area of my life where I have recently tried cutting back even more.

And that would be in the potty.

(I know. Let's just do our best to get through this together.)

The first time I heard about the idea of using cloth toilet ... um, cloths? was when I interviewed Tara Wagner of The Organic Sister for a web site I used to edit. At the time, she had just started her project Sustainable Baby Steps, and was traveling around the country with her family in an RV fueled by recycled vegetable oil.

She mentioned her family of three also used reusable toilet paper, and I thought, what I often think when I hear a new idea -- that will be the one that makes my husband finally divorce me.

I mean, I come up with plenty of weird stuff on my own, and he is a patient man, but there are times when I think he would have really liked to have found a nice, average girl -- someone who buys him Tombstone pizzas for dinner, and who doesn't fill his basement bathroom with baby chicks and kitties on the mend, and possibly a foster dog, even though he was totally all for that, don't let him fool you.

So I put the idea on a shelf for a bit. Until I started watching Downton Abbey and needed something easy to sew. So I blame Downton Abbey, really. It's so hard not to.

In the course of watching three seasons, I sewed about 4 dozen wipes and a wet bag. The wipes were easy -- the wet bag was a little harder, but I needed a distraction in Season 3, and that's all I am saying.

(Except a car crash? Really? Seemed so tacked-on, didn't it?)

The actual process I learned from my friend Danielle, who has a very down-to-earth approach about the whole thing which I have adopted: you can just use them when you're onesie-ing, and maybe working your way up to twosie-ing at some point, but no pressure. Husbands can use them or not, and you want to keep a roll in there of the paper stuff anyway for guests. Basically, it's worth a shot. It's not Spanish Influenza. Just relax. Everything will be OK.

The whole thing really starts to make sense if you sew anyway, and you have scrap fabric laying around. I gathered up a bunch of flannel and made a bunch of mixy-matchy wipes. I will say that coincidentally, a lot of them feature umbrellas? Weird, right? I choose to not over-think it.

I spent some time on Etsy looking at really cute, color-coordinated wipe sets, and I based my sizing on that. I would cut two pieces of flannel into 8-inch by 6-inch rectangles, and put right sides together (no pinning, I've got a show to watch.)

I'd then sew around, curving the corners (you don't have to -- I thought it looked cute), and leaving a little hole between corners for turning.

I'd then turn them right-side-out, fold in the little edges of the hole, and sew them up. Then I would top stitch around the outside.

I don't have a serger, which in this case probably saved me a finger.

To make things quicker, I used a rainbow variegated thread, which goes with everything and nothing.

They were super simple and easy to make, and frankly, they are really easy to use. I throw them in the laundry when the bag gets full, right along with the bag.

Some of us use them, and some don't. That's OK. We're saving a few trees, a bit of money, and we'll never technically run out of toilet paper again.

Frankly, I can't wait until Season 4. Maybe I'll start building a compost toilet ...

What's at Stake

This is a year of big changes for us -- a new house, new chickens and even a new way of gardening.

Ten years ago, at our country farmette, we grew asparagus, rhubarb, a huge vegetable garden and even grapes. My kids can't believe we had grapes just feet from the kitchen door, but that was part of the beauty of country living. That and a garage in our basement. And horse next door that scared our nervous dog.

From that house, we moved into the city. Like the city, across from a hospital and next to an apartment building.

We tried gardening. We wanted very much to make it work, but it never seemed to happen for us. Some years, we'd get a few tomatoes and herbs. Our mint and lemon balm plants produced more and more, while our vegetable plants produced less and less.

I think I knew we were in real trouble the year our neighbor got a Topsy Turvy and brought us his excess tomatoes. The gardening snob in my just couldn't handle his extra upside-down cast-offs.

And so, when we moved into this house, we began planning right away. Our kind friends even made us a garden bed to get us started, and we planted garlic and shallots last fall.

We've never beed raised bed people -- we instead would borrow a roto-tiller and wrestle with it until we had a trapezoid patch of mud chunks. From there, we'd plant and hope for the best.

But our fall garden bed looked great in the yard, and so this spring we built one and a half more. We've filled our beds with organic heirloom seeds and plants, and so far, our boxes are blooming.

I wish we had room for more, but as it is, our 2.5 beds are pretty packed -- so much so that the usual large tomato cages that we employed back when there was room for a grape arbor take up a lot of real estate in our smaller garden patch.

We decided to try staking them this year instead. I used some old long underwear pants from my kiddos to create strips of fabric. One of my favorite manuals for sustainable backyard living, Little House in the Suburbs, warned against using anything that could dig into our tender tomatoes. They suggested pantyhose. I think I had those one time -- they're like yoga pants for businesspeople, right?

I'm not sure this new approach will work. I may find myself still purchasing tomato cages instead of relying on recycled pants and stakes from the garage, but for us, this year is about embracing the change.

Everything we do may not work. But we will learn. And that learning will make every year to come just that much easier.

What are you growing this year? Have you made any changes to your garden?

9 really easy ways to eliminate chemicals in your home

You know what makes me happy? Shiny dishes. And clean counters. And fresh sheets.

None of these things make me nearly as happy as playing with my kids or hanging with my husband, but I have recognized that a certain degree of tidiness helps me think. It keeps me from feeling scattered.

But I don't want a bunch of chemicals. And the past few years have proven to me that I don't need 'em, either. I have tried making pretty much everything you can use to clean your house. Some stuff has worked perfectly the first time. Some stuff has forced me to have to scrub a gross residue off all my dishes. But I've kept at it, and these are the absolute easiest ways to eliminate chemicals from your home and still get great results:

-- Add vinegar to your dishwasher's rinse-aid holder, instead of buying a rinse aid
-- Make a basic cleaning spray. It doesn't have to be anything fancy. In an old spray bottle, I mix a couple of tablespoons of Dr. Bronner's peppermint soap with a couple of teaspoons of vinegar with water, and add about 15 to 20 drops of essential oils. Good ones to add are tea tree+lavender or eucalyptus+lemon (tea tree and eucalyptus are great disinfectants, and lavender and lemon help balance them out and keep your house from smelling like a horse barn).  I use this spray on pretty much everything but wood and windows.
-- For windows, mix up vinegar and water in a spray bottle. (1 part vinegar:3 parts water) (I'm still working on wood.)
--  Wash your floors with hot water and a squirt of Dr. Bronner's in a bucket. (Again, still working on wood ... floors.)
-- Never buy air freshener again. Mix essential oils with water in a small spray bottle. Use on sheets too. My family loves a mix of lavender and ylang-ylang. (20 drops EO:4 ounces H2O).

-- Clean carpets with a combination of baking soda and essential oils. Citrus oils are great here (lemon, lime, sweet orange), but you can use anything you like. (12 drops EO:1 cup baking soda). Shake up your mixture, sprinkle it on the carpet, leave it for a minute and vacuum.
-- Make your laundry detergent. There are a million recipes out there, most some mix of Borax, washing soda and grated soap. We use a variation of that, and add about 25 drops of essential oils, like peppermint, which makes everything smell really fresh, but isn't at all overpowering.
-- Put vinegar in the washer's rinse compartment. I promise your clothes won't smell funny. Unless you think fresh and clean smells funny and you want "Lavender Fields" or "Spring Blossoms" or something.
-- Rinse fruits and veggies with a mix of vinegar and water. (1 part vinegar:3 parts water) This sounds a lot like the window cleaner, doesn't it? I won't tell if you don't.
-- To clean your oven, spray the whole inside with your vinegar and water, definitely-windows-and-possibly-fruit concoction. Leave it for a minute. Sprinkle baking soda throughout. Now, get in there and scrub. It will happen. Enjoy your time in the oven. Think of it as your cardio for the day.

These are the easy things we do every day (Well, not vacuum, or clean the oven).

These are the things we do when we clean stuff.

Sometimes, I experiment with a new concoction, but I don't like buying lots of crazy new ingredients. You might have noticed, that my "cleaning supply" cabinet basically contains Dr. Bronner's soap, baking soda, vinegar, essential oils, and empty spray bottles. Because I'm cheap like that. And, it works.

What works at your house?

The Morning Calm

When the house is quiet first thing in the morning, I think that I could live here forever.

I look off our back deck and see neighbors, getting ready for work. They seem like nice people, but they are busy, so busy, and I'll probably never know them.

But here, in on our little city plot, we are discovering new things all the time in this new life. We don't have a sled hill, but the toboggan flies down the stairs that lead to our backyard.

(yesterday's discovery)

It is still new, being here -- a first winter -- a barely-winter at that.

And I love how this house seems to warm in minutes. In our old house, we'd usually come home to such cold. We'd drink tea, pull on layers, turn the heat up and wait. Usually we were long in our beds piled high with blankets before we'd notice our noses weren't freezing.

So why can't we stay here forever? We could, I think. But chickens probably can't. A goat might not be welcome. I know -- I read those books too about keeping livestock in your suburban backyard, and it can happen, I'm sure, through fights at city council meetings and explaining to your children that a trampoline takes up the donkey's real estate.

But all that has a very Step 2 feeling to me right now.

I'm still enjoying everything this house has to offer that our previous home did not. I still wake up grateful, and fall asleep happy that we are here. It isn't perfect, but it is 100 percent home ... for now.

This is a good place to launch dream.