Welcome back to another episode of the “Weird Is Great” podcast! Today I won’t be focusing on one particular topic. I will camp around our homestead update for a few minutes, but the bulk of this show is going to be “The Crunchy Coach Tells All.”

What will I be telling about?

• The joy of buckwheat pillows
• Craigslist for sorrow and profit
• Fair trade, organic cotton underwear (ah, the luxury!)
• And a little more.

I begin, though, with a bit about our Oklahoma land. I get transparent with the mixed emotions about this last trip, and give you some good news (at least for me!) about the earthbag house process.

Tune in!

Why green cleaning? Are conventional cleaners really that bad?

Well, let me ask you this question: Say you have a three-year-old who wants to help you clean the toilet. Would you let him or her do it with the toilet bowl cleaner you have on hand? No? Well, why not?

Chances are, you don’t have to read the ingredients list to know that there is something nasty about that little bottle of liquid. You can smell it; in fact, you may have experienced a time when you accidentally inhaled the fumes from it and ran away, choking. Maybe you even got a headache.

The ingredients in conventional cleaners are toxic, often dangerously so. And while the huge conglomerates have wisened up to this fact and taken out some of the worst of the worst chemicals, such as phosphates out of laundry detergent, they still contain ingredients that would send you to the emergency room should your little toddler swallow some.

Green cleaning versus conventional household cleaners

Conventional laundry detergents, while phosphate-free, still contain chemicals that pollute the water. So how healthy can they be against your skin? Conventional all-purpose cleaners and glass cleaners contain petroleum derivatives. These and other chemicals can cause problems that range from skin and eye irritation to liver and kidney damage and cancer.

Green cleaning products cause no kind of irritation whatsoever, nor do they contain any substances that can damage organs or increase cancer risk.

A note of caution here: some conventional grocery stores—and conventional cleaning manufacturers—have recently come out with their own versions of “green” products. Although they have fewer chemicals than the non-green versions, they still contain some toxins. Either buy the Seventh Generation brand (a natural brand which is now sold almost everywhere), or stick with other cleaners you can find at the health food store.

Better yet – and much more economical – make your own household cleaners. Here are a few ideas:

• Clean the toilet with 1 cup vinegar and 1/4 cup either baking soda or washing soda. Or, clean it with a squirt of liquid castile soap.
• Mix a little vegetable oil with water in a spray bottle. Shake well before each squirt, and use for dusting. Or, simply dampen a rag.
• Wash your floors with a 50-50 solution of vinegar and water.
• Do your laundry with a Borax and washing soda mixture. While some people object to both of these ingredients for various reasons, they are not harmful to the environment in small quantities and it is the only green laundry solution I have discovered that cleans as well as the conventional detergents. And it’s much cheaper.
• Use 50-50 liquid castile soap and water as a liquid hand soap. Or, boil 14 soap nuts in three cups of water for thirty minutes. This mixture can be used not only for hand soap, but also as an all-purpose cleaner, shampoo, and more.

Is there an eco-friendly laundry solution that really gets things clean? Tune in to hear my journey, as well as my opinion on the subject. This episode includes a surprising admission and confession from The Crunchy Coach.

Do you live in a green house? Wish that you did?

Me, too! And Jerry, Benjamin and I will eventually. So to find out what truly constitutes “green”, I’ve done a lot of digging in the area of alternative building during the past year or so. This Weird Is Great episode is a culmination of my findings and conclusions.

The most startling conclusion of all: a large percentage of so-called “green” houses aren’t all they’re cracked up to be.

Tune in to this week’s podcast episode as we discuss:

• the eco-green house that not only takes forever to build, but stinks;
• the startling truth about the cost of earth-bermed houses;
• the myth of straw bales;
• a highly insulated alternative that is anything but green;
• why cobb houses’ best features are their craftiness;
• the dirty truth about earthbag houses; and
• perhaps the greenest house of all…that most Americans would refuse to live in.

Okay, so I don’t exactly reveal every single personal detail of my life in this episode. But I do begin a new segment for the Weird Is Great podcast entitled, “The Crunchy Coach Tells All.” And in the main section I explain why I live the lifestyle that I do.

So, why do I live the way I do? I’ve been accused of being extreme, strange, and – yes – weird because I am strict about what passes into my mouth and am religious about exercising and avoiding toxins wherever possible.

But the fact is, research into the lives of the people who live well past the age of 100 and die free of disease prove that if you want optimum health and a longer life, you have to make choices completely different than what you see in mainstream culture.

Tune in to this week’s episode and you will hear:

• why I am suddenly able to provide you with a longer show (and I hope that’s a good thing! );
• the direction I am headed with my online business;
• the surprising reason why the Crunchy Coach is so particular about her healthy living lifestyle;
• why people who consume processed foods are the “extreme” ones;
• the lie of the 30 minutes/3 days per week exercise routine;
• the shocking truth about how the Crunchy Coach is feeling about gardening in October 2011;
• and more!

What questions should you ask when buying land? Particularly, raw land?

If you listened to the last episode of the “Weird Is Great” podcast, you heard about how our dream is beginning to come alive: we are about to purchase five acres of raw land in the beautiful mountains of Southeast Oklahoma. Talk about healthy living!

A couple weeks before we took the trip up, I found some websites with suggestions on what to ask when buying raw land. They included:

• “Will I have the mineral rights?”
• “Is this lot legal?”
• “Are there any restrictions?”

As we were shown the property, we found that many of the questions were unnecessary in our situation, because we were looking at property owned by a developer. And we knew from looking at the land information online that rural water, electricity and DSL access were readily available.

The questions to ask when buying land will differ from situation to situation. Relevant questions for us included:

• “Who has the mineral rights?”
• “Can we dig a well?”
• “Are there any restrictions as to what kind of house we can build?”
• “Are there any livestock restrictions?
• “How much land can we clear?”
• “Has there been a history of forest fires in the area?” (Crucial, as we currently live in Texas and areas just a couple hours south of here have been burning all summer long.)

We were thrilled to discover that the developer has loose requirements and restrictions intended to preserve the beauty of the land and keep it a nice, quiet, residential and recreational area.

Answers to our questions were, respectively:

• Who had the mineral rights didn’t matter, because there is basically nothing easily available as far as oil, gas or precious metals.
• Yes, we were free to have a well dug.
• The house can be any size, but it must look nice; i.e., the design must be approved by the developer in advance. (No asking for forgiveness instead of permission allowed. )
• You can’t have a pig farm, or more than three dogs. The couple of goats and few chickens and ducks we are eventually planning on adding to our homestead will be fine.
• The general guideline is not to clear more than 20% of the land; however, property owners can take out any tree whose trunk is less than six inches in diameter. As our tract was the one of the most recently farmed for timber, the developer’s agent thinks that we could legally clear around 80% of the growth on the property.
• No forest fires as far as the agent knew. The big lake across the road is a perfect buffer for that.

If you want to live out in the middle of nowhere and have no restrictions, fine. Just remember that therefore your neighbors won’t have any restrictions, either, and they may turn out to be not so nice. In my opinion, buying land from a developer with an open mind and who also cares about the environment may be an even better decision.

And it makes the list of questions to ask when buying land a lot shorter.

The title says it all. To get all the details, tune in to this week’s “Weird Is Great” episode!

Because certain folks have gone overboard about the environment, caring more for the plight of arctic seals than the plight of unborn babies, certain other folks have leaned completely the other direction, claiming that anyone who cares about environmental isues is “evil” or “ungodly” or (gonna be Southern here for a moment) “out of their ever-lovin’ mind.”

As a citizen of the Kingdom of God (commonly known as a “Christian”, but I won’t take that term for myself because Christianity is #1, a term given in mockery to believers by pagans and #2, a religion and Jesus Christ did not come to bring religion but a Kingdom), let me fix both sides.

1. People are part of the environment.

If you care about the environment, you should care about people first and foremost because God does.

Including unborn babies.

2. Air pollution is slowly killing you.

I don’t believe in Global Warming. But I do believe that the excessive use of every kind of vehicle – land, air and water – is producing literally tons of toxins every day that are wreaking all sorts of havoc in our bodies…more havoc than they can handle. This is causing constant illness and early death. (Anyone who dies before age 100 dies early.)

3. Our water supply is shrinking.

The huge underwater aquifer of North America is slowly being dried up by unsustainable agricultural practices and by irresponsible homeowners who think it’s their God-given right to have bright green grass on their lawn in a climate that is hot and dry.

4. Our water supply is filthy.

One of the worst offenses against the environment is that there are very few places in the world that still boast of truly pristine water. Between drugs being flushed down toilets, the use of toxic household cleaners and manufacturers dumping heavy metals into rivers, lakes and oceans, it’s next to impossible to find a way to filter out every last molecule of poison from your drinking and bathing water.

5. God never gave you permission to wipe out entire species of animals.

The destruction of forests, both rain and temperate, is unconscionable and a major reason people are concerned about too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

So quit making fun of me for using cloth for my menstrual pads and toilet wipes.

******

If you don’t care about how much garbage and pollution you produce, don’t wonder why your kid is autistic and you get diagnosed with a horrible disease before age fifty. The environment is a gift from God. If everybody doesn’t start treating it as such, we are doomed to illness and early death, and an increasingly ugly world.

When you first set out to start your first vegetable garden, you don’t necessarily realize all the potential problems you may run into. The gardening how-to is pretty cut-and-dry in the books you read, but most authors don’t emphasize what mistakes could mean the difference between having a garden forever and giving up after the first year.

So if you’re thinking about trying to grow your own food, make sure you avoid the following common pitfalls.

Pitfall #1: Wrong placement of the beds

You may want to get your garden beds going now. But do you really know how much sun the area gets all year long? If you’re in a northern climate and won’t garden past October and you know the space where you want to put the beds gets plenty of sun in the summer, fine.

But if you’re a southern gardener who might one day garden in the fall and winter, you need to spend a year (yes, a whole year) tracking the sunlight. For example, my entire side yard gets plenty of sun all summer, but by November the fall sun is so low in the sky that half of the yard is complete shade from then until March. In addition, gardeners in hot climates would do well to plant their summer crops in an area where most everything will get afternoon shade.

If you’re a northener with a lot of trees in the yard, you need to make sure you have a space that gets at least six hours of full sun (unless all you plan to grow is lettuce and cabbage family crops).

Pitfall #2: Growing the wrong crops at the wrong time

Find out – via the Web, your local extension office, neighbors who garden – which crops really do well in your area, at what time of year. You can’t grow broccoli during the summer in the southern U.S., for example, while in Wisconsin, Connecticut and Montana that’s no problem.

Pitfall #3: Not automating irrigation

As much as I respect Mel Bartholomew’s creation of the Square Foot Gardening method, I believe his insistence that you water by hand is off. Watering by hand is tedious and time-consuming, and becomes downright frustrating when your garden starts to grow more than a 4-by-8 foot bed. Drip irrigation takes some financial upfront investment, but is the least wasteful way to water and will save you a ton of time.

Pitfall #4: Ignoring the obvious

In our neighborhood, the obvious is that we have rats everywhere. They come out at night and eat the fruit from trees and destroy my patch of mung beans. If we were going to stay here – we are not – I would completely redesign my garden space and build a cage around it so that the rats couldn’t touch a thing.

Your “obvious” may be deer, or annual summer droughts, or any number of things. Figure out how to deal with the problem ahead of time, and you will save yourself countless headaches.

There are other mistakes that can be made when you first endeavor to begin vegetable growing, but these are four biggies that will enable you to have much more success much sooner if you avoid them from the very beginning. For a detailed gardening how-to that not only help you avoid mistakes, but help you create a garden that requires little labor and maintenance, you should check out my e-book, Weird Gardening. (Download the first pages for FREE before you buy!)

Today’s post is part of The Healthy Home Economist’s blog carnival.

Watch out when you learn how to start an organic vegetable garden – next thing you know, you will be building your own solar panels and drooling over wood stoves in Lehman’s catalog .

Well, maybe not, but that little taste of self-sufficiency might get to you, and you might find yourself yearning for simpler days…preferring books to T.V., homemade meals to Domino’s.

That’s what happened to me. And here is how my life as an urban homesteader currently looks early in the morning (times are approximate).

5:00-5:30 a.m.: I oil pull for fifteen minutes. Meanwhile, I prepare a xylitol solution for each of us (we swish it after every time we eat), rinse the sprouts (broccoli right now), and check on any seeds or seedlings I may have just started for the garden.

Somewhere in there I drain the kefir from the kefir grains (I let them sit for twenty-four hours) and start a new quart with raw cow’s milk I obtain locally. If necessary, I drain lentils or mung beans that I have soaked overnight for sprouting.

5:30-6:00 a.m.: I do some marketing for the blog, and then pray for a few minutes.

6:00-6:30: Extreme urban homesteader that I am, I wash laundry by hand. I do it every day because large loads get overwhelming and boring. So at around 6:00 I put the wash in the tub, add a little liquid castile soap and put in some water. I start the drip irrigation and do any necessary watering by hand (which I have now; by next spring, everything will be set up with drip irrigation – halleLUjah!).

6:30-7:00: I exercise, either power-walking/running with my husband, or doing exercises from the book Genius of Flexibility (I am convinced that book has saved my back – thank you, Dr. Margot!) I then (or before) wash, rinse and hang up the laundry (which usually isn’t much).

I shower every other day, and do that somewhere in here on my shower days.

7:00-8:00: I prepare green smoothies for our breakfast. They consist of raw milk kefir, greens – usually from the garden – bananas, and a little flaxseed. We drink our smoothies, and I read a bit from the Bible.

Some time in the future, there will be letting the chickens out of their coop, milking the goats, and enjoying breakfast in our front garden that is many yards away from any road.

But not on this homestead. In the meantime, keeping my almost-five-year-old busy all day and keeping this big house relatively clean is challenge enough!