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!

Healthy living is essential to living a full, happy life. But what exactly does it mean? Many people think of it in terms of right diet and enough exercise.

But even that is vague and a source of great controversy. Is eating meat essential to health, or is it a sure path to cancer and heart disease, as proponents of an animal-free diet claim? And what is “enough” exercise? A power walk fifteen minutes a day? Thirty minutes of aerobic exercise in a gym four times a week? Weight lifting several times a week?

Other facets of healthy living

And once you begin sorting through the cloud of confusion regarding diet and exercise, you discover that living healthy has to do with much more. Your stress level, exposure to toxicity, and mental health all affect how healthy you are and how long you will live. Even things such as how you manage money, what you believe about God and how fulfilled you are by your career, all play a part in your level of health.

The search for vibrant health will make you weird

Once you decide to start making changes for the better, people will call you “weird.” “Strange.” “Different.” And if you have enough money, “eccentric.”

This is a good thing.

You see, one healthy change leads to another. Before you know it, you are turning down desserts at potluck dinners, starting a vegetable garden, exercising daily, turning off the television in favor of an uplifting book and getting out of debt.

You are, in effect, living a counter-cultural lifestyle. And people who do that are seen by the rest of the culture as, well, weird.

In other words, if you are doing what “everybody else” is doing, you are polluting your mind, your body and the planet. If you are serious about healthy living, you will look at what everybody else is doing and – in most cases – do the opposite.

Steps toward a healthier life

In order to become as healthy as possible, you need to do four main things:

• Eat the food your body was designed to process.
• Keep active.
• Avoid as much toxicity as possible.
• Reduce stress.

Enter the Weird Is Great podcast, where you can learn how to keep your body as healthy as can be, from the inside out. You should download the podcast from iTunes, or subscribe to the blog’s RSS feed so that you don’t miss a single episode.

Get ready, get set…

GET WEIRD.

Because you are worth it. 

In this post, I expressed my great hope at soon being able to build and move into the most energy-efficient home on earth: the earthship.

But that was before I knew about the Monolithic Dome.

As you can see by the video, the Monolithic Dome is not nearly as energy efficient as an earthship. It generally does require some heating and/or cooling mechanisms, unless you live in the perfect climate where it’s never too hot and never too cold.

But since my initial burst of enthusiasm for the earthship, I have discovered some definite disadvantages of the structure.

1. An earthship takes a lot of time to build.

I’m already chomping at the bit to move out to our future homestead and get a permaculture garden going. I do NOT want to wait several months for my new home to be constructed.

2. An earthship requires tons of labor.

Most people who build earthships do it themselves, and take several long, hard years to do it. Just to ram earth in one tire requires a lot of time and back-breaking labor; even a small earthship requires a lot of rammed-earth tires.

And Jerry and I were not planning to build ourselves. I realized that to have a crew build an earthship for us would probably cost twice as much than we were originally hoping to spend for land, house, and solar panels.

3. An earthship looks weird.

That really doesn’t bother me. Really. I am, after all, weird.   I could easily live with an earthship for the sake of saving the Earth.

But I am also a typical woman, who likes her home to have some kind of aesthetic appeal.

Which brings me to…

The advantages of a Monolithic Dome over an earthship

1. It’s attractive. Most people wouldn’t object living next door to one.
2. Its exterior absolutely cannot burn.
3. The Monolithic Dome is much easier to build. It takes much less time and labor, more along the lines of building a conventional house.

And, the number one advantage the Monolithic Dome has over an earthship…

…it’s the first alternative, energy-efficient home that both my husband and I have been equally excited about.

If a new home is in your future, I would encourage you to check out monolithic.com before you contact any conventional builders. You might end up with a dream home that goes beyond your wildest imagination!

Most Americans’ idea of a dream home is something like a large mini-mansion with six bedrooms, six full baths and four living areas. (What a way to save money!)

Not mine. I want to live in an earthship.

An earthship is made of rammed earth tires (tires filled with packed dirt) with solar panels on the south side of the house. The tires are either built up against the side of a hill, or straw bales coated with plaster encircle the outside of the tires. The spaces between the tires are filled with materials such as plastic water bottles or rocks.

Earthship under construction

Why do I want to live in such an unconventional, strange-looking home? Easy. Jerry and I want to be off the grid, and you can’t be off the grid if you have central air and heat. And in a regular, modern-day house you need central air and heat in north Texas.

As Michael Reynolds explains in Comfort in Any Climate, the combination of rammed earth tires and the actual earth itself or straw bales create an indoor environment similar to the adobe houses of the Southwest. In the heat of the summer, the earthship is cool. In the frigid winter, the south-facing solar panels provide a passive heat source.

Although a space heater or wood stove may be necessary to maintain a comfortable temperature in the winter, you certainly don’t need to expend the amount of energy needed to heat a regular house.

And central air conditioning cost is non-existent, as are the costs to repair and eventually replace air conditioning and heating systems.

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Building a green home is one way to help with your finances. But if you need real help in turning your financial situation around, don’t miss my e-book, Weird Finances: How to go from broke to financially independent in ten years. You can download the first few pages for FREE!

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Having spent eight or nine grand on our two A/C units during the past five years, Jerry and I are more than ready for an alternative. It will save us money and headaches, as well as drastically reducing our carbon footprint.

Not only that, but you can run plumbing and electricity into earthships, the same as any house, and build it as big or as small as you want. We plan to build one (er, uh, have one built) between 1200 and 1500 square feet.

Maybe you like your big energy-sucking house and enjoy paying hundreds of dollars in utility bills every month. That’s you. You be you, and that’s okay with me.

But we’ve decided that simple means less maintenance, less money and a whole lot less stress. I can hardly wait for my earthship home.

Update

I have since changed my mind. Earthbag homes take much less time to build, are still very inexpensive and are just as energy efficient.

And your house won’t smell like old tires.

For those of us who are really into the level of healthy living known as “green”, finding an eco-friendly pillow can be a challenge. One of the biggest challenges is that not only do we want it to be free of unsustainable materials, but comfortable as well. The greatest ideal for such a pillow is one that is made of all natural and completely sustainable materials, and that helps you to sleep better.

The foam memory pillows you see advertised on T.V. definitely meet the last qualification, but are anything but natural and sustainable. In fact, the last one that I used is sitting in a linen closet because I’m hesitant to add that foam stuff to the landfill. If I had known about the natural rubber contour pillows, I may have bought one of those instead.

Or not. They are up to six times more costly than the synthetic rubber ones (and don’t last any longer), and at the time I bought the synthetic one I preferred to spend my limited health budget on shower filters and air purifiers.

A down-filled pillow–especially if it has an organic cotton cover–would be natural enough, but here we have the question of whether the feathers were obtained in a humane manner. You can also find a pillow filled with hypoallergenic recycled polyester fill. Sustainable, yes, but this green perfectionist doubts that the sustainability can neutralize the possible effect of the chemicals in synthetic material.

In my quest for an eco-friendly pillow, I’ve discovered three affordable possibilities.

1. The Natura Wool Cloud Pillow.

This pillow is filled with wool and covered with organic cotton.

2. The Organic Cotton Pillow.

Another all-natural, sustainable alternative, this pillow is all organic cotton, inside and out.

3. The Organic Buckwheat Pillow.

My favorite of the three. Why? I just started using one from Gaiam.com, and can attest to its comfort. The filling–of either buckwheat hulls or a combination of that and millet hulls–conform to the natural shape and bend of your neck. Even better, it will last between ten and fifteen years. When you consider the fact that most other pillows need to be changed out every eighteen to twenty-four months, this buckwheat pillow ends up costing you no more than a high-quality pillow from a department store.

By the way, you can find lesser expensive buckwheat pillows. However, those don’t have the comfy wool padding layer that the one from Gaiam.com has. I don’t know that I’d like to spend night after night with just a thin layer of cotton fabric between my head and a bunch of buckwheat hulls.

So, looking for an eco-friendly pillow? An all-natural pillow that is comfortable and affordable? Let this list be your starting place.

Under the heading of ways to save money…I have a laundry quandry.

A few years ago, before I was really into green and trying to buy only natural and/or sustainable materials, I bought this nylon laundry basket from a home department store. It isn’t your typical plastic basket, but a deep nylon cylinder held up by a wire coil. The combination of nylon and coil enables you to press down on the top of the basket, making it shorten, in order to access the laundry at the bottom–no getting your arms and head lost in its deep blue depths.

Not only that, but this laundry basket holds a lot of laundry. I’ve enjoyed it.

But alas, the inevitable has happened, and the coils have begun to break through the nylon. The top of the basket has a three-inch piece of stiff wire sticking out, the proverbial accident waiting to happen.

Of course, I’m not quite ready to throw it out. I will wait until the top wire protudes obnoxiously, or until the as-yet small hole at the bottom of the basket grows until it rips wide open.

However, I’m already wondering how to replace it when it must go to the laundry basket graveyard. I really don’t want a plastic one, as my goal is to eventually replace all plastic household items, as they break or become otherwise unusable, with natural materials. I could buy a wicker basket–probably even find one made of sustainable wood online–but having just spent several hundred dollars in other household goods and supplements, I just don’t feel like springing for a pricey laundry basket.

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So I’ve been thinking, and analyzing, and strategizing…until I finally had this thought: the greenest thing to do is to reuse what’s already hanging around the house. Preferably something that doesn’t already have a use, maybe something that might otherwise be recycled or thrown away.

Then came my eureka!: a cardboard box. Large ones come through our house with regularity, as I buy most of my nuts and seeds online, often at least than ten pounds at a time. I can cut holes in the sides for carrying, and by the time the first box wears out, I will surely have another one waiting in the wings (actually, in the garage).

Ugly? Yes. But how many of you household managers out there show off your laundry baskets to company? It will hide in our bedroom closet and only show its face on laundry day. As long as it does its job, I’ll be happy.

And the earth will be a little happier, too.