Happy-Making: Slow

I've been readjusting my view of the world lately, and I've come to a conclusion: sometimes slow is best. Soaking up experiences, savouring, creating meaningfully. Slow is good.

I'm reading all about creating a slow home here, and I dig it. It's basically what I'm all about, only more articulate.

This weekend will hopefully be a good mixture of fast and slow. Lazy mornings, birthday parties, maybe some gardening and continue the declutter.

Some things that are currently inspiring me:

5 Reasons to Declutter your Home, via Re-Nest.

This incredible vintage Airstream caravan/home/studio, also via Re-Nest

Nine Quick Tips to Identify Clutter, via zenhabits

DIY: Recycled Road Map Cork Boards, via design*sponge

These amazeballs cups made from plastic bags, via The Supercyclers

Top (Australian) Gardening Web Resources

There's tonnes of info online for budding (ha!) gardeners, but it's taken me a bit of time to find really good, local sites that have the goods.

I'm slowly putting together a list of websites that I frequent now that we've started to plan the garden (even though the food garden is a while off) and thought I could add them here for your reading pleasure.

Cityfood Growers:

It's such a brilliant resource for anyone who already grows their own food, or for people who are interested in trying. I'm a paying member, which does provide lots of extra benefits, but even the free membership gives you a tonne of useful stuff.


Gardenate:

I'm also a big fan of Gardenate and their fun app. I can only imagine at this point, but I think it really will come in handy once I start planting our vege garden in spring.

Gardening Australia - self-explanatory really.
The Vegetable Patch - super practical info for, well, vegetable patches
My Garden - there's a lot to wade through, but heaps of helpful stuff to be found

I'm sure there's others I frequent but my brain has decided to check out. So I'm going to follow suit.

Handy Hints: Beauty Ingredients to Avoid

This weekend's homework: Find something delicious and eat it. Lots of it.

Sorry for the lateness of today's post - some days just get crazy before you know it!

I was perusing the interwebs the other day and came upon this really handy downloadable guide of beauty ingredients to avoid. It's US-centric, so some ingredients may go by different names here, but it is a super handy little reference to keep if you're on the hunt for some greener/more natural beauty products.

via Going Home to Roost.

And in other news, it's Friday! We've got a few fun things lined up for the weekend, and for once the list doesn't include painting! We may do some second-hand furniture hunting tomorrow and hopefully eat an enormous ice cream somewhere along the way. Fabbo!

Loving it crazy: Homegrown Evolution

Hay bale image from Fir0002

I was recently reading a Design*Sponge Small Measures post on eco and green-living books (super score - I've googled all of them and discovered about 5 new favourite similar minded folk!) and one that I was really intrigued by was The Urban Homestead by Kelly Coyne and Erik Knutzen.

Anyway, turns out they have a blog, Homegrown Evolution, and I'm loving it a little crazy right now. Their mix of gardening, green living tips, insight into the way they're shifting their lifestyle all the while living in a normal, urban area and just really cool information (like the difference between hay and straw - who knew?! Actually I'm sure lots of people know. Just not me.) is more-ish and very very readable. Plus I like how well they articulate issues and thoughts that I roll around inside my head for days before writing about them.

Thought you may enjoy taking a peek while I go and clean up the almighty mess left by our no-longer-present garage. It's either that or playdough. Tough call.

Things I Have Done

When I started thinking about living life more lavender (twee alert!), I was overwhelmed with how much I could do. In fact, I was so overwhelmed that I did nothing instead. Information overload and all that.

It wasn't until I re-read A Slice of Organic Life that I started to think in small chunks. And those chunks were things I could actually manage.

True to form, I still ended up getting way over-excited and decided I would become the permaculture-organic-make-or-grow-everything-myself Queen. But I have since settled back down and decided that any improvements we make are still improvements, and besides, I can't sew to save my life so there is no way I could possibly make everything.

The best way for me to tackle information-overload-induced procrastination is by doing one thing at a time. So weekly, or more regualrly perhaps, I'll provide a post with a you-can-do-it-now tip. Sometimes they'll be big, sometimes they'll be small, but you can almost always do it now and improve your LQ (Lavender Quotient).

So if you're looking for one thing you can do right now to improve your LQ, make it this:

Check out what you can and can't recycle 
in your local council area. 

Recycling Near You is such a cool, simple concept (Sorry, this one is Australia only at this stage). Just pop your postcode in and it tells you straight away info like what you can/can't recycle in your council bins, what your hard rubbish nights are, links to council documents, etc.

Mobius Symbol. From Bless Designs.

Again, I'm in danger of exposing what an enormous dork I am, but I was so excited to get a definitive answer to the question of what exactly I can recycle. I was so stoked to find out that any plastics from the laundry, kitchen and bathroom can be recycled by my council (sans lids and not including clingwrap) as well as the fact that the envelopes I receive on a daily basis with the plastic windows can also be chucked in with the recyclables. We can recycle al-foil here so I now use that and baking paper rather than clingwrap, and not that we order take-away very often but when we do, the plastic boxes can all go too. Score one for the nerds!

So that is one thing you can do this week that will actually make a difference. And I started paying so much more attention to what was going into our rubbish bin as a result, which has meant we now only fill our regular rubbish bin to about 1/4 of its capacity. Our recycling bin is always full though. Happy days.