Small Tomatoes Does Not Equal Small Plants

I seriously overcrowded my little container garden.
Here's a photo of what my plants looked like 10 days ago:

I took out two of the tomatoes and two of the peppers (leaving one of each) and planted them in some pots I had from a previous attempt at growing things. Look at them now!

The tomatoes took off! The peppers didn't shoot up nearly as much, but they look healthy, too. I'm so glad I fixed it. The good news is the chives are still thriving in the over-the-balcony box. If nothing else, at least I've had fresh chives on my potatoes several times already this year.

Hopefully, the next post will include little tomatoes or little peppers!

"100 Thing" Challenge!

Are you up for it? A growing phenomenon has been attracting new believers since last July, when a blogger guynameddave came up with the concept on his site.

We actually came upon a reference to the article not more than a week ago through Time Online, after dave announced he'd be rebuilding the site to show his progress towards the 100 piece goal. I personally think it's a fantastic idea, though a little bummed that we haven't heard of it sooner. It seems to have fallen into our hands at the right time, as we are trying to make sense of unused items to make way for baby.

As far as our own personal revisions, clothing isn't too much of a clutter issue, it's the rest of our junk sitting in a closet that is. Realistically, we don't make use of most of the stuff. Those items have just been getting shuffled back and forth to make room for more junk that's never used. So with this in mind, I'm going to spend most of my time this week making a list of what's important to our family. Whatever doesn't fit on this list, well...it's going to be hard. I'll let you know what happens along the way.

My First Container Garden

I planted a container garden a few weekends ago. This is my first one, so I'm still learning about it. The plants didn't die yet, so I figured I could put up a picture.

The left is bell peppers, the center is chives and the right is grape tomatoes. I'm afraid I may have crowded the tomatoes too tightly, but we'll see!

I'll continue to post as the garden progresses. Here's hoping I'll be enjoying fresh veggies soon!

Should You Buy CFLs if You Live in an Apartment?

Compact Fluorescent Lights (CFL) are a mainstay of articles both on living green and on saving money. But the high up-front cost can be hard to justify if you are only planning on staying someplace for a year.

Why pay more for CFL bulbs so the next tenant can reap your savings? (According to the Energy Star website, a CFL bulb saves $30 or more over its lifespan.) Of course, it’s the environmentally-friendly choice, but it’s not always possible to make the green choice when money is tight.

A clever solution is to purchase CFL bulbs, but keep the halogen bulbs. When you move, return all the halogen bulbs to the light fixtures, and take the CFL bulbs with you.

Alternately, if you move to another apartment, you can switch the halogen bulbs from your new place to the old. (I’d only do this if the old place had halogen bulbs when you moved in; otherwise it’s a down-grade and a bit of a rip-off for the landlord.)

When my husband and I moved into our first apartment, we replaced all of our bulbs with CFL bulbs. We moved five years later and took those bulbs with us. (Actually, we had far more CFL bulbs than we needed for our new place, and left several there.) It was another year before the first of the CFL’s finally burnt out.