planning a budget green wedding

I've given up on reading wedding books, because mostly they don't seem relevant. They have advice about duties of the bridesmaids and groomsmen, proper etiquette for seating people, how to address the invitations, and how to have a budget wedding for $5000-$10,000. We're not having bridesmaids or groomsmen, or a "bride's side" and "groom's side," or paper invitations, and we definitely don't have $5000. Oh, yeah, and we're not 20 years old, and we've got four kids. So I took all the books back to the library.

That said, I'm also not taking the advice of people who have told us we should just have a potluck wedding. What we're trying to pull off is something in between the traditional formal church wedding and the casual backyard hippie wedding. I guess we'll find out in a couple of months if it's possible. So far, my best resource has been the offbeat bride tribe, even though I'm not wearing a red dress (sorry, Dante) and don't have any tatoos.

I initially wanted to do our wedding for under $1000. Will told me that was impossible. I still maintain that we could do it, except we're not. I got the brilliant idea to have a scavenger hunt the morning of the wedding, and that plus photographs already put us over $1000. If I had more than 2 1/2 months, I could put together the hunt myself, but we decided that in this case it is worth outsourcing. So our revised budget is somewhere in the $1800-$2000 range, which will allow us to rent space, pay for the officiant, have beautiful photographs and the scavenger hunt, plus all the incidentals and food for the reception. I think that's still pretty good, considering that we're figuring on around 100 people for the ceremony, and that the festivities will start on Friday evening and end on Sunday afternoon.

Obviously, our other big concern is environmental. We're going to attempt to have a waste-free, no-new-plastic wedding. I'm not entirely sure this is possible, but we're going to try. As we go, I'll post a series of strategies and updates to dazzle and inspire you all! Or, um, something like that...