As I imply in this post, my husband and I will be on what is commonly termed a “hobby farm” in a few short years. Our plan is to be off-grid and have a high level of self-reliance with our physical nourishment. In plain English, we hope to be able to raise most of our [...]
Self-sufficient living
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 [...]
Why dehydrate your food? Is it the healthiest method of food preservation, or is food dehydration just more convenient? I began to ask myself these questions a couple of years ago when I got into eating raw food. I had been happily using my Excalibur 5 Tray Food Dehydrator for a few months when someone [...]
Those of us who are getting back to living closer to the earth, back to a simpler life, throw around the term “self-sufficiency” liberally. But what exactly does that mean? The term implies that you are independent from everyone and do everything yourself. You go out into the deep woods, chop down trees and build [...]
To the anti-environmentalist, or anti-”green”, crowd, any kind of environmentalism seems extreme. The main reason being that they don’t want anyone to step on their greedy materialistic toes. Enough about that for the moment. I strongly believe in creation stewardship. I believe that although technology can be a good thing, we’ve taken it too far [...]
To celebrate Earth Day, 2010, I thought I’d share a video with you of my springtime square foot garden. A few notes: The self-watering planter is homemade using a Rubbermaid tub. You can google “homemade self-watering planter” and find instructions. The cages my husband made to keep out the cabbage moths are working. For you [...]
I have written about the joys and glories of raised bed gardening, particularly Mel Bartholomew’s square foot gardening method. It comes with a lot of benefits, such as requiring less weeding and having easier- to-drain soil then beds existing on the ground, in the native soil. But a couple weeks ago, I was looking up [...]
How to start a vegetable garden? Rule number one: use no synthetic chemicals. But organic gardening – or any kind of gardening, for that matter – does not come without its challenges. If you’re thinking about starting an organic garden, here are seven tips that, if followed, will save you a lot of headaches, time, [...]
I confess, when I first started learning how to vegetable garden, I hadn’t heard of heirloom seeds. When I did, the idea fascinated me. Then I got my first heirloom seed catalog, and just about fell out of my chair with excitement. Dozens of varieties of tomatoes, peppers, carrots, even lettuce that I had never [...]
If you’re a northener, planning a vegetable garden may not be up there on your list of priorities right now. But here in north Texas, this is the time to create a garden plan for next spring. While planning my garden a couple of weeks ago, I didn’t realize how close I was cutting it [...]