March Phat Fiber “Fluff” – The Elements
My father used to tell this great story about sawing off the treadle of my grandmother’s spinning wheel as retribution for her not letting he and my uncle go out to hunt. In the end, they climbed out the window and went anyway, and I can only imagine my grandfather’s reaction when he learned what [...]
Garden Primer 4 – Starting Plants from Seed
With this post, my garden primer series transitions from the planning stage to the doing stage. I will be writing about what I’m actually doing in my garden as I do it, so if you’re in Zone 5-ish, you can probably follow along in your own garden! So, if you’ve been following along with this [...]
Planning the Perfect Pot Garden – Primer Part 3
I’ve already talked about growing herbs indoors to beat the winter blues, but I know a lot of gardens in urban landscapes are looking to maximize growing space using containers (no, not that kind of pot!) to garden outside too. Whether you’re planting a few herbs in a sunny windowsill inside or growing a large [...]
Birthday Cake – Localized
Today is my darling husband’s birthday, so this morning the kids & I baked him a cake. I chose my Grandma’s Fresh Apple Cake recipe in part because I had ingredients on hand and in part because it was one I could adapt so that it used mainly local ingredients. Oh yeah, and also because [...]
More on natural dyes
I’ve been experimenting with home-made dyes for several years now whether it was dying play silks with Kool-Aid, looking for natural dyes for wool, dyes for home-made zero waste wrapping paper, or dying easter eggs. This week, I dyed some wool roving with saffron and berries and the results were nice enough that I wanted [...]
Beat the winter blues with a little green
I may still have a little chard, carrots, oregano, and rosemary alive in the garden, but my garlic’s planted, my horseradish is harvested, and outdoor gardening season ’09 is pretty much officially done. Although Seeds of Change has apparently lost its mind and started sending spring seed catalogs in November (!!), it’s early, even by [...]
A few tips on making Mozzarella
I know a lot of folks who, like me, love the idea of making mozzarella from scratch. But I also know quite a few people, myself included, who have tried it and failed miserably. This weekend, I think I finally had my mozzarella breakthrough, so of course I had to share it here. First, the [...]
My make-it-from-scratch philosophy
I blog a lot about things I make from scratch and I realized that I have an underlying philosophy that I’ve never spelled out. So here goes. When I was young, I was fortunate to spend many of my weekends on a farm my parents owned with a friend of theirs about two hours from [...]
Heart-healthy & Earth-friendly look the same when it comes to diet
A friend on mine recently asked me for some advice on eating a low sodium diet because she was recently diagnosed with high blood pressure. I realized as I typed up all my tips that a heart-healthy diet looks a whole lot like an Earth-friendly one. Just another reason to think about the foods we [...]
Quick & Easy Halloween Costumes for Beginners
I wasn’t up for spending $40 a piece on my kids’ Halloween costumes this year, so I decided to make my own. Let me preface this by saying that, although I make a LOT of things from scratch, my skills with needle and thread and pretty much entirely lacking. So I needed something that was [...]
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