Last weekend was one of the mildest we’ve had in some time, with highs near 60 degrees on Sunday. I took advantage of the spring-like weather to do a little work in the garden and snapped a few pictures in the process. No lush garden photos at this time of year of course, but there are signs of life! Winter’s winding down and spring’s on her way! Turkey tracks in the snow. We have lots of wild turkeys around here, and my bird feeders are on their daily route. Since my planting timing was off last fall, the cold frame [...]
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Birds,
Cold frame,
Gardening,
Nature,
Simple living,
Spring,
winter
Even though it’s still cold and snowy out, the gardening season has begun in earnest here in central New York. Sticking to my plan, on February 27, I started cauliflower in four yogurt cups. I also sowed parsley in another six cups, with plans to tuck them in here and there in the garden beds. The cauliflower are up already, but the only things sprouting in the parsley cups so far are a couple of sunflower seeds. I keep my bag of potting mix in the shed and apparently some little critter stashed some sunflower seeds in there. I’ll snip [...]
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DIY,
Food,
Gardening,
Permaculture,
Spring,
winter
Part 3: The plan! (Note: links to full size .pdf’s of all the plans appear at the end of this post.) Ah, so you thought all those spreadsheets were THE plan? Not quite. Although the final one of the four spreadsheets in part 2 laid out a sequence for planning each bed, I still needed a scale plan or diagram in order to know how everything will fit. And yes, it really should be drawn to scale. One of my pet peeves is garden writers who claim that all you have to do is make a rough sketch of your [...]
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Cold frame,
fall,
Spring,
succession planting
Part 2: How? So last time, I discussed the environmental importance of gardening – i.e., growing food and other useful, as opposed to strictly ornamental, crops – and I mentioned that ya gotta have a plan. When I was in high school, I had a smallish (around 250 square feet) garden in the back yard. Back then, before the days of computers, I labored for hours with my graph paper, plant lists, and seed catalogs to come up with a garden plan every year. It was always to scale and I used a circle template to indicate relative plant sizes. [...]
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Food,
Gardening
Part 1: Why? It’s hard to tell, of course, but spring – or at least the beginning of the garden season – really is just around the corner. Yes, there’s snow on the ground and nothing could really grow or germinate yet, but the time to begin is…now. In fact, if you live in a more southerly climate than central New York, the time to begin was yesterday. And for that, you need a plan. But first, I want to talk a little bit about the “why” of gardening. And why write about my garden plans, when there’s art to [...]
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DIY,
Food,
Gardening
In my last post, I introduced the idea of the “Green” or as I prefer to think of it, “Magic” Triangle. For those that missed it, this is the infallible truth that activities or strategies that save you money also correlate (either directly or indirectly) with improvements in health, as well as less stress on the environment. Or to put it another way, “going green” (not to be confused with green-washing) will get you out of debt, increase your net worth, improve your health and begin to address the myriad pressures that the environment is up against. What follows is [...]
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consumerism,
debt,
DIY,
economy,
enough,
Frugality,
Gardening,
health,
Musings,
Simple living,
Tiny homes
“Normal is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work and driving through traffic in a car that you are still paying for – in order to get to the job you need to pay for the clothes and the car, and the house you leave vacant all day so you can afford to live in it.” -Ellen Goodman, American journalist (1941 – ) A couple weeks ago, I watched Bill Moyers interview a “climate change communication expert” (who knew there was such a thing?) who pointed out that, according to surveys, there are “six different Americas” out there [...]
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climate change,
consumerism,
debt,
economy,
environment,
Frugality,
Happiness,
health
Great find! You may already be familiar with Annie Leonard and The Story of Stuff; well, here’s her latest effort called, The Story of Change. Or, as this interview with Annie tells us, it’s citizens (that’s us, folks) and not consumers who are key to solving the climate and other crises. It’s a wonderful little animation that really gets to the heart of the issue in a delightfully original way. (I particularly liked the Ghandi, Dr. King, and Rosa Parks characters.) Enjoy! Possibly related posts:So what do you really want?Urban Homesteading: Heirloom Skills for Sustainable LivingWhere the wild things are
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Business,
climate change,
consumerism,
economy,
environment,
Inspiration
One of my priorities as I try to live more sustainably is to interact with the industrial food system as little as possible.To be honest, I’ve pretty much given up on it. I no longer think our factory food supply is reliably safe, nor optimally healthy. It’s overly reliant on fossil fuels, which means it’s very prone to price increases; this will likely get worse as oil supplies continue to tighten. And mega disasters (like last- and this year’s droughts) driven by climate change will almost certainly become even more common, creating food supply issues going forward. So in the [...]
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factory farms,
Food,
Fossil Fuels,
Frugality,
grocery shopping,
locally-grown
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