Want to do something about the climate crisis and biodiversity crisis? Follow this 8-week challenge to get native plants into your yard.
gardening
12 Simple Ways to Celebrate Earth Day Every Day
Take one or more of these simple 12 actions this Earth Day—and every day! As you help heal the planet, you will benefit personally.
How to Transform a Free Burlap Sack Into a Planter
Burlap sacks make inexpensive, attractive planters for your yard. Get them free from a café for zero-waste gardening on the cheap.
13 Tips for Plastic Free Gardening on the Cheap
Gardeners want to fill their yards with plants—not the landfill with plastic. These tips will cut loads of the plastic you find in nurseries.
5 Alternatives to Fast Flowers This Valentine’s Day
Most Valentine’s Day flowers in the US travel thousands of miles in refrigerated holds, burning fossil fuels. Here are some rosy alternatives.
Unpaving Paradise: Plans for a Parched Yard In a Drought
At the end of the month, I move back to my house, where I plan to install a greywater system and grow food in the neglected yard.
Lazy, Experimental, Give-It-a-Whirl Gardening
If Covid disrupted the food supply chain, imagine what more extreme weather will do. Now’s a good time to start a garden.
Book Giveaway: Building a Better World in Your Backyard
It’s a book giveaway followed by a book discussion and you’re invited. The book: Building a Better World in Your Backyard. The guest: Paul Wheaton.
Herbal Remedies
I just returned from a visit with my family in Canada, where my daughter MK attends the University of Guelph in Ontario. While I was at MK’s, she showed me a list of herbal remedies she keeps affixed to the inside of one of her kitchen cupboard doors. She refers to this list when she […]
How to Grow Basil from Cuttings
Update 02/16/22: Although a bit more finicky than basil, rosemary will also regrow this way I’m so excited about this tip, I decided it deserved its own blog post, rather than just a footnote in another post (which I had originally planned to do). I buy basil often at the farmers market. When I get […]
Compost for the Lazy: Throw It on the Ground
Compost can save the world! It sucks carbon dioxide out of the air and not only that, a half-inch layer of this black gold can still increase yields six years after its application. I had been composting in our community bins for nearly 10 years—and for several years before that at my house—but decided to start a rogue […]
A Great Read: The Good Gut
microbiota noun mi-cro-bi-o-ta \-bī-ˈōt-ə\ : a microbial community microbiome noun mi-cro-bi-ome \-bī-ˈōm\ : all the microbial genes in a microbiota I first read about the Sonnenburgs—a husband and wife team of Stanford PhDs studying the gut microbiota—in an article Michael Pollan wrote for the New York Times a couple of years ago. […]
Buying the Farm
I’ve talked about dropping out of society and living off the land since high school when my beloved physics teacher Mr. Ross took a year-long sabbatical to farm with his family. In 2011, my sister beat me to the punch and bought a 120-acre farm northeast of Toronto (although she has not dropped out of […]
5 of the Things I Learned Over a Week of Compulsive Social Media Activity
I stumbled upon many more than five great ideas this past week, but felt I better limit myself. (I should limit my time on social media as well.)
Sharing Resources in an Intentional Community
In 2005, I moved to an intentional community. My best friend’s husband calls it a hippie commune. That’s not quite accurate, but it’s getting warm. The Fellowship for Intentional Community defines this type of community as: An inclusive term for ecovillages, cohousing communities, residential land trusts, communes, student co-ops, urban housing cooperatives, intentional living, alternative communities, cooperative living and other […]