Yes, there's a real reason gardening can help with mental/emotional issues. A fungus, present in most soil, acts like Prozac, but without the side effects. It gets absorbed through the skin, so by all means- get out there and make mud pies!
We were intended to be caretakers of this world by...
My tepary beans did very well; first time I've been able to get dried beans out of our garden. I got about a quart out of a 3x9' patch, and there were still green ones and even a few flowers when the frost finally hit. Planning on cooking some soon, to make sure we like the taste; if we do...
I can't help thinking about 76 year old Agafia, the woman that lives alone in Siberia, going out every morning to chop a hole in the ice on the river to get buckets of water for herself and her livestock. Grateful to be living where I do. We usually fill a bucket with hot water once or twice a...
I'm using electricity while it's available, but I have some ideas about how to convert my Excalibur to non-electric if/when the time comes. Something like this, connected to the dryer itself, might work
Yes, most plants do not actually Grow during the darkest months- they go into a kind of suspended state, but you can still harvest them. Also, I seem to recall that Elliot Coleman said that if the plants (greens) actually appear frozen, don't touch them. Often when they thaw, the plant is still...
Mullein is apparently the BEST cure for an earache that there is. No one in our family has ever had an earache so I've never used it for that purpose. I recently found out that a tea from the flowers is very good for a problem that besets many older women... urinary "urgency". The flowers are...
My brother-in-law had a couple of Irish Wolfhounds; extremely large dogs. He taught them the command "beep beep": a "backup alarm" as it was, since there was no room in the kitchen for them to turn around.
Most of the recipes I've found have been sort of haphazard about how much salt to add. The salt should be at a ratio of about 2% by weight. If you have a digital scale, it is worth weighing the cabbage and the salt if you want to get the perfect ratio for the brine. I use a baggie filled with...