Low-tech Magazine: Sunbathing in the living room: oven stoves and heat walls

Low-tech Magazine: Sunbathing in the living room: oven stoves and heat walls

This is too interesting to pass up! A very interesting read~!

Welcome to the Alliance for Natural Health - USA

Welcome to the Alliance for Natural Health - USA

If you care anything about being able to buy nutritional supplements
It will do you well to contact your representatives and stop Senator McCaines
Bill which will terribly damage this RIGHT. All you have to do is fill out the form and send it
To your state representative to show your support for free access to nutritional supplements.
DO IT NOW BEFORE IT'S TOO LATE!!!!

Make Your Own ORMUS - Simple ORMUS-Making Recipe

Make Your Own ORMUS - Simple ORMUS-Making Recipe

This has some very interesting attributes and I am in the process of studying it in detail.

bamboochik | eHow.com

bamboochik | eHow.com

URBAN FARM MAGAZINE

I am a fan of "good" magazines that give you a lot of helpful info and I just found this one yesterday, called: URBAN FARM Sustainable City Living.

You might wonder why I would be interested in a magazine for urban farming since I live out in the country on ten acres. The reason is simple...I like to make use of every tiny space I have here and this is the kind of magazine you need for this type of goal.


We have quite a few outbuildings on the two acres that we use for our own personal/business use and that takes up room. I have to find unique ways to garden amongst the different buildings, bamboo groves, and islands of exotic plants everywhere.


One of my favorite ways to find and use sunny spots is by using containers of every size and shape. I was mightily disappointed this winter when a few of my glass vases I had outside for growing lotus and duckweed broke in a million pieces from the freakish, ten day cold snap we experienced in January. I had them for many years so this was quite a shock.


Anyway, back to the magazine. There are great articles on square foot gardening, composting solutions, keeping a small flock of chickens and much more. I hope that you will check out a copy for yourself. I have not been able to put mine down since purchasing it yesterday while Db and I were shopping for some home improvement materials at Lowes.


Since the mag is put out by the same folks who publish Hobby Farms magazine, you should be able to find it where this is sold. If not, you can subscribe to it online at the link I have provided.


Have a great week!

CHASING TOMORROW

The hottest new band to hit the airwaves in decades!!!! Unique, new, sound will blow you away. Out of Alabama.

Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds

Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds

The place to go for your heirloom seed needs!

THANKS TO ST. JUDE THADEUS

Thanks to St. Jude Thadeus for answering my prayer for my daughter to pass her nursing final yesterday. Once again, he has not failed to come to our rescue in times of dire need. Thanks be to God the father of Jesus, Thanks be to Mary, the mother of Jesus, Thanks be to Jesus, the son of God, Thanks be to St. Jude for interceding on our behalf in our time of need. You never have failed us yet. AMEN!!!!

FLOWER ESSENCES

FLOWER ESSENCES

Amazon.com: Gold in the Grass: Rags to Riches Through Soil Reclamation and Sustainable Farming. A Back-to-the-Land Adventure from 1954 (9780972177054): Margaret L Leatherbarrow: Books

Amazon.com: Gold in the Grass: Rags to Riches Through Soil Reclamation and Sustainable Farming. A Back-to-the-Land Adventure from 1954 (9780972177054): Margaret L Leatherbarrow: Books

This is an old book brought back to life. It is excellent not only for those who are homesteading/farming but also for organic/permaculture gardeners. It is highly recommended for an interesting read on every level. A love story, a success story, and a lesson we all must learn and abide by.

Lasagna Gardening by Patricia Lanza

Lasagna Gardening by Patricia Lanza

Permaculture Activist

Permaculture Activist

Homegrown Evolution: Stirred, Not Shaken

Homegrown Evolution: Stirred, Not Shaken

A Beautiful Fall

October left much to be desired here in the deep south. A lot of rain and chilly temperatures were not the norm for this time of year, but now that we are into November it is more like our October should have been.

Temps are in the mid to upper 70's with low humidity and sunny skies. It is a joy to be working out in the gardens now. I am looking for shrub and tree cuttings now to start over the winter. I am going to make a willow hedge across the driveway to block out some neighbors who seem to be golfers and like to hit their balls into our driveway area. It is obvious that they have hit our vehicles at times. I have been saving up the balls and have a bagful so I will put them in their mailbox with a "sweet" note asking them to please cease and desist from this practice...at least aimed at our property.

I bought the turkey for Thanksgiving. They had a good sale on a few weeks ago and I couldn't pass it up. I know they will go up as the date gets closer. Now I have to show Db some of the desserts I have planned to see which one's he would like. (such terrible English usage I have!)

Not much new so will end this here.

Create a Minimalist Home - wikiHow

Create a Minimalist Home - wikiHow

How to Create a Minimalist Home

from wikiHow - The How to Manual That You Can Edit

A minimalist home is less stressful. Clutter is a form of visual distraction, and everything in our vision pulls at our attention at least a little. The less clutter, the less visual stress we have. A minimalist home is calming. It is also more appealing. Think about photos of homes that are cluttered, and photos of minimalist homes. The ones with almost nothing in them except some beautiful furniture, some nice artwork, and a very few pretty decorations, are the ones that appeal to most of us.
And importantly, a minimalist home is easier to clean. It’s hard to clean a whole bunch of objects, or to sweep or vacuum around a bunch of furniture. The more stuff you have, the more you have to keep clean, and the more complicated it is to clean around the stuff. Think about how easy it is to clean an empty room compared to one with 50 objects in it. That’s an extreme example, of course, as this article doesn't recommend you have an empty room, but it’s just to illustrate the difference.
There are actually no set steps to making your home minimalist, except to change your philosophy and shoot for the ideals in the previous section above. This article merely presents you with some ideas for how you might approach changing your home into a minimalist one.

Steps

1. Change one room at a time. Unless you’re just moving into a place, it’s hard to simplify an entire house at once. Focus on one room, and let that be your center of calm. Use it to inspire you to simplify the next room, and the next. Then do the same outside!
   
2. Start with furniture. The biggest things in any room are the furniture, so it is always best to begin simplifying a room by looking at the furniture. The fewer pieces of furniture, the better (within reason, of course). Think of which furniture can be eliminated without sacrificing comfort and livability. Go for a few pieces of plain, simple furniture (example of a minimalist coffee table) with solid, subdued colors.
   
3. Keep only the essentials. Whether looking at your furniture or anything else in the room, ask yourself if the item is truly essential. If you can live without it, get it out. Try to strip the room down to its essentials — you can always add a few choice items beyond the essentials later.
   
4. Clear floors. Except for the furniture, your floors should be completely clear. Nothing should clutter the floor, nothing should be stacked, nothing should be stored on the floor. Once you’ve gotten your furniture down to the bare essentials, clear everything else on the floor — either donate it, trash it, or find a place for it out of sight.
   
5. Clear surfaces. Same thing with all flat surfaces. Don’t have anything on them, except one or two simple decorations (see below). Donate, trash or find an out-of-sight storage spot for everything else. It will make everything much, much more minimal-looking.
   
6. Clear walls. Some people hang all kinds of stuff on their walls. No-can-do in a minimalist home. Clear your walls except for one or two simple pieces of nice artwork (see below).
   
7. Store stuff out of sight. This has been mentioned in the above tips, but you should store everything you need out of sight, in drawers and cabinets. Bookshelves can be used to store books or DVDs or CDs, but shouldn’t have much else except a few simple decorations (not whole collections of things).
   
8. Declutter. If you are clearing flat surfaces and the floor, and storing stuff in cabinets and drawers, you’ll probably want to declutter your storage areas too. You can do this in a later stage if you want.
   
9. Use simple artwork. To keep a room from being boring, you can put a simple painting, drawing or photo, framed with a subdued, solid color, on each wall if you want. Leave some walls bare if possible.
   
10. Use simple decorations. As mentioned in the above tips, one or two simple decorations can serve as accents for a minimalist room. A vase of flowers or a small potted plant are two classic examples. If the rest of your room has subdued colors, your accents could use a bright color (such as red, or yellow) to draw the eye and give a plain room a splash of energy.
    
11. Prefer plain window treatments. Bare windows, or simple, solid colored curtains, or simple, wooden blinds are good. Too much ornate stuff around the windows is clutter.
    
12. Adopt plain patterns. Solid colors are best for floor coverings (if you have any), furniture, etc. Complex patterns, such as flowers or checkers, are visual clutter.
    
13. Make the most of subdued colors. You can have a splash of bright color in the room, but most of the room should be more subtle colors - white is classic minimalist, but really any solid colors that don’t stress the eyes is good (earth colors come to mind, such as blues, browns, tans, greens).
    
14. Edit and eliminate. When you’ve simplified a room, you can probably do more. Give it a couple of days, then look at everything with a fresh eye. What can be eliminated? Stored out of sight? What’s not essential? You can come back to each room every few months, and sometimes you’ll discover things you can simplify even more.
    
15. Have a place for everything. In a minimalist house, it’s important that you find a place for everything, and remember where those places are. Where does your blender go? Give it a spot, and stick with it. Aim for logical spots that are close to where the thing is used, to make things more efficient, but the key is to designate a spot.
    
16. Sit back, relax, and enjoy. Once you’ve simplified a room, take a moment to look around and enjoy it. It’s so peaceful and satisfying. This is the reward for your hard work. Ahhhh. So nice!
    

Tips

• Minimal furniture. A minimalist room would only contain a few essential pieces of furniture. A living room, for example, might only have a couch, another chair or love seat, a coffee table, a minimalist entertainment stand (not a huge one with a bunch of shelves), a television, and a couple of lamps. It could even contain less (couch, chairs, and coffee table, for example). A bedroom might have a simple bed (or even just a mattress), a dresser, and perhaps a night stand or book shelf.
  
• Clear surfaces. In a minimalist home, flat surfaces are clear, except for one or two decorations. There are not a whole bunch of knick knacks, and definitely not stacks of books or papers or other items.
  
• Accent decorations. A home completely clear of things would be a bit boring, actually. So instead of having a coffee table completely free of any objects, you could have a simple vase with a few flowers, for example. Or a clear desk might just have a family photo. An otherwise empty wall might have a tasteful piece of art.
  
• Quality over quantity. Instead of having a lot of stuff in your home, a minimalist would choose just a few really good things he loves and uses often. A really nice table, for example, is better than 5 pieces of press-board furniture.
  
• Examples. The photo at the top of this post is a nice example of a minimalist home. Traditional-style Japanese homes are another great example of minimalism.
  

Things You'll Need

• Less of everything
  

Related wikiHows

• How to Create a Minimalist Garden
  
• How to Declutter
  
• How to Recycle
  
• How to Know What to Recycle
  
• How to Remove Clutter From Your Home
  
• How to Get Rid of Clutter
  

Sources and Citations

• Original source of article from the very generous Zen Habits. Please feel free to visit and support copyright free information providers.
  
• Learn more about creating a Custom Small House
  

Article provided by wikiHow, a wiki how-to manual. Please edit this article and find author credits at the original wikiHow article on How to Create a Minimalist Home. All content on wikiHow can be shared under a Creative Commons license.

Cooler Sunday

This has been a crazy gardening year. Drought-y summer with high heat and humidity half into October until yesterday when the pattern finally broke.

Our usually dry October has been anything but! Rain, rain, and more rain, but at least it filled the pond back up and our friends who are fishermen are anxious to get back to our pond and catch "the one that got away". :-)

Most of the vegetables did not do well this year due to the strange weather. My hot peppers which usually do great only gave me a few peppers and the tomatoes were awful. Gourds I had planted at the base of trees as is my practice did nothing all summer but are now growing...to late to make anything.

Everyone around the Eastern part of the country has been complaining about how badly their gardens did this year. I guess it is just an "off" year like happens sometimes.

Today we just worked outside cleaning up and doing some trimming around the pond. I had made some pizza dough earlier in the morning so I came in around 2:00, took a nap and then got up and made pizza's. They were very good. I make mine in my cast iron pans and it seems to give them more of a brick oven taste and texture than using pizza pans. I do have a pizza stone, but I always forget to drag it out and the cast iron pans are always in easy reach.

Tonight is supposed to get down to 37 in town so I think we may get our first frost out here since we are usually about five degrees cooler. I really hope not. The later the frosts come the shorter winter seems. Fingers are crossed for Jack Frost to postpone his annual visit.

Make Hot Tamales - wikiHow

Make Hot Tamales - wikiHow

Sustainable Living

It is a stormy night here in deep south Alabama. It got me to surfing about for information on my favorite passion, "sustainable living".

Anyway... I was just thinking about how wonderful it would be if everyone started to live and work together in a sustainable fashion in areas with-in their own towns or counties...certainly no larger than counties. Sort of like in the old fashioned times when you had your farmers, your general store, your baker, butcher, blacksmith, doctor, etc., etc.. Everyone had a place and was able to sustainably live with-in these small communities through barter, trade, and a bit of money through selling whatever they had to sell.

This system worked so well and one of the reasons it worked so well is there was not a lot of competition. Why? Because there was not an overly large population.

People cannot stand it when you start to talk about controlling human populations for some reason. Even though it makes total sense and would solve so many of today's problems, to bring it up in this country is all but taboo. You would better be able to talk of something as deplorable as incest as to talk about controlling the size of ones family.

Until we wake up and see that this is as necessary as controlling over-run animal populations with neutering or spaying, our numerous problems cannot be fixed nor will they go away. And by the way...I'm "fixed". I saw the need way back in the early 70's that people had to stand up to the plate and take responsibility for their procreation abilities. I just wish that more people would have thought as I did and do.

Fall Is On the Horizon

This has been the strangest summer I have experienced in many a decade here in southern Alabama. Where was the non-stop heat and humidity? I have no idea, but the insects were ravenous!

My Willow trees were decimated by mealy bugs, the Catalpa trees skellitonized by Catawba worms, and the tomatoes and peppers just sat there doing not much of anything.

I am starting over now that fall is on the horizon with my fall/winter plantings of all different lettuces, spinach, carrots, cabbage, turnips, mustard, collards and any other green that happens to catch my eye while going through my seed drawers.

So far I have quite a few planters going as well as big semi-tires that I have been using as composters all spring and summer and stb fall...the lettuces and spinach are popping up like gangbusters, though they slow down in growth on hot days like today where the temps hit the low 90's. Greens do not like high temps. PERIOD! I might should have waited but I got antsy for something to plant and I have them in the shade of one of my bamboo groves so they are not too unhappy.

I started writing a book awhile back so some of my time has been spent working on that in the evenings. All I will say about it is it is called: The Little Pink Trailer and is about an older lady who moves to Florida and gets heavy into the Permaculture movement with a little love on the side. Nuff said!

I will try and post more often now that it is cooling off for the season. I do so look forward to fall and winter after our long, hot,and humid summers. God bless!

gaiapermaculture

gaiapermaculture

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