Here are all the posts I wrote on A Real Green Life in 2022...
How Tending Your Inner Parts, Besides Making You Feel Better, Helps Mend the World
As you learn to inhabit your core Self more easily, and from there to bring your internal world into emotional regulation, you’re also developing the capacities that our wider world is asking of us.
Strategy #5 – What’s Shaping Your Grocery Shopping Habits?
Our physical and social environments have huge influence on our habits and behaviors. People who design supermarkets and sell products know this and take full advantage of it. This post will help you examine what’s shaping your shopping routines and your buying decisions, and learn how to change them.
Strategy #4 – to Help Parents Spend Less at the Supermarket
Strategy #4 to help you dethrone the supermarket giants. Includes a link to the previous 3 strategies.
3 Supermarket Strategies to Help You Spend Less, Tread Lighter, and Live Better
Reducing our supermarket reliance means we can spend less, live better, and look our grandchildren in the eye. This post shares 3 strategies to get you started.
New Beginnings in the Garden of You
We all have an inner life — an inner “garden.” When we neglect it, the useful, beautiful things in it whither and diminish, and the weeds take over. This post shares ways to help your inner garden thrive by tending it in alignment with Nature’s seasons.
RealFood Turmeric + Golden Milk Recipe
Tips and hints about eating fresh, whole turmeric + our basic recipe for Turmeric Milk, or Golden Milk.
The Lies That Keep You Trapped in “Not Enough Time”
How often do you say, “I don’t have time”? What if there were ways you could take ownership of how you experience time in your life?
Subtropical Spring in a RealFood Garden
In frost free areas we’re blessed to be able to grow tropical food plants in the summer and better known European style veggies in the winter. This time of year, spring, is especially abundant with its overlap between the cool weather and hot weather plants. This post shares pics and links to info for a small selection of food plants from our garden.
First Day of Spring (Southern Hemisphere)
Spring is the time to look at the “seeds” or intentions we’ve been gestating over winter, to choose those with the best chances of surviving and thriving, and to let go of the rest of them. As in the garden, so in our inner lives. Otherwise, your coming “growing season” may be filled with too much stuff, or with stuff that isn’t serving you. And if it isn’t serving you then it also won’t be serving your world, which is an extension of you.
Harvesting Ginger, Making Ginger Honey
This post shares lots of pics and a few tips on growing and harvesting ginger, and making ginger honey to settle coughs and for colds, flu, and general immune support. There are also some pics and tips on arrowroot harvesting and replanting, since we sometimes grow these two plants together.
What’s Going To Happen Next?
Our “story,” of how the world works and who we are, is like a script that prompts our choices and actions. There is a new story available to us that prompts cooperative and life affirming behaviors rather than competitive and exploitative ones. Indigenous peoples and eastern spirituality have been indicating it, and the newest sciences are finally now “discovering” it. It’s a story that would put us on an entirely different trajectory.
Food – are we facing a Crisis or an Opportunity?
There’s a reason why the words “food crisis” are making headlines, and it might not be the reason you think. Also in this post: three other random, hopeful things.
What will the Full Moon Reveal for You?
The lunar cycle offers us a template for reconnecting to Nature and living in more balanced, regenerative ways. In this post: lunar cycle and full moon concepts I’ve been learning about, along with the journal prompts I use at the time of the Full Moon.
Change… and Hope
Sometimes change asks more of us than we have to give, and we break. Sometimes we recover, but whether we recover or not, there is no going back to what we were before the change. We’re transformed us, forever, into something different than we were before. Here’s why I feel that this degree of change is upon us collectively now, and why I feel hopeful even in the midst of all that’s happening around the world.
Deep Litter Composting With Chickens
An earth-floor, deep-litter system has big benefits for the health and well-being of chickens, and it’s also the easiest way I know to build an ongoing compost creation system in which most of the work is done for you. This article shares what we’ve learned about deep-litter composting since we built our new earth floor chicken shed in 2019.
Reclaiming Meaning for Our Holy Days
Ideas and tips for tuning into Nature’s cycles to help us re-create the depth of meaning and connection that has been all but lost as the “consumer religion” has swept around the globe.
Balancing Busy-ness with Rest
The Equinoxes – the time of balanced light and dark at the midway point through Autumn and Spring – provide an opportunity to examine how we’re managing the balancing act between doing and resting. This short post shares an uncommon idea for our culture and our times: “It is safe to rest.”
Mexican Tarragon
Recently I began to appreciate the sheer beauty of the Mexican tarragon in my garden. Then I learned what a delicious iced tea it makes, and from there I discovered its huge array of potential uses in the kitchen, the medicine cabinet, and the garden.
What the Waning Moon can Teach Us about Connection and Support
The lunar cycle holds wonderful opportunities for learning and growth, and for reconnecting with Nature’s wisdom. This post explores what the waning moon and the still, empty, “mid-winter” moment at the dark of the moon have to teach us.
Happy Meat, Happy Ecosystems, Happy People
What is “happy meat?” Is meat-eating inherently destructive, or can we have “happy ecosystems” along with happy meat? What does meat-eating mean for human health on a more-than physical level? And what about avoiding eating animal products because you care about animals’ welfare?
Home Dairying, Banana Milkshakes, and Spare Egg Whites
This super-short post has some commentary on home-dairying, a tongue-in-cheek recipe for raw-milk banana milkshake, and something easy and useful to do with your egg whites when you only need the yolks. There are also a few links to related resources that I hope you’ll find helpful.
Farm Update: In the Garden
Pictures and commentary from our garden, a super-simple recipe for banana milkshake (simple only if you don’t count the steps that bring the milk to the kitchen), and a brief mention of one useful thing to do with your egg whites when you only need the yolks.
Moving from Control Toward Intelligent Interaction, in Gardening and in Life
What gardeners do is somewhere on a continuum from controlling the life (and death) cycles in the garden, to managing them, to interacting intelligently with them. We tend to default to control because of our culturally ingrained assumption that without control there will be chaos and anarchy.
This has implications far beyond the garden. How do our assumptions about the need for control shape our world?
Bananas for Mulch Production and Erosion Control
The possible uses for bananas–the fruit, the foliage, and the trunks–seem almost endless. In this article I share lots of images and ideas for using banana patches as mulch producers and for an erosion control project.
1 Garden Meal per Day: Simple Strategy, Abundant Benefits
The best way to get more effective at growing your own food is to make it super easy to eat something directly from your garden on a daily basis. Here are 5 categories of low-maintenance food plants (or plant parts) you might have been overlooking, and strategies for using them to build more food sovereignty into your life.
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