Welcome to my free Post Collections about

Caring for Ourselves

as sustainable and ethically as we can

bees on flower by Rezső Terbe from Pixabay

Table Of Contents

INTRODUCTION

Everything is connected. In my opinion a truly “sustainable" way of living directly or indirectly benefits not only ourselves and our families, but also our communities and our soil, air, water, and all the Living things that share them with us.

Because everything is so intricately interconnected, it doesn't matter where you start. When you tug on any one thread in the web of life, your choices and actions reverberate along that thread to touch another... and then another...

No action is too small to matter. Sometimes, apparently "small" actions can have a surprisingly large effect. And the smaller your actions are, the easier they will be to sustain.

So take heart. You don't need to be a CEO or a billionaire to make a difference. One small, heart-centered action at a time, beginning with how you care for your self and your family, is enough.

I'm grateful that you're here. Please enjoy browsing my free Collections of posts on caring for ourselves as sustainably and ethically as we can. (Note that many posts appear in more than one Collection.)

FEATURED posts

How to Render Fat For Cooking, Soap-Making, Skin-care Recipes, or Candle-Making

I used to put off the task of rendering fat for cooking, soap making, and skin care – because it was time consuming, messy, and intimidating. After making every imaginable (and some un-imaginable) mistake, here’s the simple method I use now. Clean, odour-free rendered fat without the mess and stress.

Tips For Productive, Low Maintenance Food Gardens

If we make our food gardens as much like natural ecosystems as we can, full of diversity and interconnections, they’ll be more vigorous and productive with less effort on our part.

How to Make Home Grown Food Simpler and Easier

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.

How to Plan a Food Garden

The success of your food garden depends on the connections between the plants and each other, and between the plants, you, and your kitchen (and also your medicine cabinet).

Let’s Choose a More Empowering Story

Our ancestors’ ingenuity and know-how kept them alive for untold generations – long enough for us to come along. Everything they knew is still available to us. We’re just not using it because it’s gone missing from the stories we tell ourselves.

The People’s Medicine

Home-based herbal medicine is an easy, accessible practice. Here are 9 quotes from herbalists about the oldest and simplest medicine in the world — so simple, a child can do it.

Posts on HOME GROWN food

We focus on low-maintenance multi-functional plants that meet more than one need, and on perennials and self-seeders that producing ongoing small harvests and don't have to be re-planted every year.

We're inspired by Permaculture, Syntropics, and all Regenerative Agriculture philosophies and techniques; our goal is home-grown food while building soil, capturing carbon, caring for ecology and water systems, and increasing biodiversity.

We’re in a semi-tropical environment with warm-season storms, frequent cool-season rain, and dry periods - so we can grow a very wide range of plants.

Growing Taro: an Easy, Nutritious Homegrown Carbohydrate Solution

How and Why to Grow Sweet Potatoes and Protect Them From Rodents

Sweet potato tubers + greens combined give you a calorie AND nutrient dense food from one growing space. Here’s how to grow them at home, including ideas for protecting them from rodents.

2 Tips to Keep Your Garden Producing in the Wet and During Times of Neglect

This post shares two tips to make sure your small scale homegrown food production keeps trucking along even when Life happens and your best gardening intentions go out the window.

Tips For Productive, Low Maintenance Food Gardens

If we make our food gardens as much like natural ecosystems as we can, full of diversity and interconnections, they’ll be more vigorous and productive with less effort on our part.

Supermarket Strategy #7 – Seven Ways to Start Growing Your Own Food in Small Spaces

7 small ways to start growing your own food, improving your nutrition, and lowering your grocery costs – even if you’re short on time, space, or confidence.

How to Hand Pollinate Pumpkin Flowers

Once you know how to tell a male pumpkin flower from a female one, it’s a simple matter to hand pollinate your female flowers and be sure of more pumpkins, especially in rainy weather when pollinating insects aren’t on the job. (Or your pollinator population has been decimated by pesticides.)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

How to Make Home Grown Food Simpler and Easier

Ginger in a RealFood Garden

Ginger has thrived at our place since I learned to think about what it gives and what it needs in terms of its connections to the other plants around it, to me as the ginger-grower, and to me and my family as the ginger-users.

How to Plan a Food Garden

The success of your food garden depends on the connections between the plants and each other, and between the plants, you, and your kitchen (and also your medicine cabinet).

Loofah – Grow Your Own Sponges

Loofahs are easy to grow. You can eat them when they’re small, and if you let them get big they make great bathroom sponges. They also make pretty good kitchen sponges. Best of all, when they wear out you can compost them to feed next year’s loofahs.

An Introduction to Sweet, Crunchy Yacon

Yacon tubers are sweet, crunchy, and delicious raw or cooked, and are a firm favorite in our family. This post is a quick introduction to yacon and my experiences with growing and eating it.

Farm Update: New Calf, Chickweed Salads, Veggie Harvest

The kids’ll be up soon and looking for breakfast. The cow needs milking and the calf pen needs cleaning. I just have time before all that starts, to show you some pics of the new calf, our recent veggie garden harvests, and the chickweed in the lawn that we’re putting into salads.

Irrigation for our Modular Veggie Garden

Long, flexible mulberry branches + pieces of old veggie net = caterpillar-proofed veggies.

7 Steps to a Frog Pond that Also Grows Food

How to build a pond for tadpoles and frogs that will also grow food-producing water plants and edge plants. Includes diagrams, pictures, plant list, and frog resources.

How to Make a Frame for a Veggie Net using Mulberry Branches

Long, flexible mulberry branches + pieces of old veggie net = caterpillar-proofed veggies.

Modular Veggie Growing with Cut Off Barrels

Ideas for modular gardening — smaller, easier, more enjoyable.

The Stevia Dilemma

Some of what you might want to know before choosing if and how you’ll use stevia-based sweeteners, along with tips on growing and using your own stevia plants.

Regenerative Farming and Gardening

Regenerative gardening and farming has an intention to both feed people AND to leave the surrounding web of life stronger, richer, more complex and more resilient, rather than less so.

Building Ecosystems as a Side-Effect of Growing Food

This post uses a pumpkin patch to illustrate how interrelated elements in a vegetable garden, an orchard, or any living system, are healthier and happier than isolated fragments of life existing alone.

Rungi – Rainforest Floor Vegetable

A vegetable from the tropical highlands of Papua New Guinea, rungi (Rungia klossii) is an attractive, edible, nutritious year-round ground cover for the tropics and semi-tropics.

Sweet Violet – Edible, Medicinal, Beautiful

Sweet Violet (Viola odorata), is a shade-tolerant, ground-covering edible plant with a long list of nutritive and medicinal uses.

Okinawa Spinach

Okinawa spinach (Gynura crepioides) is an edible, nutritious, prolific, and low maintenance ground covering plant. It looks good enough to landscape with. And the more you eat it, the better it looks.

Stinging Nettle: Nourishment for You and Your Garden

Stinging nettle (Urtica dioica) has a long history of use for food, medicine, cordage, and dye. Here are some ideas for making use of the free food and fertilizer that this under-appreciated weed has to offer.

Homemade Ginger Sauerkraut

About how the ginger growing in our garden has inspired successful homemade sauerkraut in our kitchen, which in turn has inspired better maintenance of the ginger plants in the garden. Sauerkraut recipe included.

How to Harvest and Use Queensland Arrowroot

Queensland arrowroot (Cana edulis) provides food for us, food for chickens, pigs, cattle and goats, mulch and/or compost material, and shelter for other plants. It’s super easy to grow and to harvest and it self-propagates to a certain extent but is not weedy or invasive. And I think it looks beautiful. What more could a polyculture food grower ask?

7 Easy Substitutes for When Lettuce Won’t Grow

6 Salad bowl contenders that can handle heat and high humidity. The 7th plant can make a nutritious salad by itself if you have the right growing niche for it. Plus a tip on getting the most nutrition from your salad greens. UPDATED July 2023.

Choko – People Food, Animal Food, Weed Control, Mulch

I used to think chokos were boring, bland, and not very useful, but I’ve changed my mind. Here are 6 of the ways I use chokos and choko vines since I gained a better appreciation for them.

Real Food does not come from Supermarkets: 6 Steps from Bare Ground to Homegrown Veggies

How I got from “I don’t think I could grow brassicas,” to “Ooh look – a cauliflower!”

5 Cut and Carry Goat Fodder Plants that Poultry, Pigs, Cattle and People can also eat

This article lists 5 plants for a cut and carry goat fodder system, that also serve lots of other needs as well.

8 Abundant Fodder Forest Plants, & How to Use Them

8 of my favorite multi-purpose fodder-and-food plants, and some of the ways I use them.

One Small Serve - an ebook

Growing and processing your own food is a huge task. In One Small Serve, I show you a smaller, simpler approach. Learn how to grow and use 7 food plants that are

easy and very low-maintenance
productive for two or more years without replanting
deeply nutritious

Find out more

Establish a "one-serve-at-a-time" home-grown food habit that's easy to maintain

Includes a series of FREE extra tips via email + free email support

Posts on REAL FOOD and NUTRITION*

Food was once something that people shared, locally. Everyone had food related skills and everyone worked together to insure that everyone was fed. The work of feeding ourselves and each other strengthened our relationships with each other and with the ecosystems that fed us.

Industrialization has cut these ties between growers, processors, eaters, and ecosystems.

Food produced and sold in the industrial system is now a commodity, sold to the highest bidder, traded globally and anonymously.

Commoditized food erodes our health when we eat it, and its production erodes the health of the families, communities and ecosystems that produce it.

I do talk about healthy eating and nutrition here*, but I'm interested in more than just healthy eating for individuals and families. To me, "Real Food" does more than tick boxes in a "healthy eating" list. Real food does that, and it also repairs broken connections and rebuilds health on all levels.

To me, real food is healthy for the eater and also for the farmer and community that grow it and for the ecosystem it grows in.

And one last thing to note is that Real Food, for our family, includes "Happy Meat."

*Please note that I have no formal qualifications as a nutritionist.

A Simple Addition To Your Meals With Surprising Health Benefits

When was the last time you went out of your way to eat something that tastes bitter? Wild food enthusiasts and herbalists know that the bitter taste triggers a cascade of health benefits including improved digestion, reduced cravings, and increased well-being.

Supermarket Strategy #6 – Wise Use of Whole Foods

Whole foods require more planning and organization than processed convenience foods, but the pay-off is worth it. The benefits include: better nutrition, a feeling of empowerment and reconnection as you learn to engage with your food closer to its source, and the satisfaction in knowing you’re taking better care of the Earth just by how you eat.

RealFood Turmeric + Golden Milk Recipe

Tips and hints about eating fresh, whole turmeric + our basic recipe for Turmeric Milk, or Golden Milk.

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.

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.

Herb Pesto (and Mulberry Milkshake)

Pesto can be made with any herb or combination of herbs and even leafy vegetables. When all you see in your garden is edible leafy greens, pesto is a great way to serve up all that nutrition in a form that’s easy and appealing to eat.

2 Ways to Preserve Leafy Greens From Your Veggie Garden

Here are two ideas for preserving leafy greens. The first is a bit of an experiment. The second is a tried and true favorite in my kitchen.

Supermarket Food is Like a Tiger in a Zoo

Industrialized food is a commodity, a hollow copy of what it was before it was disconnected from the web of life that gifts it to us – just as a tiger in a zoo is a hollow copy of the real, wild thing.

Easy, Natural Ways to Increase the Available Minerals in Your Diet

Assuming you’re eating the healthiest plant foods, grown in the healthiest soil, that you can find or afford, what else can you do to increase your mineral intake without using pills?

What’s Happened to Your Mineral Intake?

Minerals are essential to life, but they’ve become dramatically less available to us in the food we eat. This article explores why.

Weeds: Real Nutrition for Free

Wild edibles (aka weeds) provide better nutrition than supermarkets ever can, for free.

How Did Organ Meats Become “Offal” (Awful)?

In traditional cultures, organ meats were considered to be the animals’ most nutritious, most precious, gift to humanity. In modern society, we’re repelled by the idea of eating organ meats. What happened?

Real Food

What we eat illuminates the relationship—or lack of it—between us and our natural world. It also directly influences the way our living planet is used.

Healthier SHOPPING HABITS

What we put in our shopping trolleys and baskets impacts our own health, obviously, but it goes way beyond that. Our shopping choices also directly effect the ecosystems and communities that produce our consumables and those that absorb the by-products and waste-products of what we eat and use.

Since we're making these choices every day anyway, paying more attention to them is a small but significant way to help - without adding anything extra to your to-do list.

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.

BATHROOM and HEALTH

Read the BATHROOM and HEALTH posts here

In the bathroom aisle and at the pharmacy, you spend hard earned money on mostly unnecessary products, often full of toxins, that leave a trail of pollution and destruction in their wake.

These posts have ideas for growing or making your own safe, simple, ethical, natural, and more economical alternatives -- read all the BATHROOM and HEALTH posts here.

KEEPING CHICKENS

Read all the chicken posts here

A rooster and hens free ranging near a compost pile

Anybody can stick a flock of chickens in the backyard. The result will be fresh eggs, plenty of entertainment, and a lot less greenery in the backyard.

We're on a mission to move backyard chicken-keeping away from barren, bare ground with a pile of wilted greens in the middle of it, and towards the model of a healthy ecosystem. To do that, we need to learn to manage the flock so that ALL of its functions—not just egg and meat production but also manure production, and garden and composting assistance—are put to use effectively. Read all the chicken posts here

CATTLE and HOME DAIRYING

There are just a small handful of posts here, mostly farm updates that include pics and mentions of our home dairying adventures.

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?