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Welcome to

Practical Skills

for Regenerative Living

INTRODUCTION

I define a “sustainable lifestyle” as one that's regenerative for ourselves as individuals, for our families and communities, and for our ecosystems. Everything is connected; the health of any of these effects the health of all of them.

And since you're here on this page, we're probably in agreement that the way we humans have been doing things is not regenerative.

We're outsourcing our needs to extractive/exploitative industries that are depleting our atmosphere, soils, water, ecosystems, biodiversity, and communities.

Profit-focused corporations and government-funded institutions are keeping us hooked and helpless so that we'll keep propping up a failed economic system.  

We're living in a house of cards. The apparent affluence on the supermarket shelves is part of an illusion.

Obviously, something needs to change.

Exactly what needs to change, how it should change, and who should do the work, are topics that continue to be flogged to death in discussions at every level, but discussion is much more valuable and productive if we also take action. 

Small actions are best, that we can learn from, that we can build on. Action at a level that we can sustain.

"Hope is a verb with its sleeves rolled up." ~ David Orr

Its up to us, in our own kitchens, gardens, and communities. Here and now. To get on with providing for ourselves and living in ways that regenerate, rather than depleting, the web of life we rely on.

Use the Table of Contents to navigate, or just scroll down to explore the different Post Collections.
Note that some posts appear in more than one Collection.

Use the Table of Contents to navigate, or just scroll down to explore the different Post Collections.

Note that some posts appear in more than one Collection.

RECENT 

RECENT

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.

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

RECENT

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.)

How to Hand Pollinate Pumpkin Flowers

RECENT

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.

Supermarket Strategy #6 – Wise Use of Whole Foods

RECENT

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.

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

RECENT

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.)

How to Hand Pollinate Pumpkin Flowers

SIMPLE HOME-BASED HEALTH-CARE

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

There are safer, cleaner, more ethical alternatives, and they can be economical, simple, and quick to make.

In our culture, control and separation are given more importance than compassion and relationship.
To illustrate what I mean, here’s a comparison between the dominant approach to healthcare and the marginalized, “alternative” approaches.

The Dominant Healthcare Approach vs Marginalized Alternatives

The herb yarrow (Achillea millefoleum) has many uses. Its particularly well known for its ability to quickly stop blood loss and help heal wounds.

Yarrow for Wound First Aide

How I came to swear by yarrow (Achillea millefolium) for oral health care and particularly for gum health.

Yarrow for Oral Care

In our culture, control and separation are given more importance than compassion and relationship.
To illustrate what I mean, here’s a comparison between the dominant approach to healthcare and the marginalized, “alternative” approaches.

The Dominant Healthcare Approach vs Marginalized Alternatives

The herb yarrow (Achillea millefoleum) has many uses. Its particularly well known for its ability to quickly stop blood loss and help heal wounds.

Yarrow for Wound First Aide

HOME GROWN

These posts are full of ideas for:

  • what to grow and how to grow it, 

and sometimes also:

  • why to grow it,
  • how to use it, and
  • how it relates to other things you might be growing. 

At our place, we grow lots of food plants including edible and medicinal herbs (some of which are often called weeds). We also grow plants for animal fodder, mulch production and soil building, shade and shelter, and to encourage biodiversity. 

We're particularly interested in low-maintenance multi-functional plants that meet more than one need, and in perennials and self-seeders that don't have to be re-planted every year.

We're inspired by Permaculture, Syntropics, and all  Regenerative Agriculture philosophies and techniques; our intent is to build soil, capture carbon, care for ecology and water systems, and increase biodiversity in the process of growing things we can eat and use. 

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

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.)

How to Hand Pollinate Pumpkin Flowers

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.

Subtropical Spring in a RealFood Garden

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.

Harvesting Ginger, Making Ginger Honey

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.)

How to Hand Pollinate Pumpkin Flowers

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.

Subtropical Spring in a RealFood Garden

REAL FOOD

Food was once something that people shared, locally. For people fed by industrial agriculture, food is now a commoditysold 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 define
"Real Food" as food that repairs these broken connections and rebuilds health on all these levels. To me, real food is not just healthy for the eater. It's also healthy for the farmer and community that grow it and for the ecosystem it grows in. 

Real Food, for our family, includes "Happy Meat."

And this post collection also includes some posts with tips for getting the most nutrition possible from your food, along with profiles of super-nutritious plants (which will also appear in the Plant Profiles collection, above).

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.

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

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.

Supermarket Strategy #6 – Wise Use of Whole Foods

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

RealFood Turmeric + Golden Milk Recipe

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?

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

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.

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

Free PDF: "Beyond Eggs"

Mobile vs stationary chicken runs, deep litter bedding, keeping chickens happy in confinement.

ANIMALS

We raise chickens for eggs, meat, and compost making. We raise a few pigs at a time for meat. And we keep a couple of house cows for fresh milk and for the calves, which we raise with their mothers and then on pasture, for meat. 

Immediately below you'll find posts on "Raising Chickens," and in the sections under that you'll find "Raising Pigs"  and "Cattle & Home Dairying."

Raising Chickens

If we had to downsize and choose only one type of livestock to keep, it would be chickens. These posts explore various aspects of chicken-keeping, as well as the many talents of a backyard flock as egg and meat producers, garden assistants and soil builders, and entertainers.

Beyond Eggs - a Series

Anybody can stick a flock of chickens in the backyard. The result will be fresh eggs, plenty of entertainment, and a progressive and terminal de-greening of the backyard.

To move backyard chicken-keeping away from barren, bare ground and towards the model of a healthy ecosystem, we need to consider how to manage the flock so that all of its functions—the chickens' behaviors and their manure—are put to use in service of the surrounding ecosystem.

This Series of posts is about mobile vs stationary chicken runs, deep litter bedding, and keeping chickens happy in confinement.   Read the posts here, or download the Series as a free pdf.

Read these posts one by one, or download the Series as a free PDF

Chickens can either be very helpful to gardeners, or incredibly destructive. How can we harvest all that chickens have to offer, in ways that keep everybody happy, healthy, and productive?

Beyond Eggs – Pros and Cons of Free Range and Mobile Pens

Deep litter bedding for chickens mimics the forest floor environment they evolved in, builds their health, provides them with entertainment, and captures fertility for soil building. Here is why we decided to try confinement on deep litter with no outside foraging.

Beyond Eggs – 8 Advantages of Deep Litter Housing for Chickens

The best way to have healthy, happy chickens is to integrate them tightly into a thriving, bustling ecosystem that benefits from their presence, rather than allowing them to spread out in a sparse ecosystem that they steadily ​degrade because it is unable to support them.

Beyond Eggs: How to Keep Chickens Happy in Confinement

Chickens can either be very helpful to gardeners, or incredibly destructive. How can we harvest all that chickens have to offer, in ways that keep everybody happy, healthy, and productive?

Beyond Eggs – Pros and Cons of Free Range and Mobile Pens

Deep litter bedding for chickens mimics the forest floor environment they evolved in, builds their health, provides them with entertainment, and captures fertility for soil building. Here is why we decided to try confinement on deep litter with no outside foraging.

Beyond Eggs – 8 Advantages of Deep Litter Housing for Chickens
Backyard Chickens - a Series

This is not a “how to take care of chickens” Series. It contains stories about the unique differences in the ways individual hens mother their chicks, how the chicks mature toward independence, and the fascinating ways that roosters care for their hens (it goes well beyond sharing food with them and protecting them from danger).

In his book, “The Small-Scale Poultry Flock,” Harvey Ussery states that eating is “an intensely moral act," and that the happiness of his birds "defines good husbandry." The stories here are about chickens that are as happy as we can arrange for them to be, and that, in my opinion, makes for happy eggs and happy meat


You may enjoy these posts if you like chickens for their own sake, if you like eating food that comes from happy sources, and/or if you care deeply about our living world but sometimes feel powerless to make a difference in caring for it.

Why our efforts to address ecological destruction aren’t working yet, and how backyard chickens (or any other living thing that you care for) can help.

Backyard Chickens, and the Interconnectedness of All Things. Part 1

Doesn’t happiness – even “just” the happiness of some hen in a backyard hen house somewhere, count towards a more whole, more beautiful world, a world that has a little more rightness about it?

Backyard Chickens, and the Interconnectedness of All Things. Part 2

This post shares the funny things one of our roosters gets up to, and it concludes the Backyard Chicken Series with the question, “Can good husbandry, regenerative agriculture, and morally right living, be defined in terms of happiness and connection?”

Backyard Chickens, and the Interconnectedness of All Things – Part 3

Why our efforts to address ecological destruction aren’t working yet, and how backyard chickens (or any other living thing that you care for) can help.

Backyard Chickens, and the Interconnectedness of All Things. Part 1

Doesn’t happiness – even “just” the happiness of some hen in a backyard hen house somewhere, count towards a more whole, more beautiful world, a world that has a little more rightness about it?

Backyard Chickens, and the Interconnectedness of All Things. Part 2

Raising Pigs

Pigs, for us, have turned out to be very rewarding animals to keep and also very challenging animals to keep. Rewarding because they're charismatic, intelligent, sociable, and also because pork, ham and bacon are meats we refuse to buy -- so we're very fortunate to be able to raise them ourselves.

And challenging, because pigs have big needs for space, play, clean soil to dig in, and a diverse diet -- and providing those while keeping their environment alive and vibrant is a big challenge. We're far from feeling like we've got it sorted; these posts share what we're learning as we work toward it. 

Read these posts one by one here, or download a PDF of the entire Series, below. 

What we have (so far) found to be the pros and cons of mobile versus stationary pig raising systems, and why we are currently trailing a stationary arrangement for our pigs.

Raising Pigs – Mobile Pens vs Pigs in One Place

Why we buy piglets rather than breeding our own; preparing for their arrival and minimizing the stress of their transition; what to feed them; a few thoughts on choosing heritage breeds versus modern breeds.

Raising Pigs – New Piglets

Feeding ​the pigs, as they grow bigger, ​can ​easily degenerate into a full body contact sport in which the pig ​wins and the amateur pig-raiser ​gets discouraged and gives up on homegrown pork. Is there a way to keep pig-raising ​enjoyable when those cute little piglets are no longer cute?

Raising Pigs – Can pigs learn table manners?

What we have (so far) found to be the pros and cons of mobile versus stationary pig raising systems, and why we are currently trailing a stationary arrangement for our pigs.

Raising Pigs – Mobile Pens vs Pigs in One Place

Why we buy piglets rather than breeding our own; preparing for their arrival and minimizing the stress of their transition; what to feed them; a few thoughts on choosing heritage breeds versus modern breeds.

Raising Pigs – New Piglets

"Raising Pigs" is a 4-Part Series about mobile pig pens versus stationary ones, raising piglets, and feeding and fencing tips.

Read the posts one by one here, or download a PDF of the entire Series, below. 

Cattle & Home Dairying

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

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?

Happy Meat, Happy Ecosystems, Happy People

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.

Home Dairying, Banana Milkshakes, and Spare Egg Whites

​​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.

Farm Update: In the Garden

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?

Happy Meat, Happy Ecosystems, Happy People

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.

Home Dairying, Banana Milkshakes, and Spare Egg Whites
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