Natural living. Healthy eating. Attempted gardening.
This post may include affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I’ll earn a small fee at no extra cost to you.What do you think of when I say “bulk food?” Do you picture giant tubs of mayonnaise, a 25-pound bag of peas, or 50 gallons of cheese doodles? While those things do exist, they really aren’t practical for most of us. Just thinking about all those cheese doodles makes
Let me explain up front why I needed to make homemade cinnamon bread: I don’t like raisins. Maybe it’s a texture thing; I don’t really mind their flavor. But they certainly don’t belong in my bagels, my oatmeal cookies, or in my bread. I sure don’t want to pay $5 at the store for dry, stale cinnamon bread that I have to pick the raisins out of! Once you’ve eaten
Who has walked down the hand soap aisle at Target and been amazed at all the varieties of soap you can buy? I saw Fig & Rhubarb foaming hand soap the other day…wow. When you buy those fancy brands of soap, you’re getting a lot more than you’ve bargained for. Most–even natural brands like Method–contain artificial colors, preservatives, and sodium chloride. Yes, there is table salt in your liquid soap.
Spring is a busy time of year for our family. School, gardening, music, and sports take up a lot of our time. I like to make a huge batch of these baked Italian meatballs and freeze them for easy dinners. They can be served in lots of different ways (see Kitchen Tips below), and you can add or subtract spices to change the flavors. While I wish I could say
Did you know that you need special soil for starting seeds? While you might think you could just scoop up some dirt from your garden to start your seeds, that’s not a good idea. Why? Because your garden soil could have fungus! Microbes! Seeds! Pathogens! Bugs! And the seeds you are planting are tender little babies who need TLC. It’s easy to make your own seed starting mix to help
Ahhh, April! Spring is finally here (for those of us in Zone 9 anyway), and it’s time to get our seeds and starts in the ground. Does it seem like winter lasted about 6 million years? It does for me. I can’t wait to get outside and get my hands in the dirt. This planting guide for Zone 9 will give you 12 vegetables you can plant in April for
Imagine, if you will: it’s a beautiful summer day, and you mosey out to the garden after work. It looks wonderful from afar–watermelon, zucchini, tomatoes–everything is growing well and you’re looking forward to a great harvest. Then you get a closer look and gasp in horror. Your precious, precious vegetables, that you’ve loved, cared for, and nurtured since they were seedlings, are covered with teeny bugs of evil–APHIDS. What are
Ok, show of hands. How many of you think that here in California, we put avocado and sprouts on everything we eat? *peers out of computer screen* Just as I suspected…99% of you think we eat sprouts 24/7! We do love our sprouts here in California. I’m not so crazy about the avocados, but that’s a story for another day. Sprouts are delicious on sandwiches, wraps, in salads and stir-fry…even
Making soap using the melt-and-pour method is the easiest way to make homemade soap. It’s especially fun and easy with kids, because you aren’t using caustic lye–that part of the soapmaking process has already been done for you. But how do you know which melt-and-pour soap base to use? A quick Amazon search will give you more than 100 different ones to choose from. Which one should you pick for
Show of hands—who has run frantically to the store at 10pm the night before Easter to grab a couple dozen eggs and some Easter egg dye? Surprised Chicken (who lives with my friends at Pasture Deficit Disorder) can’t figure out how you ran out of eggs in the first place, but that’s another story. Great news! You can dye Easter eggs naturally, with stuff that’s already in your kitchen. You
If you’ve been composting for a while, you know that food scraps and fallen leaves are perfect for the compost pile. (Beginning composters, get the scoop here.) There are some pretty crazy things you can compost that I bet you’ve never considered, though! For compost to decompose correctly, you need about a 30:1 split between “browns” (carbon-heavy materials) and “greens” (nitrogen-heavy materials). Don’t worry about measuring this precisely; just know
Brrr! It’s chilly in March, but the worst of the cold winter weather is over. If you’re itching to get outside in the garden, like me, it’s not too early to plant some spring vegetables. Your first step is to make sure you’re planting the right seeds at the right time. A vegetable planting schedule for your area will help with this. Then check if the soil is warm enough
