In a previous post on growing ground cherries and making ground cherry jam, I noted that the leaf, stem, husk, and unripe fruit of the plant were toxic. A comment on reddit questioned the validity of that statement and another comment to that post asked (in my own words), how toxic is toxic, or what would the effects be? I hope this post will at least point readers to some resources I found dealing with this issue.
[Photo credit: ground cherry/husk tomato, By annethelibrarian on Flickr]
We experimented some with polycultres in the 2011 vegetable garden. We’ve put together some polycultures in the past with varying results, but wanted to keep experimenting. Planning, experimenting, growing, and harvesting from polycultures is in my opinion what is needed to move us away from the typical monocultural way of thinking to a more sustainable horticultural way. This post will give an overview of some of the polycultures we used in the vegetable garden, provide some photos, and provide results on how well each polyculture worked for us.
The following are 3 simple diy home cleaning recipes you can use to save money and provide a safer and more earth friendly alternative to your typical chemical household cleaning product. And from what we can tell these work just as good or even better.
We recently purchased the soil cube tool from Deeply Rooted Organics. We have been starting seedlings indoors using Jiffy pots and pellets. This technique has worked fairly well for us but it has become more and more expensive each year as we have begun to start more and more vegetables, herbs, and flowers. After hearing about the soil cube tool on an episode of The Survival Podcast we decided that we would try it out.
[Soil cube tool with wooden tong]
I used the methods described in the article A Better Way to Fertilize Your Garden: Homemade Organic Fertilizer for a couple of years to organically fertilize our newly constructed vegetable garden. The article was published in Mother Earth News in the June/July 2006 edition and written by Steve Solomon. By using the recipe for this organic fertilizer I obtained very good yields and our vegetables were very healthy. I think this is a very good alternative to chemical fertilizers and a great technique for a new garden to give it an initial boost, but I would like to offer some sustainable soil management practices for soil building in the home garden that should eventually eliminate or greatly reduce having to add any fertilizer.
[Photo Credit, Soil by John!!! under Creative Commons License]
So where do you fall on the eco scale? Do you consider yourself an environmentalist or are you just and eco poser? Paul Wheaton’s recent post on Make it Missoula discusses a test that Paul calls The Wheaton Eco Test. It’s a simple test to measure one’s eco level. The test is simple. If you spend more money on electricity per year than the average American you can’t consider yourself eco based on the criteria of this test. I thought it would be interesting to see if our family passed the test.
A couple days after the new year I read an inspiring post at Zen to Fitness, called Self Sufficient Training. The post discusses ways and the benefits of training in the outdoors as an alternative to gyms and how it can be a more self sufficient fitness option. I’ve been struggling lately of having any real motivation in going to the gym. Over the past 3 years I’ve been pretty consistent at going to the gym for resistance training and cardio workouts. I’m just not a big fan of workouts on machines or indoors for that matter. I’m more of a get a workout from playing soccer, basketball, or going for a hike type of person. Don’t get me wrong, I think working out in gyms and using free weights or machines is better than nothing. The article above gave me the idea and motivation to do my first real structured outdoor workout.
[Use your imagination to find workout equipment in the outdoors. Here is my outdoors stairsmaster.]
We go through quite a few cans of olive oil spray every year. We seem to use it for almost every meal we cook. My wife picked up a refillable Misto Olive Oil Sprayer recently. Many might already use these, but I thought I would share this as it is a great way to reduce waste since we will no longer be throwing all of those olive oil spray cans in the landfill any longer.
It seems easy enough to use. There is a plastic cap underneath the top that twists off to allow it to be filled. Fill only half way to allow for pressure build up when pumped. Replace the top, pump, and spray.
So I wanted to share this because I’m guessing since it’s a non-aerosol can that it’s better for the environment. Those aerosol olive oil spray cans have soy and anti-foaming propellants, and may contain milk and wheat. This way you will be spraying pure olive oil. Plus I’m hoping it will save us some money by not having to purchase new cans.
Now that the holidays have past and a new year is among us I want to document my top projects for the homestead for this year. I’m going to try to keep this as a top 10 of our main projects.
Liver is probably the most widely accepted and well known of the the organs we eat (beef, chicken, deer, etc). It’s kind of a tradition with deer hunters on the night of the harvest to cook the liver usually fried with onions. Most hunters that I know still do this but from what I’ve heard it’s becoming less and less common. This year I used the recipe below for fried venison liver and onions the night of harvesting my first deer (a doe). 2 days later I harvested my second deer and decided to freeze the liver and the heart for later use. I’m sure it won’t be as good as eating them fresh but we will see.
Stuff you will need: