Here we are again at the very beginning of the spring planting season. If you live down in the southern part of the US chances are you are already gearing up for planting since you have that wondrously long growing season. Up here in the Midwest we do not quite enjoy that luck so we are still dreaming of the spring planting and the only thing we can do is start our seedlings. So with that in mind now is the time to start your own seedlings indoors so that they will be large enough for transplanting when it is finally warm enough. In reality you need to start very few types of plants indoors and that is only because they need a longer growing season than can be provided. I will typically only start tomatoes, peppers and watermelons indoors and will instead direct seed the rest when the weather allows. You can also use season extension techniques like low tunnels or hoop houses to protect and encourage new growth earlier. It is very tempting to jump the gun when it comes to new planting especially if you have unseasonable warm weather but make to pay attention to the local last frost dates and if you want to plant earlier seriously consider using low tunnel hoop house to protect against those surprise frosts.
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So as I was perusing the internet reading up on a variety of topics i came across the following study and informational map done by Yale University. It is all about the the perceived perceptions of what the American people believe is happening concerning climate change. It also covers how average folks feel about some of the commonly floated ideas for addressing the climate change issues like,
According to this study 70% of people surveyed agreed that climate change is happening but only 53% of those same people believe that it is human caused. This is despite the overwhelming evidence that we are indeed responsible. Now we don't yet know what the full impacts of climate change will be but what we do know is that civilization as we know it has grown up under climate that has been stable for essentially the last 10,000 years. Now we are undergoing a period of rapid change that seems to be coming with more extreme storms, longer droughts and more unpredictability in general. Whether you believe humans are the cause of climate change or not is fast becoming a moot point. We will have to deal with it sooner or later. I just hope that when the time comes we will be able to deal with it and not collapse under the weight of our own folly and arrogance. Yale Climate Opinion Map Like many other types of fruit you can dry citrus like oranges, lemons and limes. It makes for a interestingly chewy product that can be very tart and biting. While not my favorite type of dried produce it can make for an interesting component of a homemade trail mix or camping food.
Drying out citrus is a lot like drying other produce with some of the same basic steps. Step 1 Select only the best ripe citrus like you would with other types of fruit and carefully wash. Step 2 Next slice the citrus into even quarter inch thick slices and then cut those slices in half again so you have a bunch of half slices. Sometimes you will have to remove seeds before you begin drying. Step 3 After you have the half slices you still need to completely remove the rind so you just have the actual fruit itself. Step 4 Place on the dehydrator trays with space in between each slice and dry for 6-8 hours depending on your unit. Step 5 Place dried slices in a jar with a good seal so they don’t go bad and enjoy. Drying food is a tradition of food preservation that goes back for thousands of years and is an effective way to keep food safe to eat for long periods of time. Fruit is by far one of the easiest things to to dry out safely and many different types of fruit can preserved in this way. In this article I am going to talk about the simple method of dehydrating apples using a home dehydrator unit. Every unit is a bit different so drying times and capacity will vary depending on what unit you have. Step 1 Pick only the best firm and crisp apples that do not have any blemishes or bruises. You need to have really good fruit otherwise the drying process will not work effectively. Step 2 Peel the apples and then slice and core them so you have slices that are around a quarter inch thick on the fat side. Step 3 Place on the dehydrator trays with a little bit of space between a each slice so you get good airflow around every piece. Step 4 The drying should take anywhere around 6-8 hours depending on you unit. You will know they are dry when they are slightly brown and have a leathery feeling to them. So you find yourself with a whole bunch of bananas that you got on sale at the local grocery store and you know that despite how much you love them you won't be able to finish them all before they go bad. You have a couple options you can freeze them which works good if you are saving them for bars, smoothies or banana bread. The other option of course is to dehydrate them. The easiest way to do this is with a home dehydrator. They are very cost effective and can be used to dehydrate many of things produced from your garden. That of course is assuming you have a garden if you are interested in starting one there are many resources at your disposal including many pages dedicated to to the topic on this site.
Disposing of your Christmas Tree In a Sustainable Way
Like many of you out there I put up a Christmas tree to celebrate the holiday season. But when the holidays are done it is time to dispose of the tree and there enters a conundrum. Some communities offer a eco friendly option for tree disposal in the form of a composting or chipping service that will turn that tree into a useful product for the garden. But in many town across the nation that does not hold true. So if the only obvious option you have left is to send your tree to a landfill sealed up in a plastic bag then its time to consider lessobvious options. Firewood If you have a wood stove, fireplace or grill that you can cook with wood in then the first solution is a easy one. With a simple camp saw you can buck a Christmas tree into usable chunks fairly quickly. I really like this option because I will take my Christmas tree and cut it up and then save that firewood to grill my 4th of July meal over. There is a certain balance to that I really like. The limbs can be saved for excellent kindling as well, once they have had time to dry out. Compost Material This option is another great one if you have pile set up or want to create one. Cut branches are excellent for this as they provide a continuous source of carbon to the pile and they add lift to the pile which lets in more air to help the compost along. You could add the trunk sections to the pile as well but the larger the chunks the longer they will take to decompose. Arts and Crafts I like to take chunks of my tree and turn them into little wood carvings, coasters, trivets for hot pans and things like this. To use a tree for this purpose you would want to the trim the branches off and put it somewhere it can season for awhile. This is crucial as members of the pine and spruce family are prone to cracking if worked before they are properly seasoned. With a little thought you can turn the chore of disposing of the Christmas tree into a opportunity to cook good food, enrich your garden, or surprise your family with your artistic side. The choice is yours but if I was you how could I turn down a opportunity to turn some simple wood into a beautiful item. Christmas is a wonderful time of year full of cheer, good humor and a deluge of commercial purchasing that comes in all sorts of one time use packaging. As great as Christmas is it comes with all sorts of pitfalls that can make it difficult to be green and environmentally friendly as you want. To that end I am reposting a couple of articles about how to avoid some of the pitfalls of this time of year.
When you decide to plant a tree there are many different things you must take into account before you purchase the tree. You will need to answer a few key questions before you can figure out what type of tree you should plant in that area. · Will this tree be planted near a structure? · Will the tree be planted underneath utility lines? · What type of soils do you have at your site? · Do you have enough rain or supplemental water to grow a tree successfully? · What is the primary purpose of the tree? (shade, aesthetics, food production etc.) The foundation of a home is by far the most important part of the home and it pays to do it right the first time. Now what makes a good foundation is always up for debate and can change with the type of house you will choose to build. I will not try to tell you how to build a good foundation because frankly I am not qualified to do such a things. I will only attempt to provide you with some ideas of what you should be looking for in a good foundation for earthen construction or straw bales.
Every year about this time it after the harvest is done and all the various garden tools like sprinklers, hoses and cultivators have been put away there is one last thing to do. Soil believe it or not is a living thing just like us and like us it needs time to take a break and rest from all the heavy work it has been doing for you all summer. All the delicious food you have eaten from the garden come at price to the soil in tern if fertility, tilth and overall health. So if you want to continue to have good harvests you should take a few key steps that will greatly improve your gardens health every year and theoretically should completely remove the need for artificial fertilizers and wee controls. Step 1 Completely remove any weedy things that may yet be lingering in your garden and either compost them or leave them where you pull them. Step 2 Mulch the whole garden area in leaves, straw, pine needles whatever you can get your hands on for free or cheap. The mulch is by far the most important thing you can have in your garden over winter as it provides a food source for all the microorganisms that live in your soil. These organisms use the material you put there as food and then of course what goes in must comes out as beautiful nutrients and lets face it lots of "poop" This is my garden after I spent a few hours moving leaves that my trees have dropped onto my lawn into the garden.
Step 3 Once you have all the leave in your garden and you have the soil and all the surrounding areas covered up you are good to go for the winter. Now just sit back relax and dream about you want to grow next summer. Tree with their multiple benefits including aesthetics, shading and food production are very important contributors to any green living lifestyle. They can be used in multiple ways to improve or even make possible a truly self-sufficient lifestyle for people across the world. I will go over fairly quickly three different things trees do for you that make your life better, easier and more cost effective.
This time of year is a great time to be purchasing food directly from producers at your local farmers market.
https://www.ams.usda.gov/local-food-directories/farmersmarkets The link above will take you directly to the USDA searchable data base of farmers markets. Enjoy the tasty food. Log homes like many forms of construction can be green if built in a way that makes them green. Modern log homes unlike their older counterparts are tightly built, have very little air infiltration and can be outfitted with all the modern heat exchangers, furnaces and insulation. They can also be made very durable and incredibly long lasting with good roof overhangs, foundations that keep the water off the log walls and modern low to no VOC containing stains.
What is Earthbag Building?
Earthbag building in a nutshell is earthen building made easy with modern technology. It takes the time honored methods of building with earth like cob, adobe and rammed earth and simplifies them to the extreme. Gone are the long drying times of adobe, the critical mixture requirements of rammed earth and the limited amount of material you can lay in a day like cob. With earthbag building techniques you can build a home out of almost any soil, in any location, using tools that you made on site. What is adobe?
Adobe in its simplest form is a sun dried brick of clay, sand and other earthen materials. It has been around for around at least since 3800 bc in Egypt and may extend even farther back in history than that. It has been around so long because when done correctly adobe is a strong building material that is suitable for many climates even rainy ones. Origin of the word adobe can be traced back to the Egyptians and it transformed only a little bit over the intervening 5000 + years. It was given it current spelling and usage when the word was assimilated from Arabic to Spanish and then the English language just co opted it from there. Earth sheltering is an ancient and time honored technique for moderating the temperature of a house or other structure without any external energy. It has been used for thousands of years across many cultures starting all the way back with humans who lived in caves. To the right can see a picture of sod houses built in Iceland by some of the early settlers. They not only needed to build out of sod due to the climate of Iceland but also because it was one of the few available resources to build with. They work off of the very simple fact that the soil maintains a certain temperature year round despite how cold or warm the air outside. This can offer you tremendous advantages when it comes to keeping your home comfortable for no extra cost in money or energy. The diagram below illustrates what I am talking about about the soil maintaining a steady temperature. Not only do you get the climate control benefits but having a earth sheltered house can protect your home from storms and other forces that nature can throw at you. You home will also be quieter and burying your home in the earth could be a great way to escape city noise. Well summertime is definitely here in full force in my home state. As I write this it is currently 100 degrees outside and it is putting my AC to work today. While I get to enjoy the cool conditioned confines of my house it reminds me that not everyone can have AC or chooses to use AC because of its environmental impacts. AC just in the USA is responsible for emitting 100 million tons of CO2 into the atmosphere every year which is the equivalent of 21 million cars driving around for 1 year.
With properly designed house right from the start it is conceivable to get most if not all your heating needs from the sun. This of course is very dependent on your climate and requires solar design from the ground up. Most of us do not have the luxury of building a passive solar house from the ground up so we have to suffice with adding on solar heat to our house.
Amy,
I don't know if you will ever come back but it appears that I can't reach you by the email you left in the contact form. I tried 3 times and it was a no go every time. Just to let you know I would love to look at any info you have to offer the Green Living Library as I want the website to be be built by the users so the content can be tailored to what people actually want to know. So if you do come back and I hope you do try to get a hold of me one more time and hopefully it will work. Sincerely, Josh A masonry heater as defined by the the Masonry Heater Association of North America is
“... a site-built or site-assembled, solid-fueled heating device constructed mainly of masonry materials in which the heat from intermittent fires burned rapidly in its firebox is stored in its massive structure for slow release to the building. It has an interior construction consisting of a firebox and heat exchange channels built from refractory components.” To put that in plainer english you could call a masonry heater a big wood stove made out of brick or similar materials that is capable of capturing heat from a burning fuel source and slowly releasing that heat into a space. There are many features that make a masonry a great choice for you home heating needs and I will touch on just a few of them with this article. But to keep things fair I will also go into a few of the cons because you can’t really understand something until you know both sides of it. Fresh Food From Small Spaces- The Square Inch Gardeners Guide to Year-Round Growing, Fermenting, and Sprouting By R.J. Ruppenthal A generalized look at the techniques and methods used to make the most of small spaces and urban locations for growing your own food. This book is good for beginners and people who are not familiar with some of the basics of gardening and other techniques for composting, mulching and growing your own seedlings in the spring. The part that jumped out to me the most were the sections on sprout growing and their nutritional qualities and some basic info mushroom production. Wind vs Solar For Household Power: Exploring The Pros And Cons
If you have chosen to transition to a green energy source in your home, you may be wondering whether wind or solar power is your better option. Unfortunately, there is no single answer to this question that will apply to every homeowner. This is because wind and solar powered systems work in very different ways to produce electricity for your home. Consequently, this is a decision that each homeowner will need to make on a case by case basis after learning about the way each system works. Below you will learn more about the pros and cons of each of these options so that you can make the choice that is right for you. Solar power can be divided into two broad types of systems. You can either have a off the grid system that is not connected to the electrical grid or you can have a grid tied system where you generate power but are still tied the electrical system. Each method has its own pros and cons which I shall endeavor to lay out in the following post.
Fall that wonderfully cool time of year that signals the end of summer's heat and summers work in the garden. The fall is actually a very simple time in the garden with only two tasks left to accomplish, the removal of the last of the year's produce and the prepping of the protective cover of mulch that will enhance your garden's soil over the winter. The most important thing you can do for your garden is the removal of anything that might contain any diseases like powdery mildew or wilts that could overwinter till next spring. If you don't have any issues like that than you can just go ahead and lay down the leftover stalks and stems from your plants right in the bed. Leaving as much as possible in the garden is important in maintaining soil fertility and health as everything you grow removes necessary nutrients from the soil. This can also be a good time to add residues, manures or other fertility adding materials to the garden. One thing that I am going to try this fall is the addition of coffee grounds straight onto the garden beds. I know they make a great addition to my compost bins and they promote high heat active composting. The same principle could maybe apply right in my beds and work for me all winter in enhancing the soil for next spring. Once that is done the best thing you can do is leave the garden alone till spring rolls around again. Everything even soil needs a rest period and winter is that time for your garden so let it rest by giving it some "food" and leaving it alone. |
AuthorHello my name is Josh Larson and I am the creator of the Green Living Library. Here on the blog you will find updates to content found in the Green Living Library as well as stories from those living the sustainable life already. Archives
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