This article came from: Some Simple Living Resources at SimpleGreenLiving.com..

This article came from: October Walk at SimpleGreenLiving.com..

But I didn’t do a thing about it. Now, finally, I am losing weight and I am also working on the site. Writing is how I learn things.

This ties in with simple living and green living–and that is part of what motivated me to finally get going on a weight loss project. As I looked ahead, it seemed to me that shedding those excess pounds would be one of the best ways to keep my health at least as good as it is now, more likely better. That sure fits in with frugality and simple living!

If you want to lose weight, or have someone you love who does, do visit the new site. Here are some of the topics so far:

Is High Fructose Corn Syrup Worse Than Sugar? –The answer is yes! It’s got some effects on your metabolism that you don’t really want to endure.

How to Lose Weight Slowly and Keep It Off — Looking ahead, I’ll need this information and maybe you will too. Turns out, not really a surprise, that exercising is an important part of this.

Weight Watchers Reviews — What do people say about this popular program, both online and in local groups? It is highly rated. I don’t live near a local group or I would be interested. As for online, right now I am exploring some other websites about weight loss.

Rebounding for Weight Loss — I recently got a rebounder and it’s definitely good for health overall as well as for weight loss.

Sparkteens — A shoutout to one of the best websites for overweight or obese teens. It’s free too.

There will be a lot more articles up there soon! It’s my main project, and it’s keeping my own motivation high!

This article came from: Gotta Lose Weight! at SimpleGreenLiving.com..

The Small Scale Poultry Flock is divided into seven sections. In Part One, Getting Started, the first chapter is called “Why Bother?” and it proceeds to give a full answer, from the amount of joy they can bring you, to the contribution your own chickens and eggs bring to your ability to eat better, to the horrors of commercial chicken raising and the related food safety issues, including the  massive amounts of antibiotics and arsenic that commercial chicken raisers feed. He adds in Peak Oil and financial meltdown as further good reasons for raising your own chickens.

The next chapters in this part are titled

• The Integrated Small-Scale Flock
• Your Basic Bird
• Planning the Flock
• Starting the Flock

He integrates his chickens into the full range of activities of the Virginia homestead where he and his wife Ellen have lived for many years. As I read about his putting his flock into a greenhouse for the winter and how he used cover crops in doing that, I was thinking, well, that’s fine for real homesteaders but we don’t quite fit in that category. We just have half an acre and a busy life inside on our computers.

Then suddenly a light bulb went on. We live in high desert in Colorado, and I had already been envying the lush greenery everywhere in the numerous color photos in the book. Made me homesick for my growing up (sans chickens) in Maryland. I’d been wondering how our chickens would have a good life in our yard without totally denuding it of everything but the sturdy yucca plants. Hmm… cover crops….. hmmmmm…. a greenhouse… I was only to page 17 and he already had my imagination working! A good sign in a book.

The basic bird chapter explains all sorts of things about anatomy, behavior, molting, and the like. This would make great bedtime reading, as it is interesting but shouldn’t keep you awake the way gripping novels could.

Chapter 4, Planning the Flock, starts out with what Ussery says is one of the most common questions he gets from people thinking of starting a small flock. Is it necessary to have a rooster? His answer: the hens will lay just as many eggs without a rooster, just as women ovulate without men in their lives. (I did enjoy his dry humor throughout the book.) In many places you can’t have roosters because you have too many human neighbors who wouldn’t accept the noise. But if you can have roosters, he outlines some of the benefits.

He talks about flock size, giving a useful rule of thumb that you will get two eggs a day for every three laying hens you have. Spring and summer are the best times of year for eggs, and it slows down a lot in the winter. He touches here on the question of whether you plan to raise chickens for meat and buy batches of meat birds for your freezer or whether you will just be doing the necessary culling now and then from a flock you keep mainly for eggs. (Later he covers three ways to butcher your chickens and provides detailed photos on how to process the birds for meat.)

Next there’s a  useful discussion of the many different kinds of chickens you might want to get. Size (standard or bantam), eggshell color, temperament, whether for eggs or meat or both, and winter production of eggs are some of the topics here. My husband and I know we want some Ameraucanas (sometimes mistakenly called Auraucanas) for their colored eggshells and good temperaments, as we have had them before. But this section made me realize how many other interesting breeds there are out there. He comments that if you buy from an online hatchery, many of them will allow you to put together your order for some of this and some of that, even down to just one chick of a breed! Enticing.

This chapter also has a list of useful traditional breeds for small-scale flocks, divided somewhat arbitrarily he says, into layer breeds, meat breeds, dual purpose breeds, and game and other broody breeds. Another chart lists breeds worth conserving. Following these charts are his  comments on the breeds they have raised. I found this particularly interesting. Reading The Small Scale Poultry Flock  is like having an extended series of conversations with your favorite uncle who happens to know darn near everything about chickens!

Chapter 5 on starting the flock discusses the pros and cons of buying locally or from an online hatchery. Here I learned something that will change how I purchase baby chicks online. (Because they need no food or water for the first day or two or even three, they can be sent through the mail.) You can choose all females, all males, or “straight run,” which is roughly half and half. I had assumed that we would get all females but then — gulp — I read this on page 49:

Since the majority of hatchery orders are for pullet chicks only, it becomes impossible for hatcheries to sell the unwanted cockerel chicks–however many “cockerel specials” they offer. It is simply a fact of life in the business, therefore, that excess cockerels are killed, by the hundreds of thousands, by [3 different methods I won't go into here but at least 2 of them sound cruel--Zana]. The reader may well choose otherwise, but my choice–since learning that my pullets-only orders necessitate the treatment of living creatures like so much disposable garbage–has been to make straight run orders exclusively.

On the same page, he cautions you that if you do order straight run, most of the males will have to be culled, that is butchered, before they mature. You will not find it easy to give them away or to find someone else to butcher them for you. Death is part of life.

Part Two: Basic Care covers housing, managing the chickens’ manure, watering, pasture and the joys of electric fencing, and mobile shelters. One of the most interesting points to me in this section was the information that you need a lot of ventilation in the house, and that insulation and heat are either not needed or very minimally. It’s important to give your chickens access to the outdoors, for their well being.

Chapter 7, Manure Management in the Poultry House: The Joys of Deep Litter, was an eye-opener. I didn’t realize how effectively you can use the manure in combination with leaves or wood shavings, provided your chickens have enough space, ideally 5 square feet per bird in their house but denser can work too.

Part Three: Working Partners describes how chickens can help you improve the soil you have and help in your garden.

Part Four: Feeding the Small-Scale Flock includes Ussery’s reflection on feeding, using purchased feeds, making your own feeds, and feeding a flock from home resources.

Part Five: Other Management Issues describes the behavior of cocks, introducing younger chickens into the flock, mixing species, protecting the flock from predators such as dogs, foxes, and even weasels. There are also chapters on chicken health, managing the flock in winter, and other domestic fowl.  

Part Six: Breeding the Small-Scale Flock is a how-to section with an overview, as you would expect from Ussery. It includes a chapter on working with broody hens.

Part Seven: Poultry for the Table covers butchering poultry, cooking eggs and chicken, and selling your poultry or eggs to small local markets.

The book ends with an epilogue called The Big Picture, and a bunch of useful appendices.

Highly recommended! This is a new book from the  sustainability publisher Chelsea Green, and that link takes you to the page on their site about the book. (Thanks to them for sending me a review copy of the book. As a former librarian, I do love to write about books.) And here is the link to Harvey Ussery’s website.

This article came from: The Small Scale Poultry Flock, by Harvey Ussery at SimpleGreenLiving.com..

But where to put it all? Our winter squashes went on the bookcase in the hall, on a high shelf just out of reach of the dogs. It isn’t as cool as I’d like there, but we’ll just have to eat them sooner this year. Maybe by next year we will have some sort of root cellar, maybe even combined with the possible chicken house we talk about.

Our dehydrator gets used a lot. That bowl is not actually full of snakes… it contains our favorite summer squash, an heirloom called Zucchino Rampicante from Baker Creek Seeds. We grew it for several years in the highlands of central Mexico, and it did well for us this year too, our first year gardening at this house in Colorado. I highly recommend it — instead of getting fat like zucchini, it goes long and curvy.

I used to have a picture of me wearing one of these in the logo of this website, til several people told me they thought I was wearing a snake! Anyway, although the zucchino rampicante is easier to give away than plain ol’ zucchini, it can still get out of hand now and then. The larger of the two canning jars there contains dehydrated zucchino chips. and I haven’t decided yet if that will be the fate of the ones in the bowl. They are also excellent in stir-fries.

The other jar contains some of our tomatoes, dried. Sure cuts down on the space. I’ve had the 4-tray Excalibur dehydrator for so long that they don’t make it anymore, but when it needed a fan replaced last year, Excalibur had the part. Kudos to them. Recently a gardening friend of mine asked my advice about whether to get the 5 tray or the 9 tray model. I said it depends on what size batches you like to do. She got the nine-tray one and has been very busy with it since. Here it is; click on it to see it at Amazon.

Not that my trays would look that neat if my life depended on it!

The tomatoes were in some baskets but it was too hard to see if they were turning color or going bad, so I pulled out a couple of cafeteria trays that are very useful to have around. Now we can keep up with the tomatoes, or if not, I will dry more of them. Some years I’ve wrapped them in newspaper and put them in a cool place and we have been able to eat fresh garden tomatoes well into winter, but this house just doesn’t have any cool places that aren’t already full of other things.

Our carrots will be fine in the ground outside; we may dig a pit to store the potatoes…

Ah, it’s really fun to be wrapping up a satisfying gardening season!

This article came from: Storing Garden Produce in a Small House at SimpleGreenLiving.com..

All those colors you see across the top represent different stitches. I have my favorites, and a while back I wanted to do some mending with some of those stitches. That’s when I discovered that I couldn’t. Not to worry, the same thing had happened years earlier and a fabric store had fixed it by giving the machine a good oiling.

So we took the machine, all 40 pounds of it, back to that store, which had changed hands in the meantime. Weeks later, I got a phone call that they couldn’t fix the machine. They couldn’t even figure out how to get into its core. This Swedish-made machine, made by Husqvarna of chain saw fame, is one sturdy thing and it isn’t meant to be oiled by the home user. So I guess it wasn’t evident how to get into it.

So we brought it home and it took my handy husband five minutes to have it apart. He oiled it thoroughly but it still didn’t work. Over about a week, he spent a few minutes now and then testing to see if it worked, saying what a good machine it was, and finding more places to oil.  And he got it to the point where I could sew a straight stitch forward and backward. Progress!

I knew from my online research that a lot of people have old Vikings, model 6460, that only do that, and they use them quite happily. Kelly thought maybe I would be satisfied with his success. But no, I really wanted to do three-step zig zag and some of the fancier stitches. I said in any case we would keep this machine for heavy-duty sewing, as its low gear is phenomenal, but I had read online that people had oiled their machines and that had been all it took to get everything working. And indeed that had been our experience about 10 years ago. Of course, in the meantime we had lived in Mexico for five years and the sewing machine had languished in a storage unit in the heat and the cold of Colorado.

I thought I might have to buy a new machine and even looked at some online. But we both love to save money and besides this machine ought to be fixable! So we examined exactly where the cams go into the machine and where the bottleneck might be. Behind that solid red metal Kelly spotted an area of moving parts that was all gummed up. He oiled that area…

AND now the machine works! Hooray! Now I just have to get the momentum up to tackle my mending pile…

This article came from: How to Repair a Very Old Sewing Machine at SimpleGreenLiving.com..

Emergency water storage at home is a topic that most people would probably just as soon not think about. At least when I started asking my friends how much water they had stored, I quickly realized that few had thought about it. I needed to ask, “Do you have any emergency water stored?” instead of asking how much. Most had nothing.

Home water storage has been on my mind for much of the summer, and I blogged about it in June… that blog post is where the link takes you. We had a few short water outages here, nothing more than a few hours, but as a result, I was asked to do a presentation at our small-town Energy Fair. As I gathered information I thought of doing an ebook to sell, which is part of how I earn my living. But when I realized how few people actually are prepared to survive just a few days without water coming in their pipes, I thought I would rather give it away and thus reach a much wider audience.

The ebook is just over 20 pages and to give you an idea of what it covers, here are the chapter titles:

1. Why Store Any Water When You Probably Won’t Need It?
2. How Much Water Should You Store in Your Home?
3. Simple Ways to Store Water in Your Home
4. Storing Water Outside
5. Treating Stored Water
6. Maintaining Your Emergency Water Storage: A Few Minutes Twice a Year
7. Checklist of Things to Do
8. Resource Guide

I was writing this last week as Hurricane Irene was heading up the East Coast of the US. Some of the people in that region would have had an easier time of it if they had stored some water. Who will need this information next? If you find the ebook useful, please post a comment here!

This article came from: Emergency Water Storage at Home: Download My Free E-Book Here at SimpleGreenLiving.com..

In one of the most beautifully created books I’ve seen short of expensive art books, she writes about how she and her family became the core of what became the SSE. Her passion for saving valuable old heirloom seeds and keeping them from dying out runs through just about every page of the book. I was moved and inspired.

I’ve gardened mainly with heritage seeds and so unknowingly I am one of the many who owe these dedicated people a big thank you!

The book is personal autobiography woven with the story of meetings, a house where seed collections threatened to take over every inch that Ott Whealy, her husband Kent, and their children lived in! Since she and I are of the same generation, I specially enjoyed her stories of different eras.

A terrific, important, and visually pleasing book, highly recommended! It’s available at http://www.seedsavers.org/Details.aspx?itemNo=B1392. And while you’re there, browse around the site and learn more about this group. You might want to become a member or buy some wonderful seeds.

This article came from: Gathering: Memoir of a Seed Saver, by Diane Ott Whealy at SimpleGreenLiving.com..

Here is what happened: a few weeks ago, I got an email from a man named Dan Philipps, who described himself as a genealogist by hobby. He had come to that About Us page while searching for Sunshine Camp in Forestville. As he wrote me:

In the 1930s my grandfather’s cousin (Rev. Charles Philipps) was the Catholic priest and pastor of Saint Sebastian’s in Sebastopol. Somewhere during that time he obtained via foreclosure the property that became Sunshine Camp. From the 1930s to 1958  he ran the camp and each summer would bring children from the poorer areas of Oakland and San Francisco for camps on the Russian River. After he died in 1958 the Catholic Church kept the camp going until the early 1970s.  At that point the land was sold. From your site’s information it sounds as if you were living there for seven years shortly after that.

In the last few years I have made contact with this priest’s relatives in France and they are coming for their first visit this September. They had some pictures from Sunshine Camp (very rustic looking accommodations) and would like to go and see it while they are here.

He wanted to know just where Sunshine Camp was, so I wrote him back with the street address and recently he visited the camp and took some photos. The photo at the start of this article is one he took of the row of cabins that Kelly and I later lived in, and here are a couple of photos of the same part of the camp, from a book that my (then) brother-in-law, Roland Jacopetti, wrote with two friends while we lived at Sunshine Camp, Rescued Buildings:

Just as interesting to me was further information that Dan sent us from a book called The Radical Peasant by Gerald F. Cox, about Father Philipps, or Charlie as he was widely called. Evidently he was a very colorful and dedicated man. I’ve just ordered that book from Amazon to find out more. Nice to think that the place where we had so much fun had been started by someone with such dedication and flair!

[Update: I read the book and here is its link at Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Radical-Peasant-Gerald-F-Cox/dp/1412095573/ The book is a labor of love by a priest who knew Charlie well.]

I think I will let Roland have the last word. This is the start of his discussion of Sunshine Camp from Rescued Buildings, which is out of print but available online:

This article came from: Sunshine Camp Revisited Because of the Internet at SimpleGreenLiving.com..

And the music! There are familiar local groups, hot regional groups, and national headliners. This year, Tower of Power was here from California for Saturday night. There’s something magical about dancing outside at sunset, with people you know around you, also dancing to the beat of some jazz, salsa, or other lively music. Of course, people come from other towns, too.. and we know some of them.

This year, we had a family member visiting from out of town. She commented at one point about the “vibrant old hippies” in the crowds. I guess I’m used to that, as I noticed more how many young children were running around, how many babies were being held as adults danced with them.

The festival is put on by a dedicated group of hard-working people, and all their efforts pay off in one of the most joyous events on my calendar! I’m already looking forward to next year.

This article came from: A Sense of Community from a Small Town Music Festival at SimpleGreenLiving.com..