I recently read a fascinating account of the growth of the seed savers movement in the United States. Diane Ott Whealy, who wrote Gathering: Memoir of a Seed Saver, is one of the founders of the Seed Savers Exchange, which you can go to at seedsavers.org.

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. Read the rest >>>

Household cleansers rank high in the lists of toxic substances in most homes. That’s why I was so delighted to see that Clean: The Humble Art of Zen-Cleansing, by Michael de Jong, has received dozens of five-star rankings at Amazon. People comment that they keep the book handy. I’ve added this to my Amazon wishlist and will report in again sometime in the future on how I adopt its many  simple recipes for household cleaning. — Zana

Description

It’s easier than you think to clean your home in a nontoxic, environmentally responsible way! Conceptualized and designed by legendary publishing visionary Joost Elffers—the force behind such bestsellers as Play With Your Food and The 48 Laws of Power—this wonderful guide will help get your house shipshape without hurting the environment or your health. Inspirational cleaning guru Michael de Jong writes with humor and a Zen-like spirit as he presents five safe, all-natural products that take care of just about anything:

• Baking Soda,
• Borax,
• Lemon,
• Salt, and
• White Vinegar.

Each one gets a chapter featuring dozens of clever tips, while a handy alphabetized directory, organized by category, makes it easy to locate the information you need. With its graphically stunning and easy-to-use design, Clean helps you find your spic-and-span center.

Clean: The Humble Art of Zen-Cleansing

The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight, by Thom Hartmann, is a depressing book and an optimistic one.  I found it both VERY depressing and VERY optimistic. When a friend offered to lend it to me,  I wasn’t going to take it till I noticed who had written it. Hartmann is a prolific and profound writer on many subjects.

I took the book and buried it in a large pile until I had the emotional stamina to tackle the state of the world. That was a couple of days ago.  For two days, off and on, I read one discouraging fact after another until my heart was down in my shoes.

“I’m not going to read any more of it today,” I said to my husband at dinner last night. “I want a good night’s sleep and if I read one more example of how the planet is being destroyed, I think I will melt down.”

So I did other things during the evening. But a curiosity was growing in me. He had held out the carrot at the start of the book, that the ending was optimistic. I kept wondering how he was going to pull that off. Read the rest >>>

“Turning Around the Unsustainable American Dream” is the subtitle of The Cul-de-Sac Syndrome (Amazon link) which my husband and I have just been reading. Kelly’s green home building blog has a long review of it, so I just want to reflect on one of its  themes.

I pretty much missed the macmansioning of America. Read the rest >>>

Yesterday, I wandered over to my husband Kelly’s bookshelf in search of something to read. I came away with Climate Change in Prehistory: The End of the Reign of Chaos by William J. Burroughs. In the pages I have read so far, Read the rest >>>

The Cheap-Ass Curmudgeon’s Guide to Dirt: Hand-Building with Adobe, Papercrete, Paper-Adobe, and More, by Michael Van Hall, is a delight.

This downloadable ebook will take you through the steps to make your own simple dirt structure. He doesn’t go into all the details of how to build a house, as he points out that you can find that information everywhere.

This 100-page ebook focuses on… as you might guess from the cover… dirt. With close to 100 photographs and numerous drawings, the book is a relatively quick and very enjoyable read. It will motivate you even if you already are excited about natural building. And it will give you enough information to pile up the dirt with his special method.

(One quibble: he says you can also do this approach with papercrete and other materials. Kelly and I used papercrete as the exterior covering on our earthbag house in Colorado, and we have several friends who built all-papercrete homes. Don’t do it just before the rains come or during the rainy season, as it needs to really really dry or there can be mould problems. If you want to use papercrete, do a lot more homework on it specifically.)

Okay, back to this ebook. After an upbeat introduction with some history, there is an illustrated section on the traditional way to make adobe bricks, with comments on how much work it it – both to make them and to carry them to the building site. Not to mention the patience required to wait for them to be dry enough to use.

Much better, says Michael, is his Self-Locking Pour-in-Place System (trademarked.) Much of the book describes how to do this, and it looks like a lot of fun. Okay, any play with dirt is still going to be a lot of work, but this sounds like fun work!

I specially enjoyed the chapter where he did everything wrong… at least by traditional standards.

Michael’s website is fun too – click here to see what else the cheap-ass curmudgeon has to say, download some chapters of his ebook at no cost, and buy it if you want to.