Happy, happy International Permaculture Day! !
Have you been doing anything to celebrate (maybe even if you didn’t know it was today)? Continue reading
It’s International Permaculture Day!
Tag Archives: Health
Farm to Table Through the Year – Free Ebook!
Today I’m happy to announce the debut of a new ebook, Farm to Table Through the Year: 12 Months of Fresh Food From the Garden. This helpful book is a collection of growing tips, recipes, and inspiration for each of the 12 months of the year. Continue reading
Homemade Yogurt in a Crockpot – Four Steps
Yogurt is an excellent way to promote proper functioning of your digestive system. As long as you’re eating yogurt that has live active cultures, it contains probiotics (aka beneficial bacteria) that help to balance the microflora in your gut. This makes digestion easier and helps keep your system moving regularly.
Making your own yogurt ensures that you know where your milk came from, and also reduces your reliance on continually buying hundreds of little yogurt containers. By knowing where your milk comes from, you can be sure to choose milk from grass-fed cows. Not only are grass-fed cows generally living a higher-quality, free-ranging life where they are eating what they should be naturally (i.e. grass and not corn or soy which also increases your exposure to GMOs), but grass-fed cows also produce milk that is more nutritionally dense. For example, most grass-fed cow milk contains nearly 5x more conjugated linoleic acid (CLA), an unsaturated fat that may help with heart health and assist with weight loss. Continue reading
What is Balance?
As we move closer to the Spring Equinox and many struggle to feel content and whole in the last days of winter’s grasp, I would like to share a guest post by De’Anna L’am. Continue reading
Embracing Winter While Finding the Spirit of Spring
I hear a lot of people bemoan winter weather, but I try to avoid complaining about it. Winter is just another season, the wheel of the year will turn again just as quickly as it always does.
I find it better to embrace the gifts of winter. I allow myself to sleep a bit more knowing that in the days before electricity people were certainly getting a lot more dreaming in this time of year. Why did we decide that we always have to go, go, go? The colder, darker days also allow me to find joy in the ample time to read, sew, journal, and dream of plans for the future. This extra inward-focused time will quickly pass when spring comes! Continue reading
“Heart Your Heart” Herbal Sprinkles
Food is medicine.
It’s true. What we put into our bodies will have consequences for our energy levels, ability to ward off diseases, and maintain homeostasis in our body’s systems. We know this immediately if we pay attention to how we feel after eating poorly or well — we are either drained or renewed, weighed down or weightless. And of course, there are new studies added almost every day that link poor diet to the diseases we see so frequently in our culture that often revolve around a cluster of symptoms we call metabolic syndrome.
Adding herbs to our diets is an easy way to benefit from their protective and healing properties. They can also taste delicious! Continue reading
Clean it Green: Laundry Detergent
We recently went to a Sustainability Symposium at the Botanical Gardens. It was a day filled with a variety of lectures related to the impacts of climate change in Northeast Ohio, gardening, and green living.
One of the lectures discussed green cleaning products. At one point, the presenter showed a picture of what it looks like in the cupboards underneath the sink in a “green” home — lots of cloth rags, vinegar, baking soda, and maybe some borax or washing soda. She then asked, “How many of you have cupboards that look like this?”
I was one of very few people that raised a hand. Hmm…I guess there’s still a lot of educational work to be done! Continue reading
Sprout It Out
The weather remains snowy and cold, but there are fresh things growing indoors!
Sprouts are a wonderful way to introduce a fresh, healthy food to your winter diet. And certainly, if you are aiming to eat a low-carbon diet that incorporates lots of local foods, sprouts are an ideal way to continue eating fresh through the winter months.
They’re also really good for you! The most common types of sprouting seeds (mixes of radish, alfalfa, clover, broccoli, legumes) are rich in nutrition containing:
- Vitamin A, Vitamin C, Vitamin K, Vitamin B1, Vitamin B6, Vitamin K
- Minerals such as phosphorus, iron, magnesium, potassium, manganese, and calcium
- Dietary Fiber
- Folate
- Protein
- Antioxidants
- Chlorophyll Continue reading
Permintic Health and Wellness
What does permanent, integrative, and holistic wellness for a sustainable world look like?
There aren’t too many models at the moment, but Permintic Health and Wellness is leading the way with a new vision of what healthcare could be.
Permintic Health and Wellness is one of the next steps in the path that my partner and I are following to foster the change to a sustainable, equitable, and exciting new world that works with the Earth for the benefit of people and planet.
Here is some selected text from the Philosophy page that Michael has written: Continue reading
We Must Be the Change
As I observe people around me, I’ve been noticing a trend –most everybody, in theory, wants to save the Earth. The problem, however, is that far too few people are willing to make the lifestyle changes necessary to ensure a livable future. The appeal of constant financial progress, of fast food and perfectly temperature-controlled rooms is too great. The ease of processed foods, disposable diapers, and commuting by car to work is too alluring. The abundance of cheap clothes, out-of-season foods, electronics, and toxic beauty products is too pervasive to pass by. We have become perpetual children – looking to others to easily assuage our hunger, temperature, and state of mood. We expect governmental regulations or some technological breakthrough to fix global warming and the ecosystem issues we fear. We are unwilling to take the risk that moving toward a new way of living requires. Continue reading
