Earth Day ‘08

In honor of Earth Day (April 22) and Earth Week (April 20-26), I went on over to EPA’s Earth Day Events & Volunteer Opportunities page to see what’s happening in my neck of the woods. I live in region 4, which includes the entire southeast plus Kentucky. If you’d like to pick up on some opportunities in your region, just click on the map and the list comes up.

In Atlanta the Children’s Museum is sponsoring one of the biggest regional events for kids. EPA has a character called “Mother Earth” who will distribute vegetable seeds and help children plant them in pots, and she’ll be giving away sun visors for the “SunWise Parade” through the museum. Sounds like fun, but I’ve no little kids and it’s way too far to drive.

Lots happening in Florida, but I won’t be there until Saturday - for a funeral, alas. Knoxville isn’t that far to go for their Earthfest event on Saturday, but I’ll be in Florida then. Oh, well. Looks like there’s just not much happening - at least, nothing government sponsored - in my Western North Carolina mountains. But wow! I’m looking out my window right now at the new green baby leaves on my hardwood forest, at gorgeous sprays of white-white dogwood scattered throughout, the red azaleas are in full dress around my garden bench, the tulips and cala lilies and jonquils are everywhere, wildflowers are popping up in the garden terraces where I didn’t plant them…

There are some great ideas available on the International Earth Day site, and interesting news and projects on the EarthdayNetwork website.

Hmmm. I’m guessing the best thing I could do today is sip some nice fresh mint tea while sitting on my garden bench planning all the hard work I need to do to get the place in order. It’s a perfect 72 degrees and the sun is intermittent. Happy Earth Day and Earth Week, all you hopeless nature-lovers!

Links:

Earth Day goes political and corporate
International Earth Day
EarthdayNetwork
EPA’s Earth Day Events & Volunteer Opportunities

Cool “Eco-Tourism” Ideas for Homesteaders

I’ve been looking around at vacation ideas, delighted to discover a nifty partnership and grant program involving folks like the Ag department, the cooperative extension services, the park and forest services and even state and local arts councils, which they’re cleverly calling “Agritourism”. It’s really quite the innovative way to put some capital and ideas to work in the rural sector. Innovative, that is, unless you’re old enough to remember the Great Depression and FDR’s New Deal.

I know that a lot of committed homesteaders spend their vacation time working on the ’stead instead of jaunting off to ski in Switzerland or tromping through the Amazon, but it’s really nice to take a few days off and at least get off the property for awhile. And the best part of supporting initiatives like agritourism is that it’s really, truly Green!

Even better, it’s Green without costing a bundle. It always seems kind of funny to me when things show up in my searches (this time it was “green vacations”) that simply don’t apply to anybody I know or hope to know in the idle rich jet-setter category. Ah, well. Maybe “Green” jet-setting is a new fad like bottled water - you know, the dumb things people do to look really cool without a thought to whether it’s actually cool or not. For instance…

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Ready, Willing and Able: Part II

What Kind of Emergencies Are We Preparing For?

In Part I of this series on being prepared for the storms of nature and humanity that may require us to take care of ourselves and our families for days or weeks at a time, we looked at the idea of “Survival Kits” and where those should be kept so that we’re never far from them if ever we need them.

On a scale of likely types of emergencies or disasters homesteaders (and the rest of society) might face, it’s best to be prepared for the ones that would present the most significant survival challenges when planning on what to put into our survival kits. That way the lesser emergencies will seem positively trivial in comparison, and the whole family will become ‘expert’ at getting through tough times. Some examples on that scale -

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Ready, Willing and Able (to Survive)

Making sure you can weather the storms: Part I

It took the government six days to get water to storm refugees in New Orleans while people were dying. How many people know that many sectarian relief organizations were trying hard to get into the city with trucks full of supplies, food, water and preparation trailers the moment the rain stopped? FEMA wouldn’t let them in, confiscated the supplies and sent the volunteers home. I recall wondering at the time if perhaps the government was doing this on purpose - using the opportunity of the Katrina disaster to teach us all a lesson about taking care of ourselves. Then I came to the conclusion that they were simply incompetent and just didn’t care. THAT, I strongly suspect, is the most valuable lesson any of us can learn!

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A Log Cabin Christmas

During this 2007 holiday season, it seems the children are all nestled asleep in their beds, with visions of sugar plums dancing in their heads… oh, wait. You say the “children” are all teenagers now, terminally bored with Christmas and expecting a 10-gig iPod loaded with every album too objectionable to be played in public, plus keys to your a car and $400 worth of “Prison Chic” pants that hang somewhere around the thighs and show off their underwear?

Did the fudge never set, so you had to run to the store to buy enough ice cream to disguise the un-set fudge as super chocolate syrup? Were those tollhouse cookies hard as a rock, breaking grandpa’s dentures with the first bite? Did cousin Jim finish off the entire bottle of rum you’d brought for eggnog before passing out under the tree? Did the dog eat that perfect glazed ham before you could get it into the oven to heat? Did it snow during the night and hide all the firewood you’d stacked somewhere in the yard for the Christmas Eve fire? Are the in-laws insisting on watching Enemy of the State as a “Christmas Movie” instead of It’s a Wonderful Life for the 16th time?

Be of good cheer, enjoy yourself anyway, and…

Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night!

Your Perfect Homestead Christmas Tree

It’s now just one week until Christmas Eve. Have you found and installed your Christmas tree yet? The holidays around this homestead require a tree that must go up the week before Christmas and come down a week after Christmas, so let me lend a few homestead hints on that particular subject…

Our family stopped buying commercially produced Christmas trees as soon as we moved to our homestead in serious Christmas tree country. They’re a regular Big Cash Crop here, but take years to grow and a lot of work trimming so they’ll have just the right thickness and shape. Heck, there are Christmas tree farms in our immediate region that’ll let you come in with a hand saw and cut your own!

But that’s not what we do. We do have a cathedral ceiling in our little living room from when the loft was built, so we like our trees to be 15 feet tall. But even though Scotch pines and hemlocks and Frasier Firs grow wild on our property and in the forest around us, they’re rangy and thin from growing in a forest. You’ll have this if you don’t carefully trim your growing trees in view of future Christmases.

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Getting Rid of the Mind-Waster

And Freeing Up Some Money Too!

When our son and daughter were children barely starting school (and long before MTV or cable, VCRs or DVDs), I tossed our television down the basement stairs one evening in total disgust.

It had been some adult-like (English speaking) company for me when they were in diapers and my husband was often out at sea, I’d somehow become addicted to it to the point where it was turned on first thing in the morning and stayed on until bedtime. No matter what the actual quality of programming might be.

Back in those days there was a dinnertime contestant program called “The Gong Show” that was a forerunner to current terminally awful “American Idol” audition segments. I’d prepared a nice dinner and sat down with the children to ingest when I suddenly realized the television ‘background noise’ accompanying our meal was an obese, middle-aged woman burping the national anthem.

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The Homesteader’s Medicine Chest

People who choose to live close to the land, to do for themselves as much as possible, and to learn to live in harmony with nature will also tend to want to assume some responsibility for their own health maintenance whenever they can. This commitment may play out in the garden by growing a variety of healthful foods and culinary herbs, and many homesteaders will also cultivate a variety of useful medicinal herbs while they’re at it - because they can.

Those who have chosen a rural environment and have managed to gain control over several acres of land will also want to become familiar with the many useful wild herbs that grow in their region and perhaps even on their property. Some of these are endangered in the wild due to over-harvesting (ginseng roots, for instance, are worth their weight in gold in the medicinal market), so you’ll be happy to learn that a good many homesteaders are making good economic use of their patches of shady woods and forested acres to cultivate these wild herbs as cash crops or homestead medicines.

There is a good deal of information out there about cultivated garden herbs, some linked below. Here I’d like to talk about the usually wild, forest-grown offerings, particularly Mayapple, goldenseal, ginseng and black cohosh.

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