I've found a great website called Learning Herbs. They have a fun board game called Wildcraft, which is a great way for the family to learn which herbs you would apply to help which ailments. The kids really cracked up when they got "diarrhea" in the game! The site also offers email newsletters with free recipes, as well as some ...

This may come as no surprise to some, but just recently I've noticed that my energy fluctuations, over an entire year, move in sync with the sun. My energy runs pretty high in May and June, right before the longest day of the year (Summer Solstice--June 21). It runs high again in September, I'm guessing because after the hot summer some ...

My friend pointed out to me, growing as a weed in my backyard, the plant called Common Plantain. I had never noticed it before. But it turns out that it is edible (the young leaves in salads or in soups and casseroles), and that it has many various medicinal uses. Part of learning to be self-sufficient means learning about and using wild edibles. ...

Recommended by a friend who knows me well, I've been getting episodes of BBC's The Good Neighbors from Netflix and watching it with my daughter. We're both enjoying it tremendously. I believe this show aired in the 70's. It's about a normal couple living in a suburb. The husband turns 40, and realizes that his life is dull ...

Our back yard is a blank slate of weeds for us to design and reinvent. Last summer I played with making a garden maze. This summer I want to start working on our permanent plans--we're wanting to grow a forest garden, with lots of dwarf fruit trees and bushes. We want a shed with a path. We want to tear up our old concrete patio and add a ...

Mark out the outline of the bed, after you’ve figured it out on paper. You can lay out some of the loose bricks as the outline.Using a trowel or a narrow spade, carefully dig a 2-3” trench about the width of the bricks, following the outline you made. Smooth out the bottom of the trench, making it fairly level with your hands. While ...

I posted before about eating our wild spinach weeds (commonly called Prostrate Pigweed). We’ve gotten so much rain lately I’ve been weeding and eating the pigweed almost every evening for supper, just to keep up with them! Most of the time I wash, chop and throw the plants, stalks and all, into a salad I’m putting together or into a stew. They ...

I’ve been reading and learning about edible landscaping lately. My goal is to grow as much of our own food as I can in our small urban yard. But my husband and I also want the front to look nice, and I have many favorite flowers I’ll want mixed in with the edibles. One of the books I just finished is Edible Wild Plants of the Prairie by ...

Speaking of weeds, I noticed a very aggressive little weed popping up everywhere in my new garden beds. Since weeding them all would be an incredible amount of work, I researched it instead and discovered that it is edible! Commonly called Prostrate Pigweed, it is an Amaranth plant which can serve as a wild spinach in ...

My love for the Middle Ages and adventure comes out in just about everything I do. For example, this summer I decided to plant some vegetable garden beds out back. But why just make several squared plots, when I can design those plots into a maze? So I drew out my maze garden in a Microsoft Word document, 18’x18’, and laid it all out in the ...