Chelsea Green Blog
Farming & Homesteading
Red Delicious: Ester’s Apple Strips
Need the perfect companion to your afternoon cup of joe? Hanne Risgaard’s Home Baked: Nordic Recipes and Techniques for Organic Bread and Pastry has just the thing. Cozy up and use your fall apple harvest to make Ester’s Apple Strips! These strips use sweet-tart apples as the filling for a delicious baked treat.
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Can’t Find the Perfect Garden Tools? Make Your Own
Is hoeing hurting your back? Is your trowel cramping your wrist? Are the tools at your local hardware store just not cutting it? Gardening can be such laborious work, but what you put into your garden is what you get back. With a few simple do-it-yourself modifications you can find and alter your tools to…
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All About Cows: What has Four Legs, Says “Moo,” and Could Save the Planet?
Many of us have been taught that overgrazing, methane-emitting livestock turn green pastures into arid deserts and are responsible for the widespread desertification that threatens precious biodiversity, soil quality, and more. Not so, as Allan Savory explains in his TED Talk, “We were once just as certain that the world was flat. We were wrong…
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Making Yogurt or Kefir Cheese: A Simple How-To
Making your own yogurt is an easy, healthy, and affordable way to experiment with fermentation, make milk last longer, and replace an industrial food product filled with mysterious chemical ingredients with one you know all about. Yogurt itself is a wonderful, versatile food, but you can also turn it into a spread or dip by…
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From Seed to Table: Buckwheat Pancakes
According to a column in Agricultural Research from September 1974, “buckwheat has an amino acid composition nutritionally superior to all cereals, including oats,” due to its high content of lysine. Not only that, but hearty buckwheat pancakes are just as tasty, if not tastier, than those made from wheat. So what are we waiting for?…
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Watering Your Plants: How Important Is It?
There’s an old saying: water, water everywhere, and not a drop to drink. But now with climate change, make that: water, water rapidly disappearing, and more and more gardens popping up that need watering. A terrible rhyme, but a paradox for sure; with the increase of local and small family food production, comes a bigger…
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Sustainable Food: The Movement Toward This System
Respect for the land, for the worker, and for the value of agriculture are some of the underlying principles of Community Supported Agriculture—an increasingly popular movement that helps connect consumers to the growers of sustainable food and fresh, local, and organic produce. The following is an excerpt from Sharing the Harvest: A Citizen’s Guide to…
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The Permaculture Way—Tending Your Personal Garden
An integral aspect of Permaculture—”an approach to designing human settlements and perennial agricultural systems that mimic the relationships found in the natural ecologies”—is the realization that all things are connected. Finding peace in the harmonious systems of your garden is a good entry point for plugging into the interconnectedness of all systems on Earth. The…
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Build Your Own Cold Frame, Part 3: Get a Jump on the Planting Season
For a cold frame to really work, the light has to be just right. It creates the perfect climate to grow your food when the temperatures make it seem impossible. It can be adjusted to allow for ventilation or more closed to prevent snow or large amounts of water from entering and damaging the plants.…
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Grow Berries in Your Low-Light Urban Space
The following is an excerpt from Fresh Food from Small Spaces by R. J. Ruppenthal. It has been adapted for the Web. A central problem for many of us who garden in the city is a lack of light. This is covered extensively in the vegetable chapters. I mention it again here only to note…
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Raise Bees in Your Apartment: Urban Apiculture
Not everyone is a fan of bees, but when you get down to their level, you start to appreciate all that they do for us; pollinating the flowers and giving us delicious honey. Beekeeping is a noble profession or hobby to take on as you are providing a habitat for your colony to thrive. But…
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Growing Shiitake Mushrooms in a Garage or Yard
Learn how to grow shiitake mushrooms in almost any environment, including your yard and even your garage! The following is an excerpt from Fresh Food from Small Spaces by R. J. Ruppenthal. It has been adapted for the web. Some of the most expensive and delicious gourmet mushrooms on the market are shiitakes, which also…
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Replace Your Soap with Soapy Plants
Sick of chemical-filled soaps that leave your hands feeling dirtier than before you washed them? Then we’ve got the project for you! Do it yourself soap with soapy plants! It’s as simple as adding water. The following project is from When Technology Fails by Matthew Stein. It has been adapted for the web. There is…
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Rare and Hard-to-Find Perennial Seed Sources
Eric Toesnmeier, author of Perennial Vegetables: From Artichokes to Zuiki Taro, A Gardener’s Guide to Over 100 Delicious, Easy-to-Grow Edibles, knows the value of a good seed source. So, to encourage interesting selections for your food garden this summer, we thought we’d post this helpful seed source appendix from Perennial Vegetables. From the book: Perennial vegetables…
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Food Shopping: CSA in the Global Supermarket
The following is adapted from Sharing the Harvest: A Citizen’s Guide to Community Supported Agriculture (revised and expanded) by Elizabeth Henderson. I grew up in Croton-on-Hudson, New York, a bedroom suburb of New York City, raised by parents who were deeply committed to the struggle for world peace and economic justice. They were city people…
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Spicy Fried Egg and Tomato: Good Food Corner
Add some punch to a bland winter afternoon. Dust off your frying pan and whip up some Spicy Fired Egg and Tomato for yourself or your family. Taken from This Organic Life by Joan Dye Gussow, this recipe is great for less-than-perfect tomatoes. Ingredients 1 mild green chili pepper 4 tablespoons unrefined corn oil 1…
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