Chelsea Green Blog
Posts
Building A Solar Oven: A Weekend DIY Project
Want to cook your food for free? By building a simple and affordable solar oven, you can use the power of the sun to slow-cook beans and stews and more. This step-by-step guide, illustrated by Rebekah Hren, will show you how to build the oven plus some tips on how to use it. Happy solar…
Read More
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…
Read More
Make Your Own Shoes: When Technology Fails
Matthew Stein’s book, When Technology Fails: A Manual for Self-Reliance, Sustainability, and Surviving the Long Emergency, offers this quick guide to making your own shoes. The book is packed with useful tips for saving money, living a sustainable lifestyle, and surviving in a savage, Road Warrior-like dystopia. We hope that will never happen, but if…
Read More
Recipe: Squash Ravioli
The following is an excerpt from In Late Winter We Ate Pears: A Year of Hunger and Love by Deirdre Heekin and Caleb Barber. It has been adapted for the Web. Tortelli di Zucca Squash Ravioli Around the elegant northern city of Mantova these ravioli are called Tortelli alla Mantovana, “in the style of Mantova.”…
Read More
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…
Read More
Make Your Own Root Beer: Celebrate the Wort Moon!
Much of what we know about the moon consists of when it’s waning, when it’s waxing, and that a full moon makes people do strange things. And while it’s common knowledge (and not just on cheesy astrology websites) we have a connection to the moon, it’s hard to know exactly what it is, without sounding…
Read More
Traditional Italian Sponge Cake Soaked in Liqueur
Is your happy hour missing something? You’re sitting there, enjoying a glass of wine, a pint of beer, or a snifter of scotch — depending upon your tastes. The cares of the week are melting away as you slip under the spell of alcohol, one of the human race’s most ancient and most reliable methods…
Read More
Blood Moon Recipe from Full Moon Feast: Swedish Meatballs
The following recipe was adapted for the Web from Full Moon Feast: Food and the Hunger for Connection by Jessica Prentice. In midautumn, when the air is growing colder and the nights longer, comes the Blood Moon. Also called the Hunter’s Moon by indigenous peoples in the eastern woodlands, it was a time when northern…
Read MoreWaste, An Excerpt from The Carbon-Free Home.
Ever wonder why we humans insist on wasting our human waste? Well, no. Probably not. But I have. And so have Stephen and Rebekah Hren, authors of our new release The Carbon-Free Home: 36 Remodeling Projects to Help Kick the Fossil-Fuel Habit. The following excerpted chapter makes clear that—given the right technologies—we can put our…
Read More
Fermented Foods: Health Benefits & Cultural Rehabilitation
When we talk about “culture,” we’re talking about everything humans have ever created to make their lives a little nicer, from painting, to music and literature, and including food traditions. We also use the word “culture” to describe foods that are alive with beneficial bacteria. It’s no coincidence. Humans have been working together with health-giving…
Read More
10 Sheep Cheeses, An Excerpt from The Atlas of American Artisan Cheese
Until the end of the month, all of our tempting cheese books are 25% off. One of them is The Atlas of American Artisan Cheese by Jeffrey Roberts. Below is an excerpt from the book, featuring 10 cheesemakers who work with sheep: The Atlas of American Artisan Cheese is available in our bookstore–25% off until…
Read More
Drying Herbs and Flowers
The following is an excerpt from Preserving Food Without Freezing or Canning by the Gardeners & Farmers of Terre Vivante. It has been adapted for the web. A few guidelines: Pick plants in the morning, when it is dry and sunny and they are at their peak, depending on the plant and the part that…
Read More
A New Kind of Pickles! Hurray, Hurrah!
Your pregnant girlfriend loves them. Your mother loves them. Your friends and your house guests and your children love them. They store well, they last long, and they’re perfect in potato salad. Pickles–the magical fermented sour (or sweet) treat. But have you ever made a pickle a la Sandor Katz? Because, ehem, he’s sort of…
Read More
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?…
Read More
Old Nalgene Bottles: 5 Ways to Reuse Them
The water bottle that (kind of) defined a generation…is really a killer. Last year, toxic plastic struck close to home. In April 2008, the FDA deemed Nalgene water bottles—those awesome, never-break, never-leak containers you had come to depend on—as unsafe for use, due to dangerous levels of toxicity in the plastic. Durability, in other words,…
Read More
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…
Read More
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…
Read More
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…
Read More
Heat Your Home and Water with the Wind
Paul Gipe, wind energy expert and author of Wind Energy Basics: A Guide to Home- and Community-Scale Wind Energy Systems, introduced me to the idea of using the power of the wind to heat your home or hot water. Solar domestic hot water systems have been gaining in popularity in recent months due to the…
Read More
The Importance of Community Values and Natural Work
The following is the foreword to Dave Pollard’s Finding the Sweet Spot: The Natural Entrepreneur’s Guide to Responsible, Sustainable, Joyful Work by Dave Smith—and entrepreneur and co-founder of Smith & Hawken. It has been adapted for the web. During the seventies—when high unemployment and energy shortages were a daily fact of life—some friends and I started…
Read More
A1 Cow’s Milk May Account for a Range of Serious Illnesses
The following is an excerpt from Devil in the Milk: Illness, Health, and the Politics of A1 and A2 Milk by Keith Woodford. It has been adapted for the Web. What North Americans should be concerned about is that North American milk is very high in A1 beta-casein, and no one is doing anything about…
Read More
Green-Tech and Distributed Powerdown: A Future Scenario
In Future Scenarios, permaculture co-originator and leading sustainability innovator David Holmgren outlines four scenarios that bring to life the likely cultural, political, agricultural, and economic implications of peak oil and climate change, and the generations-long era of “energy descent” that faces us. The following is an excerpt from Future Scenarios: How Communities Can Adapt to…
Read More
5 Things You’ll Need to Get Back on Your Bike: Spring Is (Almost) Here!
It’s mud season in Vermont—also known as late winter/early spring in other parts of these here United States—but spring is just around the corner. That’s the thought that keeps getting me out of bed every morning. It’s time to get the ol’ bike out of mothballs, grease up your chain, fill up your tires, and…
Read More
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.…
Read More
Building for the Future: Fire-Resistant Green Building
The following is an excerpt from When Technology Fails: A Manual for Self-Reliance, Sustainability, and Surviving the Long Emergency by Matthew Stein. It has been adapted for the Web. In October 1993, when a vicious wildfire broke out in Laguna Beach, a southern California beach town, firefighter John Henderson was called down from his home…
Read More