You may have heard the term before, but what is brackish water? Simply it is a mixture of both saltwater and freshwater. Naturally brackish conditions create a unique habitat for plant and animal life. On the other-hand, brackish conditions that are created by humans typically harms the pre-existing environmental habitat-permanently, or many years after the...
Herbs can be used for a variety of purposes: as culinary flavoring, adding spice and depth to meals, or as medicine to treat or prevent common ailments. Having a home medicine chest of medicinal plants is extremely useful and growing ones own herbs and preserving them for later use past their normal expiration time are...
If you use herbs, either medicinally, or as food, or both, but either don’t have the available space or climate to do so outdoors, growing herbs indoors may be right for you. Indoor gardening allows you to tightly control your growing environment to a degree where you could coax even fussy plants to grow by...
Pickling is a wide-ranging and widely-practiced form of food preservation. When we pickle whole foods, such as produce like cucumbers, or other garden vegetables, or fish, or meats (like pork), we take the bounty of summer months and save it, extending the availability of those perishable goods into the seasons when such food is unavailable...
Tomatoes are the classic summer crop. As flavorful as they are bountiful in the summer months, there is no substitute for a fresh, homegrown heirloom tomato variety paired with fresh basil and olive oil. Especially when you contrast it to the tomatoes that are available during winter; hybridized varieties that were produced for durability during...
Neem is a useful plant. It’s an evergreen tree endemic to the Indian subcontinent and distributed throughout tropical ecosystems. Neem oil, the most notable derivative of the plant, is made from pressing the fruits and seeds of the plant. Neem oil has been used in India traditionally in Ayurvedic medicinal practice to treat a variety...
Canning food is a reliable form of food preservation. By taking the bounty of the fat times, the summer months and converting them into jellies, pickles, sauces, stocks and other products, you can store up a reserve of food for the lean times, winter months when few, if any, crops will grow. It’s a labor-intensive...
Oil, a natural resource, becomes unnatural when it leaves the depths of the Earth and into the living surface for industrial purpose. The most obvious and devastating depiction of this is an oil spill in the ocean, however large commercial pipelines can break anywhere, destructing everything in its path. Why do such accidents occur and...
You’ve probably heard the word before, ‘deciduous’ but forgot it’s meaning. The definition of deciduous when it comes to trees is, ‘one that sheds it’s leaves annually’ or ‘tending to fall off’. In contrast to the evergreen, that keeps it’s green needles throughout the year, a deciduous tree goes through the winter looking a stark...
Piles of leaves are either a chore to clean up or a pleasure to jump into, depending who you are. Each fall, leaves throughout the world turn bright orange, red and yellows displaying the best of fall colors before losing their leaves and scattering the ground with a natural multch. It’s a natural pattern that...
To make yogurt, you’ll need milk. Whatever the amount of milk you use will be the amount of yogurt it yields. For this recipe, we’ll use a half gallon. You’ll also need some store-bought yogurt with active cultures. You’ll also need two pots which can nest within one another, to create a double-boiler and a...
Think of some of your favorite foods. Yogurt, bread, sauerkraut, pickles. Drinks? Beer, cider, kombucha. What do they have in common? They’re fermented. Fermentation not only makes food nutritious and tasty, it’s also an ancient form of food preservation, born from time-honored rituals that were practiced long before anyone could grasp microbiology. There is evidence...
