Green Bookworms Come Together

The Blogging Bookworm is a group of people interested in 'green' books. There are lists of good books, reviews, discussion, and even some book giveaways.

Check it out and add some environmental books to your reading list.

Good Reads: Notes From Little Lakes

This past winter was long, stretching it's cold fingers into spring. This wonderful book, Notes From Little Lakes, by Mel Ellis, helped me through the long cold season.

The author's descriptions of his homestead in Wisconsin (not that far from me!) brings alive a world of color and beauty. The book it set up like a journal, and takes you through the seasons of the land, animals, and his family. It inspired me to write more about my own little homestead and natural beauty of Wisconsin.

• Notes from Little Lakes: The Story of a Family and Fifteen Acres (Outdoor Essays & Reflections)

Sustainable Living Challenge

This blog is a record of my journey to add a little bit of 'the way it used to be' to my modern life. I want to get back to when we, didn't spend so much money we don't have on things we don't need. Back when we went outside, knew our neighbors and saw more wildlife. Back to shopping on main street, and eating real nutritious food.

Sustainable Living Challenge
This year, my sister Sarah and I have been working on (and just now getting organized) our personal plans to become more sustainable. We will be reporting our progress in our newsletter Handcrafts & All Things Green. Sign up for updates there by entering your email in the top left corner (be sure to watch for an email confirmation in your inbox!).

Basic Goals of the Sustainable Living Challenge:

1. Be Healthy
2. Maintain an Efficient and Sustainable Home
3. Benefit the Environment
4. Save Money
5. Support Community
6. Live a Simple & Enjoyable Life
7. Encourage and Inspire others

We made goals based on our different situations, but we challenge you to come up with your own Sustainable Living Challenge. Feel free to add comments or email us anytime.

Ideas from the Garden Show

My sister and I made our way down to the 2008 Chicagoland Flower and Garden Show this week to try to get a glimpse of spring and some inspiration for the year.

My favorites this year:

Hyacinths! I just love the bright color and the sharp fragrance of the hyacinth that were massed in the garden displays.

Succulents- Tiny cactus, jade, hens and chicks and other succulents abound this year. I'm going to try a container garden with these cute little plants.

I absolutely love this color combination with the brown pussy willow branches and yellow-green dogwood. Must be my favorite color palate this year, my favorite table design display was this ensemble of greens and browns, complete with fruit and feathers as accents!

Oxalis violaceae- huge purple leaves as pretty and showy as flowers.

Beautiful colorful butterflies- I could look at these displays all day, simply fascinating creatures.


This little mini-garden with wine corks and moss gave me an idea for what to do with the corks I just can't throw away!


Water features with systems that collect and recycle rainwater.

New Online Photo Gallery

I am proud to announce my new photo gallery online- where you can order different sized prints of my photos, and other items made with my photos such as greeting cards, puzzles, and mugs.

Check out my Gallery:

• Orchids and Houseplants
  
• Nature in My Backyard
  
• Outdoor Adventures
  

Feel free to contact me about projects including photo books, personalized cards custom photos, announcements, or other items.

My Favorite Sunsets

Click here to view this photo book.

Valentine's Day

I just finished my photoshoot with my new orchid that appeared on Valentine's Day. It is a beautiful deep pink Moth Orchid (Phalaenopsis) with five big blooms on a graceful arching stem. Multiple buds promise a long beautiful display.

What a perfect present! I hinted that I didn't want anything expensive or commercial, and a live plant is a gift that keeps giving for years. I am not big on this holiday, but something like this is simple, sweet, and I will enjoy it for a really long time.

Trip to Glacier Park- MT

I know, it took me a while to put this together! In August of 2007 I was fortunate to go on a trip to Montana and see and hike the amazing trails at Glacier National Park in Montana. Here is my photojournal from this amazing trip. (Click below and then hit Full Screen to see it a little closer up)

Click here to view this photo book.

Good Reads- Woodswoman

Woodswoman is a great book I found at my favorite used book store. I recently finished this wonderful book by Ecologist Anne LaBastille about her adventures in the Adirondack Mountains. She takes you with her on a journey of self discovery and wilderness survival with accounts of great beauty, harsh reality, and some humorous events. The author builds her own log cabin in the wilderness, survives winter alone, lives simply and frugally, bonds with the mountains, trees, and wildlife (a pet fox!), and explores the wilderness on foot and by canoe with her dog Pitzi. A great read in the winter, it made me appreciate the conveniences of my furnace and indoor plumbing, while at the same time inspired daydreams about adventures of my own in the quiet of the woods.

Quote:

"The glow is stronger now and a pearly pink light tinges the hills around Black Bear Lake. Three days of spring sun and the trees will leaf right out, practically bypassing that lovely, innocent period of frothy, pastel, baby-tender foliage. Instead they will turn quickly into a serious, deep green, adult covering. There is very little time for immaturity in the North Country. Life is hard, rough, and sober."

LaBastille, Anne. Woodswoman- A Young Ecologist Meets The Challenge of Living Alone in the Adirondack Wilderness. New York: Penguin Books, 1976

Fun Garden Blogging

Here are some cute blogs that I have come across about gardening

Good 'n' Planty by the Web Editor of organicgardening.com (Also a useful site)

• My favorite post- 'Name that Tweet' with a link to a bird song quiz

You Grow Girl

• My favorite post- Automatic Seed Starting Chart- the latest addition to my garden notebook
  

What to Eat?

One of my favorite authors, Michael Pollan, has explored many angles of the question 'What to Eat?' in his books and also his articles for the New York Times. His writings have opened my eyes to the reality of where my food comes from. 'The Omnivore's Dilemma' is a great read, interesting and informative, and I would highly recommend it.

Pollan's next book, which I am eagerly anticipating, will be “In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto.” Go to the authors website for a list of books and articles.

Here are some excerpts from my favorite articles:

'Weed It and Reap' (Published: November 4, 2007, New York Times)

"Americans have begun to ask why the farm bill is subsidizing high-fructose corn syrup and hydrogenated oils at a time when rates of diabetes and obesity among children are soaring, or why the farm bill is underwriting factory farming (with subsidized grain) when feedlot wastes are polluting the countryside and, all too often, the meat supply. For the first time, the public health community has raised its voice in support of overturning farm policies that subsidize precisely the wrong kind of calories (added fat and added sugar), helping to make Twinkies cheaper than carrots and Coca-Cola competitive with water. Also for the first time, the international development community has weighed in on the debate, arguing that subsidized American exports are hobbling cotton farmers in Nigeria and corn farmers in Mexico."

'You Are What You Grow' (Published: April 22, 2007, New York Times)

"A few years ago, an obesity researcher at the University of Washington named Adam Drewnowski ventured into the supermarket to solve a mystery. He wanted to figure out why it is that the most reliable predictor of obesity in America today is a person's wealth. For most of history, after all, the poor have typically suffered from a shortage of calories, not a surfeit. So how is it that today the people with the least amount of money to spend on food are the ones most likely to be overweight?

Drewnowski gave himself a hypothetical dollar to spend, using it to purchase as many calories as he possibly could. He discovered that he could buy the most calories per dollar in the middle aisles of the supermarket, among the towering canyons of processed food and soft drink. (In the typical American supermarket, the fresh foods--dairy, meat, fish and produce--line the perimeter walls, while the imperishable packaged goods dominate the center.) Drewnowski found that a dollar could buy 1,200 calories of cookies or potato chips but only 250 calories of carrots. Looking for something to wash down those chips, he discovered that his dollar bought 875 calories of soda but only 170 calories of orange juice."

'Unhappy Meals' (Published: January 28, 2007, New York Times)

"Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.
That, more or less, is the short answer to the supposedly incredibly complicated and confusing question of what we humans should eat in order to be maximally healthy. I hate to give away the game right here at the beginning of a long essay, and I confess that I'm tempted to complicate matters in the interest of keeping things going for a few thousand more words. I'll try to resist but will go ahead and add a couple more details to flesh out the advice. Like: A little meat won't kill you, though it's better approached as a side dish than as a main. And you're much better off eating whole fresh foods than processed food products. That's what I mean by the recommendation to eat ''food.'' Once, food was all you could eat, but today there are lots of other edible foodlike substances in the supermarket. These novel products of food science often come in packages festooned with health claims, which brings me to a related rule of thumb: if you're concerned about your health, you should probably avoid food products that make health claims. Why? Because a health claim on a food product is a good indication that it's not really food, and food is what you want to eat."

'The Vegetable-Industrial Complex' (Published: October 15, 2006, New York Times)

"Wendell Berry once wrote that when we took animals off farms and put them onto feedlots, we had, in effect, taken an old solution--the one where crops feed animals and animals' waste feeds crops--and neatly divided it into two new problems: a fertility problem on the farm, and a pollution problem on the feedlot. Rather than return to that elegant solution, however, industrial agriculture came up with a technological fix for the first problem--chemical fertilizers on the farm. As yet, there is no good fix for the second problem, unless you count irradiation and Haccp plans and overcooking your burgers and, now, staying away from spinach. All of these solutions treat E. coli 0157:H7 as an unavoidable fact of life rather than what it is: a fact of industrial agriculture."