Cultivate Simple 32: It’s The Little Things
Small changes you can make to live a healthier life:
- First off, don’t get too crazy!
- Don’t believe everything you read, adopting the latest and greatest “health” craze isn’t your best option.
- Incorporate herbs and spices into your diet whenever you can – SPICE IT UP!
- Add more whole vegetables into your diet, particularly for breakfast.
- Add fermented and or cultured food to every meal.
- Add gelatin to your diet as often as possible.
- Swap out tea and herbal tea for water when you can.
Links
- South River Miso for unpasteurized naturally fermented miso & tamari
- Mt Rose Herbs for organic spices and teas. I love their vitablend & seasons of discontent tea.
- Coconut Oil from Tropical Traditions
- The Berkey Guy. Berkey water filters are awesome!
- Big Berkey Water Filter
Brian’s Geeky Corner
Recommended Books
Any healthy living tips you’d like to share?
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:41:01 — 70.1MB)
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Quote of the Day: Joan Dye Gussow
Vegetable gardens are much more important that houses in the overall scheme of things. Agriculture is the foundation of civilization. Houses come and go, but soil must be cherished if food is to be grown for us to eat.
Joan Dye Gussow from This Organic Life: Confessions of a Suburban Homesteader
This is certainly the case here, we are putting off any work on the house and investing our time heavily in the garden, particularly the edible spaces. We know that time invested now will pay of tenfold in the future, especially when it comes to investing in our soil.
I’m already harvesting bountiful salads, both for me and the neighbors. On Friday I traded a big bowl of lettuce for some of my neighbor’s rhubarb. A wonderful trade indeed. I do have rhubarb plants to put in the ground here, but it will be a few years before I’ll be making any pies from them.
How important is your vegetable garden to you?
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Chick Update
The chicks are doing really well, they are now outside 100% of the time. Dailon built a movable chicken coop, following the instructions in the back of Harvery Ussery’s The Small-Scale Poultry Flock. So far we like it, there roosts inside and nesting boxes with outside access. We don’t really need to worry about eggs any time soon, these chickies are just about 5 weeks old.
I love that they’re roosting and acting like little tiny chickens. They scratch, dust bathe, chase insects and they are even establishing a pecking order. It is nice to have them be fully outside and more or less taking care of themselves.
It has been fun to watch these little guys/gals grow up, we’re looking forward to the upcoming months to watch their transformation into teenage chickens.
What’s your favorite animal to watch grow up?
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Happy Anniversary!
Yesterday, Mr Chiots and I celebrated out 15th wedding anniversary. Well, celebrate is a strong word. We actually just went about our usual business, celebrations are not really our thing. Even though I’m the one that writes all the posts and takes most of the photos, Mr Chiots is a big part of this blog and puts in lots of hours. Case in point, many of you probably couldn’t get to the website last night or this morning. Our web hosting company moved our sites to a new server and messed everything up. Thankfully, Mr Chiots knows what he’s doing and spent many hours on the phone and chatting with the company trying to get things fixed (amazing when he knows more than the company we’re paying to manage our server).
Anyways, a big thanks to Mr Chiots for dealing with all the behind the scenes parts of the blog and podcast to keep things running as smoothly as they can. If we hadn’t married 15 years ago, this blog would not exist – so I suppose our anniversary is a rather important thing for Chiot’s Run!
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Worms, Worms, Worms
Back in Ohio, the earthworm population in our garden was just starting to grow thanks to our organic gardening methods and our use of leaf mulch each fall. Each year, I would still purchase Encapsulated Earthworm Cocoons to increase the worm populations. Last year I had a container that never got planted, they made the trip with us in a box with the rest of our fridge contents.
I planted them on Tuesday. This is a great way to jump start the worm population in your garden if you’re bringing it back from the dead and increasing soil fertility.
Other things you can do to help increase the worm populations:
- mulch with leaf litter each fall
- don’t till or work the soil
- avoid chemical fertilizers and herbicides at all costs
- trench compost your kitchen scraps
We seem to have a decent worm population here, though the chickens eat their share of them. No doubt the more we start mulching with chopped leaves and the longer the soil goes without too much tilling/working, the more robust the earthworm population will be. They are such valuable assets in the garden, well worth the effort to encourage them!
Do you notice lots of worms in your garden?
