Toilet paper in the woods: a rant and some advice

...I clean it up when I can, just like I pick up the empty water bottles and beer cans and pint bottles of booze and cigarette butts and those damn plastic flossing devices and everything else people see fit to leave behind whenever they visit nature. I suppose we all have our different priorities and beliefs, but to me, the wilderness is sacred, all of it. Not just pristine wilderness, but parks and roadsides and beaches. I’d no more throw toilet p...

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Did Kelly follow her 2012 resolutions?

...due for a complete overhaul.) This I did. All of it. Yay me. -Organize the labels or tags on Root Simple so our dear, somewhat abused readers can find information when they want it. This I did as part of our overhaul. -No processed sugar for the month of January. Or beer. (sigh) This I did. I’d forgotten. I probably should do it again, because I’ve been having a torrid affair with the cookie jar. -White flour, crackers, tortillas, pasta & etc. are...

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Straw Bale Garden Part III: Adding Fertilizer

...rea, on philosophical grounds, but blood meal, a byproduct of our industrial food system, doesn’t make me feel much better. Urea would be a lot cheaper. Perhaps the best solution would be human urine. Throw a week-long party, serve a lot of beer and invite your guests to fertilize your bales! Undiluted human urine has an NPK ratio close to that of blood meal. Those of you who have experimented with straw bale gardens please leave a comment on what...

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Does Sourdough Offer Hope for the Gluten Intolerant?

...ise quickly. But even before Pasteur, bakers used the yeast remaining from beer making (also a strain of Saccharomyces cerevisiae) to make doughs rise. Sourdough cultures are not as powerful and predictable, so it’s understandable that commercial bakers would want a more dependable alternative. What is in a sourdough culture? There are many strains of yeast in sourdough cultures, but the main one is Candida milleri. Candida milleri is tolerant of...

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Prickly Pear Jelly Recipe

...ason. Next year we’ll take a crack at making a batch of Tiswin, the sacred beer of the Papagos Indians of central Mexico (usually made with saguaro fruit but prickly pear fruit will do in a pinch). This August we’re making jelly. Here’s how to do it: 1. Taking reader Steven’s (of the fine blog Dirt Sun Rain) suggestion, burn off the nasty spines by holding the fruit over a burner on the stove for a few seconds. Using the non-cutting edge of a knif...

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