New Project: Making Bitters

...I’ll share the recipes I develop as I follow this path. In the meanwhile, making your own bitters is really easy. You may be able to throw a few experiments together just using things you find in your spice cabinet. Since these are flavoring, not medicine, you don’t have to be as careful with the quantities and timing as you must be when tincturing herbs for medicine. Yet at the same time, it’s a great introduction to that essential herbalist’s c...

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Seat Weaving for Fun and Profit

...2-pound rolls since I correctly anticipated making some mistakes the first time and I’m planning on making more of these chairs. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQkE05DD9_Y I found a helpful seat weaving tutorial on YouTube by Ed Hammond a.k.a. Peerless Rattan. Hammond has sixteen videos on how to weave and cane a variety of chairs. Please note that in addition to ladderback chairs there’s a lot of mid-century Scandinavian chairs that have a sligh...

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Planting in a Post-Wild World

...landscape out of the Grey Gardens situation we’ve got going now — and not making much progress. Then this book came to my rescue.* Look for posts in the near future charting the progress of our redesign using this system. October/November is the time for this work in Southern California. The idea is to get the plants in before the winter rains, so they can establish before the summer heat and drought hits. In temperate climates, folks are just be...

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Big List of Earth-Friendly (homemade, compostable, recyclable, no-plastic) Holiday Decorations

...reconnect with nature. This alone can be enormously calming at a stressful time, and may help us back into a more expansive state of mind. The holidays can be so loud and jangly and rushed. Just stepping back and spending some time admiring the geometry of a pine cone or the cleverness of an acorn helps cleanse the mind of all that noise. Seasons come and go. Holidays come and go. Ornaments which reflect the seasons should come and go, too. The fa...

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The Year We Gave Up Our Smart Phones

...just didn’t want our work and leisure interrupted and monetized. And no longer would there be suicidal smart phone factory workers or wars over rare earth metals. We now have much more time to create, to garden, to make beautiful things, to take care of our loved ones and neighbors. We devote our time to the things that matter....

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