Red State Green

AKA using what God gave you.
We throw away wayyyy too much stuff here in America, and the time will come when that isn’t an option anymore, whether through financial tightening, lack of supply, or lack of landfill space. Part of being self-reliant/independent is managing the things you have so you aren’t being wasteful.
I [...]

I love dehydrating food.
I had never done anything like this before, but it sounded like a good thing, so I got an Excalibur food dehydrator (which I absolutely adore).
I haven’t had much from the garden this year, so I’ve gotten tomatoes, apples, and peaches from the local food co-op to learn all these things (canning, [...]

Green With A Gun has a fascinating post up on Georgia, Russia and the West.
We went from a major drought to the wettest August on record in a matter of days, and it looks like there’s more rain coming this weekend. The rain knocked out some people’s power in Oklahoma City, and flattened some of [...]

Here’s an Independence Days update …
This has been an uninspired past few weeks: hot, so dry the ground has cracks in it. The only things that seem to like my yard right now are sweet potatoes and sunflowers.
Can you live on those??
Planted: potatoes
Harvested: some greens
Managed: have been making up uses for the last of the [...]

(If you don’t care for rants you can skip this one )
I’m seeing an interesting trend on some of these groups I belong to: people who start on something (like canning or gardening) then at the first sign of anything that might not be picture-perfect, ask if they should “throw it away”. One [...]

It rained really hard overnight! I was thrilled to see the barrels full as well as the buckets I use for the overflow. I really need more barrels.
Harvested some lovely greens, which I’m not sure what kind they are or how they got there. I think they’re really large versions of something in my mesclun [...]

Not much (didn’t even fill up the rain barrels), but it was the first time in a while, and I’m grateful for it

I wish I were talking about a picture of a guy or something.
A lot of my plants outside are wilting, and my stevia out front died. 100F and humid! Yecch.
I brought Leon outside this morning, and it wasn’t too bad. I went out just now and the heat was awful.
So other than composting some bunny [...]