Red State Green

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I have a theory, gleaned from the two time periods (back about fifteen years ago and now) that I started a new garden for food production. There seems to be definite stages people go through:

Fumbling around — This is usually what happens the first year in a new place: half-heartedly putting things in the ground, […]

I figured out the numbers for April (except the water bill’s not in yet) for the Riot for Austerity challenge, and I got a nice surprise!
Here’s the numbers we started out with back in June 2007:
Gasoline: 59% of the American national average
Electricity: 425% (multiple computers, TV’s, and lights on all the time, in an almost […]

I just updated the list, so go over and take a look.
I also got some very old seed as a gift that I haven’t listed yet as I don’t know what the germination is. Some of these are sort of odd plants, so if you’re interested in quirky let me know.

This is one of the better conferences I’ve been to so far. They have five tracks (plus a kid’s track tomorrow) for each day. Today I picked the food/permaculture track.
But before that, today I fed and watered bunnies, made breakfast for three teenagers, got said teenagers to school, had to go home and change bunny […]

Check it out over at http://oksustainability.org
The conference will be held in downtown Norman, Oklahoma, just south of Oklahoma City.
The theme for this year’s conference is “Red Dirt, Green Culture: Growing Sustainable Communities.” Keynote speakers will be Julie Frieder, environmental analyst for the Calvert Group mutual fund, and sustainable agriculture pioneer Joel Salatin. New to this […]

It’s a rainy day in Red State land, so since I didn’t have to bring small ones anywhere (spring break) I decided to pot up some seedlings.
But I need to back up some here.
Remember when I talked about seedlings before?
Well, here’s what I did, and it’s not too late for you to do this […]

Today I tried to make yogurt for the first time, using the second method on this page (very easy, btw!). It didn’t exactly turn out as I expected. But I did learn some things:

Don’t try to use old milk that has already started to make curds and expect to get yogurt
Let the milk […]

Someone asked earlier if I would talk about preserving food. At this time of year, if you have extra preserving it somehow is a good thing to do.
For those of you who’ve never thought about such things before, there are many ways to preserve food:

drying (dried apples, raisins (dried grapes) , beef jerky)
canning (jams, jellies, […]