Innholdsfortegnelse for December 2013 -January 2014 i MOTHER EARTH NEWS

Expert Advice, Exclusive Extras and an Engaged Community Smarter Home Heating Concerned about how high heating costs could climb this winter? No need to shiver in your boots (or indoor footwear of choice): You can take steps right now that will slash the amount of cash you’ll spend to stay warm in your home. MOTHER EARTH NEWS has been reporting on viable strategies and projects for saving money on home-heating costs for more than 40 years, and we’ve assembled our best articles in our online Guide to Home Heating. This collection provides all of the how-to for repairs, retrofits and quick adjustments that will instantly improve your abode’s energy efficiency, plus do-it-yourself projects ranging from stitching some homemade thermal shades to incorporating elements of passive solar home design. You’ll learn…

Each year, the world’s taxpayers fork over at least $700 billion in subsidies that support environmentally destructive activities, such as burning fossil fuels, overpumping aquifers, clear-cutting forests and overfishing. As the Earth Council report “Subsidizing Unsustainable Development” pointed out, “There’s something unbelievable about the world spending hundreds of billions of dollars annually to subsidize its own destruction.” One way to correct this imbalance is by tax shifting: raising taxes in certain situations so the price to carry out environmentally destructive activities begins to reflect their true cost, and offsetting this with an overall reduction in income taxes. Another way to achieve this goal is to shift government subsidies away from unsustainable practices. On the climate front, scores of countries could cut carbon emissions by eliminating fossil fuel subsidies. We can…

Step by Step Sourdough is the original way to leaven bread, and evidence of it dates to 1500 B.C., when the Egyptians used blends of wild yeasts and lactobacilli to make both beer and bread. When flour mixes with water, starches convert to sugars in an enzymatic reaction. The lactobacilli change sugars to lactic and acetic acids, souring the dough. As the dough becomes more acidic, the yeasts that tolerate acid begin to convert sugars into carbon dioxide and ethanol. The carbon dioxide makes sourdough’s characteristic holes, and the ethanol evaporates. Here, we’ll show you how to work with starters, and give you two recipes to use them. Sourdough Schedule Because they are living entities, sourdough starters need care, and this may be where their reputation for being finicky comes…

If you pride yourself on doing most of your grocery shopping in your backyard (“Tomatoes? Check. Eggs? Check. Berries? Check.”), you may be interested in learning how to make cooking oils and render your own cooking fats. Making creamy butter, rendering lard and tallow from pork and beef fat, or coaxing nuts or seeds to give up their liquid riches is worth your time. Butter Up Butter is simple to make. Step 1: Milk your cow. No cow? Find a local source of heavy cream. Add the cream to a quart canning jar until the jar is one-third full. Screw on the lid and shake the jar until you see the butter bits separate from the liquid, which is now buttermilk. You can also make butter much faster using a…

Never Understimate Its Tranformative Power Inventor and entrepreneur Elon Musk leaves little doubt about how far vision and imagination can take us. (Very far, and in great style.) I want to tell you a true story with a happy ending, one that’s happening right now. Its heroes are engineers, artists, bankers, farmers — and you. With our eyes figuratively swollen shut because of the steady beating we take from much of the news media, we sometimes can be numb to the amazing technological advances taking place in our time. I recently found that one sees these advances more clearly through the windshield of a Tesla Model S electric automobile. I test-drove the Model S on a country road in the Colorado mountains. The experience blew my mind. I’ll never think…

MOTHER Knows (Gardening) Best Are you excited to start planning your vegetable garden for next year? If you’ve been reading Mother Earth News for a while, you know that we’ve developed some exceptional resources to help you grow more of your own food. Here’s a roundup of our key gardening content and digital tools to help you brush up on the basics and discover new ideas. Crop at a Glance series. Get clear, concise advice on how to grow 51 crops, from classics such as tomatoes to staples such as grains. These guides include cooking suggestions, harvesting tips and organic pest-control advice, in addition to planting and growing basics. We’ve featured a different crop in almost every issue for the past six years, and now you can find all of…

If you think you’ve had cinnamon before, there’s a good chance you’re mistaken. Says author Ian Hemphill in The Spice and Herb Bible, you’ve probably actually tasted cassia. Cassia is cheaper than cinnamon and the United States allows both products to appear on labels as “cinnamon.” True Ceylon cinnamon (Cinnamomum verum), sometimes called “Sri Lankan cinnamon,” is the inner layer of bark of a tropical evergreen tree related to bay laurel. The cassia tree, its relative, produces bark similar to cinnamon. Several varieties are harvested for consumption, and you’ll find a host of names for all of these types of cassia. C. burmannii is often labeled “Korintje,” “Padang” or “Indonesian cassia”; C. loureiroi is labeled “Saigon cinnamon,” “Vietnamese cassia” or “Vietnamese cinnamon”; and C. cassia is labeled “Chinese cinnamon.” Telling…

Raising broiler chickens can put meat on your table quicker and with less effort than raising any other livestock. In just a handful of weeks, your chicks will reach target weight and your larder can be stocked with meat that’s tastier and better for you than anything you could buy at the grocery store. Plus, raising meat chickens lets you opt out of the profoundly inhumane industrial food-production system. The choices between hybrid or heritage breeds, confinement or free range, and conventional or organic feed are entirely up to you. Best Broiler Breeds Growing broilers — young chickens with pliable skin and tender meat — involves making several choices. Your first decision is whether to raise hybrid or heritage poultry breeds. The fundamental differences are the amount of time they…

Antibiotic-resistant bacteria, known as “superbugs,” are becoming more numerous and more virulent thanks to continuing overuse of antibiotics. Herbal medicine offers an alternative to these increasingly ineffective drugs. What follows is an excerpt from the book Herbal Antibiotics: Natural Alternatives for Treating Drug-Resistant Bacteria (reprinted with permission from Storey Publishing), in which herbal expert Stephen Harrod Buhner offers compelling evidence that medicinal herbs should be our first line of defense against disease. He explains the roots of drug resistance and why medicinal herbs can work better than pharmaceutical drugs. Drawing on massive amounts of scientific research, Buhner’s book provides in-depth profiles of and recipes for using the most reliably effective herbs to treat common ailments, such as wounds, urinary tract infections and strep throat, as well as life-threatening methicillinresistant Staphylococcus…

Afew years ago, my husband and I built a greenhouse adjacent to our pole barn. The greenhouse shares its back wall with the pole barn’s back wall, which we insulated to be a heat sink for the greenhouse. To store heat, we used sand and cement stepping stones for the greenhouse floor, and we sank two 50-gallon drums filled with water into the floor under the growing tables. Because we only used the greenhouse to start seedlings, it seemed like a waste to leave it idle during winter months, especially with temperatures inside it reaching 110 degrees Fahrenheit. We had the idea to run a double clothesline 6 feet off the ground inside the greenhouse, which we could use for drying clothes in winter. In order to control moisture evaporation…

A Foster Hen for 50 Chicks I had just ordered 50 Araucana chicks when I read the letter “Adoptive Mother Hens for Day-Old Chicks” in the June/July 2013 issue. Friends of ours mentioned they had a hen that was “setting,” so I asked them to try the method mentioned in the letter — lifting a broody hen off her nest at night and replacing her eggs with chicks so they can be raised naturally by a mother. They took eight of my chicks to give it a go. The next day our friends were back and raving about how well it had worked. They said they would like to bring the hen, Barbara, over that night to see whether she would take all 50. When she arrived, she accepted all…

Sweet potatoes (Ipomoea batatas) are productive, delicious and supernutritious. Few crops keep as well as these flavorful tubers, which can be stored for months in a cool, dry place. This crop is a staple in climates with hot, muggy summers, but growing sweet potatoes is also possible in cooler climates if you adjust to meet the plants’ requirement for warm temperatures. Types to Try Sweet potato varieties differ in skin and flesh color and texture, as well as in leaf shape and vine length. The flavor and nutritional qualities of sweet potatoes vary with flesh color: Orange-fleshed sweet potatoes are rich sources of fiber and vitamins A and C. White-fleshed varieties contain less vitamin A, but are a good source of minerals and B vitamins. Purple sweet potatoes contain a…

Many gardeners use cold frames and quick hoops to extend the growing season, but just beyond these options is a step we think is simple and super-productive for the home gardener: a small, low-cost, portable greenhouse. At first this may seem like a big step. We’ve found, however, that you can build a 10-by-12-foot greenhouse for less than you’d spend on a store-bought 4-by-4-foot cold frame. Our goals in designing this movable greenhouse were that it be simple to build with off-the-shelf parts, easy to move, easy to anchor and inexpensive. Even gardeners in moderate or warm climates can benefit from a greenhouse, which gives you much more variety in your winter fare, wherever you live, and also makes the experience of growing it more pleasant. Like the cold frame…

Discover ways to help create more local, equitable economic models — and feel good about how you get your goods. Bartering was the original means of exchanging goods and services, predating the invention of money as we know it. Garden bounty was traded for sheep’s cheese; mead was swapped for a woven blanket. Today, a resurgence in bartering is underway, as people turn away from our culture’s dominant “buy more stuff” paradigm, and instead take pride and satisfaction in the goods and services they provide, the handiwork of their friends and neighbors, and in helping make their communities more self-reliant. The growth of this direct-trade economy is accompanied by an emergence of several other exciting economic trends that diverge from business as usual. Options include seed libraries, bike-sharing programs, local…

I’m looking to put in new flooring and want an eco-friendly option. What do you suggest? Bamboo, sustainably harvested wood, and linoleum made from recycled content are all eco-friendly flooring options. Also available at most major home improvement stores, cork flooring is competitively priced with other kinds of sustainable flooring, and cork is a beautiful, eco-friendly material. Cork products are made from the bark of the cork oak tree (Quercus suber). Much of the world’s cork comes from forests in Portugal, where the trees’ drought resistance allows them to flourish. Harvesters cut and strip the bark during early summer, a process that removes only the dead outer bark layers while leaving the living cambium intact. The cork trees continue to grow unharmed for about nine years before the bark gets…