Innholdsfortegnelse for April - May - 2017 i MOTHER EARTH NEWS

Lambs have been dropping at my place for going on a month now, and with around half the ewes finished, we’ve got only one bottle baby (a triplet runt) and only one new mom that lost her little one to a crushing injury. The bottle baby is doing great and loves his hay, his bottle, and us. The new mom mourned her baby’s loss for a short while, until she reluctantly agreed to allow other triplet lambs to poach her good supply of milk. There’s a lot to learn from the social dynamic of a sheep flock when it comes to protecting their young from predators and sharing some of the feeding duties. In years past, we’ve had bottle lambs, orphans, and hungry triplets to contend with. More often than…

Many vegetable seed companies are serving up more organic options in response to gardener demand, and some even offer an exclusively organic line. Johnny’s Selected Seeds has a few new organic tomato cultivars that caught our eye. ‘Carbon’ is a productive, purplish-black heirloom that resists cracking and catfacing. If you’re looking for an early tomato, determinate ‘Glacier’ produces small, flavorful, red fruits and is especially tolerant of cool spring temperatures. It’s well-adapted to northern regions. ‘Skyway’ is a reliable beefsteak hybrid with broad disease resistance that’s newly available as an organic option. New this year from High Mowing Organic Seeds, an allorganic seed company, is ‘Matador’ spinach, an open-pollinated cultivar that’s especially cold-tolerant. It was among the three top-yielding cultivars out of 19 in the company’s trials. Also check out…

Shade EASY STARTERS Black cohosh (Actaea racemosa) Black elderberry (Sambucus nigra) Bugle (Ajuga reptans) Nettles (Urtica dioica) Sweet violet (Viola odorata) FOR DIVERSITY American ginseng (Panax quinquefolius) Balm of Gilead (Cedronella canariensis) Bloodroot (Sanguinaria canadensis) Blue cohosh (Caulophyllum thalictroides) Bowman’s root (Gillenia trifoliata) Celandine (Chelidonium majus) Goldenseal (Hydrastis canadensis) Lily of the valley (Convallaria majalis) Morning glory (Ipomoea spp.) Skullcap (Scutellaria lateriflora) Tibetan gentian (Gentiana tibetica) Trillium (Trillium erectum) Twinleaf (Jeffersonia diphylla) Virginia snakeroot (Aristolochia serpentaria) Wild yam (Dioscorea villosa) Swamp EASY STARTERS Alsike clover (Trifolium hybridum) Angelica (Angelica archangelica) Babylon weeping willow (Salix babylonica) Calamus (Acorus calamus) Marshmallow (Althaea officinalis) Peppermint (Mentha x piperita) Selfheal (Prunella vulgaris) FOR DIVERSITY Blue flag (Iris versicolor) Boneset (Eupatorium perfoliatum) Brahmi (Bacopa monnieri) Bugleweed (Lycopus virginiana) Butterbur (Petasites spp.) Camus (Camassia quamash) Cardinal…

As the weather warms, fresh-picked ingredients with a fruity, flavorful dressing can make a satisfying meal when you can’t imagine turning on the stove. Homemade salad dressing is far superior to store-bought — you can use ingredients you already have on hand and herbs from your garden, adjust the texture and flavors as you prefer, and whisk up a dressing in minutes. With this in mind, we asked our MOTHER EARTH NEWS bloggers for their favorite homemade salad dressing recipes. The creative concoctions here feature mostly on-hand or homegrown ingredients and bring a wide variety of flavors to the table. Experiment with a tart dressing one night and a spicy one the next to transform the same garden greens and vegetables into different-tasting meals. Between the bloggers’ various techniques for…

I had an old crib kicking around from when my children were little. Because the regulations on cribs are ever changing, I was reluctant to sell it. So, I took it apart and used pieces of it around the farm. At one time, one side of the crib served as a gate for my baby goats. Now, it’s working beautifully as a feeder. I could easily have two feeders, but the other side of the crib is mounted to my son’s wall to hang and store musical equipment. Tenino, Washington…

Because they’re omnivores, chickens are perhaps the most salvagesavvy critter on the farmstead. Historically, their cleaner-upper role predated compost piles for getting rid of food and garden waste and for generally ridding a farmscape of ticks and beetles. The chicken’s compatriot, of course, was the pig, especially on dairies and cheese-making outfits. A pig can scarf down copious amounts of whey and spoiled milk. Chickens like these liquids too, but it takes a lot of chickens to go through 5 gallons of whey. Amazingly, in the days prior to chemical fertilizer and mechanization, skim milk offered a more reliable and cheaper protein feedstock than soybeans did. My, how times change Pat Foreman, chicken whisperer and guru of keeping urban flocks, says we have enough food scraps in America to feed…

“I decided to write to say ‘thank you’ for the December 2016/January 2017 issue. It has great articles, practical recommendations (I like stuff I can use!), and is just plain encouraging.” Just Plain Encouraging I started reading MOTHER EARTH NEWS back in the early 1970s, so I guess I’m a longtimer now. I always find something of interest in each issue, but I decided to write to say “thank you” for the December 2016/ January 2017 issue in particular. It has great articles, practical recommendations (I like stuff I can use!), and is overall just plain encouraging. I’ve been baking bread for more than 40 years, but I’m still learning new techniques all the time, so I’ll be trying Wendy Akin’s recipes (“Daily Breads: Potato, Oatmeal, White, and Rye with…

Back in 2003, the North Carolina Cooperative Extension Service started a program to help traditional tobacco farmers transition to a different crop. Shiitakes were, and still are, considered a specialty crop. The extension office proposed that these farmers grow edible mushrooms for farmers markets, restaurants, and health food stores, or grow medicinal mushrooms for herbal stores and acupuncturists. A diversified farm could do both! The extension office provided each farmer with organic mushroom spores in exchange for data on how well the mushrooms produced. Each farmer received bags of spores with batch numbers. When submitting their data, the participating farmers would refer to their batch numbers. This ongoing research is revealing which strains of shiitake mushrooms do best in various areas of North Carolina. We first got involved with shiitake…

Fire can be used to boil water, cook food, signal rescuers, warm a shelter, and provide a psychological boost. Survival fire starters can be an incredibly important tool in the wilderness, which is why you should include several of them in any emergency kit you plan to use outdoors. You can choose from many different types of fire starters, each with its own merits and flaws. Always carry at least three different fire starters. That way, if one or two methods fail, you’ll have a backup system in place. I generally divide survival fire starters into two categories: igniters and accelerants. Igniters provide the initial flame or heat. Accelerants help a small flame grow into a larger blaze. 7 Types of Igniters 1Wood-friction fire (bow drill, hand drill, fire plow,…

I supplement with feed for my chickens, pigs, and goats — which means bags and more bags. I don’t want to just toss them into the landfill. How can I reuse them on my homestead? When growing melons, cucumbers, and squash, we typically rely on some type of weed barrier. Black plastic is expensive and tends to be drying to the soil. Instead, we cut feed bags open, turn the printed side down, and lay them in rows. We then cover the feed bags with soil or rocks to hold them in place. Sometimes, we hill the rows before laying the bags down. After completing a row, we go through and make “slits” in the feed bags and then plant. You can also use old feed bags as grow bags…

SHOW US! Share your unique perspective with our community by submitting photos of inviting gardens, nutritious foods, wild animals, and more to the MOTHER EARTH NEWS Photo Group on Flickr (www.Flickr.com/Groups/MotherEarthNewsPhotos/Pool ). We’ll feature our favorites here and online!…

Community Support I was very interested to read your article “Aging Gracefully on the Homestead” (February/March 2017). I’ve spent the past several years working with others to create a senior community in rural North Carolina called Elderberry, which has 18 small and tiny homes. It’s a place where we can continue to do the things we love as we age, such as gardening, keeping animals, hiking, heating with wood, etc., but do so with the help and companionship of others. For those of us who love country life but are becoming unable to manage our large farms, this is a creative alternative. Sharing your farm with others, or converting it into a small community, can provide support for the daily work and other needs, as well as foster deep friendships…

Maybe you reside on a boat, vacation in a remote cabin, or live off-grid like me. Or perhaps you’re just interested in lowering your energy bill. Either way, with a handful of inexpensive and easyto- source materials, you can build a homemade wind generator, making electricity yours for the taking for as long as the wind is blowing. You’ll be able to light up that storeroom, power your barn, or use a generator to keep all your vehicle batteries charged. Electricity for my off-grid cabin comes from solar and wind power stored in a bank of four 6-volt golf cart batteries wired for a 12-volt system. A charge controller and battery minder keep my system from under- or overcharging. The whole shebang cost me less than $1,000, and I have…

How to Make City Streets More Friendly I want to connect with my community to identify common goals and boost morale. Where can I get started? If you can organize a small group of volunteers, you can take inspiration from the Friendly Streets Initiative (FSI), which grew out of a group of volunteers working with various neighborhood organizations to make biking and walking safer in St. Paul, Minnesota. In the summer of 2011, FSI sponsored a series of parties along Charles Avenue, which runs through a racially and economically mixed community a few blocks from the freeway, to discuss community concerns. The group created a survey to measure residents’ opinions and offered a photo gallery of innovative street designs found around the world. The Friday-evening block parties featured food from…

oorrgganainc gicar gdeanrdinegning THE WILD WISDOM OF WEEDS The Wild Wisdom of Weeds is the only book on foraging and edible weeds to focus on the 13 weeds found all over the world, each of which represents a complete food source and extensive medical pharmacy and first-aid kit. The 13 plants found growing in every region across the world are: dandelion, mallow, purslane, plantain, thistle, amaranth, dock, mustard, grass, chickweed, clover, lambs-quarter, and knotweed. Including more than 100 unique recipes, this book shows you how to make soups, beauty products, first-aid concoctions, and much more. #7435 $29.95 HIGH_YIELD VEGETABLE GARDENING Authors Colin McCrate and Brad Halm show you how to make your food garden much more productive, no matter how big or small. You’ll learn their secrets for preparing the…