It's Easy Being Green

As you round out your seed orders for the 2012 vegetable garden, have you considered adding any heirloom vegetables or fruits to your shopping list? This year we are making the push to dive even deeper into heirlooms and I encourage every gardener and homesteader to do the same.

Heirlooms are open-pollinated varieties of plants that are often 60 or more years old. Most date back 100 years or more. Heirlooms are the truest plants, often showcasing eyestopping individuality and some of the finest flavors you can get in a fruit or vegetable. Aside from sticking it to large agri-business based seed companies who deal in hybrid or Genitically Modified seeds, heirloom seed can be saved and replanted year after year. You can read more about it here.

If you’d like to learn more about heirloom gardening, you should pick up a copy of a brand new book on the subject. The Beginner’s Guide to Growing Heirloom Vegetables: The 100 Easiest-to-Grow, Tastiest Vegetables for Your Garden by Marie Iannotti.

If the 250 pages of scintillating photographs of heirlooms don’t have your taste buds watering and your green thumb twitching, I’m not sure what will. Iannotti gracefully shares her 100 favorite heirlooms, treasures that should be kept under lock and key. She also shares the wonderful stories that round out the unique history of each featured heirloom.

Don’t let the title fool you either. This book should also be a prize for any gardener with more advanced skills. I give it two green thumbs up!

Now you can win a copy of the book along with a spectacular heirloom garden prize pack including 35 packets of heirloom seeds and a bareroot tree! Click the link to head to Timber Press and enter The Heirloom Garden Giveaway

What’s your favorite heirloom fruit or vegetable to grow?

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Awhile back I was sent a copy of the Green Princess Cookbook to review.  Several other books on green living and sustainability have been in que first so I haven’t paid much attention to the Green Princess Cookbook by Barbara Beery, that is until my wife T and I started searching for a green cake recipe for our daughter’s (we’ll call her Tater Tot)  first birthday.

Tater Tot was exclusively breast fed because booby is best!  Once Tater started on solid foods though, we’ve been feeding her Earth’s Best organic baby foods.  We feed her little in the way of processed or unnatural foods and avoid most things that retain pesticides and other harsh chemicals used in factory farming growing practices.  Tater doesn’t get much in the way of refined sugar either because both T and I have seen the outcomes of children who get way too much at an early age.

With that said, T and I have been trying to find recipes for a more natural first birthday cake.  We don’t necessarily want to go entirely vegan on this because little Tater Tot hasn’t made the decision to go that direction yet.  Tater’s Mommy and Daddy love their meat very much but we’ll support her if she eventually decides meat products aren’t for her.  Since we’ve been on the hunt, T pulled the Green Princess Cookbook from my book review stack and we began pawing through it.

Based on the title, you’d think there would be a lot of natural or in some way environmentally friendly recipes in this cookbook.  I wish I could say that was the case but instead, we found ourselves looking at a cookbook that had merely a sprinkling of the “green” idea laid out in its recipes.

The forward does recommend you try to use organic or locally grown ingredients whenever possible but this is a suggestion that virtually any cookbook author could slap in front of their recipe collection too.  The book is geared toward children and Beery did a good job including easy to make items like Organic Orchard Salsa and Solar-Power Strawberry Lemonade (which actually does have to warm up in the sun as part of the recipe).  They’re novel ideas and take a good step in teaching younger kids about organic foods and greener living practices.

You might be disappointed though when you come across recipes like No-Bake Brownie Cupcakes.  The idea is to use less resources by not using your oven to bake them but unfortunately the recipe calls for a package of brownie mix as its base.  We all know that’s not only resource intensive but surely there is a way to make your own no-bake brownie mix instead of trying to rely on another box of processed food.  The recipe for Off-the-Vine Zany Zucchini Muffins goes the same route, using a box of spice cake mix for its base.

I have to give Beery some credit for trying to spread the teachings of greener living to her childhood cooks.  There’s a greener living tip on each page and some recipes leaning toward learning about how to be sustainable like making your own butter.  Parents could expand discussions on each topic while helping their budding chef whip up their recipe and maybe teach them even more about living life a little greener.

I’m giving away a copy of the Green Princess Cookbook so if you’re interested in entering, here’s how you do it:

1)  First leave a comment on this post

2)  Secondly, send me an email to easygreen@greenpreferred.com with a favorite organic or green recipe you like to make with your kids or for them and a short story explaining why it’s your favorite.

3)  Finally, follow me on Twitter and re-tweet the following message:

“I just entered the Green Princess Cookbook for kids giveaway put on by @GreenPreferred.  Learn how to enter and win http://bit.ly/c1Phcu”

The contest will close on Friday, May 7th, 2010 and the person with the most creative recipe and story will win the cookbook for their budding chef.  Keep checking back for a free recipe or two while the contest is running. Good luck!

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If you haven’t already read my brief review on a new book profiling modern architecture and alternative energy, click here.

A new book profiling 10 modern homes and how they're built with alternative energy useage in mind

Lori Ryker, author of Off The Grid: Modern Homes + Alternative Energy, grew up in Texas and has lived several places around the world. She now lives in Livingston, Montana and teaches at Montana State University’s School of Architecture and is a partner of Ryker/Nave Design. I recently had the opportunity to ask Ryker some questions about her new book and her thoughts on the future of sustainable living.

Q: What do you think is the biggest misconception people have about living off the grid?
A: That someone else should take the first step, that alternative energy is something of the future.

Q: You discuss how you think living off the grid brings people closer to where we live, making us more involved in how we live. Why do you think it’s important for more people to be connected to where and how they live?
A: Understanding where we live in the world and the reality of what it takes to live in that place (without the support of mechanical/big energy that creates a pseudo-environment) helps us take responsibility for the place in which we live, and the planet in general. Understanding the conditions of where we live help us make healthier and more responsible choices for environmental conditions such as clean water, air and landscapes; local food sources including plants and animals. Peter Berg coined a phrase in the 1970’s called bioregionalism, which addresses how we live in a place with particular identifiable physical and environmental features that then influence the use and consumption of local foods, materials and native plants, among other things. In the same way, living responsibly with alternative energy requires the knowledge and understanding of regions, bioregions and particular places so that we most efficiently employ the natural resource, such as sun or wind. Such a quality of life also makes us more grounded and invested in ourselves and the world.

Q: Have you found that a lot of people don’t think modern architecture and green features like off the grid living can be combined together?
A: No. I find that most people believe this relationship is normal. However, even three to five years ago this was not the case. There has been a strong and successful popular media push in the past few years to dispel the perception that living off the grid means living in the back-woods somewhere.

Q: You say the book is all about great living in great architecture. These homes certainly aren’t like the earth ships of the 60’s and 70’s are they?
A: No, but every once in a while I drive by an earth ship style place and think to myself, they are still quite sophisticated in their energy use and ability to connect people to the place in which they live, even if they do not appeal to everyone. I would argue that earth ships are also a “style” of architecture. An architect or designer could use the same materials and strategies of an earth ship today and arrive at a vastly different form of expression.

Q: You talk a lot about resource extraction and what you call “dirty energy”. What do you think it will take for people to understand how big of an environmental impact their home has?
A: A completely different way of evaluating home construction and energy use. Such as how bank loans are made, or how homes are taxed, how a builder accounts for the construction of the home and the materials used. In the meantime, we need alternative energy to become more affordable, better methods of measurement of an individual’s energy use and means to control particular components of energy use. Such as being able to separate out use of heating and cooling from media, not simply unplugging. We need more accountability. Simple things such as timers on lights and showers that are already in use in other parts of the world. These strategies remind us that the Earth is not limitless.

Keep checking back for the second half of my Q&A with Lori Ryker coming up later this week.  That’s when I’ll also post the details behind how to enter the contest to win a copy of Lori’s book.  You can get an early entry now by subscribing to my RSS Feed and then posting a comment on this article.

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There’s a lot of talk these days centering around living life on Earth a bit greener than we have been. Green living, alternative energy and sustainability are all buzz words surrounding the movement to live more in harmony with our environment. Some might question though whether that movement can really be partnered with the construction of a new home utilizing modern architectural designs.

A new book profiling 10 modern homes and how they're built with alternative energy useage in mind

Lori Ryker’s book titled Off The Grid: Modern Homes + Alternative Energy shows that you really can live in a beautifully designed, modern home while reducing your demand for energy. The 160-page glossy, hard-backed book profiles ten homes around the globe and shows how they’ve overcome complete dependence on the grid and leave a smaller footprint on the Earth.

Through example and illustrations, Ryker shows how each technology from geothermal heat pumps, wind turbines and solar arrays, can be integrated into the beauty and design of a modern home. The homes profiled in the book aren’t straw bale homes or Earthships. They range in size from small to large and sparse to intricately decorated. If you’re embarking on a journey to build a new modern house and have considered making it more green, Ryker’s book might be just the ticket to turning your visions into reality.

Stop by later in the week for a Q&A chat with Ryker and I’ll also tell you how you can have a shot at winning a copy of her new book.

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