I love Autumn it is my absolute favourite season, I love the cooler weather and the beautiful colours that fall brings. I really enjoy spending time with the family at this time of year and there are always so many memorable things to do around the home and outdoors. It is such a special time.
I created this video below to show you how we are enjoying the season at home with decorations and foodie treats (of course!).
Love Angie x
Our hen coop has been turned into a recycling plant and the chickens recycle all of our kitchen scrap food and garden waste back into eggs and compost. It’s really important to us to have a good supply of organic compost that we can use in our garden in the future. I’m strictly against anything that is not of a natural origin when it comes to feeding my vegetable and fruit plants, at the end of the day its my kids that are eating them and I like to think that they are eating something healthy and nutritious.
We are really new to growing our own fruit and vegetable plants but have been trying to implement natural growing methods and no dig systems using permaculture ideas and techniques. At the end of the day everything is trial and error here in our garden but this spring we did get a good supply of really fertile soil from our last dig in the chicken composting area. We also found a load of old pottery pieces, glass bottles and a coin dating back to 1918, as far as garden digging goes its pretty interesting around here!
So the first system is basically a large fenced off area in the chicken coop where the chickens are free to scratch around and eat what they like from the food and garden waste. They enjoy our scraps and they also enjoy the seeds, weeds, grass etc. we throw in there also. We continue to do this from spring to spring and then dig out what has broken down into really fertile compost. As you can imagine the chickens also poop all over the area as they forage and this also adds to the fertility of the compost. It is the perfect natural solution for the vegetable garden.
We also have a simple pallet made compost area in the vegetable garden where we put all sorts of garden waste in. This might include our grass clippings, weeds, chicken straw waste from the garage chickens and other food scraps that we don’t give to the hens.
Our hens literally do eat anything and everything, there diet varies massively from the organic GM free pellets we supplement them with the super foods in our smoothie and juice scraps. They are very healthy and all of our rescue hens come back to full health pretty quickly once they arrive due to such a healthy and varied diet.
The best method we have found is the composting area in the chicken pen, this is due to the fact that the compost has additional soil food in it as a result of the constant hen pooping.
Anyway that’s enough about hens, poop and waste, back onto some more interesting subjects soon! The link to the video is below 🙂
Love and Peace!
Angie xxxx
Check those eye bags!!!
I was so tired today doing all the pet chores outside as I was woken up every hour last night with the howling wind and snow storms. The weather was also freezing cold but I made a really quick video in the garden today and had another peek at all the rescue hens who are still on lock down due to the bird flue risk. This means they are not allowed out of their enclosure or outside until the end of February. It makes things very difficult but its not long and I look forward to seeing them free ranging at the start of spring…what a delight that will be! 🙂
Remember those times when you would come back in the house crying because your hands were so numb with cold, well that was me today, I was almost greeting my hands were so sore! 🙂
I hope to post it onto my youtube page late next week.
Many houseplants are amazing at purifying our indoor air and can help to create a natural environment in the home. According to NASA’s study on houseplants they have the capability to filter out harmful toxins and common pollutants. They also create a calm and peaceful environment in the home.
I only own about 4 house plants and must admit I’m not the best at looking after them but I am looking to increase my houseplants after reading some interesting information on their ability to filter out harmful toxins and pollutants in the home. I hope to put more effort into the watering of them lol! 🙂
There are so many different types of house plants and many ways to display them, you can display beautiful little plants inside glass bowls, have tiny clippings of plants in small pots or even create little dessert worlds. My personal favorite is the bonsai tree, is there anything more magical than owning a tiny tree which needs such patience and creative input to grow, it definitely is worth the wait.
I plan to purchase 3 organic Aloe Vera plants so I can have them rotating in my kitchen and so I can use them medicinally. I also like the thought of a banana palm in the living room and perhaps a Boston fern in the bathroom.
I plan to do a quick video with the plants Ive purchased and the best (in my opinion) places to purchase them from. The best place to start of course is your friends living room, take cuttings and grow them from teeny tiny size. If you want some larger ones to start though you will have to purchase them from the garden center.
There are other ways to reduce toxic build up in your home environment, here’s a very short list of some of the things you can do but lets face it we can’t do everything and some things are just too expensive to do if you have a large family. I’ll cover these in a bit more detail in my next video.
Like I said it’s impossible to avoid all the indoor pollutants but if you want to try a bit of natural living we can start by making small changes. Each tiny step is a step in the right direction of creating a natural and clean indoor environment.
More on this subject and my progress of this soon.
Thanks for reading!
Sorry it’s been a while folks, I’ve been busy studying a very basic course on Naturopathy, it’s just the tip of the iceberg but the knowledge I’ve gained has been very useful so far and it’s a good introduction to Natural medicine etc. I hope to continue further along with some plant powered study! 😊
So here’s a quick smoothie I knocked up and it was so powerful I went for a run afterwards, my legs are still sore and that was a few days ago ha ha ha! The black kale plucked fresh out of the garden still covered in the morning dew was absolutely amazing and I could feel the effects of the nutrition immediately lifting my morning brain fog! It seriously felt like a light coming on, it could also have been the ginseng kicking in! I’m so impressed with this stuff it’s definitely on the garden growing list next year!
So I blended it in the vitamix with persimmons (I’m a persimmons addict at this time of year) and a whole orange, a tbsp of pumpkin seeds, flax seeds and some ginseng! I topped up with water as I had ran out of almond milk! You could use half almond milk if you prefer.
Black kale (cavolo Nero)
whole orange peeled
persimmons
tsp ginseng
tbsp pumpkin seeds
tbsp of flaxseeds
I should probably add I shared this with the kids! It’s quite a lot to consume yourself!
Plant powered body fuel! 😎
Cavolo nero (black Tuscan kale) – I love it! 😍
This bad boy is packed full of goodness, here’s a wee link to the honestly healthy blog where they list the benefits of this beautiful vegetable. I think it looks so pretty with the orange flowers in background. I’m amazed I grew this at all, my previous attempts at growing vegetables have not been very fruitful. I tend to juice this mostly with apples, it’s amazing! 😊
