Reading Time: 5 minutes I bury my root vegetables in sand and compost. No longer do they wilt and wrinkle in a basket in the cupboard, or in the fridge, if I can’t use them quick enough. Would you bury your root vegetables? You may know that you can keep root vegetables in sand or peat (or compost) over […]
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Traditional Food Storage – Fridge Freezer Free
Reading Time: 7 minutes Love Your Larder, Pep up Your Pantry – get into traditional food storage, and you’ll think twice about the fridge freezer. Fancy something salted, pickled, fermented, dried, smoked, potted, cellared, and stored in olive oil or honey? You can find this food all around the world. You can sample all kinds of distinctive foods that […]
Animals and Ancestors: A Life Lived With Animals
Reading Time: 2 minutes Could a life lived with animals be in our DNA? We’ve evolved from hunter-gathers, into farmers looking out onto pasture, cornfield, hedgerow and wildwood beyond. Today the wildwood has retreated, and for most of us even farms too. We live in an increasingly artificial environment, and few of us live off the land. Yet we […]
Wildwood, Tree Rings, Climate and Environment
Reading Time: < 1 minute The life a forest has seen is written into its wood. Rising and falling temperature, water availability, the affect of people living at its edge; tales of bark chewing deer and clouds of insects too. All leave their mark in tree rings. The signature of wildwood, climate change, insects and people; of oakwood and birchwood. […]
Do We Need to Revive Traditional Knowledge to Live Well for the Future?
Reading Time: 4 minutes The best of the past for the future. That’s what I want to focus on this year.
When I started this blog, I never thought of it as relating to my working life. But, as time goes on I’ve found it sneaking in. I’m a cross between an archaeologist and an ecologist, and so I’ve found the phrases ‘ancient knowledge, passed down through generations’ slipping in.
A Return to Sheets and Blankets: Out With the Duvet
Reading Time: 5 minutes I’ve gone back to sheets and blankets (traditional bedding) since we’ve redecorated and carpeted two bedrooms. Call me old-fashioned but I see many good points in what we’ve discarded and left at the back of linen cupboards. What started me off on this was that we were one set of bedding down for our newly […]