Total Health Breakthroughs: Free Natural Health Newsletter and Alternative Health Articles

Have you ever been hungry? Not just “skipped a meal” hungry, but really hungry. I am talking about the kind of hunger that won’t go away because the cupboard is bare. If you have, you will understand the need to store food. If you haven’t, this is your chance to learn from the experience of others before it happens to you. Because if you run into hard times, or the store shelves run dry, you will need to have a backup supply of tasty, nutritious food.

Food storage is not about simply stuffing a bunch of canned goods into a room and forgetting about them until you run out of food, but rather a system that focuses on creating a working food bank within your own home that is used every day by everyone in the family.

Becoming self-sufficient is not only the prudent thing to do, but it is also a rewarding journey full of adventure and hope, that lasts a lifetime and provides a sense of accomplishment that nothing else quite compares to. Being able to go out your back door and pick fresh tomatoes that you have grown yourself instead of going to the nearest grocery store for veggies that have traveled for miles across country is a source of pride for us country folk.

I was going to write about the wonderful exercise I get in the garden, wonderful because I enjoy the activity, whereas working out at a gym has no appeal for me.  Then I thought of the many people who overdo it in the spring and end up with aching muscles.  This [...]

Our nation has been on a collision course with simple, natural living for quite some time. People in cities are crammed into high-rise apartment complexes, working 12 hours per day, eating fast food as a daily staple, and getting sicker by the minute.

In my last article , I discussed how to get started with your first vegetable garden and advised beginners to start small, a 6 x 6 plot being a good size to grow your own salad greens, pole beans, or potatoes. When you’ve seen success with this size, you can graduate to a serious plot of about 450 square feet and start growing a substantial portion of your food.

The days of growing up on a small organic farm in New Jersey were far behind me when I dug my first garden as an adult. It was only five or six feet square and done at my wife’s behest so she could have some home-grown tomatoes. We crowded in half a dozen tomato plants and a couple of short rows of potatoes using spuds from the store that had sprouted. We then neglected the patch pretty much until harvest. Amazingly we got tomatoes and potatoes.

Whether following a garden talk or being introduced to a party of four in our restaurant as the “farmer who grows the vegetables,” it is inevitable that someone will say, “You must have a green thumb. I can’t grow anything.” My response is, “Not so much a green thumb as a brown knee.”

Check out my work jeans, or if it’s a hot day, check out my knees. There will be garden soil on at least one, even if I’ve only been out there a few minutes. It’s kind of like an adult dropping down on a knee to talk with a child. I drop down on a knee at the sight of a weed.

Here is my answer to those who say they don’t have a green thumb, and to those who might be afraid they won’t be able to master the mysteries of gardening. To get a green thumb, you need to have some success growing something.

Having written a garden column for 20 years for the local paper, I’m probably the best-known gardener in the area. I now plant over half an acre in vegetables each year. But this year cutworms wiped out my first two plantings of lettuce and all my zucchini plants died about two weeks after they started producing.

I have not been able to get a decent stand of spinach for the past five years. Discouraging? You bet — but also challenging. If gardening didn’t present me with challenges, I suspect I would become bored and look for something more challenging.

On hearing Barbra Kingsolver promote her new book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, I thought, “been there done that.” She and her family moved to a farm and vowed that for one year they would eat only food they grew themselves or that was raised locally. My wife, also Barbara, and I moved to our farm in Maine 35 years ago and have been living close to the land ever since.

I too, wrote a book about our experience of raising the majority of our food — which I titled Gardening for Independence.

We were part of the “back to the land” movement of the 1970s. I don’t know that any of us in this so-called movement knew we were part of any movement. Some say they were influenced by Scott and Helen Nearing — early green living pioneers. We weren’t. For us, it is just the way things worked out.