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Soil to Self Blog

3/29/2019

Permaculture And Faith

By Victoria Mininger

I stumbled upon permaculture by accident in 2012. At the time, we were living on ten acres of land in Nelson County and had decided to revisit the task of growing a garden and raising our own animals.
Having been raised on a dairy farm in Northern New Mexico, I had been immersed in all things farming and gardening. Hard work was the motto. The art of self-sufficiency was our way of life and, with a mother raised in the Mennonite faith and tradition, she was a master at growing a large garden and canning/preserving food. To this day, I can still hear the canners rattling and hissing away as yet another batch of tomatoes and green beans were put up for the harsh Rocky Mountain winter ahead.
Years later, as our family settled on our own piece of land, I realized that farming and growing things had never really left my blood. It was like my fingers itched to get into the soil as soon as March and warm spring days hit our patch of grass. However, unlike the rich soil of our tiny, New Mexico town, the soil we encountered was clothes-staining red. It was so heavy with clay that we were at a loss as to how to plant in this new place. We were attempting to successfully raise food on land that had only seen a passing herd of cows. Somehow, we needed a new approach. Enter permaculture.
Through our initial study of permaculture, we quickly figured out that the incorporation of sheet-mulching and organic leaf material from the woods nearby could quickly increase the soil’s fertility to then grow things quite successfully. Permaculture was a whole new way of thinking that took the traditional way of gardening I was raised with and made it a richer, deeper experience.

I can tell you that there was nothing quite like harvesting our garden that first year. While it was far from a perfect harvest, the fact that we could take a previously unyielding landscape, and see it produce bountifully, was exhilarating. However, the piece that I was not expecting, was how much the practice of permaculture resonated so deeply with my own personal faith practice. As I read more about the 3 ethical pillars of permaculture - the call to Care for the Earth, Care for People and the practice of Fair Share - I was reminded of this Biblical passage from Genesis 1:28;
“And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”
As a young girl, I was raised in church with the belief that this creation we see and experience each day has a Creator; a Creator who I could have a personal relationship with and experience, not only through faith, but also through interaction with the world around me. However, as I grew and studied Scripture for myself, I began to
understand that part of that relationship with my Creator was to answer the mandate given in Genesis to care for the earth, people, and animals He had created. In fact, if you’re a student of the Biblical text, you will find other passages that point to this call to care for the earth and God’s people throughout Scripture.

I’ll be honest and admit that we as a people of faith have not always heeded that call and the ramifications of that neglect are seen in our world today. However, for me to wait on someone else to step up to do what I feel God is saying in my life, is not to live out an active faith, but rather a disobedient one. I embrace the practice of permaculture because I feel it best expresses how I am called to care for the Earth and the people that make up my community and beyond. It is through the practice of permaculture that I feel I can authentically work in harmony with creation and the patterns of nature set forth from the beginning.
As a young girl, I spent enough time outdoors to see those patterns of nature emerge in everything we did on the farm. The coming of new, Spring calves and watching the way a garden grows - from seed to greening plant - with the help of care, water, and sun. It is when we honor these cycles of nature and how they work with one another that we have the opportunity - dare I say privilege - to enrich and heal the land instead of robbing life from it. However, just as much as permaculture and my faith is about the care of the earth, it is more importantly an opportunity for me to care for people in my life well.
Throughout the last 16 years of being a business owner and employer, I have seen how my own practice and understanding of permaculture has impacted the company I own and lead on a daily basis. We are a company that builds things but, more importantly, we strive to build-up people. By focusing on building people through job placement, skill acquisitions, and care for one another as a work community, I also answer the call of caring for people through the lense of my faith. It matters how we treat people, receive them, and choose to care for them beyond just a paycheck. If I truly believe that each person is uniquely created and has infinite worth, then my faith calls me to care for them well by building-up and serving the community God has put in my particular sphere of influence.
As I reflect on all I have learned through the last few years of studying permaculture, this quote from the Scotsman, John Muir, sums it up well for me;
“Oh, these vast, calm, measureless mountain days, days in whose light everything seems equally divine, [that open] a thousand windows to show us God.”
May I forever look through the windows of creation to its Creator as I hike the bounty of the Blue Ridge Mountains; as I bend to press my hands into the soil of this valley I call home and care for the people within my greater community.

4 Comments

Soil To Self

3/22/2019

1 Comment

Rope A Dope Style - A Case Study In Creative Use and Response To Change

How many of y’all hear Gerald Levert looping in your head right now behind that title? Or have visions of the Mayweather vs Mcgregor fight last year? As a 90’s kid with an appreciation for combat sports, I could say a whole lot about both. But this blog is not a nostalgic ride through my childhood, it’s about permaculture and farming.
And farming is a blood sport.
Why then the Rope A Dope?
For those not familiar with the Rope A Dope concept, it comes out of the boxing tradition. The Rope A Dope was made famous by Ali. At its simplest, it is a strategy in boxing where the boxer appears weak, by doing so, invites his opponent to fire off a flurry of ineffective punches. The boxer is on the ropes, which allows the rope to absorb the shock of the punch. In this scenario it appears as though the boxer is being beaten badly, only to turn the fight in their favor quickly at the right moment with a well-placed blow on a tired opponent. Ali beat Foreman (a heavily favored opponent) with this strategy. The fight is up on youtube - every time I watch it I get goosebumps.
In permaculture, we often find ourselves in systems where we are over matched.
I’m on the ropes.
For the last decade, I’ve been vegetable farming at the market scale. I started out building a not for profit farm and then transitioned to build my own small farm. I have learned much.
The seasons on an intensive small scale vegetable operation are long, brutal, and rewarding. Revenue can be extensive, but profit, in the early years especially - is sparse. It’s not uncommon to watch the thin margin on the season disappear in one night in a clandestine orgiastic Roman style feast at the hands of the local whistle pig community (that’s groundhogs for those not from the valley). Excess consumption is not unique to the human sector. I have come to love hunting the beasts down with a crossbow, literally counting the dollars saved with each kill.

Photo from left to right: the farm a decade ago, an overhead of the farm now, a picture of the lower field that is now flooded.

Some seasons are difficult,
Some seasons will sink you.
We live in a valley, peppered with microclimates.
Last year, in my corner of my county, my site received almost 80 inches of rain.   We average 36 inches a year.
In all of my design work on the site, I never imagined this much water.   The perennial systems performed well, but the annual systems, on which I depend for income, failed.
By July, my neighbor’s property sprung a spring, and a creek developed that ran across my driveway into my lower fields. 9 months later as I’m writing this, there is still water running across my driveway. And my lower field has been underwater since last summer.
Feedback, not failure.
What do I do?
I could lease extra land off-farm, and push forward through the barriers refusing to change the direction I set ten years ago.
This would require pouring more resources, human calories, gasoline, infrastructure - money - into keeping the dream alive.
Instead, I lean on my training.
In permaculture, we look at the goals of a project, our ethics, and the 12 principles to evaluate a design.
In the middle of this crisis, both existential and financial, the two principles that provided the most relevant support in our evaluation were; obtain a yield and creatively use and respond to change. We asked ourselves the questions, what are our goals? What are our yields?
Our goals point towards connection, sustainability, and financial stability.
The vegetable operation isn’t cutting it.
After years of pushing sometimes 60 hours a week, I am 40 years old, broke and facing an effort to salvage an unsustainable project.
This cold analysis is hard. Permaculture is not for the brittle spirit.
But, it is freeing.
My next step is to point positive. What do I have?
I have a killer homestead. Professional grade paid-for infrastructure, tools, and equipment and deep knowledge of plant systems - I have my formal training in counseling, deep roots in a community that I am native to, and passion for medicinal and useful perennials.
By focusing on what I have, rather than what I’ve lost. By applying my assets to goals of the project plus hard climate realities I am able to move forward.
What it looks like.
It’s time to stop the vegetable hustle. My site is no longer appropriate for it, nor my familial context. I am in the midst of pivoting toward a more perennial system and utilizing my present infrastructure to grow out and produce medicinal and edible landscaping nursery stock. In addition, I can lean on my formal training as a mental health counselor to find off-farm work that supports resilience in human sectors in my community and my family.
Psychologically, this moment creates an opportunity to re-brand. Our new name is Moonstone Plant Company.
Zora Neale Hurston - the anthropologist and writer once described strength as like being a rock or a blade of grass. The rock is hard but worn down and broken by water, whereas the blade of grass is unfazed and yielding - strong - when confronted by the elements. (Students of Taoism/Ch’an Buddhism may recognize this idea. I love the thought of Hurston reading Lao Tzu.)
In permaculture, we can’t be hard rocks, breaking ourselves against uncontrollable sectors.
At the end of the day, rather than moving forward stubbornly only to crumble like last Christmas’ peanut brittle, turn to permaculture principles, ethics, and the design process as the structure for a thoughtful, relaxed, and flowing decision making process.   This is the seat of resilience.
We must change.
When you find your project at this moment do three things.

Remember your goals, ethics, and principles
Re-engage the design process, focusing hard on analysis and yields (shout out to Emilie’s blog post last week)
Point positive. (Focus on what you’ve got, not what you’ve lost.)

And after licking my wounds for a couple of weeks while making this decision, a funny thought emerges. The hardest thing I have to do now is change my Instagram handle.
Small price - big yield
Find the leverage point in the system.
Projects stumble - shit goes sour, just remember the Rope -A- Dope.

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Soil To Self

3/15/2019

13 Comments

The Permaculture Toolkit - An Intentional Design Process

By Emilie Tweardy

Permaculture gives us a toolkit for moving from a culture of fear and scarcity to one of love and abundance
-Toby Hemenway

This quote speaks deeply to me because I’ve always seen Permaculture as a toolkit. A common Permaculture frustration is the absence of a specific working definition. Ask any 10 Permaculturists and you’ll get 10 different definitions. In fact, in recent months, I discovered a new personal favorite straight from the mouth of the godfather himself (Bill Mollison) calling Permaculture “the rational man’s approach to not shitting in his bed”. This off-the-cuff approach to a definition is common in the Permaculture world because it’s just such a broad field. The idea of intentional design can (and should) apply to anything you’d like, so how do we pare it down to an elevator pitch? Hence, the toolkit analogy. There are hard skills, soft skills, precision skills, broad skills. Permaculture as a system is the structure - the whole kit. The techniques themselves are the tools inside.

The study of Permaculture is best approached from the bird’s eye view, or “Pattern Level”. Over time, we zoom in to look from a worm’s eye view - what we call the “Details Level”. The pattern informs the details; the context makes sense of the minutia. And what we at SPI emphasize overall, is that in our world the “human sector” (in permaculture, ‘sectors’ refer to the energies flowing across a site or through a project. We study a myriad of sectors - wind, water, sun, human. etc.) is the foundation for all observations, techniques and applications. After all, we’re living in the Anthropocene Era now - even geologists (in labeling current time as the anthropocene) recognize that the study of the Earth at current time deserves an underlayment of anthropology, it simply cannot be escaped. We must take into account the effect of humankind on anything and everything we do. From community design on down to garden design.

Moving through a Permaculture Design Courses (PDCs), students learn hard skills like tree plantings, soil sampling, client interviews, map making, mushroom cultivation, grafting, intensive gardening and so much more. Stocking the toolkit. This is the easy part, frankly - collecting merit badges for all our skills. Nothing gets a group excited like digging in the dirt! And, we all get to know each other in the process. Oddly enough, that’s the hard part. Tensions arise, energies flow, bonds are made, strengthened, made stronger again by sharing and vulnerability and a common experience. This may sound like a metaphor for a drum circle, but the reality is that this simple process of group learning develops intimacy; it supports fundamental human needs. In this ever-connected world of electronic “followers”, “likes”, and “friends”, we see an increasing need for real-world sharing and connection. The struggle is real! That “fear and scarcity” that Hemenway references is just as human as it is economic. We emphasize and explore this in our classes for a number of reasons, but most importantly, we model, learn and practice these skills because they are absolutely crucial tools in the toolkit for successful design. As Dave Jacke says, “90% of all Permaculture projects that fail, fail due to poor design in the human sector.”

As we get to know each other, the “human ecosystem” of the classroom unfolds. We become guilded into useful groups and subgroups as we navigate our own Human Sector experience. There are unique flora and fauna represented by the individuals present. We may have teenage college students, 70 yr old retirees, businesswomen and men, entrepreneurs, execs, stay at home parents, massage therapists and construction workers, all in one room. Any one person might hold several of those titles at the same time. The cooperative learning experience then unfolds as a result of all the people in the room coming together, stepping up to the experience and leaning into the recognition that we are all in this together. We begin to see how we meet each other’s needs. What would happen if we were stranded on an island together? Where are the holes in our knowledge base? What skills are being lost from our communities altogether? How do we identify these strengths and challenges in our projects and for our clients? How do we meet them with grace and understanding, and ultimately - with elegant solutions? Enter the intentional design process. It’s a way to pull all of our skills together and make sense of a situation, whether it’s an office space or a backyard.

Over time, we fill the toolkit with strategies for strength and resilience. And while we learn these skills for independence, we continue to dig into the importance of dependence, not on fossil fuels or electronics, but on each other. We can’t all specialize in everything. We don’t all have grazing lands, we don’t all have mechanical skills, we don’t all have computer savvy. How can we come together to fill those gaps for each other? How can we use the human sector to elevate our design? To enhance our lives? This human sector focus turns all of the other tools into useful equipment, not just blunt instruments. After all, what’s the point of building a community garden with no community? No food forest is meant to feed a single individual. And drilling deeper into skill building and design savvy, we always, always, always return to Principle #1 - Observation and Interaction. If you’re not awake and involved, if you’re not participating, the cycle is broken. Permaculture design requires engagement. It’s as simple as that.

It’s not uncommon to see a Perma-newbie on a message board saying “Permaculture has all the answers! We can use it for anything!”. At first glance, this sounds so incredibly pretentious, but they’ve hit on something - Permaculture does have many answers, because it’s rooted in observation, adjusts to accommodate feedback, and includes everybody. And when you utilize everybody’s strengths - you can find all the answers. Or at least a lot of them.

But without the design process, Permaculture is just a pile of tools. Mollison famously warned against PDC grads just being “a bunch of woo-woos spinning around in circles”. And it’s a fair criticism. Permaculture can easily be an echo chamber of environmental enthusiasts, and gardeners, natural builders, non-violent communicators, edible landscapers, artists and more. But even Mollison, the founder himself, wasn’t afraid to call it out. Because that’s the heart of the design process - we never stop observing, we recognize feedback, and we re-evaluate as-needed. Permaculture in practice is an evolution. This design process gives us a structure to hold all of the tools, and a method to the way that we use them.

So when people frown on day 1 of a course when we say “this is not a gardening class”, I lean in. When people roll their eyes as we use Hemenway's talk of “love and abundance”, I get excited. Bring on the skeptics! These folks have the most transformative experiences of anyone because the Permaculture design system actually values and validates them and their opinions. We use an intentional design process because we look at all elements together - skeptics included. We design for people AND the environment, and we make each one better in the process. The toolkit is massive and growing all the time, and none of it holds together without the process. And because we are growing with intention, we aren’t just tools, but instruments, tuned to a purpose, playing together. Hell, we’re a symphony for change! Ok... maybe I’m getting carried away. But the moral of the story is that Permaculturists walking the walk aren’t just woo woos spinning in circles. We’re a community spiraling towards abundance, and it’s all by design.

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Soil To Self

3/8/2019

2 Comments

Towards a Permaculture Kitchen: Culinary Techniques for Reducing Waste

By Tom Parfitt

With the exception of the past five years, my entire career was spent working in kitchens. I worked my way up from a beer-soaked dishwasher, to a sous chef in a celebrated bistro, to the head chef of my own market and catering company. I spent time in a tiny 8 table restaurant, a large award winning five-diamond hotel, and I spent almost a decade teaching culinary arts, baking and pastry arts, nutrition and food science, and food service management. Even today as a stay-at-home-dad and fledgling homesteader, a good portion of my day revolves around preparing food for my family of six.
Throughout the years I’ve seen it all - drunken chefs barely making it through a shift right up to a Michelin starred chef orchestrating a kitchen brigade with the finesse of a distinguished maestro. I’ve cooked through services standing in a half inch of dirty water and I’ve worked in an immaculate open kitchen where one crumb on the floor was too many. Throughout all my unique experiences with kitchen culture, there has always been one common thread: kitchens produce an amazing amount of waste. The lessons I’ve learned in professional kitchens translate well to meal planning and preparation at home and I’d like to share some of the techniques I use to create a more streamlined and less wasteful permaculture kitchen. Our time, energy, and food resources are valuable and often wasted but with a little know-how and a bit of good design, we can begin to slowly and simply reduce our waste streams.

Teaching culinary school clued me into a couple of things: my kitchen philosophy is driven by techniques and my students are predisposed to think in terms of specific recipes. In general, their mindset is so entrenched in the detail that I had to provide written recipes for everything we made together. But instilling a technique-based philosophy was important to their success.
Technique-based cooking frees us up to use what’s on hand instead of making special trips to the store to purchase specific ingredients. This saves time, fuel, and encourages us to use the food that is already in the house, minimizing food waste. It allows for improvisation and seasonal cookery - so we’re not spending valuable time searching for out-of-season vegetables and we don’t scrap the idea of a new flavor combination because one ingredient is missing. I guarantee that the bulgogi will taste just as good if it’s marinated in garlic and onion chives as it would if we used the traditional green onions. Who knows, maybe swapping out the herbs will create a magic formula that makes it truly next level!
Here are four easy techniques to start adding to your culinary repertoire: Getting away from a recipe mindset and using cooking methods to make countless dishes, cooking from the pantry, full-value cooking, and making energy multitask.

Searing-In a New Mindset- Using One Cooking Method to Make Countless Dishes

One of my favorite cooking methods is searing meat and making a pan sauce. There are actually several cooking techniques combined to make this quick and easy meal preparation: Searing, Deglazing, Reducing, and Emulsifying. Don’t let those terms make you think this is complicated - it’s super easy. One of the more famous examples of this method is chicken piccata, which essentially goes as follows:
Sear seasoned chicken breast cutlets in olive oil on both sides until browned and almost cooked through. Add a tad more oil into the pan and cook minced garlic in the same pan. Deglaze the pan with white wine and chicken stock, making sure to dissolve the delicious brown bits that are stuck to the pan. Reduce the liquid until it’s almost gone and stir in cold butter little by little until a sauce forms. Add capers, lemon juice and flat leaf parsley and then season with salt and pepper.

Once we cook something like Chicken Piccata, we could think of it as adding a single recipe to our repertoire - but if we switch gears, we can think of it as a method to utilize the food we have on hand to make countless flavor combinations.

Step one - look in the fridge and see what we have on hand.
Step two, formulate a plan for specific ingredients.
Step three - cook!

Almost any piece of meat that you would consider throwing on the grill can be seared and cooked through. You can make any type of pan sauce by deglazing the pan with stock and/or wine, swirling in butter, and stirring in some herbs. Maybe next time, instead of olive oil, capers, and lemon we can use a sesame oil/grapeseed oil blend, ginger, mirin, and green onions. By switching out the ingredients we’ve made a completely different meal using the same technique. Little by little we can add techniques to our repertoire and a whole world of improvisational cooking is ours to experiment with! You can follow the same line of thinking and apply different flavors combinations to other methods of cooking such as braises, roasts, soups, sautees, and so much more.

2. Cooking From the Pantry

Buying in Bulk

Purchasing and storing rice, quinoa, pasta, etc. in bulk can save us money. It can also reduce our carbon footprint by reducing trips to the store as well as the amount of packaging we buy and discard. It really comes in handy when the roads are covered in ice and we need to get dinner on the table. Whole and bulk spices from an Indian or Pakistani grocer are infinitely cheaper and tastier than the powdered spices from the big-box grocery store. Whole spices last longer because they have much less surface area exposed. Simply toast spices (coriander, cumin, or fennel seed, for example) in a dry pan until they are several shades darker and then grind them in a mortar and pestle or in a coffee grinder.

B. Using Whole Ingredients to Make your Own Specialty Mixes
Learning to make ingredients can help as well. For example, lots of southern biscuit makers swear by White Lily Flour because it makes an extremely tender biscuit that also stays together. Knowing a bit about flour and how it reacts to water can help us understand. Water links together the characteristically elastic gluten-forming proteins in flour and the higher the protein count, the tougher the resulting product will be. However, a bit of protein is necessary for structure. White Lily flour strikes a good balance between tender and sturdy and is about 8% protein. So if we mix half cake flour (7%) with an all-purpose flour (about 9 to 10%) we can approximate the ever important protein levels of biscuit flour. We really don’t need to know all about flour proteins to make a substitute ingredient - simply do an internet search for substitutes and we can save ourselves from stocking specialty items. Now, our AP flour and Cake flour are more multi-functional. The same could be said for things like garlic-salt (garlic powder and salt mixed in it’s own little container!?) and lemon pepper. For lemon pepper we could just mix salt, pepper, and lemon zest. It’s more wholesome than the premixed stuff which is full of citric acid, and other free flowing agents. Actually, I suggest zesting all citrus fruit. Even if we don’t plan to use the zest right away it can be frozen and used later - in pie crust, scones, soups, spice rubs (it’s great on salmon), drinks, and so much more! There is so much value in that marginal fruit “waste.”

3. Full-Value Cooking
Speaking of valuing the marginal, I’ve watched so many vegetable stems and usable parts of meat get thrown right into the trash. Whole tops of peppers, broccoli stems, asparagus stems, peach pits and skins, carrot tops - all have value. Here are a few techniques for maximizing the value of your food.

A. Using the Less Prized Portion of Vegetables
We can micro-dice pepper scraps, zucchini ends, onion tops, the tougher outer layers of brussels sprouts, etc. and sautee them for use into a wonton filling, rice pilaf, goat cheese spread, or into ricotta cheese for ravioli filling. I like to julienne and pickle broccoli and cauliflower stems for a sour note in salads. I love cooking beets in vinegar and honey and then serving them over their own stems and greens with a little cheese crumbled on top.

B. Pureeing Scraps and Adding Them To Sauces
One way to use scraps and disguise vegetables for picky eaters at the same time iis to puree and hide carrot peelings, mushrooms stems, etc. and mix it into pasta sauce. Carrot tops, beet greens, and radish greens are great in pestos and smoothies.

C. Steeping In The Flavors
Peach pits and skin can be steeped into cream for a delicious ice cream or custard base as can coffee grounds - espresso creme brulee with churros anyone? This technique is never ending - chive stems steeped in milk and added to mashed potatoes, roasted Hatch Chile skins steeped in cream and used to make green chile queso, and on and on.

D. Using Less Valued Meat Scraps
One of the most tragic waste streams is usable meat scraps. These animals gave their lives for our sustenance so the least we can do is utilize them wisely. Of course we can use chicken bones, beef bones, as well as shrimp, crab and lobster shells for stocks and broths, which are the basis of countless soups, braises, and sauces. We can also save chicken fat to cook with or enrich rice dishes, beef fat and tough chine meat can be made into ground beef. Chicken skin tacos - enough said!

There are levels of usefulness when it comes to “waste”, so let’s starting with eating it when possible. Of course not all food waste is edible or palatable, but it typically has value anyway. We can’t eat rosemary stems but we can certainly use them to smoke fish or to skewer and grill chicken. And we can always vermicompost, compost, or feed animals with food waste.

4. Making Energy Multitask

Beyond food waste we can better use resources while we cook by making energy work for us in multiple ways - through batch cooking, by capturing escaping energy and valuing/using would-by “waste” and by making meal-prep a bonding experience.

A. Batch Cooking
By cooking in batches we can save fuel, wash water, and personal energy. It takes much less energy to cook twice or three times the amount we need for a meal, as it does to cook the same meal three separate times. Batch cooking and then freezing portions of prepared meals comes in handy and we all need a night off from cooking and washing dishes.
B. Capturing Escaping Energy
Boiling a big pot of water to make pasta uses quite a bit of electricity or gas and there is a good deal of heat energy going unused as steam escapes off of the pot. There are several ways we could we use that energy: we could steam dumplings, veggies for the week or even fish or shellfish in a bamboo steamer, right on top of the pot while the pasta cooks. We can also blanch veggies in the hot water before we cook the pasta. When the cooking is done we could use the pasta water for making stocks or simply watering plants. Similarly, potato water is great for making gravy and actually increases the volume of the yield.
There are other energies that go unused in a kitchen, such as a cooling but still warm oven. This heat can be used to proof sourdough bread for the bulk fermentation stage, or for drying herbs, breadcrumbs, and more.

C. Stacking Functions - Turning Meal Prep Into Teaching and Bonding Time

Yet another waste stream is wasted opportunity. Kids can easily be integrated into the cooking process (ginger can be peeled with a spoon - great for really young kids!). We can also invite friends and share the experience of learning from each other and bonding as we cook. From my personal experience, my children are way more likely to try new foods if they’ve had a hand in preparing them. I love seeing their pride as they present their dishes. My three year old made breakfast potatoes the other day and all his sisters liked his small batch better than the ones I cooked - success!

By using cooking methods instead of recipes, cooking from a smart pantry, changing our mindset to full-value cooking, and making energy multitask for us, we can waste less food, energy, and opportunities. What techniques do you think are important to setting yourself free from the details of recipe preparation?

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Soil to Self Blog

Permaculture And Faith

By Victoria Mininger

Soil To Self

Rope A Dope Style - A Case Study In Creative Use and Response To Change

Soil To Self

The Permaculture Toolkit - An Intentional Design Process

By Emilie Tweardy

Soil To Self

Towards a Permaculture Kitchen: Culinary Techniques for Reducing Waste

By Tom Parfitt

Authors

Archives

Categories

Soil to Self Blog

Permaculture And Faith​By Victoria Mininger

Soil To Self

​Rope A Dope Style - A Case Study In Creative Use and Response To Change

Soil To Self

The Permaculture Toolkit - An Intentional Design Process​By Emilie Tweardy

Soil To Self

Towards a Permaculture Kitchen: Culinary Techniques for Reducing Waste ​​By Tom Parfitt

Authors

Archives

Categories

Permaculture And Faith

By Victoria Mininger

Rope A Dope Style - A Case Study In Creative Use and Response To Change

The Permaculture Toolkit - An Intentional Design Process

By Emilie Tweardy

Towards a Permaculture Kitchen: Culinary Techniques for Reducing Waste

By Tom Parfitt