Homegrown goodness.

Growing your own produce at home is not only nutritious, but it tastes far better than produce found in grocery stores.

When produce is grown commercially and shipped to grocery stores, it is generally picked while still unripe and artificially ripened or shipped green. This leads to produce that is technically ripe, but lacking most of the good taste and consistency of vine ripened fruit. Hence the radically different taste between a homegrown tomato and a store bought one.

Growing produce at home is easy, fun, and almost anyone can do it, even if you don't have a single outdoor spot of land to call your own! I have grown vegetables in an apartment, in the lawn of a duplex we were renting and of course, now in my own garden at home. All you need is to know which seeds do well in what circumstances.

If you don't have any spot in the ground to put plants, you'll need to tailor your circumstances to container gardening. Most importantly, you need to make sure you purchase seeds meant to be grown in containers. Most bush varieties of plants can be grown in containers. Tomatoes do particularly well in less than ideal conditions, and nothing beats the taste of a homegrown tomato. Bush beans are another plant that does well in a container, along with most varieties of medicinal and cooking herbs. If you're really ambitious and you have a big enough pot, you can try growing plants like pumpkins (bush varieties) in containers. Make sure to keep your plants well watered and make sure they have good drainage! A layer of sandy loam underneath the potting soil can help the plants drain better while not letting out too much water like gravel. If you don't have a patio or porch to put your pots on, find the sunniest southern facing window in your house and stick the pots there.

If you are unable to keep plants in your apartment or condo for whatever reason, check out the American Community Garden Association's website. There you can find information on community gardens near you, or if you're particularly ambitious, you can start a community garden of your own! Community gardens are not only a great way to make your own food, they are an opportunity to meet new people and a chance to add greenery and plant life to a community.

If you're lucky enough to have your own land to garden, consider heirloom varieties. Many companies such as Seeds of Change and Johnny's have all or some heirloom varieties of plants. Heirlooms preserve natural diversity and often have unique flavors or looks. Most importantly, they save money for the home gardener by allowing you to collect the seeds at the end of the year to save for next years garden!

Tip of the day: If you're a yogurt eater, save the cups! Yogurt cups can be easily recycled into tiny plant pots for seedlings, and are large enough to hold the seedlings until they get big enough to go in the garden. The cups can be reused year after year. It's a great way to hold healthy food in that yogurt cup two times!

Moving away from the "green" hype.

The ongoing debate about catastrophic climate change and "green" technologies fires up a lot of strong emotions in people on both sides of the argument. But no matter what side you fight on, we should all agree on one thing: pollution is not a good thing. Smog, poisoned lakes, trash and deforestation affect all of us in an equally negative way. Returning to a more natural lifestyle should be the goal of all of us, political and religious affiliations aside.

So I'd like to move away from the hype and popularity of the green movement and distinguish natural from "green".

When I think of the concept of green living, I associate it with commercialism and hype. Green is a company producing a more environmentally friendly plastic bag when we should be trying to stop using so many plastic bags in the first place. Green encourages us to be just as focused on consuming as before, only shift our thought patterns slightly to the left. Green does not invite real change, it draws in the hip and trendy and when it goes out of style, nothing is any different.

Natural living encourages an entire lifestyle change. Natural living is about reducing our consumption, even if it means stepping out of our comfort zone to do so. It's about learning to live in harmony with nature, which means fewer products, not greener ones. To be natural is to be the way that you were meant to be, living the way your body was meant to live, the way nature intended.

This isn't to say that there are no virtues to the green movement. Making environmentally friendly things more trendy and popular might help to encourage people who would otherwise shun the natural life as too "hippie" or "earthy crunchy" to make a real lifestyle change. And I don't think anyone is complaining about places like LA reducing carbon emissions. But we need to focus on a real life change, not just a trendy grocery bag that gets stuck in the closet next month.

I encourage all of us to take the steps to move towards a more natural life that will last a lifetime.

Tip of the day: Starting seedlings indoors this time of year? Try using egg cartons until the seedlings have 2 or more true leaves. The egg carton can be torn apart and transplanted without disturbing the roots of the seedlings and it is naturally biodegradable.

New to blogging, yet not.

Well, welcome to all those who are visiting my blog for the first time. Although I'm new to the official blogosphere, I've written in an online diary since 2000, so the concept of splashing my life all over a screen for others to peruse really isn't anything new to me.

I grew up in a very suburban and consumerist environment and only recently began attempting to live in a way closer to the way nature intended. My husband and I have moved into a house with enough acres to start a sizable garden and hopefully begin raising some livestock. We already compost and recycle, and are trying to learn how to better reduce our consumption and reuse what we already own. We feed our cats an all raw diet of chicken, chicken and more chicken (and some supplements).

The biggest challenge for me blogging right now is learning more HTML than the basics I already knew. The biggest challenge for me with natural living is finding the happy equilibrium between natural and within my price range. As a stay at home mom, we live off of my husband's income alone, plus whatever I can bring in through my freelance nature photography and whatever I'm able to sell during the growing season (produce, herbal teas, flowers). So sometimes organic isn't the easiest thing to do. I hope to share tips and tactics I've found for doing natural cheaper as I blog about life living in Maine, renovating a house and living a more natural and healthy life. I will feature these tips in the "tip of the day" at the end of each post.

I hope you enjoy this blog, and if you do, tell everyone you know! I firmly believe a more natural life is a healthier life.

Tip of the day: Spider plants are a virtually indestructible houseplant that can thrive even if neglected, will produce baby plants if well cared for, and will filter toxins out of your air. Find someone who has one already and see if it has babies to get a free starter plant. They can live indefinitely if well cared for.