Porridge, gruel, mush... your body needs it!

Gruel, attainable healthy

A new small kitchen appliance can change your healthy... Yea, yea, yea, you say to yourself, how many times have I heard of that? But, this thing really works! It is a soy milk maker, however it does more than soy milk. I use it to make porridge, gruel or mush, whatever you call it. It is an easy and delicious way to boost your health. You can use all sorts of grains, legumes and other nutritional rich ingredients. It has a heating element and a blender built in, it will break up all the ingredients and make them into a thin porridge like paste. The sensor inside the machine will stop the porridge from boiling over.
A simple recipe goes like this: 1 cup of black rice, 2 cups of white rice, 1 cup of assorted legumes (small red  beans, kidney beans, mung beans or navy beans or whatever you have on hand), 1/4 cup of black sesame seeds and 1/4 cup of flax seeds.
Use 2/3 cup of the gruel mix, add 6 cups of water, set the soy milk maker to "dry beans" and the cooking will begin. 20 minutes later you will have a pot of healthy warm delicious gruel.
The colorful various ingredients you add to your gruel mix consists of vital nutrients, nutrients our bodies don't get in the SAD diet (Standard American Diet), nutrients our bodies desperately need. The machine break up the cellular structures of the ingredients, making nutrients easily accessible to our bodies.

Gruel Mix

How to Grow Baby Bok Choys

Baby bok choys belong to the cabbage family. They are the non-heading cousins of the regular green cabbage. They are easy to grow. They mature quickly, 30-45 days The key to succeed in growing baby bok choys is to pick the right variety for the right season. The secret is most baby bok choys, or cabbage family for that matter, are cool crops that only do well in the fall. There are special classes of baby bok choys or cabbage that can be planted in spring and summer successfully. These are the breeds either through hybridizing or special selection that acquired the traits that allow them to withstand the spring conditions. So if you are planting them in the spring or summer look for the varieties that are bolt resistant or specifically bred for spring.

Building a Small Homestead

Green lawn or green living? It doesn't have to be one or the other, building a small homestead in your backyard will allow you to save money, eat fresh and nutritious food and reduce your carbon foot step. To fit all the pieces together can take sometime, but next time when you plan your landscaping, consider implementing some of these ideas. Planting fruit trees instead of the regular landscaping trees, they can be beautiful as well as functional. An herb and vegetable garden will allow you to enjoy fine dinning right at your dinner table. Raising chickens or ducks if circumstances allow, is a great way to form a mini eco-cycle, not only you can get the fresh eggs, the animals will eat any leftover food you may have and they are great at keeping the insect pressure low on in the garden. Following a few simple steps, you can too enjoy the green living and reap all the benefits from it.

How to Grow Cucumbers

Fresh cucumbers from the garden is not the same as the super market kind. To grow cucumbers successfully, you need to learn a few tricks. Cucumbers are very sensitive to the soil temperature so do not sow cucumbers until the ground is warmed up significantly. Soil temperature should be at least 55F before you sow cucumbers. Tips for starting the seeds indoors and then transplanting to the garden:  The ideal germinating temperature for cucumber is 75 to 80F. Time the starts so they are ready to be transplanted when they have two sets of leaves plus the tip growth. How long you can achieve this depends on the growing condition, but usually you can do this in 4 weeks. The seedlings will need to be "hardened off" before being transplanted to the garden. Hardening off is a process of exposing the seedlings to the environment where they are going to be growing so they won't experience the transplanting shock. Cucumbers are notorious difficult to transplant, the reason being their root system do not recover well. So if you could sow them directly in the garden.

Growing Potatos

June 20. Potato plants are lush and full, a few started to flower. This is the indication that new potatoes are forming underground. Carefully remove the dirt under the plants and you can "steal" a few. After stealing the potatoes, be sure to back fill at the root level with some compost, cover as much stem as you can. There will be new potatoes developing.

New Potatoes

Backyard Chickens: Leghorn-The Egg Laying Champion

Raising backyard chickens is a great way to get high quality protein. Chickens start to produce eggs anywhere from 5-9 month after hatching. Leghorn is one of the best egg layer there is around. Not only they start laying early in age, they are the most consistent egg layers. Leghorns are small bodied birds, they have a very efficient egg/feed conversion ratio. Our leghorn has been laying almost daily for two and half years. Feeding extra protein to the chickens is important, so they can replenish their body for the high protein demands from laying eggs. Feed chickens any leftover food you may have besides the chicken feeds. Chickens are not very picky, they will eat just about anything except purple vegetables. Leghorns are not broody, they lay their eggs and off they go. Mine has not gone through molting in the two and half years I've had her.

Garlic Shoot Pesto

Garlic shoot pesto

Garlic Shoots

It's the middle of June, the garlic I planted last October is looking great. Garlic shoots are starting to come up, and they should be promptly removed to avoid sucking energies from the garlic plant, so bigger bulbs can be developed underground. But don't just toss those garlic shoots in the compost, they make good pesto. Check out this recipe and try it yourself....