#self sustainable

[christenhelm]

📸 The Seasonal Homestead

[balkanradfem]

Happy shoutout to my childhood self who was always putting some petals, leaves, dirt and stones in a pot making a magic potion. She was right. If she had the knowledge I have now, she would have been over the moon. She only lacked a person to teach her that:

Yarrow mixed with hot water will make a potion against stomach-ache

Lemon balm leaves and pine needles mixed with hot water will make a potion that makes sad and distress go away

Basil leaves mixed with hot water will make a potion against headache

Nettle mixed with hot water will give power, clarity and calcium to the drinker

Mint leaves mixed with hot water will soothe stomach spasms

Linden flowers mixed with hot water will become a cold medicine

Chamomile with hot water makes a sleepy potion

Elderberry flowers mixed with hot water will become a cold medicine

Elderberries if mixed and cooked, powerful anti-flu and anti-cold medicine

Violet leaves mixed with hot water will give anti-fever medicine, and cures sore throat

Blackberry leaves mixed with hot water will make an anti-diarrhea potion

Sage mixed with hot water will help fight bacteria

Rose petals left in cold water in the sun will create sweet-smelling potion that lifts the mood of the drinker

and she’d be so proud to make actual functioning potions. Herbal tea is a witchy power.

[chilihere]

[robocop1906]

Because knowledge is power

[samwisethewitch]

Homemaking, gardening, and self-sufficiency resources that won't radicalize you into a hate group

It seems like self-sufficiency and homemaking skills are blowing up right now. With the COVID-19 pandemic and the current economic crisis, a lot of folks, especially young people, are looking to develop skills that will help them be a little bit less dependent on our consumerist economy. And I think that's generally a good thing. I think more of us should know how to cook a meal from scratch, grow our own vegetables, and mend our own clothes. Those are good skills to have.

Unfortunately, these "self-sufficiency" skills are often used as a recruiting tactic by white supremacists, TERFs, and other hate groups. They become a way to reconnect to or relive the "good old days," a romanticized (false) past before modern society and civil rights. And for a lot of people, these skills are inseparably connected to their politics and may even be used as a tool to indoctrinate new people.

In the spirit of building safe communities, here's a complete list of the safe resources I've found for learning homemaking, gardening, and related skills. Safe for me means queer- and trans-friendly, inclusive of different races and cultures, does not contain Christian preaching, and does not contain white supremacist or TERF dog whistles.

Homemaking/Housekeeping/Caring for your home:

Making It by Kelly Coyne and Erik Knutzen [book] (The big crunchy household DIY book; includes every level of self-sufficiency from making your own toothpaste and laundry soap to setting up raised beds to butchering a chicken. Authors are explicitly left-leaning.)

Safe and Sound: A Renter-Friendly Guide to Home Repair by Mercury Stardust [book] (A guide to simple home repair tasks, written with rentals in mind; very compassionate and accessible language.)

How To Keep House While Drowning by KC Davis [book] (The book about cleaning and housework for people who get overwhelmed by cleaning and housework, based on the premise that messiness is not a moral failing; disability and neurodivergence friendly; genuinely changed how I approach cleaning tasks.)

Gardening

Rebel Gardening by Alessandro Vitale [book] (Really great introduction to urban gardening; explicitly discusses renter-friendly garden designs in small spaces; lots of DIY solutions using recycled materials; note that the author lives in England, so check if plants are invasive in your area before putting them in the ground.)

Country/Rural Living:

Woodsqueer by Gretchen Legler [book] (Memoir of a lesbian who lives and works on a rural farm in Maine with her wife; does a good job of showing what it's like to be queer in a rural space; CW for mentions of domestic violence, infidelity/cheating, and internalized homophobia)

"Debunking the Off-Grid Fantasy" by Maggie Mae Fish [video essay] (Deconstructs the off-grid lifestyle and the myth of self-reliance)

Sewing/Mending:

Annika Victoria [YouTube channel] (No longer active, but their videos are still a great resource for anyone learning to sew; check out the beginner project playlist to start. This is where I learned a lot of what I know about sewing.)

Make, Sew, and Mend by Bernadette Banner [book] (A very thorough written introduction to hand-sewing, written by a clothing historian; lots of fun garment history facts; explicitly inclusive of BIPOC, queer, and trans sewists.)

Sustainability/Land Stewardship

Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer [book] (Most of you have probably already read this one or had it recommended to you, but it really is that good; excellent example of how traditional animist beliefs -- in this case, indigenous American beliefs -- can exist in healthy symbiosis with science; more philosophy than how-to, but a great foundational resource.)

Wild Witchcraft by Rebecca Beyer [book] (This one is for my fellow witches; one of my favorite witchcraft books, and an excellent example of a place-based practice deeply rooted in the land.)

Avoiding the "Crunchy to Alt Right Pipeline"

Note: the "crunchy to alt-right pipeline" is a term used to describe how white supremacists and other far right groups use "crunchy" spaces (i.e., spaces dedicated to farming, homemaking, alternative medicine, simple living/slow living, etc.) to recruit and indoctrinate people into their movements. Knowing how this recruitment works can help you recognize it when you do encounter it and avoid being influenced by it.

"The Crunchy-to-Alt-Right Pipeline" by Kathleen Belew [magazine article] (Good, short introduction to this issue and its history.)

Sisters in Hate by Seyward Darby (I feel like I need to give a content warning: this book contains explicit descriptions of racism, white supremacy, and Neo Nazis, and it's a very difficult read, but it really is a great, in-depth breakdown of the role women play in the alt-right; also explicitly addresses the crunchy to alt-right pipeline.)

These are just the resources I've personally found helpful, so if anyone else has any they want to add, please, please do!

[beaft]

after spending many hours as the squishiest and most useless member of my party, i have finally settled on a decent build for chanterelle. i call it the Boys Build. it goes like this: chanterelle is able to summon up to fifteen Boys at any one time (regular zombies, mushroom zombies, dryads, etc). when there's a fight, chanterelle turns invisible, hides behind a rock, and sends in The Boys to do the dirty work. i have now won multiple fights using the Boys method without taking a single point of damage. it's not glamorous but it works

[ride-a-dromedary]

[birchsapfaerie]

✨

[taikk0]

the unspoken broflovski family curse

[keepingitneutral]

Happier Camper's !

[christenhelm]

Which way does your garden face?

Ref: Youshouldgrow.com

[balkanradfem]

So, I’ve brought home more mushrooms than I could possibly eat, and I wanted to preserve some for the winter. My ideal plan was to dry them, but the weather outside is abysmal for drying, all rain, fog, and no sunlight. The heating in the apartment isn’t working yet, or I’d just set them on the radiator in a little newspaper box and they’d dry. But I had to go another route.

I figured I’d freeze a bunch, and I got the instructions that I should blanch them first (meaning, I need to cut them, boil them for 2 minutes, then put them in freezing cold water to stop the cooking, then freeze), and when I finally put them in the freezer, they were not only extremely slimy, but also decided to freeze in one solid rock, which is not very easy to break apart to take little bits out for meals. I decided for the next batch, I’ll try drying instead. Even if it doesn’t work, it’s worth a try.

So I bring out my little homemade drying rack and put the mushrooms to dry, and I couldn’t even set them outside because of how cold and humid it was, so I just set them indoors. I was worried they wouldn’t dry fast enough, and they’d become moldy or start rotting instead of drying, but look at this!

Instead, it worked! I know most of my garden produce would not dry at room temperature, but mushrooms can do it! I let them dry for 4 days, and then finally it was a bit sunny outside, so I set them on the balcony to dry them to that crispy dry level. And now I have a little jar of dried mushrooms!

Extremely easy to use and most importantly they’re NOT SLIMY. I accidentally found out that dried mushrooms are like, ridiculously expensive on the market, I don’t know why, but I feel smug that I could make them on my own.

I also remembered the trick I learned from last year - if something won’t dry completely, you can dry it for a few days on room temperature, and then when you’re using the oven to bake something, you wait until it cools down and it’s just warm in there, and you can set your produce to dry until the end, I dried some apples that way and they were excellent to have as a snack.

[writeouswriter]

Two people with the exact same brand of ADHD and shared intense hyperfixation clicked too hard, 100 dead, thousands injured, 3 million new timelines unlocked, a single starting line of conversation ending in 400 new novel length messages sent and one month between reply times

[robocop1906]

Red Dawn was released 39 years ago today