Learn how to sleep better at night naturally by creating a peaceful sleep environment with tips for decorating your bedroom. Our bedrooms are our oasis for sleep, relaxation, and rest after long, stressful days. Your bedroom should be the most personal room in your house, especially because you spend one-third of your life sleeping. When it comes to styling your interiors, never neglect the importance of your bedroom. Be intentional with your decisions and create a space that can optimize your sleep to help contribute to a happier, healthier life.

Looking for some easy water conservation tips for emergencies? Here are a few simple methods of saving water and making the water you have last longer. The Penny-Pinching Prepper (Ulysses Press, 2015) by Bernie Carr helps readers prepare for an emergency without breaking their bank. Carr walks his readers through DIY projects, storm shelter building, and more all on a budget to make sure that anyone can afford to be prepared for an emergency. In the following excerpt, he explains the best ways to conserve water in an emergency. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the average family of four uses 400 gallons of water per day. Using the toilet entails the heaviest consumption, followed by bathing, doing laundry, washing dishes, and finally, drinking and cooking. It’s a good idea to conserve water every day, but it is crucial to save water during an emergency. Repair water leaks as soon as possible. If water is scarce, you will need to use every opportunity to minimize your usage. Here are a few tips to save water every day.

Many hot sauces begin as a homemade concoction, which grows into a legend among friends and family and eventually develops into a business that one hopes is lucrative. Maybe you run a restaurant, have a sauce that your customers crave, and decide to take the plunge and bottle it, to sell at the restaurant or to a wider audience. Or maybe you are a hot sauce collector, have tasted hundreds of sauces, and think you could make one that’s better. Perhaps you’re a computer programmer by day and an amateur sauce maker by night, you have been dreaming up culinary concoctions and think you’ve stumbled upon a great formula. Whatever your pathway to getting sauced, the first step is to come up with a recipe. There are several aspects to consider.

Most of us have no idea where our food comes from, much less all the segments of the chain that have to be coordinated to get us that food. Farmers markets offer the opposite to shoppers – a short route from farm to the market, direct relationships between farm and consumer, and full transparency along the way. If you get to the market early enough, you can even see the farmer unload product – labor that goes otherwise unseen in the “big” food supply chain. The “big” food supply chain faces a range of challenges and vulnerabilities for a range of reasons: it is tasked with aggregating products from tens and maybe even hundreds of different producers, runs on long trucking routes managed by many transportation partners, requires complicated data flows, and has to accommodate a range of temperature needs during transport – just to name a few! Farmers markets are shielded from some of these challenges because they offer a simple alternative: instead of operating a complicated supply chain, why not just connect people to the closest food sources in their own regions? Farmers markets are essentially pop-up grocery stores; but unlike grocery stores, they aren’t bound to carrying a specific set of products, don’t rely on long national transportation routes, and don’t have to pass through bottlenecks at ports – farmers market resilience is born out of the basic simplicity and common sense of the model: facilitating direct transactions between farmers and shoppers.

When most of us think of pumpkins, we tend to limit our conjuring to visions of spicy pies and eerily glimmering jack-o’-lanterns. Actually, though, the bright round gourds have served a number of additional purposes — gastronomic and otherwise — since … well, since before recorded history. In fact, archaeologists have found the remains of pumpkins among the relics left by ancient cliff dwellers. And when Europeans first arrived on these shores, they were quick to learn — from Native Americans — to plant the distinctive squash between hills of corn, discovering that their sprawling vines served as a living mulch and helped keep the maize fields free of weeds. The early settlers apparently developed “orange thumbs” in this regard, too. Samuel Eliot Morison (an expert on the period) writes in his book The Story of the “Old Colony” of New Plymouth that the pumpkins harvested prior to that first Thanksgiving were piled “in great golden heaps alongside the houses”.

Achieve year-round gardening success in your climate by following this expert advice on selecting vegetables that grow year-round with variety selection, overwintering cold-hardy vegetables, and practicing season extension techniques, such as using cold frames and row cover to protect plants from frost. Fall frost doesn’t have to spell the end of garden-fresh eating. By choosing the right crops and varieties, as well as implementing some season extension strategies, you can push the seasonal envelope much further than you might have imagined. In fact, gardeners in every region of the United States can enjoy vegetables that grow year-round to enjoy fresh foods from the garden every season. We talked with 11 of the most adventurous and successful gardeners we know from coast to coast to learn their top tactics for stretching the growing season to its max (see where each of the experts lives on this Zone map). Try tips from in or near your Hardiness Zone or your region to help set you on your way toward eating from the garden year-round!

When I dream about corn on the cob in mid-February, I think about sitting around a checkered, oil-cloth–draped picnic table with my family, chomping away on steamin’ ears of corn. With butter dribbling down our chins, we often took 10 minutes to eat a row of corn typewriter-style from one end of the ear to the other. Personality traits manifested themselves in our individual cob-crunching styles: I ate every kernel in each row before moving on to the next; my brothers inhaled their corn at record-breaking speeds, racing to see whose cob pile would become the highest; and my sister munched on her corn haphazardly, leaving large gaps here and there. A fight would inevitably break out over who’d get to use the last remaining plastic corn-holders, and someone always ended up getting stabbed in the struggle (usually the younger and weaker siblings). Other than that, however, corn consumption was quite pleasurable, as most of you can attest to. And let’s face it, who can get all nostalgic when it comes to eggplant or brussels sprouts? Those are childhood memories best forgotten.

With these off grid food preservation techniques, you can rely less on electricity and more on tried-and-true ways to preserve food. Before widespread refrigeration and electricity, people developed other food-preservation methods to slow down spoilage. Adopting some of these long-established ways to preserve food and relying less on modern ones will reduce your carbon footprint; increase your self-reliance; and cost less than canning, freezing, and other grid-dependent ways to preserve food. (Note: Home-preserved food may carry a slight risk of botulism or food poisoning.

Winter in the Midwest always reminds me of the Christmas vacation I spent as a young girl with my grandparents in southern Germany: the bright snow and crisp wind that gives way to muddy ground, and then back again to snow. We often went on what felt like long walks to the playgrounds or to see the sheep or deer that lived near my grandparents’ house, and it was deeply formative to spend time outdoors, gazing at the wintery landscape while bundled up. Here in the Midwest, we’ve recently had a winter storm pass through and leave us with quite a bit of snow. While it’s certainly enjoyable to be outside, the limited daylight can make it difficult to be outdoors for long in the evening. Instead, I prefer to settle down with some cocoa and a good craft. I’ve been crocheting since the start of the pandemic, and I’ve recently gotten the hang of tatting after multiple attempts and tangled thread. Someday, I’ll be able to make some tatted lace trim! Crafting, however, isn’t just limited to the fiber arts. Oftentimes, the best crafts are the ones made with materials just lying around your house, such as spare cardboard or old clothes. Crafting can be a wonderful way to make the most of the quiet season, and there’s nothing better than art that brings the outdoors indoors. Here are some inexpensive, child-friendly craft ideas to fill your winter with imaginative fun.

Making your own seed paper at home is easy and a great way to recycle materials that might otherwise go to waste. I tear up newspapers, magazines, and used envelopes to produce pulp for my homemade paper. I especially like to use the colorful ads from the local grocery store. Lint from the clothes dryer can also be an interesting addition. Here’s how to make seed paper at home. The only specialized equipment you’ll need is a deckle kit. I bought an inexpensive deckle set online for $9.99. It came with three pieces: a wooden frame, a plastic grid about an inch thick that fits inside the frame, and a fine screen. During papermaking, you’ll pour the liquidy pulp over the screen, and excess water will seep through. The plastic grid supplies support for pressing out additional moisture. You can also make your own simple frame with four dowels or narrow pieces of wood trim. For detailed instructions on building your own deckle, see our article “Making Paper at Home.” The size of the device is up to you and depends on whether you want to produce 8-by-10-inch paper, a 4-by-6-inch postcard, or another size entirely.