I often wonder what my life would be like without garlic. Sad, mundane, flavourless, boring. Am I crazy? Probably. Am I motivated to grow my own garlic every chance I get? Definitely. So why don’t we all learn how to grow garlic in pots at home, because let’s be honest garlic is love, garlic is life. (trust me I’m normal) Let’s start with the pots; Any pot around 8 inches will be fine. Of course, you can take a bigger one if you want to plant more! But 8 inches can be like a minimum. A round or rectangle pot is your choice. But make sure the pot has drainage holes so there isn’t any water clogging.

Do you or your mom love to make Baingan Ka Bharta at home? Or make very healthy Eggplant chips and Masala? What if you can grow your own Eggplants at home and it just as easy as going to the grocery store and buying it! here you have the added luxury of knowing just how clean and chemical-free your food is.First, let’s see the kind of potting mix you need. Brinjal likes a well-Draining, Sandy soil. You can use a mixture of Sand, Garden soil and Compost or manure, keeping the sand on the heavier side. You can now get your seeds. You can buy them online or your local nursery or gardening shops. The best time to sow these seeds is right after the monsoon season.

You put in all your love into your chilli plant. Give it all the care, do whatever necessary to make it work. But then it slowly starts declining. Its chillies start falling off and dying. It's very sad to see all your hard work go away. So, let's learn a few things you can do if this happens! First, check if there are any pests. The most common cause for a plant to get eaten is bugs like cabbage worms or mealy bugs. So, make sure you remove any Pests you see and spray neem oil and water mixture every 15 days or so.

You're in the kitchen, cooking up a storm. Boiling some Spaghetti, stirring the sauce, your house is basically Italy. You plate it up all nice in the “fancy guest plates”, it’s a mood. The only thing missing is some basil to sprinkle on top to make it truly gourmet. Wouldn’t it be great if you could just run to your garden, pick some fresh herbs? Well, you can.

People often think that all plants go Dormant in the winter. Yes, some do. But some continue to give out beautiful blooms even in the dead of winter.

Now we all plants that stay with us forever. Here to make that happen are perennials. If you read the article "Gardening dictionary for new gardener", you already know what perennials are. If not, here is a definition: A perennial plant or simply perennial is a plant that lives more than two years. Perennial means “through the years”. They keep growing for years!

When I was a kid, my mom used to make this dish with Bhendi. She used to slice it very thin and mix them in masala and fry them. It used to be so crispy and tasty. It’s like a food childhood memory. A veggie that has so many names. ‘Okra’ if you want to be fancy, ‘Ladyfinger’, ‘Bhendi’, ‘Bhindi’ it’s all very easy to grow at home!

We all have read about the usual easy-care House plants. But if you’re bored of reading about the same old snake plants and ZZ plants, you have come to the right place! Over time I have realised just how easy these plants are to care for and they aren’t mentioned in a lot of “top 10 easy-care indoor plants”.

For success as a flower farmer as well as a seed breeder and seller, it helps to possess both a creative spirit and business acumen. My guest this week, Erin Benzakein of Floret Flower Farm and the Magnolia Network series “Growing Floret,” has both in spades, and we discuss how she maintains her creativity and furthers her mission to get more flowers out into the world.

The intention of housewarming gifts is to make the new residents feel welcome and assist them in making the house their home. As a result, each housewarming present has a tremendous deal of weight and significance. An indoor plant is one of these types of gifts. Houseplants assist in the transformation of a new house into a home. Houseplants are ideal housewarming gifts because they have the ability to transform even the smallest new living area into a welcoming home and create an aura of cheerfulness. Indoor plants come in a huge variety of shapes and sizes, each with its own set of benefits and a different aesthetic.

This Orange Marmalade recipe is made with ordinary oranges and lemons, and it’s as unfussy as it is delicious. It follows the “old fashioned” technique of sitting in a pot overnight, and every spoonful will make your morning toast sparkle.

For the Love of Apricots is a feast for the eyes as well as the soul. Beautiful food photography blends with images of California’s apricot orchards; from today as well as not so long ago, when fruit orchards covered much of the Santa Clara Valley landscape.

A reach-in pantry narrows your shelves to a trimmer space, generally a closet with the shelves taking up the whole area. This is a wonderful resort for houses with restricted space or for people who do not want a lot of extra storage. A perk of these types of pantry shelving is that all items are more organised and easily accessible.

A Butler's pantry provides a dedicated space for meal staging and serving so the main kitchen can stay clean and organized. You can use it to store and prepare food before serving, keeping the mess and clutter away from your dining area.

Designate areas for breakfast items, like cereal and oatmeal, plus canned goods, condiments and packages goods, such as pasta or rice.

There exist many design options for a kitchen pantry cabinet. You can use shelving designed exclusively for contents, inserts to help maximise storage capacity, pull out pantry cabinet for easy access, a corner pantry cabinet or a floor pantry. A benefit of a kitchen pantry cabinet is that it is a space to organise items that you want to have easy access to while keeping them out of sight.

For those who do not have the luxury of devoting a whole room or cabinet to a pantry in kitchen, then a pull out kitchen pantry unit is your best bet.

Has your pantry turned into a game of spice-and-go-seek that usually ends in headaches and guilt? Do you see wrong-sized bins and myriad of packages, from cans all the way to cellophane-wrapped cookie boxes, as you walk into your walk-in? How long has that cookie mix been sitting there - is it longer than a year? If you’ve answered anything but a “no” to these three questions, fear not. Those dream pantries you’ve been seeing in magazines and pinning online aren’t as far out of reach as they might seem. Here are seven kitchen pantry organization tips and ideas you can implement in your pantry, no matter how small.

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.

How does a solar water heater work? Explore the various types of solar water heaters. Reduce your reliance on fossil fuel emissions by building a passive solar water heater.

Which kind of fabric is best for the planet? Unfortunately, trying to choose might leave you with decision paralysis. While it’s well-advised to avoid the petroleum-based synthetic fibers such as polyester (which can burn through millions of barrels of oil), knowing what kinds of fabric to buy instead is hardly clear. Are you better off with breathable but resource-hungry cotton, or is fast-growing but heavily processed bamboo a smarter choice for the environment? Let’s look closer at the growing and processing methods of six of today’s most popular natural fibers to find out.

Not everyone has the privilege to live in an earthship. In fact, an earthship is not your everyday home that you will see in your neighborhood, let alone something you will regularly come across while doing house hunting. But they are out there, considered by some as the most eco-friendly homes ever built while providing the owner with a sustainable, carefree and healthy lifestyle. Many people who take on the task of building their own earthship are usually seen as extremely eco-friendly, and hearing complaints from them about their sustainable home is rare. Not that you can blame them, I mean why look for faults and complain about something you designed or built yourself? Imagine the mass production of earthships for the ordinary folks today. Yes, it is the age of the green movement, and many people are trying to live a more eco-friendly lifestyle. However, the furthest many will go to live “eco-friendly” is through recycling and making use of smart technology.

Do itchy eyes, sniffles and a scratchy throat sound familiar? Many of us know the symptoms of allergies: An estimated 40 percent of the population is sensitized to allergens, meaning that the immune system has a strong response when certain substances are inhaled from our environment. Common allergens include pollen, mold, pet dander and dust mites–tiny bugs that feast on shed flakes of skin and are a common cause of year-round allergies and asthma. Allergic reactions range from mild coldlike symptoms to headaches to an aggravation of asthma symptoms. Sufferers do not always recognize allergens as the cause of their symptoms. Even indoors, allergies often worsen as spring approaches. At this time of year, certain pollen counts rise and humidity levels typically increase, encouraging the growth of mold and dust mites. While some of this is out of our control, we can take steps to reduce the level of allergens in our homes, keeping ourselves and our families feeling better and breathing easier. These four cleaning and maintenance tactics can reduce our exposure to allergens and provide a powerful boost to overall health.

Changing your life requires courage and imagination, and Cassandra Naylor has plenty of both. Growing up at Cliffeholme, the Maryland farm her great-grandfather bought just after the Civil War, instilled in Naylor a love and respect for nature, and she became a dedicated environmentalist long before the term was invented. When her husband passed away, Naylor decided the time had come to simplify her life and put her beliefs about ecology and conservation into practice. First on Naylor’s agenda was to give the large stone home she’d lived in all her life to her son and his family, and move into a smaller, more practical dwelling. An old barn on her property perfectly suited her simpler tastes and love of nature. Built by her grandmother in 1902, the structure was still sound, though the old horse stalls were now inhabited by birds and a variety of other wild animals. Encouraged by her children, she decided to turn the barn into her new home. Her plan was nearly thwarted, however, when a housing development sprang up next door, its access road just 6 feet from her property line. Though tempted to abandon the project, Naylor resolved to create an energy-efficient home that would be the antithesis of mass-produced housing. She planted a screen of evergreens to hide the access road and carried on with her plans.

Fresh, nutritious eggs and homegrown roast chicken dinners are reason enough to raise your own poultry. If you use your chickens in the garden, you can also harvest rich manure to create homemade chicken manure as fertilizer and put your flock to work mixing organic wastes into superb compost. Plus, if you let your birds range on your property, get ready for a big bonus: They’ll provide terrific control of ticks and other pests.

Have you had problems with your chickens being annoyed with flies, mites or other problematic insects? You may not have noticed your chickens scratching in the spring when the insects become more active, but odds are that they’ve been doing it. You can grow plants for chickens that can help to keep the insects off of your chickens and away from their coop. Lavender, marigolds, mint and nasturtium are easy to grow and all have insecticide value for your chickens.

Chickens are the perfect starter livestock for your homestead — whether you have a small backyard in an urban area or 20 acres in the country. Chickens provide eggs, meat and fertilizer, plus they’re small and easy to manage. We developed a survey of our readers who have lots of experience with various breeds to find the best chicken breeds. (Many thanks to more than 1,000 readers who participated in the survey.) The summaries below include only results from people who have more than three years experience raising chickens. And we only included breeds or hybrids if at least three people responded to questions about them.

When I had the urge to buy six chickens, I began looking into different coop designs. I also talked to a chicken-owning friend who told me he would make his coop mobile and smaller if he was to start over. Taking those things into consideration, I got to work making my own. For the majority of my project, I was fortunate enough to use reclaimed material. A truck frame had been given to me a few years prior — a trailer with a pickup bed still attached. To start, I began with the bare, stripped-down truck frame, removing the leaf springs and relocating the axle to the center of what would become the coop.

In her 2015 article Choose the Best Garden Watering Systems, Barbara Pleasant described some of the most efficient watering systems for your garden, including soaker hoses, drip irrigation, and buried reservoirs. These not only grow healthier plants and save water but also minimize weed growth and reduce watering and weeding time. The secret? Feeding water and nutrients to the plants you want and starving out the weeds.

While a couple of overhead cabinets can’t fit everything, having a kitchen pantry unit becomes crucial for storing everyday items like groceries, utensils, crockery or bags of vegetables. Most homes have a small space dedicated to storage, but it often requires shifting items around and searching for things hidden in dark corners. In this article, we will skip discussing the need for this essential design and instead focus on exploring the top 2 kitchen pantry unit ideas. These ideas are tailored to suit various kitchen styles and layouts, helping you optimise your kitchen space effectively.

At any given time, there’s a confluence of design approaches considered en vogue. For example, when it comes to designing kitchens, there’s currently an equal mix of color-saturated maximalism and hyper-minimalism, while farmhouse-inspired designs and kitchens that take their cue from the French countryside are also prized. Modern kitchens—with their sleek lines, natural sunlight, and neutral color palettes—are also coveted and are arguably one of the most timeless design approaches you can take. That's precisely where we're aiming our focus today. Whether you’re considering a complete remodel or seeking inventive ways to modernize your space, we've rounded up 5 of our favorite modern kitchen designs to inspire you.