Abby Quillen

Freelance Content Marketing Writer and Editor

Household

A Christmas Raft

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We were inspired by Tricia at Little Eco Footprints to make our own version of her “calm and creative” natural advent calendar, so last week we gathered leaves from around our neighborhood, numbered them, and strung them on a piece of twine. Tricia shares all sorts of wonderful “quick and simple activities” to do in the evenings each day. However, I took a quicker and even simpler approach (read: scrapped together at the last minute) and told Ezra that we would “sing a Christmas song, tell a Christmas story, or make a Christmas craft” each day.

He was thrilled at that idea. So the first evening, as we untied our leaf, I asked, “What would you like to do tonight to celebrate?”

“Make a Christmas raft,” Ezra exclaimed.

“You mean a Christmas craft?”

He gave me a funny look.

And that, future house guests, is why we have the oddly strung together chopstick contraption in our bathtub.

I hope you too are finding delight in unexpected places this holiday season.

Here are a few more inspiring ideas for simple and joyful December celebrations:

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Field Guide to a Simple, Joyful Holiday Season

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The holiday season is here! Honestly, I’m excited. Having a four-year-old helps make this time of the year fun and wonder-filled.

We used to buy and ship a lot of stuff around the country, and it was incredibly expensive and stressful. So for the past few years, we’ve been on a mission to make our celebrations joyful, memorable . . . and slow. We’ve established a few traditions, like tree decorating, cookie making, and a solstice celebration. But we try not to get too frenzied with making, baking, or gift giving. We leave lots of time for taking walks, reading aloud, telling stories, and just being together.

I’m excited about the handmade gifts we have planned for our close friends and family members, but I can’t say very much about that here, at least until after the big day. So I thought I’d offer you a roundup of some helpful resources for making this holiday season simpler, greener, and more meaningful:

Ideas for do-it-yourself recycled gift bags, green gift bows, meaningful gifts, and plenty of food for thought on focusing more on people than things this holiday season.

A fantastic list of resources for making the holidays simple and stress-free. Also worth checking out: 35 Gifts Your Children Will Never Forget.

A beautiful natural advent calendar and simple gift-giving strategy.

Twenty-eight ideas for clutter-free gifts, including gift certificates, cooking or yoga lessons, and homemade edibles.

And finally, here’s a roundup of my past posts about simple, natural, and slow ways to celebrate this time of the year:

As a gift to myself and my family, I’m embracing slow blogging this holiday season, so you may notice fewer posts than usual.

Are you planning a slow, simple holiday celebration this year? I’d love to hear about it. 

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Preserve Fall’s Colors

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Full confession: I’m not the craftiest person.

As much as I love the idea of crafting and am convinced that it improves our creative, cognitive, and emotional health, I am a bit challenged in the area of actually, you know, crafting. (Just thinking about it works, right?)

That’s why I’m grateful that Ezra attends a sweet nature-based preschool for a few hours a week, where craftiness abounds. This week he made these beautiful (and wonderful-smelling) beeswax-dipped leaves. And it’s such an easy project; I think I could probably even master it.

Here’s a how-to from Martha Stewart herself, if you are in a crafty mood and still have some fall leaves to preserve.

Wishing you a happy Halloween!

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The Empty Table

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mount pisgah fall day 081

My husband and I recently achieved the pinnacle of our domestic lives together. We cleared the counter in our laundry room. It was like jumping into a time machine back to the spring of 2008 just before we became parents. Apparently that’s when we last had time for organizing. Handouts from our birthing classes and congratulations-on-the-new-baby-cards mingled with mail, tools, broken toys, and bits of wayward debris. This tucked-away rubbish pile enabled the rest of the house to look relatively tidy and clutter-free. But occasionally one of us would have to suit up and traverse into this danger zone to try to find something. So finally we spent a morning sorting and shredding, recycling and organizing . . . and we unearthed a glistening, white counter.

As we gazed it, the inevitable question arose: what should we put on it? The bill file? The laundry detergent? Cleaning supplies?

Then, it occurred to us.

Nothing.

If we left the counter empty, we could actually use it for folding laundry, brewing beer, or making crafts. For activities, rather than stuff.

I’m in love with our empty counter. I feel happy every time I see it. So I’ve been on a mission lately to empty tables. My desk. The table in my office. The kitchen table and counters. They’re not always empty, of course. There’s nothing I love more than a table full of food or craftiness. But empty is their default state. And when they’re full, they are intentionally so, because someone’s using them.

I’ve taken this empty-table approach into my working life as well. Working at home means maneuvering around the clamor of family life, which is the best and hardest part of it. When I sit down to work, I have to focus regardless of what’s going on in the wider world of my household. I’ve found it immensely helpful to take a few moments to empty my table, so to speak, by focusing on my breath and clearing away any mental clutter before I dig into my work.

Now, if my husband and I can just tackle the garage.

Have you discovered any household tips or tricks that make you happier? Leave me a comment. I’d love to hear about them.

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Celebrate the First Day of Fall

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 “How beautifully leaves grow old. How full of light and color are their last days.” -John Burroughs

Saturday is the first day of fall. I must confess that my feelings about this time of year have shifted rather dramatically. I used to delight in everything about fall – crunchy leaves, red apples, the start of school. But now that I share my days with two little ones, fall does not not hold quite the same appeal. I love summer with kids – gardening and running through the sprinkler and throwing the doors wide open in the evenings — so it’s hard to say goodbye to it. But, ready or not, fall has arrived. Here are a few simple ideas to observe the change in season:

  • Reflect:

Do we subconsciously tip waiters more on sunny days? So says Leonard Mlodinow  in Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Life. And changes in the weather probably affect us in countless other ways that we’re barely aware of.

If you have some time this season to reflect on our relationship with nature and how closely our emotional states mirror the “capricious, moody earth itself”, I recommend David Abram’s mind-bending long-form essay “Air Aware,” which I read in Orion three years ago and still think about all the time. Here’s an excerpt:

If our sense of inward confusion and muddledness is anciently and inextricably bound up with our outward experience of being enveloped in a fog—if our whole conceptualization of the emotional mood or “feel” of things is unavoidably entwined with metaphors of “atmospheres,” “airs,” and “climates”—then it is hardly projection to notice that it is not only human beings (and human-made spaces) that carry moods: that the living land in which we dwell, and in whose life we participate, has its own feeling-tone and style that varies throughout a day or a season.

  • Read:

What better way to celebrate cooler weather than with a stack of fall-themed library books? Here are a few of my family’s favorite autumn picture books:

  • Too Many Pumpkins by Linda White
  • Leaf Man by Lois Ehlert
  • Autumn is for Apples by Michelle Knudsen
  • Apples and Pumpkins by Anne Rockwell
  • Fall is Not Easy by Marty Kelly
  • It’s Fall! by Linda Glaser.

It’s also fun to read aloud from The Autumn Equinox by Ellen Jackson, which educates on different modern and historical cultural traditions celebrating the day.

Looking for adult reads to help you wile away the cooler days? Check out some of the season’s new releases.

  • Eat:

Fall is a time of abundance where I live: bushels of sun-ripened tomatoes, every variety of squash . . . and pumpkins. Here’s a recipe that will bring some of the best tastes and scents of fall into your kitchen.

Pumpkin Bread

  • 1 and 3/4 cups whole wheat flour
  • 1 cup pumpkin, baked and mashed
  • 1 teaspoon cinnamon
  • 1/2 teaspoon ginger
  • 1/4 teaspoon nutmeg
  • 1/4 teaspoon cloves
  • 1 teaspoon baking soda
  • 1/4 teaspoon baking powder
  • 1/2 teaspoon salt
  • 2 eggs
  • 1/2 cup olive oil or butter
  • 1/4 cup maple syrup
  • 1/4 cup honey
  • a handful of walnuts or raisins (optional)

Mix and pour into an oiled bread pan. Bake for 50 minutes to an hour. Test with a tooth pick. Cool and enjoy.

(Thanks to my friend Craig, who generously shared this recipe with me several years ago, including all of his healthy twists.)

Wishing you a happy first day of fall. You can find many more ways to celebrate the season here.

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Farmers Go Wild

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My article “Farmers Go Wild” about conservation-based agriculture is in the Winter 2012 issue of YES! Magazine.

Farmers Go Wild

By Abby Quillen

“Frogs are an indicator species,” Jack Gray explains, leaning over a small, muddy pond to look for tadpoles.

Here on the 170-acre Winter Green Farm, 20 miles west of Eugene, Ore., Gray has raised cattle and grown vegetables and berries for 30 years.

It’s a sunny April day, but water pools in the pastures, evidence of the rains this part of Oregon is known for.

Gray is in his mid-50s and agile from decades of working outside. He built this pond to provide habitat for native amphibians, because bass in another pond were eating the red-legged frogs and Western pond turtles.

They envision a landscape where farms meld into the environment and mimic the natural processes that surround them.

Cows graze in a field behind him; wind whispers through a stand of cattails, and two mallards lift off. Gray points out the calls of killdeer, flycatchers, and blackbirds. Up the hill a flock of sheep chomp on long grass. “They’re part of a controlled grazing to try to control reed canary grass, which is an invasive species,” Gray explains. “It tends to smother areas. It makes deserts almost.”

Gray, his wife, Mary Jo, and two other families co-own Winter Green Farm. They are committed to something Jo Ann Baumgartner, director of the Wild Farm Alliance, calls “farming with the wild.”

The words “wild” and “farming” may seem at odds. In the last century, with the development of petroleum-based pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers, farms were increasingly modeled on industry. “Fencerow to fencerow,” mono-crop farming emphasized high production and minimized the importance of biodiversity. Farmers ripped out vegetation, cut down forests, shot predators, and filled in wetlands and streams. Today, agriculture is a major cause of the habitat loss that puts endangered species at risk.

Practitioners of wild farming, also called conservation-based agriculture, seek to reverse industrial agriculture’s devastating effects on wildlife by adopting farming methods that support nature. They envision a landscape where farms meld into the environment and mimic the natural processes that surround them. If wild farming sounds like organic farming, that’s because both are based on a similar vision: that farms should be managed as natural systems. Most wild farmers employ organic practices, like nontoxic pest management, composting, and crop rotation, all of which encourage biodiversity.

However, farming with the wild goes a step beyond organic and looks at how farms can support nature and wildlife at the larger ecosystem or watershed level. For a farmer, that might mean planting native plants and hedgerows along the borders of fields to provide habitat for wildlife and beneficial insects, finding ways to accommodate fish and large carnivores, preventing genetically engineered organisms from interacting with native species, and networking with other farmers and agencies to create wildlife corridors that connect wilderness areas.

The Mountain Lion and the Lamb

Wild farms exist all over the country, from North Dakota’s grasslands to Florida’s marshes, and by their nature, they vary based on the farm and the geography. In the Bridger Mountains of Montana, at Thirteen Mile Lamb & Wool Company, Becky Weed and Dave Tyler are committed to predator-friendly ranching. They use guard llamas, instead of guns, traps, or poison, to protect their cattle and sheep from coyotes, bears, mountain lions, wolves, and eagles. They take a risk with their non-lethal approach to predation and occasionally lose sheep, but they support a healthy ecosystem where predators control populations of their natural prey, like mice, rabbits, gophers, and deer. They also qualify for certification from Predator Friendly, an “ecolabel” that touts the sustainability of their products and helps ranchers get premium prices from conservation-minded customers.

In the arid Mimbres Valley of Southwestern New Mexico, at the No Cattle Company, Michael Alexander and Sharlene Grunerud grow fruit, vegetables, and flowers using an ancient Spanish “acequia” canal system for irrigation. They’ve installed bird perches and bat boxes on the sides of their fields, and the free-tail and big brown bats they attract feed on their worst insect pests: codling moths, cucumber beetles, and corn earworm moths. Alexander and Grunerud also see benefits from accommodating larger wildlife at their farm, like bears, foxes, mountain lions, bobcats, and coyotes. The bears feed on fallen apples, eating the codling moth larvae inside, and the coyotes, as well as ravens and hawks, help control the population of pocket gophers.

The families and farm animals at Winter Green share their land with elk, deer, coyotes, beavers, possums, skunks, osprey, black-shouldered kites, red-tailed hawks, and other wildlife.

Winter Green Farm boasts certification from Salmon-Safe, an eco-organization that protects endangered wild salmon and steelhead habitat. Last summer Gray rebuilt a culvert on Evans Creek so that fish could swim through, and he’s installed fencing along Evans and Poodle creeks to keep cattle away from the waterways.

But farming with the wild is not only about protecting nature and ecosystems, says Baumgartner, who, along with other conservation-minded agricultural experts, founded the Wild Farm Alliance in 2000. Wild agriculture also benefits farmers. Planting native plants to attract beneficial insects can increase pollination of fruits and melons and protect farmers from the consequences of declining honeybee populations. Moving cattle every few days to mimic the actions of wild migratory grazers, a practice called management-intensive grazing, keeps cattle healthier and improves the land. Studies show that by restoring wetlands and waterways, farmers can reduce pesticide runoff and E. coli contamination on a farm by as much as 99 percent. Gray has implemented all of the above practices and says he sees the benefits in healthy soil, grass, cattle, and crops.

And in 2001, he and his fellow farmers planted a hedgerow, a narrow strip of trees, shrubs, ground cover, and vines bordering fields. Jude Hobbs, a horticulturist and permaculture expert who helped the farmers at Winter Green plant their 300-foot hedgerow, explains that hedgerows can create shade for waterways and provide wildlife habitat. Hedgerows also benefit farms; they can decrease wind damage, reduce soil erosion, attract pollinators, and provide extra income opportunities.

Wild farming always requires management—and compromises. Gray laughs as he talks about some of his problems with wild animals, particularly the crows that like to feast on his blueberries.

“We used these tapes in the fields that supposedly sound like the death song of a crow—horrendous squeals and stuff,” Gray says.“You’d come out and find them perched right on top of it.”

Gray also tried hanging Mylar tape and putting out huge balloons with eyes on them. But nothing distracted the crows from their favorite food. Finally he put netting over the blueberries and a mile of woven-wire fence to stop elk from eating the berries. He laments some of the trade-offs. “It changed the patterns of the elk. They’ll go elsewhere, where they used to cross at certain spots of certain streams. We loved to have the elk right outside our kitchen window.”

A Field of Weeds

Wild farmers face political and economic challenges that can be more formidable than crows and elk. Baumgartner and other wild-farming advocates have witnessed a shift away from conservation-based farming in the last five years, especially in the Salinas Valley of California, the top vegetable-producing region in the country, where the Wild Farm Alliance is based. In September 2006, bagged spinach grown in the valley was contaminated with E. coli, which sickened 205 people in 26 states and killed three. Cattle, feral pigs, and grazing deer were implicated, although the source of the outbreak was never found.

“There was this gunshot reaction of, ‘Let’s get rid of all wildlife and habitat on farms,’” Baumgartner says. Farmers throughout the Salinas Valley, under pressure from large buyers and suppliers, bulldozed trees and hedgerows, filled in ponds, and removed and trapped wildlife. The Wild Farm Alliance has worked overtime trying to educate farmers and certifiers about the benefits of wild farming and convince government officials to include conservation in food-safety legislation. The shift away from conservation was particularly distressing, because many more large conventional farms will need to transition to wild farming to reconnect the nation’s fragmented wildlife habitat. And it can be slow and difficult for farmers to learn new methods—even with government assistance.

Less than 50 miles from Winter Green Farm, in Oregon’s Willamette Valley, farmer Clint Lindsey is adopting a number of conservation measures. Lindsey, 31, and his dad run A2R, an 870-acre farm near Corvallis. Two years ago, like the majority of farmers in the valley, they grew conventionally grown grass seed, a pesticide-and-fertilizer-intensive crop. Then the grass-seed market collapsed, a victim of the economy and the housing market.

A2R was on the brink of bankruptcy when Lindsey met a group of farmers who were testing the viability of growing edible crops in the valley for local markets. He and his dad decided to transition the majority of their acreage to organic grains, beans, and edible seeds.

A2R qualified for a grant from the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), a department of the USDA, which invests millions of dollars of grant money each year in helping farmers support healthy ecosystems. The grant helped Lindsey and his dad replace chemical pesticides and fertilizers with a pungent-smelling compost tea made of liquefied fish, kelp, and compost. They also agreed to a number of other practices, including planting peas during the winter months to help fertilize the soil, curtail runoff, and attract beneficial insects.

Lindsey says it’s too early to tell whether the area will benefit the farm by attracting pollinators or pest-eating birds. But preserving the land helped A2R gain certification from The Food Alliance, an ecolabel that requires farmers to meet an extensive list of biodiversity and wildlife conservation requirements.

The challenges of transitioning are not just economic. Lindsey says his dad, who has grown conventional grass seed for 30 years, struggles to adjust psychologically to a style of agriculture that more closely resembles nature. “For a conventional farmer, these fields are a complete mess,” Lindsey says. “One of the biggest challenges is getting used to seeing a field full of weeds and figuring out what to do about it, because you can’t spray herbicide on it.”

A2R is at the beginning of a long journey to becoming a healthy ecosystem. Despite the challenges, Lindsey is enjoying the process. “It just became a heck of a lot more fun to farm. For a long time we’d been looking at ways to turn our farm from just a factory turning out grass seed into something that was a valuable asset to the community and to our family.”

A Wild Hope

Even in a nation dominated by giant mono-crop farms and animal feedlots, there are hopeful signs about the future of conservation-based agriculture. The acreage of farmland in conservation and wetlands-reserve programs jumped 20 percent between 1997 and 2007, and the 2008 Farm Bill further increased funding for conservation projects.

Since 2002 the government has studied the environmental impacts of NRCS agricultural conservation projects and found that wild farming makes a difference. For instance, stream improvements made by ranchers on private land in Montana increased the population of trout by 59 percent, and native vegetation buffers planted by farmers along the borders of fields dramatically increased the population of Northern bobwhites and several upland songbirds in 14 different states, according to the NRCS.

In its decade of existence, the small, nonprofit Wild Farm Alliance has been successful at getting conservation included in national organic standards and state and federal food safety legislation. But wild farming’s greatest hope may be the growth of local food networks, farmers markets, and community-supported agriculture, as well as the emergence of third-party ecolabels. These movements connect farmers with consumers, enabling all of us to choose food grown in ways that protect and support wild nature.

[Editor’s note: This article is available courtesy of a Creative Commons license and was originally published here.]