Eight Acres

A friend told me he had read the China Study and it sounded really interesting, so I asked for a review.  Here's what he thought about it and, spoiler alert, he's decided to go vegan as a result!  I can't see myself following the same course, but it was interesting to read the review and his comparison to Michael Pollan's writing and diet recommendations.   **** I came across Dr Campbell’s ‘The China Study’ ( The China Study: Revised and Expanded Edition: The Most Comprehensive Study of Nutrition Ever Conducted and the Startling Implications for Diet, Weight Loss, and Long-Term Health  - affiliate link) as I do with so many other reads, even music. When watching a documentary or a film, I graze the credits for future readings. This is how I have built up my jazz collection, or how I first read Michael Pollan thanks to the film Food.inc .  Lately my Netflix has taken a turn towards food documentaries, not only for the acclaimed ‘ Cooked ’ but follo...

Blog reader Jeriann Ireland offered to send me a post about homemade health and beauty products.  This is of course an interest of mine, as I make a lot of different products myself.  Some are just personal experiments and some I share on my Etsy shop .  My reasons are much the same as Jerriann discusses in this post - save money, know the ingredients and take control of your health.  Jeriann is a writer and crafter who makes homemade body care products and fun craft items, mostly as gifts for her friends and family. She loves learning about beneficial and harmful ingredients in everyday products and finding alternatives that fit her health goals. See more of her writing at dairyairhead.com . ********* I used to think that “health and beauty” as a category was a bit odd. Health and beauty aren’t necessarily related. You can be healthy and ugly, and you can be beautiful and sick. But when you look at what society considers beautiful, it’s often tied to ...

I'm happy to share with you a guest post from another beekeeper Liz, details of her social media links are at the end of the post.  This is a post about keeping bees in the city.  We don't have to worry about neighbours on our property. Keeping your neighbors happy is an important part of successful beekeeping, and that’s not always an easy task. Wasps have given honeybees a bad rap — and unfortunately for beekeepers, a good percentage of the population lump the two together into one nasty, stinging group. If you’re a budding apiarist, here are some simple tips to preserve harmony in your neighborhood — and keep the city council on your side. Be a Legal Eagle Before you start your hives, it’s important to know your city’s ordinances regarding keeping bees. Is it allowed? Are there rules regarding number of hives, fencing, distance from other residences, etc.? Knowing the answers to these questions is your first line of defense against angry neighbors — and can sa...

One of my regular readers and commenters offered to write a guest post about a horticulture course, its quite a funny read, with some serious insights into our technology obsession.  If you'd like to submit a guest post, email me at eight.acres.liz {at} gmail.com.  While I am always happy to share links back to your blog or website, this contributor preferred to remain anonymous.  I hope you enjoy their story.... -**-  -**-  -**-  -**-  -**-  -**-  -**-  -**-  -**-  -**-  -**-  -**-  -**-  -**- Just a few days ago our daily horticulture classes were interrupted by an invitation to review some new gardening gadgets. The idea was to open half a dozen of electric hand trimmers , test them and fill in some review about their goods and bads. As nothing is more dear to a student – even a “hort “ one - to escape routine and mess around till lunchtime, we opened the boxes and got down to business. What did we...

Permaculture seems to be getting more popular, I'm seeing it pop on on blogs more often and its great to see people talking about it and teaching each other.  I'm still running my series of guest posts on permaculture, so if you are keen to share what you know, please get in touch eight.acres.liz at gmail.com. In the meantime, here's a compilation of posts about permaculture from me and my guests so far: I first wrote about permaculture in mid 2012 , in which I tried to cover some basics about permaculture ethics and principles.  Permaculture is pretty hard to explain in a short post.  If you know nothing about permaculture, I think the one thing that I want you to know is this: permaculture is a way of organising things so that you get more product from less work.  Surely you want to know more now! The best part about permaculture is that its all common-sense, you just need to do a bit of reading and thinking and suddenly you find yourself using it all the...

John and Jean  write a blog  about their property Homehill Farm in rural NSW, here's their thoughts about permaculture basics and how they apply them at their place. Casuarina wind break In trying to put together a post explaining how HHF has used Permaculture we found it difficult to decide how to present the information or for that matter where to start.  We went back to basics and re-examined the publications by David Holmgren and Bill Mollison i.e. Permaculture One, Permaculture Two and Permaculture A Designers' Manual. In addition, further investigation was made into other sources such as Wikipedia. Home Hill Farm (click to expand and see the notes) Do we go through the 12 Design Principles or do we address the core tenets? Maybe it would be better to look at how we incorporated tools such as Patterns, Layers, Guilds, Edge Effect, Zones etc? If we did all that it would be a huge post. In the end, we decided to just look at how we compare against the...

Linda from Greenhaven shares her take on the permaculture principle "Produce no Waste".  Linda has a wonderful blog about her garden, chickens, fermenting, and more recently, homeschooling her kids, but my favourite post is her permie poem ...   If you would like to write a quest post about Permaculture , please send me an email at eight.acres.liz at gmail dot com. The last guest post was Chris from Living at Gully Grove . Here's what Linda has to say about Produce no Waste: If you are new to permaculture, let me tell you that it is a design system which makes sense. A way to live which works in a fair, connected and thoughtful way. (Thoughtful of people and the world in which we live. It has twelve principles which inter-relate to create a true synergy and can be applied to many different areas of life. While I have chosen to talk about principle six, throughout this post I will incidentally speak about many of the principles. To save me repeating...

Chris from Living at Gully Grove shares some excellent examples of using permaculture design principles to improve her property, as a response to my invitation to guest post about permaculture. If you have something to contribute that could help others learn how to use permaculture at their place, please send me an email eight.acres.liz at gmail.com, and I'll send you some more details. A family of three (now four) left suburbia in 2007, to start life on five acres. We could only afford degraded bushland on slopes, which has proven to be a lesson in how natural systems work. The only way we could live harmoniously with the challenging terrain, was by implementing some clever permaculture designs. It's a constantly evolving process too. We dubbed our little patch “Gully Grove”, simply because gullies are the natural terrain here, and planting groves in them, are our solution to avoiding degradation. Personally, I never wanted to be a Permaculture convert, but curiosity le...