Don't spray those weeds!

You can drive down the street and see lawns of all shape and size. Some of them make you want to take off your shoes and take a walk, others make you want to grab the weed killer and go to town. My yard is one of those...I heard a saying " If you can't beat it, eat it"! That can apply to your lawn as well. If you rolled by my yard at this time of year, you would probably see me gleaning my yard for wild medicinals. Spring is a haven of wonderful tonics, grown right in your own front yard. You can eat them, make medicine, tea, and poultices from these wonderful weeds. So if you have some of these, become one of us "odd" ones, and eat your yard! I will point out some of the common "weeds" of our Georgia lawns, though on my travels I have spotted some of those pests in other states too. Some of my favorites include plantain: used for skin problems, It is a rich source of minerals and it is anti-bacterial, anti-allergy, a blood tonic, antacid, expectorant, and helps in wound healing; wild violet: this is used as a mild anti-cancer for the lungs, a wonderful remedy for childhood bronchitis, as a poultice that can help reduce swell ling of the tonsils. It can also be used for cystitis, vaginal complaints, and fibroid; Cleavers: a lymphatic purifier and cleanser, painful urination, was until recently used for obesity, probably due to its diuretic effect. It has also been useful for bed wetting; chickweed: This herb is eaten well and juiced well, is high in vitamin C, it helps with the itch of poison ivy, and bug bites when made into a cream, it cools the body and soothes and relieves irritation of boils and ulcers and abscesses when made into a poultice; Last but not least is dandelion: this childhood favorite is a medicinal favorite as well, it is useful for acid reflux, stomach/digestion problems, a valuable source of vitamin A, B, and C, helps with hypoglycemia and liver disorders, inflammation of the gall bladder and congestive heart failure. This is only to name a few! This is only five of the ones I know and love. I will post a few more later. Starting small and getting familiar with them a few at a time can help you to not get overwhelmed. I have found that eating the flowers and leaves of these with your children can help eliminate the fear of the outdoors and make for great educational fun. God has put so many wonderful things here for us to discover for our benefit, it is amazing what was right beneath my nose my whole life and I never knew it! Just cracking the surface of your yard in early spring, you can get started harvesting and making your own herbal medicines for a fraction of the cost that it takes to kill them! These are the herbs I just picked from my yard. Then in the next few days will show ways to convert these into dried herbs for use in teas and poultices, and how to make a tincture of some of them also. I hope this makes you think twice about supporting Monsanto(more on that later) better known as round-up, and also keeping these herbal weeds alive for future generations to benefit. These herbs are actually on the GA State Institution's list of noxious weeds... sad but true. They hope to kill them all off and are right now in the process of making it illegal to run an herbal or plant selling business if these are found on your property. Hopefully with a little education we can keep eating freely of our weeds, for free, instead of having to buy them from overseas because they have been made illegal to grow. Sounds silly, but 10 years ago we wouldn't have thought half the stuff that is illegal now would ever be, right? Lets do our jobs as Americans and do what our fore-father's did. Eat the stuff we have, learn what we don't know and spread this knowledge on to others. So have fun, eat well and thrive!

The Ick factor

When I first heard of using "family cloth". I have to say it turned my stomach, I was not one to touch icky things. The thought of cloth diapering was foreign and all I could think of was the dunking of the diapers that I remembered as a child. Smelly bathrooms also came to mind. Like I mentioned before though, I was broke! I knew it was either potty train at 2 months or take the free diapers. So my friend suggested that we install a kitchen sprayer to our toilet. Then I could just spray off the poo and drop it in the diaper pail, that worked. Actually it worked wonderfully! I never had to touch a yucky diaper. The next thing I wondered was about sanitation. Was this going to spread disease. I looked online and found that as long as you keep them contained in a lidded trash pail it would be alright. ALthough, sometimes in the summer we get flys in the house with the kids coming in and out all the time and I was worried about maggots, but I have been using them for 5 years now and never once have I had one. After I adjusted to the diapers I went to visit a Friend who used cloth for her toilet paper. I had been having issues with my septic being clogged with all the toilet paper that my then very young children were dumping in at a rapid rate. While I was staying for the week with my friend, I found that her bathrooms weren't smelly and she didn't have sanitation issues and I thought maybe I would try them, just to see. So we bought 3 yards of flannel in cute prints and made about 50. I thought I would break myself in by just using them for the baby, then when I dropped in the diaper I didn't have the wipes left to put in the trash. This was a great thing, because I had to use a whole other trash can to dump these in and it did get smelly, (granted I couldn't smell them until I dumped them because I had one of those diaper geineys) because there just wasn't enough of them all at once to merrit taking it out every day. Anyway, I made a wipe solution out of 8 oz. of water, a tbsp of vinegar and some tea tree EO. Then I would spray the baby's bottom and just wipe and drop in the bucket. She never once had a rash. As my confidence grew, I started making some cloth washies for the kid's use. I put a bottle of wipe solution on the back of the toilet and a stack of washies, instructed them in their use and stepped back to see what would happen. They reported to never having had a clean butt before the washies. They were thrilled, not to mention so was I, because now we didn't have to buy exorbitant amounts of toilet paper, or pump the toilet to unclog it. This saved about $5 a week alone! Well, my husband still said he absolutely was not going to ever use them, but never say "never". The day came when I hadn't made it to the store and he needed toilet paper. I grabbed the washies and the solution and put it behind the toilet. He never said anything, but we never went back to paper. I now have about 450 washies and 30 bamboo terry kitchen wipes and 25 muslin facial tissues for noses and such. Every year I make about 50 more wipes and I love the freedom of not having to run to the store or for putting stuff into my septic, which I must mention when we had it pumped 2 years ago it was full to the brim with toilet paper and tampons. And remember I haven't used these things in 5 years! SO this stuff is piling up underground! I also use cloth pads for my period and just spray them with hydrogen peroxide and vinegar with tea tree oil before dropping them in the bucket and they are never stained or smelly. I launder all this stuff about every 2 days using soap nut solution with lavender and tea tree EO, a scoop of borax and a 1/4 cup of vinegar, then spray out the bucket with homemade cleaning spray. They have never smelled and never been stained. I have a front loader HE washer, but when I didn't I would just run a rinse cycle first with cold water and the vinegar and tea tree, then would run my regular wash with detergent on HOT. We have saved so much money on this, I even factored in the water and electricity costs and we still came out on top. I don't honestly know if you would if you didn't have four kids using all the toilet paper to get their poor little butts clean, but if you are on a septic system ,it sure is helpful. I am not sure what they do with it all in the city, probably incinerate it or something, but is that good for us to breath? As for diapering in cloth, I am one hundred percent sure that the land fills are overflowing with them, they don't break down and they are actually toxic if left there. But what to do about it? If you burn them the toxic gas let off into the air has been know to cause cancer and not to mention that horrid smell, so they just pile up year after year. And of course there is the money spent on diapers. At $10-$20 per week for 52 weeks a year and about 3 to four years, well you so the math. If you had 12 diapers, which is actually a lot, you would spend about $120 for your start-up and then with all the new stuff the cloth diaper gurus are coming out with you could manage to only spend that twice, for newborn/sm and then med/larges. Then purchase 3 pullups for $30. You are spending less in their whole diapering lives then you would on your first year of disposables. That is not including the cost of all those non-flushable wipes! Out of all my kid's, my cloth diapered one was the only one to never have a rash. I felt kinda bad about it for awhile,the rest of them having to suffer and all, until I realized that that is what learning sometimes entails. I didn't know any better and now I do. If I had known what I do now, when I first started out as a wife and mother, I am sure we would've saved ourselves a lot of heartache and the land fills a lot of trash, but as I figure it now...We are only held responsible for what we know, and knowledge is power. Now I know and so do you! God once told his people through Hosea "my people perish for lack of knowledge". He must have known a thing or two....Now I am helping out our earth and my fellow man. Sometimes our ick factor and our American snobbery can rob us of the opportunity to try something new, and let me tell you I was a snob like all the rest. But regardless of whether you ever try family cloth, at least try something new as soon as possible, you just might be surprised what you will do!

What its all about...

I am setting up this blog as a informational diary. I am not technologically savvy, but I will try to keep up for the sake of posterity. This world is changing; going back to a simpler way of life. My family and I take part in this sort of alternative, all though once the only, lifestyle.
It originally started by our lack of funds and took on a life of its own, no pun intended. My husband and I had recently gotten out of the Army and had a low-paying job, a fixer-upper house, and a forth baby on the way. I was in utter despair that this was going to be the end of us. I looked to God and cried out that there had to be a better way. Low and behold there was, and our seeming undoing turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to us.
It started when a dear Friend started a cloth diapering business and needed a Guinea pig, my new daughter willow was it. She offered to help me with free diapers if I would help her develop a usable product. This led to family cloth, which is reusable flannel washies to use instead of toilet paper. This saved us money and a trip to the store. I then got to thinking if I was using these things than why was I continuing to pay for the laundry detergent and wipes for my baby's diapers, so I went online and found out that I could make that myself too. When I started using these I found that her bottom was rash-free and I thought about the soap the rest of us were using for our bodies and maybe I could make that too. So I did. Then we learned to make our own food, because the cost of that was so high and I was tired of being without. The outcome was a healthier and cheaper way of life. I am also schooled as an herbalist, and have made my own medicines for a long time. I had a small plot of land and I decided to start growing some of my herbs and then eventually started growing our vegetables and fruits too. It has been 5 years since my daughter was born and we now make about 75% of the things in this house. Including toys and furniture ( my father was in the furniture repair business and we learned from him).
We live a simple life, which I have grown to love. It is busy, but I can honestly say that I don't stress about tomorrow, because it is safe in the Lord's hands. Now, with the economic downturn, others are turning to this way of living, the way our forefathers did. I hope to use this blog to educate and inspire people like me, who long for a better way. If anyone has questions on gardening, herbs, food preparation, early crafts such as: soap making, candle making, knitting, quilting, chair or furniture repair or weaving, cloth toiletries, household supplies or anything else, I will try to answer to the best of my knowledge. If I don't know I would love to find out! I will post on things we are doing as well as random recipes and herbal remedies. Lets learn to enjoy our life outside of time.