Old Fashioned Green Living

This afternoon as Emery and I sat next to each other churning ice cream made from our goats milk and eggs from our chickens we talked about how so much of the talk these days is about Green living and its a good conversation to have, only its turned into some sort of marketing frenzy that has people spending lots of GREEN.

I made a lentil loaf today and covered it in the oven with a cookie sheet, no need for aluminum foil...after all what did your great grandmother do ? She used another pan to cover the one in the oven if what was being baked needed to be covered. And then what did she do in place of plastic wrap for storing food, simple really. I do it too. Most of my stainless steel bowls can be covered with a pot lid that is the same size or many mixing bowls that are used for storage too, can be covered with a dinner plate or a bread plate if the bowl is small.

Imagine if we all went back to doing things this way, we would be living with a lot less plastic waste in the dumps. I still wrap sandwiches in wax paper, our local Whole Foods sells great wax paper sandwich bags just like my mother used to wrap my sandwiches when I was in grade school. Simple solutions really, for a serious issue.

Living so old fashioned just naturally manifests itself as living green. Home made soap, home made laundry soap. Heating with downed wood, burns clean, no fossil fuel needed and it helps folks get rid of fallen trees on their land. No paper towels or napkins used, cuts down on the amount of trees used for things that cloth can do better. Cleaning cloths to clean up spills and cloth napkins on the table don't require much space in the washing machine. No need for a clothes dryer. A clothes line works great. Its good exercise, lifting bending, reaching etc. Using natures resources to dry the clothes is a great way to be living greener and once again, your great grandmother probably did the very same thing. It gets you outside, listening to the birds sing and watching the clouds drift by.

Forget using all these fancy kitchen machines that use electricity that is so often requires some sort of fossil fuel to keep it going. Make bread without a machine, it keeps the arm and hand muscles strong and consider a hand crank egg beater to whip things up. Living like great grandma has a lot of benefits, one of which, you sleep well at night and for me, I am glad to hit the hay after its been dark a couple hours. No desire for me to be burning the midnight oil. Sleep comes easy and that's the way I like it.

You don't need to buy a ton of new fangled "green" things to step lightly on the earth. Just live old fashioned and you will be living very green.

here are a couplr links that might help you decide to dump some of the toxins in your daily life

http://healthfieldmedicare.suite101.com/article.cfm/list-of-xenoestrogens---chemical-estrogens

and here is a good reason to limit all the electricity in our lives.

http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs296/en/

My great great great grandmother lived totally green and never knew what that term even meant ! She is seen here with my great great grandmother and her siblings who lived without all those things we think we have to have in order to live our lives.