Chickens Love A Wood Ash Dust Bath

April 6, 2020April 6, 2020 / Liesl Clark / 3 Comments

We burn wood for heat in our house, mostly wood that we collect from our property. High winds bring down a lot of limbs from the trees so we cut them up and use them for heat, as well as bring down any “standing dead” trees in the forest. A weekly by-product of our wood heat is wood ash and when we don’t place it around the base of our fir trees for soil amendment, we occasionally place some in our hen yard for the girls to use for dust baths. In the winter and spring months, here in the Pacific Northwest, it’s mud season, so chickens are in need of some dry dirt for dust bathing, as a pest repellant to rid of mites and bothersome bugs that harbor in their feathers and on their skin, which must be itchy as heck. It also gives them a little added magnesium and calcium.

Our hens love their wood ash baths. They fight over them, in fact!

Here’s how we help our hens use wood ash to rid of their unwanted pests: We find a small “hen bowl” that they’ve dug in the yard, for bathing, and pour in the wood ash. Within minutes, they’ll scratch it around, mixing in the surrounding dirt, and then lay down in it to dust themselves up! A pop-up hen spa!

Apparently dried lavender and dried lemon balm are also great pest deterrents so sprinkling some into your wood ash bath could be an excellent potpourri addition for your chooks. We do love pampering our girls! After Valentines Day, our leftover dried roses were turned into rose petal chicken bedding for their coop, along with some blue paper hamster bedding a neighbor give us from our Buy Nothing group to line the chicken coop floor. Pretty!!

Rose petal and blue paper hamster bedding make for a fun late-winter coop bedding.

What spa treatments do you give your hens?

I Wrote A Book

March 28, 2020March 28, 2020 / Liesl Clark / 5 Comments

From a young age, I’ve dreamed of writing a book. I think I had a small inkling of what that book would be about, so my internal voice has been slowly writing it since I was about 7. I recall wishing I could start a movement where people didn’t have to spend their hard-earned money on the things they needed to live. I wanted to start an everything store where all things were available for free, like cinnamon bread and my own book that I wrote that might help solve people’s problems with money. It was early idealism during a time when I first came to understand there were “haves” and “have-nots” in the world, painful inequities that touched people deeply. But I never truly believed that one day I’d be given the opportunity to write a book, bound together as an offering of ideas lived, and made final. Now that I have a book coming out in a matter of days, one co-written with by my friend, Rebecca Rockefeller, the launching of it is, admittedly, bittersweet. Somehow, we’ve written a book that’s near-impossible to sell.

The Buy Nothing, Get Everything Plan, with its oxymoron of a title, is an intentional book, a challenge to buy less and share the bounty around us, seeking to further spark a movement Rebecca and I started with the Buy Nothing Project network of local gift economies. Over 6,000 of them have sprung up all over the world with nearly 1.5 million participants. We want to show people how our reliance upon buying things can be turned upside-down if we rely more upon our neighbors, our own ingenuity, and the abundance of our own goods and services we can share in our communities instead. There are ways to Buy Nothing while getting just about everything you want and need.

Our book is due out in bookstores on April 14, 2020, and ironically most bookstores are now shuttered due to orders from our governors and the much-needed imperative to stay home due to COVID-19. The in-person book tour we set up with 9 booksellers along the US West Coast including Seattle, Tacoma, Portland, Oakland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and San Diego has been cancelled, with the hope that these independent booksellers will host us in the future. Nothing is more important than stopping this virus from spreading further and that means staying at home.

We may call it “social distancing” but what we’re all actually doing is physical distancing while social connecting, weaving our inter-personal connections even tighter, tying people all across the globe together through our simple humanity. By way of virtual creativity, people are now sharing their expertise for free, through videos shared online, via Zoom gatherings, on their Facebook feeds, over YouTube, through emailed newsletters, every way they can. From free therapy sessions, workouts, yoga classes, cooking classes, and how to-fix-it tutorials, we’re creating a worldwide shareocracy that’s non-commercialized and offered freely from the heart. Our book is literally about this, a blueprint for sharing of ourselves in times of peace so we can be prepared for times of chaos.

We had no idea the chaos would come so soon. The more we establish these systems of connection with one another, the more we’re capable of achieving en mass, for the common good, in honor of our community, ourselves, and also the environment. But now it’s imperative we take these steps for our very survival. The less we go to the store, the safer we are. The more we can make-do with what we have at home, the more we can reuse, repair, and repurpose, the less we have to run to the store. Stretching what we already have in our homes to meet our needs is not an act of austerity, it’s one of resilience, and we believe that resilience can be had without suffering.

Much of my blogging here, and the conversations we’ve had in the comments and through email, has inspired this book, coming from a desire to simplify and reuse what we already have in abundance surrounding us, rather than going out and buying new. I do hope, ironically, that you’ll – yes – buy the book and read it – feel free to share it – and participate in our call to action to find daily ways for us each to share more and live generously.

Avocado Pit Turned Fake Egg

May 9, 2018 / Liesl Clark / 6 Comments

It was a dark and stormy winter….and my hens were bored. Here in the Pacific Northwest, our hen yards can get pretty mucky and the chickens tend to turn to deviant eating behaviors, like, well, eating their own eggs. There, I said it. Gross! That’s like….oh, never mind. We can’t allow this to happen, because the purpose of backyard chickens is their yummy eggs, a critical part of our family’s mostly vegetarian diet. (Our hens do produce other products for us, like amazing compost.) But no, we won’t be allowin’ them hens to eat their eggers.

I found a great solution to deter an egg-eater, right in my compost bucket: An avocado pit!

An avocado pit works beautifully as a dummy egg. © Liesl Clark

For years, I’ve used dummy wooden eggs, plastic easter eggs, egg-shaped stones, golf balls and pingpong balls as dummy eggs, to deter the little peckers (egg-eaters) from pecking apart their eggs. Dummy eggs are just that, fake eggs that chickens think are real (think, bird brain.) They peck ’em and realize they can’t break ’em and therefore we stop the deviant eating disorder in its tracks. Problem solved.

One of these things is not like the other. © Liesl Clark

So, don’t go and buy fake eggs. Please. Just use an avocado pit in your nest box. Deploy 5 of them if you’d like, and your egg-eater will get frustrated when the avocado pits won’t crack and produce an egg-licious mess in your laying box.

Enjoy your guacamole knowing your avocado pits can be put to use!

New use for an avocado pit. © Liesl Clark

Purple Deadnettle Purple Smoothie

May 26, 2017May 26, 2017 / Liesl Clark / 3 Comments

Purple deadnettle is my new favorite weed. At the Brooklyn Botanical Garden, they have a great description for this lovely purple fuzzy flower to pop up in early spring: “This common weedy plant is a member of the mint family and forms early groundcover mats, with fuzzy, spade-shaped leaves and delicate purple-pink flowers, a lovely addition to a spring weed bouquet.”

For years, I’ve pulled it out of my vegetable garden, and have given it to my happy hens who devour it immediately. But this year, I’m eating as many weeds as I can, that are within just feet of my front door. For this, purple deadnettle is your friend. It’s a superfood, with known anti-inflammatory properties! I always let it flower because I know it’s one of the first spring flowers the honey bees use for nectar and pollen. Purple deadnettle looks a little like henbit, which is also edible, so there’s little chance of you getting a stomach ache from this beauty.

So, in our bellies it goes, with morning or lunch smoothies, pestos, or atop our green salads. Here’s a quick recipe that’s our staple for most smoothies, and you can replace the fruit with any favorite fruit you have on hand or replace the purple deadnettle with kale if you no longer have any on hand:

Purple Deadnettle Purple Smoothie

1 small bunch purple deadnettles, flowers and stems included

2 bananas

1 Cup coconut milk

2 Cups mixed berries (we love blueberries, marionberries, blackberries, and raspberries)

1 scoop of your favorite protein powder (I use Vital Proteins collagen)

That’s it! I throw a sprig of mint into our pretty glasses as garnish and the kids drink it down. When it ends up really thick, we use spoons and eat it like ice cream. Often, our bananas and berries are frozen, so this serves as a meal or an ice cream treat for the whole family.

Sticky Weed Cleansing Drink

May 19, 2017May 19, 2017 / Liesl Clark / 4 Comments

You probably know this weed well, for its clingy tendencies. In the Northwest, we affectionately call it sticky weed. It comes in the door on our dog, our socks, and the backs of our sweaters. Also known as clivers, cleavers, goosegrass, catchweed bedstraw, or sticky willy, this little bugger with tiny hooked hairs that’ll stick to you better than velcro, now holds a special place in my kitchen culinary arts: I use it in a simple spring cleansing drink, thanks to the advice of a friend.

The Kew Royal Botanic Gardens has this to say about its uses:

Galium Aparine — “The whole plant is edible, though not particularly tasty, and in China, for example, it is eaten as a vegetable. Its seeds can be roasted to prepare a sort of coffee substitute. It is also reputed to have a number of medicinal properties, having been used in traditional medicine (usually as an infusion) to treat kidney problems, skin disorders and high blood pressure among other ailments. Archaeological evidence suggests that it may have been used in this way for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. Cleavers is still used by medical herbalists today, although scientific evidence regarding its effectiveness is still lacking.”

I use it as a spring “cleanse” that might be good for my kidneys but just tastes wonderful, and excites my need to get the most out of the plants around me. As I weed it out of my garden, I set it aside to be washed and then stuffed into a jar filled with fresh water and throw it into the fridge.

Twenty-four hours later, we have a refreshing sticky weed infusion that tastes like spring green. It thickens the water a little, too, (or maybe I’m just imagining that) making it feel silky on its way down.

Drink Your Sticky Weed © Liesl Clark

This Homemade Citrus Power Cleaner Works

May 13, 2017 / Liesl Clark / 5 Comments

We have hard water in these parts, which means that whenever it sits around, like at the base of a water faucet, you get calcium/mineral buildup. Here’s what ours looked like a few hours ago. Ew!

Thanks to some homemade citrus vinegar that I made last month, I now have a power cleaner that’ll cut through the boilerplate mineral deposits found around our sinks, shower, and bathtub.

This mineral deposit is hard and sticks like glue.

First, to make the citrus cleaner, just throw your orange peels into a mason jar and pour in some distilled white vinegar to cover the orange rind. Keep adding orange peels until the jar is filled, adding vinegar to totally cover over the peels.

Screw a lid on the jar, and let it sit for a month with all of the peels totally submerged. Remove the orange peels and the remaining liquid is your all-purpose citrus cleaner that’ll work wonders in your home.

I dilute it with water 1:1 into a spray bottle and use it wherever I’m cleaning: countertops, windows, ovens and stoves, bathrooms. But the kitchen sink faucet was where I hit paydirt. This stuff cut through that mineral deposit and enabled me to get my faucet back to looking like new.

Just spray the 1:1 solution on your affected area and let it set for a few minutes and rub off.

I had to repeat this several times, but it eventually removed the white caked-on material.

So the next time you eat an orange, just save those peels, stuff them into a jar and cover with white vinegar, adding more peels and vinegar until the jar is full. After a month, you’ll have a citrus cleaner ready for your toughest jobs.

Save Your String

May 6, 2017May 6, 2017 / Liesl Clark / 2 Comments

We salvage string. Don’t you? When I see rolls of string sold in the hardware store, I wonder who buys it? String is freely available if you just know where to look for it.

The feed we buy for our chickens comes in large paper feed bags laced up with string. When we pull the string to open the bags, it comes out freely and we have plenty to last us throughout the year. We roll it onto a small roll of paper and it goes into the string box.

I found an old wooden box that was covered with Christmas wrapping paper a few years ago. This box has been salvaged for the use of storing our saved string. So, shoelaces are salvaged and washed, bungee cord gets thrown in there, craft string, a few pieces of yarn, homemade “plarn,” cordage, twine, even pieces of candle wicking that hasn’t been put in wax go in there. Whenever something has reached the end of its life and we need to throw it away, any string on it gets salvaged and thrown into the string box.

String is a staple for my gardening, as I use it to create pea ladders between woven sticks for my growing pea shoots, or to hold the hellebore up when the heavy blossoms weigh down the large plants.

The whole family knows where to go when they need a piece of string or shoe lacing to make a repair and tie together a few things. When my son was 5, he connected his favorite truck to its trailer with string when the hitch broke.

String is the stuff of life, affording us everyday repairs to sew-up, tie together, wrap around, hold up, and weave anew.

Save your string, all forms of it. Don’t throw it away. And find a pretty container to hold it, for all to access for the projects that will come.

Banana Peel Shoe Polish

April 19, 2017April 19, 2017 / Liesl Clark / 7 Comments

You heard that right! I used a banana peel to shine my shoes.

Before

After

My boots were looking pretty bad, having made a few trips to the hen house surrounded by mud. They’ve also been scraped and battered over the years, and I never seem to have the time to shine ’em up. We don’t have any shoe polish here in the house and I didn’t want to go out and buy some, knowing it’s likely not made with the most environmentally-friendly ingredients. I had also done some research a year or so ago about 20 incredibly versatile things a banana peel can be used for. Shining your shoes with a peel was on the list. I figured it was time to give it a try.

So here’s all you need:

Your scuffed up shoes, made of leather or a facsimile thereof

A Banana Peel

Soft Cloth

These seriously needed some help.

The Method: Rub the inside of the banana peel all over your shoes. Spread that shiny gook all over and rub some of it in as you swipe peel over leather. Then, grab your soft cloth and buff, just as you would if you were polishing your shoes with that black or brown stuff you see at the airport shoeshine spot. Rub and then buff. Apply a second coat of banana peel goodness and rub and buff again. Do it a third time, and you’re done! They’re not sticky at all. The oil from the inside peel of the banana did its magic and my boots are good to go for a few hundred more miles.

Maybe not perfect, but so much better! Try it, this banana stuff works.

DIY Taco Seasoning in Bulk

April 18, 2017April 18, 2017 / Liesl Clark / Leave a comment

Buying taco seasoning is pricey and when you have the ingredients in your own home, why not just make a batch that’ll last you days. Your own seasoning is also lower in salt content. Here’s our family recipe that we’ve used for the past year, and sometimes the amounts of each ingredient change a little, based on just how much we have in the spice rack. We buy our spices in bulk, too, to save money, have a zero waste kitchen, and so we don’t accumulate a lot of those little plastic bottles.

Taco Seasoning (makes about 1 2/3 Cups)

½ Cup chili powder (we sometimes use speciality chili powders we find in Mexico. Go with your favorite!)
1/3 Cup cumin
3 teaspoons garlic powder
3 teaspoons onion powder
1 Tablespoon coarsely ground pepper
2-3 Tablespoons ground coriander seeds
2 Tablespoons paprika (sometimes we add smoked paprika)
1 1/2 Tablespoons salt (feel free to add more if you like your seasoning salty)
2 teaspoons red pepper flakes
2 teaspoons oregano (we like Mexican oregano)Enjoy!

Paper Bag Cast Iron Skillet Cleaner

April 13, 2017April 13, 2017 / Liesl Clark / 9 Comments

We stopped buying paper towels years ago. Never really needed them.

And since we were eating mostly vegetarian meals, we rarely had the dilemma of what to do with a greasy cast iron skillet. Now that we eat bacon occasionally, because we’ve reintroduced a little locally-produced organic meat now and then, we have to contend with the leftover grease. We’ve used a few rags on the grease and just wash the rags, but that isn’t the best use for the rag.

And then, one day a week or so ago, I posted a dozen lunch-bag size bags to give away in my local Buy Nothing group. (I save these little bags whenever they somehow make their way into our house, and the kids use them when they go on school field trips.) A member immediately posted a comment explaining that he uses those thin lunch bags to sop up his bacon grease. It was an “aha” moment for me.

Here’s what he wrote:

“If you have a new, or not-so-well-seasoned pan, a thicker bag will leave little micro fragments of paper. So generally, the smoother the pan and the finer quality of the bag, the better it works. Newspaper is completely unworkable because it’s such lo’grade.”

I decided to keep the bags, and now I have a small stash of little brown bags I can use to clean out my cast iron skillet when it gets a little too greasy. The thin bag is pretty darn absorbent.