Old-Fashioned Living Archives - Our Heritage of Health

How to Save Seeds from Carrots, Beets, and Other Biennial Plants

Saving seeds from your own garden plants is a great old-fashioned way to save money in your garden, but the process of saving seeds from some vegetables isn’t always quite as simple as harvesting the plants at the end of …

4 Times When It’s Best NOT to DIY

DIY projects have become increasingly popular the past few years (as anyone who has visited Pinterest lately is well aware of), and there are lots of great reasons to give them a try.

They are a great way to customize things exactly the way you like them, and when you’re making things yourself, you can use simple and natural ingredients and avoid the harmful chemicals in many store bought products – especially for personal care and household products. DIY products can also often allow you to save a decent amount of money compared to what you would spend buying a similar product at the store.

There are a few situations, though, when DIY projects aren’t the best option. In the natural health and simple living world, we can sometimes end up feeling like we have to make things ourselves if we truly want good quality products that are the best for our health.

How to Cook from Scratch (Without Spending all Day in the Kitchen!)

Switching over to a healthier, real food lifestyle can seem a little bit daunting at first, especially if you’re used to grabbing fast food on the way home from work or popping a TV dinner in the microwave.

Cooking your own meals is the best way to save money, avoid the artificial ingredients in many processed foods, and ensure that the food you’re eating is good quality (since you know exactly what ingredients you’re using and how you’re preparing them.)

When you hear the phrase “cooking from scratch,” though, you might think of someone from your great-grandmother’s generation, spending hours and hours in the kitchen. But while it’s true that cooking healthy food from scratch takes might take more time than popping a TV dinner in the microwave, it doesn’t mean you have to spend all day in the kitchen either!

How to Store Vegetables for Winter

Whether you want to store your own garden-grown produce or whether you want to take advantage of a bulk discount for fresh vegetables from a local farm stand or farmer’s market, one of the most important things to know is how to properly store those vegetables for the winter.

Storing produce for the winter is something we don’t always think about today since we have the option of running out to the grocery store anytime we want, but our ancestors had to plan carefully for winter storage to make sure they would have a well-preserved food supply to last through the winter without spoiling.

Old-Fashioned Friday #93

Old-Fashioned Friday

Welcome back to another week of Old-Fashioned Friday! Old-Fashioned Friday is a weekly gathering place for bloggers to share their ideas, tips, discoveries, etc. about real food, natural health, and old-fashioned living. Just like the quilting bees and front-porch gatherings of the “good old days,” Old-Fashioned Friday is a spot for bloggers and readers to stop by for a visit to greet one another and to learn new things.

Each week I will be featuring the three most-viewed posts from the previous week, so make sure to check back for next week’s carnival to see if you were featured! I’ll also be pinning to my Pinterest boards as much as I can all of the posts that follow the guidelines.

Finding Edible Weeds on a Plant Literacy Tour

A few weeks ago I visited Old Sturbridge Village (a living history museum focusing on early 19th century life in New England,) and one of the things I did while I was there was to take a plant literacy tour to learn about edible weeds.

It was an absolutely beautiful day with blue skies, sunshine, and a slight breeze, and if I hadn’t needed to get home to let my dog outside, I think I could have stayed there all day walking around the village and learning about the different plants.

The tour guide was one of the costumed interpreters from the village, and he seemed to know just about everything there was to know about plants, both the ones growing in the gardens and the ones growing wild along the roadside.

10 “Newfangled” Foods Our Ancestors Never Ate

Of all of the things that have changed a lot in the past few years, our food supply is definitely one of them! And a lot of those changes have occurred in just the past century.

These foods may seem commonplace to us today, but in the scale of human history, these are all very recent, “newfangled” foods that the people of our great-grandparents generation viewed with a lot of skepticism at first.

Here’s a list of ten foods our ancestors never ate that didn’t even exist before the 20th century: