Simple 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.

12 Ways to Hygge in the Spring

The art of hygge is something that has become more and more popular in recent years. Hygge is usually associated with the cold, dark winter months, but hygge isn’t something that needs to be limited to just the cold months of the year. Practicing hygge in the spring can be just as enjoyable and as rewarding.

Hygge (usually pronounced “hoo-gah” or “hue-gah”) is a Danish word that doesn’t have a direct translation into English. Some of the connotations associated with hygge include the ideas of creating an atmosphere of warmth, light, comfort, and connection; an awareness and appreciation for the beauty and joy around us; enjoying simple pleasures; and the feelings of coziness and well-being.

8 Easy Ways to Get Healthier (Without Changing What You Eat)

Trying to live a healthier lifestyle seems like it would be a simple thing, but it can get surprisingly complicated sometimes, especially when it comes to food.

If you do any reading or researching online, you’ll likely find dozens of different recommendations for the ideal healthy diet or for foods that you should either add to your diet or eliminate from your diet if you want to improve your health.

Since food can be such a confusing topic at times, I wanted to talk about some of the simple and easy ways to get healthier that have absolutely nothing to do with food at all.

So, if you’re trying to improve your health but you’re not sure what foods you should or shouldn’t be eating, these eight things can help you to live a healthier lifestyle even if you don’t change anything about your diet.

How to Use Hygge to Improve Your Health and Well-Being

For our ancestors, winter was usually thought of as an enjoyable time of year even though the weather was cold. Winter time was often a time of less work and more leisure time, and this slower pace meant that winter was a peaceful time for relaxation and rest. This old-fashioned view of the cold weather months, and of life in general, is something that the Danish people embrace with their concept of hygge.

Hygge is pronounced something like “hue-gah” (although for months I had read it like “higgy” so that’s still how it sounds in my mind!), and there’s no direct equivalent for this word in English.

How to Make A Backup Sourdough Starter

If you like baking with a sourdough starter, the best thing you can do to make sure you can continue using it for a long time is to make a backup sourdough starter.

Even though sourdough starters are usually pretty resilient and hard to kill, if you neglect feeding it for too long, or if you go away on vacation and completely forget about your starter, the wild yeast can die off.

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.