The Art of Meditation© When I started to practice meditation it was simply for two reasons. One was during a religious search and second was for stress reduction. Meditation techniques have been practiced for thousands of years and for me, originally, the goal was to... ( added 1 year 58 days ago.)

Don’t Stand in the Way of Yourself© Today I came across some notes I had made to myself in June of 1988. The first line said, "Don't stand in the way of yourself". Pretty heady stuff when one thinks about it. Why do we limit ourselves? We have tremendous inner reserves and... ( added 1 year 58 days ago.)

How to Know What Tree to Plant© At the end of every Louis L'Amour novel he asked his readers to plant one tree a year. His premise was that it only takes about 30 minutes to cut down a tree and it takes years for one to grow. He realized that millions of trees are cut each year... ( added 1 year 58 days ago.)

How to Grow Sprouts I started to grown sprouts when I started doing a lot of oriental cooking simply because in my area it was hard to get fresh sprouts. Once I realized how simple it was I was amazed at how fast these little seeds did their thing. Many people use a... ( added 1 year 58 days ago.)

How to Correctly Transplant Tree/shrubs or Shrubs© Besides knowing how to correctly transplant a tree or shrub you need to know when to do it and what you are dealing with. Is the tree/shrub going to be a nursery purchased tree/shrub that usually has been balled and wrapped in burlap or is the... ( added 1 year 58 days ago.)

How to Make Italian Zucchini and Eggs© I don't know about your part of the world, but in my part of the world, the beginning of September is the time to really start to figure out what to do with all those zucchini that are being offered around the neighborhood. In Italian cooking... ( added 1 year 61 days ago.)

How to Make it Nice on a Shoestring© It was getting towards the end of the month and even though I did not need a thing, nor did I seem to want a thing, I realized I was getting low on money. What brought it to my attention were all the sales flyers that were coming into our post... ( added 1 year 61 days ago.)

How to Make a Good Italian Garden Sandwich© As our organic gardens offer up an abundance of harvest towards the end of the season most of us are busy with canning, preserving, drying or storing our produce for the coming winter. This is not the time to forget we are still enjoying our... ( added 1 year 61 days ago.)

How to Grow and Use Arugula (uh ROO gyuh luh) © If you like salad greens and if you like peppery, pungent and spicy flavors then perhaps growing arugula in your garden is the thing to do. This plant was once grown by the Romans for both its seed and its leaves. Besides using the leaves in... ( added 1 year 61 days ago.)

The Look, Smell, and Taste of Wine Tasting© I was once asked, "Is all that swirling, sniffing and spitting that goes on during wine tasting really necessary?" Yes! Do you need to serve white wine with fish? No! But it usually is a good choice. Making good choices is something you can learn.... ( added 1 year 62 days ago.)

Bread Baking Machine Hints© As a baker of bread for over 50 years, I purchased a bread machine a few years ago. Most my recipes call for 5 loaves at a baking. However, once the 5 kids were gone we did not need so much bread. The bread machine solved the problem and I love... ( added 1 year 62 days ago.)

How to do Scratchbord Art© I first discovered scratchboard art by accident. It was at the clearance aisle in an art store. Here was a little kit that had the scratch pen missing. As a consumer I could not resist the bargain price and as an artist I could not hold back my... ( added 1 year 62 days ago.)

How to Make Your Credit Cards Work for You© In 1965 I made a statement to my friend that this country was going back to the "Nobles and the Serfs" and that I would make the world's most rotten serf! This reference was to my personal vision of the decline and fall of the middle class... ( added 1 year 62 days ago.)

How to make Funeral Pie Before we became accustomed to having every staple we needed on hand whether in or out of season our pantry or larder held just a few things such as flour, sugar, salt, coffee and the rest of the time we cooked whatever was in season and most of... ( added 1 year 62 days ago.)

Does Your Community Have a Community Food Bank? We often think of the local Community Food Bank as an arm of our government's welfare system. Most state and communities have a Community Food Bank especially in large areas. Basically the Community Food Bank helps a person who is hungry and that... ( added 1 year 62 days ago.)

Urban Gardening Made Easy© Many of my favorite places in the world are in the Mediterranean and since most of these places are so old many of the towns have become big cities. Those that have not are mostly stone, concrete, narrow streets and very few have large plots of... ( added 1 year 62 days ago.)

Planning Your Foundation Garden© March is the time that most of us in the warmer zones can start thinking about scratching the ground and hoping that by the end of March, at least in zone 6, we will be having our last frost. In 2007 we got a big surprise after all of our orchards... ( added 1 year 62 days ago.)

School Garden Ideas© Mostly urban schools have school gardens. Should your child go to school in suburbia then perhaps they will be lucky enough to have a school garden or something that relates to it like a school green house. Here is Kentucky many schools have... ( added 1 year 62 days ago.)

Water Gardening Made Easy© In the early evenings of late spring and through out summer until the first frost settles into our part of the world one of the nicest sights and sounds for me is the melodic sound of the water coming out of the large clay koi fish that sits in... ( added 1 year 62 days ago.)

Square Foot Gardening Do’s and Don’ts© The original square foot unit is 4x4ft, 16 sq ft, which can supply one person with vegetables and salads. I personally found this square block unwieldy when I put mine in about 1999 or 2000. It was suggested that I use 3x3 ft blocks instead, and... ( added 1 year 62 days ago.)

National Gardening Association The National Gardening Association is a non-profit organization that was founded in 1973 and since then has become this nation's leader in plant based information. They are headquartered in South Burlington, Vermont. Their biggest contribution... ( added 1 year 62 days ago.)

Plants that Get a Bad Rap and Those that Should! © For years I was with those hordes of people who back away from Ragweed the minute I see it. I could never understand why florists were putting them into bouquets. They really were gorgeous in the fields. I did not get to sneezing when I came... ( added 1 year 62 days ago.)

How to Build a Floating Hydroponic Garden© The first time I ever saw or heard of Hydroponic gardening was in Orlando when we took our kids through one of the rides they had. It was about 1973 and Disney World had a boat ride through this giant greenhouse and there were all these vegetables... ( added 1 year 62 days ago.)

Neighbor Sharing Cleome Seeds© My gardening neighbor no longer lives next door to me, but when she did she was really into gardening and she was a very good gardener. I would hire her teenage sons to weed in my gardens and we would talk about their mother's gardens. I was often... ( added 1 year 62 days ago.)

Planting Little Pine Trees the Easy Way© When we lived up in our mountain house in Northern New York on the Canadian border it did not take long for us and our neighbors to find ourselves suddenly inside of what was called the "Blue Line". This was the edge of the Adirondack Park that... ( added 1 year 62 days ago.)