DIG IN
The latest articles from Chelsea Green and our authors: offering tips and techniques about how you can bring our books to life in your kitchen, backyard, or community.
Herbal Medicine: Knowledge Rooted in Connection
Using herbal medicine to heal the body is an ancient practice, but it has since become a worldwide industry in the twenty-first century. Today, modern-day doctor’s visits and industrial medicine have displaced common knowledge of herbal medicine. Some still remember the ancient practice, though. In her new book The Business of Botanicals, Ann Armbrecht interviews one…
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Fungi: All Around and Among Us
Fungi are fundamental to life. As decomposers, they are critical to the formation and sustenance of soils and ecosystems. As endlessly innovative chemists, they devise and secrete enzymes that can break down a vast variety of materials, mitigate bacterial and viral infections, and interact—for better or worse—with the bodies and brains of animals that consume…
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The Best Meatloaf You’ll Ever Taste… Ever!
It’s a staple in almost every kitchen. It has hundreds – nay, thousands – of variations. It’s delicious, nutritious, and packed full of protein. It’s meatloaf!! This meatloaf recipe from London restaurant Towpath is sure to delight everyone in your household. And who knows, it may even end up taking the place of your tried-and-true family recipe. The…
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How to Use Reflected Light to Boost Indoor Food Production
Growing food indoors or in an urban setting can be quite a challenge. You need to find the right kinds of plants, purchase or build tools, and make sure you have lots of time and patience. Oh, and don’t forget making sure your garden gets enough reflected light so it can thrive! If your space…
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What If Schools Nurtured Imagination?
Imagination is central to empathy, to creating better lives, to envisioning and then enacting a positive future. Yet imagination is also demonstrably in decline at precisely the moment when we need it most. In his book, author Rob Hopkins asks why imagination is in decline, and what we must do to revive and reclaim it.…
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Medicine as a Process, Not a Product
What do you picture when you think of medicine? Pharmacy shelves filled with plastic bottles promising cures to your every ailment? A doctor’s office? Whatever you think of, you probably don’t picture fields of medicinal herbs or bookshelves covered in jars of amber-colored liquid or trained hands drying leaves and cutting roots. What if, at…
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The Evolution of Tools: Rock, Paper, Scissors
We’ve all played Rock, Paper, Scissors; whether it’s to decide who’s goes first, who’s doing the dishes, or simply a way to pass the time– we all know the rules. While it’s a child’s game on the surface level, Nick Kary gleans a deeper meaning to this game of tools. The following excerpt is from Material…
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The Power of Positive Self-Talk
Are you starting off the new year with an athletic resolution? Maybe you want to get stronger or run faster and further, or maybe you just want to incorporate more movement into your daily life. If this sounds like you, it’s important to remember that your mindset is equally as important as your physical prowess.…
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Year in Review: The Best From 2020
As we look back on the year, we’ve started to take stock of what our community has found most useful. If there’s one thing (or two) we know about our readers, it’s that you love growing food and getting your hands dirty. Take a spin back through our top posts from 2020. Did your favorite…
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Brew Recipe: Lambswool Wassail
(Mugs of Lambswool Wassail. Photo by Jereme Zimmerman) Wassail! Whassat? We’ll tell you! From brewing genius Jereme Zimmerman, we have another out-of-the-barrel brew for you to try at home. Especially on those colder nights. This recipe is an excerpt from Brew Beer Like a Yeti by Jereme Zimmerman and has been adapted for the web. Winter…
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The Complexity of Membranes and the Beauty of the Unseen
It can be comforting to define things using strict categories; black and white, tasty or gross, good or evil. Sandor Ellix Katz, author of Fermentation as Metaphor, knows that this isn’t really the case in real life. Taking another lesson from the act and art of fermentation, Katz dives into the complexity of membranes and…
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Sage and Chili Butter on Fried Eggs (and everything else!)
Spice up your fried eggs with this delicious caramelized sage and chili butter! Not only is this butter great on eggs, but also on pasta, roasted veggies, and an array of other great meals. Much like the sage chili butter in its kitchen, Towpath has a way of enhancing everything it touches. From planting gardens…
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Chelsea Green’s Audiobook Gift Guide
We all have one of those people on our gift lists. You know the type: the hardcore hobbyist with very specific taste who is sick of socks and isn’t all that into reading. Lucky for you, some of our most popular (and interesting) books also come in audiobook form! Get your loved-ones the gift of storytelling and knowledge…
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Wine Pairings for the Holidays
(Photography by Deirdre Heekin) As the holidays get closer, it’s good to know what kind of wine to serve on the right occasion with the right meal, right? Deirdre Heekin, winemaker and author of An Unlikely Vineyard, is here to share some of her favorite wines along with food pairing suggestions. Her selections include a…
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The Energy Consumption Crisis
At the rate humanity is currently burning fossil fuels, we will create an uninhabitable earth long before we run out. So if the pressure of a finite resource doesn’t push us towards a renewable energy revolution, what will? And what will this revolution look like? This is an excerpt from A Small Farm Future by Chris…
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A Book for the Fruit Nerd on Your Holiday Gift List
Have a fruit nerd on your holiday shopping list this year? Then give the gift that Booklist calls, “a thorough investigation of one wonderful fruit”—The Book of Pears by Joan Morgan. In this one-of-a-kind guide, noted pomologist and fruit historian Joan Morgan (The Book of Apples) has researched and crafted a definitive account of the pear’s…
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Big Bang 2: The Debtonator
(Photo: The ‘debt in transit’ van, filled with paper notes representing £1.2 million of toxic debt, mid-explosion: Big Bang 2. Credit: Graeme Truby.) Art hacks life when two filmmakers launch a project to cancel more than £1m of high-interest debt from their local community. Bank Job is a white-knuckle ride into the dark heart of…
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Try Homemade Mead For a Very Viking Thanksgiving!
A thousand years ago, the people who lived the Viking lifestyle enjoyed a myriad of foods and beverages and threw feasts that lasted several days to show off what they had stockpiled throughout the harvest season. Bring the Viking spirit of celebration to your Thanksgiving table this year with a traditional batch of spiced orange…
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How Loving Labor Leads to a Brighter Future: Sourcing a Solution
Drawing on a vast range of sources from across a multitude of disciplines, A Small Farm Future analyses the complex forces that make societal change inevitable; explains how low-carbon, locally self-reliant agrarian communities and loving labor can empower us to successfully confront these changes head on; and explores the pathways for delivering this vision politically. Challenging…
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What You Didn’t Learn About “Leaves of Grass” in School
In her book Outrages, Naomi Wolf shows how legal persecutions of writers, and of men who loved men affected Symonds and his contemporaries, including Christina and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Walter Pater, and the painter Simeon Solomon. All the while, Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass was illicitly crossing the Atlantic and finding its way…
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Treating Addiction: From Opium Poppy to Morphine to Naltrexone
LDN, originally prescribed in higher doses as a treatment for opioid addiction, works by blocking opioid receptors, thereby stimulating the production of endorphins, mitigating the inflammatory process, and stabilizing the immune response. Prescribed off-label and administered in small daily doses, this generic drug has proven useful in treating many different ailments. This excerpt was taken…
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Understanding your Microbiome: The Garbage in Your Gut
When treating multiple sclerosis, Dr. Michaël Friedman does not promise a miracle cure but instead provides the personal prescriptions he follows that are delaying the disease process and radically improving his quality of life, including dietary measures and supplements to support a healthy microbiome and hormone therapies that can reduce neuroinflammation and possibly promote neurorestoration.…
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Thanksgiving Feast: A Twist on the Traditional New England Dinner
If you’re looking for something new and different to serve this Thanksgiving, Chef Evan Mallett of the Black Trumpet restaurant in Portsmouth, NH has some ideas. From his book, Black Trumpet, Mallett has selected three traditional, New England-inspired dishes that are sure to add some new flavors to your Thanksgiving feast. The following is an…
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Looking for Answers
Since his diagnosis of multiple sclerosis a decade ago, Dr. Friedman has been searching for a cure for the disease. After years of research, he realized that he had some of the answers right in his naturopathic medicine toolbox, and others, surprisingly, lay in the realm of conventional medicine. Before all of this, he first…
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What Does a Sustainable Future Look Like?
In a time of looming uncertainties, what would a truly resilient society look like? Farmer and social scientist Chris Smaje argues that organizing society around small-scale farming offers the soundest, most sustainable, and most reasonable response to climate change and other crises of civilization—and will yield humanity’s best chance at survival. The following excerpt is…
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