Slice of Organic Life
- ISBN13: 9780756662110
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
Product Description
Featuring over 80 self-contained projects, from growing your own organic food, cooking home-grown produce, keeping selected livestock, and leading a more sustainable lifestyle, Slice of Organic Life is the perfect start for someone looking to go “green.”… More >>
“A slice of organic life” is yet another book of the back to basics movement. The author gives you a broad overview on what you can do to become part of the organic life. Along with that the book has tons of beautiful pictures which makes it very nice to look at and will probably have you wanting to start your own farm today. Nevertheless the author assures you that you don’t have to live in the country to put at least some of her ideas into practice.
Some of the topics covered include:
Energy Saving
Natural Cosmetics
Support local businesses
Reduce, reuse, recycle
Bake Bread
Beekeeping
Grow your own herbs, fruit & vegetables
Raise pigs, chicken, ducks and cows
Although it’s a bigger book with 352 pages, the author only touches briefly on every topic. For the beginner this would make a great introduction into what’s possible in the organic world. If you are, however, looking for more in depth and How-To information you should look for a different book.
This book does exactly what it sets out to do, bring the reader a slice of organic life. While I did wish that some of the sections had been a bit more detailed, the point of the book isn’t to provide an exhaustive thoroughly-detailed resource on all facets of an organic natural green lifestyle. And there’s a nice appendix in the back providing websites, phone numbers, and addresses of businesses and organisations that can give the reader more information on the areas s/he’s most interested in, such as growing herbs, raising livestock, or starting a hobby farm. Divided into the sections “No Need for a Yard,” “Roof Terrace, Patio, or Tiny Yard,” and “Yard, Community Garden, or Field,” it presents numerous projects and lifestyle changes the reader can implement based on the amount of personal space s/he’s got. For example, someone with only an apartment can be more selective about one’s food products, make fruit cordials, and grow salad leaves, someone with a small yard can make compost, grow tomatoes in a pot, or make one’s own barbeque, and someone with a large yard or field can become a beekeeper, keep geese, or plant a vine. There’s also a bit of overlap with some of the suggestions; for example, anyone can use cloth diapers, buy natural bath products, use reclaimed furniture, make jam, or make berry popsicles. It gives the reader a lot of ideas, some of them things which most people are already aware of, such as raising a garden, and some which one might not have known about before, such as having a truly green Xmas tree. It also doesn’t really preach to the reader and tell him or her to do all of these things; besides the fact that everyone should transition to a greener lifestyle at one’s own pace instead of jumping in whole hog all at once, some of them won’t be practicable for everyone, for whatever reasons. For example, some of these things seem really hard-core or evenly potentially dangerous for a beginner, like making one’s own paint, foraging for mushrooms, and creating one’s own cleaning and bath products. The sections on raising animals for meat and other byproducts also rather surprised me; it seems as though most people into a natural organic lifestyle would be promoting getting food from the resources we already have instead of using up even more resources to raise farm animals and contributing to an animal overpopulation problem just to get a regular supply of pork or so that a cow or goat can have a continual supply of milk (dairy animals need to be pretty much pregnant every year in order to keep producing milk). Overall, though, there are a lot of good interesting suggestions on how to make a greener lifestyle a reality instead of just a dream.
Not only is this book a completely shallow coffee table book, it gives actively bad advice. For example, taking a cruise is in no way an environmentally-friendly alternative to flying (pg. 74). Furthermore, I wouldn’t be surprised if a few people get botulism or other kinds of food poisoning after following her lackadaisical advice about canning – jar sterilization gets half a sentence in a sidebar. The author cheerfully offers 2-4 page guides on buying chickens, bees, ducks, geese, and goats when any livestock purchase requires significantly more research – not a fact she mentions; it all sounds very easy and pleasant.
I guess it’s pretty, though. Just make sure you actually get some proper instruction on things that are a bit more serious than “buying natural fabrics”.
“A Slice of Organic Life” introduces readers to the various ways they can incorporate organic living into their routines, regardless of where they live or how much time they have on their hands. Chapter one, titled “No Need for a Yard,” has a variety of easy tips that can be adopted by someone living in a small apartment, from shopping ethically and growing strawberries in a hanging basket, to growing herbs indoors and then drying those herbs for storage. Each topic is 2 to 4 pages long and gives the reader a brief, yet helpful, introduction to the subject. Recipes are included where appropriate, for instance, in the section about how to make & freeze baby foods, where the authors share recipes for baby meals like herb mash, carrot soup, and fruit smoothies. The second chapter of this book is meant, as the title indicates, for people who live in an apartment or house with a “Roof terrace, Patio, or Tiny Yard.” Here how-to topics include growing an apple tree in a pot, gardening without pesticides and collecting rainwater to water your plants. The third chapter, titled “Yard, Community Garden, or Field,” takes organic living to its utmost manifestation and includes sections such as how to preserve fruit, create a wildlife pond, make apple juice, milk a cow and make freshly churned butter. Every page includes eye-catching color photographs and much food for thought. Indeed, if I had a large yard the section on keeping chickens would have left me seriously considering building a coop.
In general the chapters in this book are well-conceived and enjoyable, but on a couple occasions the authors took their enthusiasm for organic living a bit too far. For instance, on page 102 they counsel readers to forage for mushrooms in the wild, which is dangerous advice if only because several lethal mushrooms resemble their edible cousins. Though the authors share photos of four poisonous mushrooms and tell newbie foragers to tag along with experienced foragers in the beginning, only an expert should attempt to gather mushrooms for consumption. Every year approximately 9,000 people in the US accidentally poison themselves with mushrooms, and though one could easily talk around this point by noting how a majority of the people poisoned are curious children with an appetite for fungi, in my book it counts for something that even food expert Alton Brown has said he wouldn’t presume to pick mushrooms in the wild. Nevertheless, on the whole, this book is an excellent introduction to organic living, giving readers the opportunity to thumb through a user-friendly manual on how to make their lives more environmentally friendly without abandoning metropolitan life or giving up creature comforts. “A Slice of Organic Life” will make you rethink how you approach even the most mundane aspects of your life.
I was a bit disappointed in this book, as I thought it would be a more in-depth discussion of living and farming in a sustainable way. We live on a farm and are just starting an organic beef operation, and I was just looking for something more detailed. Instead, this book includes snippets of ways that people in more urban areas can live the organic life, such as making your own soap, growing plants in pots, using earth-friendly cleaning products, even keeping bees.
The information that is in the book is mostly helpful, although some important safety details are omitted from certain sections. For example, in the section on making jam, the instructions tell you to boil the fruit mixture, then “spoon it into jars and seal.” There is no discussion of sterilizing the jars first or of how to tell if your seal is good on a jar – these things are the difference between safe and unsafe food. The section on woodstoves says nothing about the need for education on safely operating a woodstove or the expertise needed to properly install one so that it isn’t a fire hazard. So – I would recommend that if you are new to the farming/country life and you want to try anything other than the most basic projects listed in this book, research it using other sources first so that you know what you’re getting into.