Organic Gardening: How-To-Do

Bruce Deuley, who has a morning show on KAHL-AM every weekend, has a fantastic site called Organic Matters providing lots and lots of information on organic gardening.

What's that? "Lawn and garden care without the use of toxic chemicals, pesticides, or herbicides," Deuley explains.

Oodles of tips appear on how to use ordinary, easy to find items - like cornmeal or epsom salts - in your lawn and garden .... Recipes are included. A really good site: it even has podcasts of Deuley's radio shows.

Paper or Plastic?

Leaving the crafting question aside (paper wins), which is better: paper or plastic bags at the grocery store? The Institute for Lifecycle Environmental Assessment, after much scientific study, voted plastic in 1990. However, in 1990 the Simpsons had just started on TV and Bush the First had only been president for one year. Perhaps more data is needed.

The plastic bag folk provide a site that breaks the choice down into three components - reduce, reuse, recycle -- and they suggest plastic is the better option. (Duh.)

However, even the paper people at treehugger.org vote plastic is the lesser of two evils, after much consideration. Wow.

So, I guess the answer is .... plastic, please.

Books To Inspire and Encourage

Well, any list of books to inspire and encourage your Simple Quest has to include Walden by Henry David Thoreau ... which is available to be read, in its entirety online for free. As is Ralph Waldo Emerson's essay Self-Reliance.

Not everyone seeking a Simple Life is a transcendentalist, however. Those interesting in simplifying life run the gamut -- for example, spiritually-speaking, Jews and Christians and Hindus and Buddhists all can be, and are, participants in the simplicity lifestyle.

Much can be said for The Razor's Edge by W. Somerset Maugham as well as Pathways to Bliss by Joseph Campbell, and The Story of My Life by Helen Keller. Heck, I get a lot from the Wizard of Oz, if you must know - as well as anything by PG Wodehouse. Laughter is good.

Personally, I found Joyce Meyer's Approval Addiction: Overcoming Your Need to Please Everyone and Stephen Covey's Living the 7 Habits: the Courage to Change both to be very helpful.