Turtles-Paradise

Strawberries at wimbledon, and minty pea-soup to sip in the garden. June passes us by, and July gets ready to burst onto the scene – in, I hope, a gloriously sunny month that let’s me take long rambly walks through fields of wild-flowers.

July is all about barbecues, picnics, salads and refreshing glasses of ice-cold lemonade. Family gatherings, water-balloon fights, and siestas in the sun. Bliss!

Eating what’s in season has a number of benefits. It’s cheaper, it’s healthier, and it keeps us in touch with the cycles of nature. When we can buy strawberries in December, or pumpkins in April, the food loses a touch of what makes it special. Anticipation, after all, is half the fun of anything.

The Best Food of July

Cherries – ripe, luscious little fruits that taste like nothing else. Unfortunately, Britain has lost around 90% of its cherry orchards in the last 50 years, in favour of importing them from overseas. July 17th is Cherry Day, so go pick your own from a local orchard, or buy some from a farmer’s market. Cherries can be used to make fruity buns, sauces for meat, or delectable pie fillings. Or just eat them by the handful. Om nom.

Peaches – peaches are another refreshing fruit. Somehow, the idea of eating a peach with juices running down my chin while sitting under a cloudless blue sky is my idea of heaven. If you like peaches, you’ll be pleased to know that peach trees can be grown in containers. Just make sure they get lots of sunshine. And make sure you get lots of sunshine as well – we all thrive and grow during the sunnier months.

Cucumber – cumbers are cool. They’re famous for it, in fact. And, when you get a bit hot and bothered, or maybe don’t like the sun quite as much as the peach tree – a cumber is the perfect antidote. A cumber salad makes for a good lunch, or as a trusty side for a bbq. If you feel a bit worn out, you can lie down with a couple of cumber slices on your eyes. Or, you can drink it.

Fennel – It’s not all fruit and salads. You might still want your sunday roast, or fancy something a bit more filling. Enter fennel, a vegetable I was first exposed to as part of my veg box delivery (for those of you unable to get to a market, one of these can really help you support a local farmer – I really miss it), and which I instantly fell in love with. It looks a bit like it came from outer-space, and it tastes like aniseed. Aniseed is one of those flavours you either love or hate, so if you didn’t like the sweets you won’t like this. It goes well in a risotto, and makes a perfect match with fish.

Spinach – spinach is in season through most of the year, which suits me just fine. As a leafy green, spinach is one of those nutritional powerhouses that – whilst not turning us into Popeye – has a truly insane amount of vitamin K and A. Plus a bunch of other things, all of which are good for you. Add it to a salad, steam it as a side, or dump it into a fruit smoothie and turn that smoothie a beautiful shade of green.

Peas and Beans – Peas, green beans and broad beans are all being picked and podded right about now. Add them to that risotto, or enjoy them with fish and chips. Vegetarians can enjoy this tasty walnut and green bean dish – well, and so can the rest of us. Don’t you just love summer?

This is a mere sampling of what’s on offer right now, but it makes a good start. Remember to buy local – if you shop in a supermarket, look for the British sticker. Alternatively, visit a farmers market, or get a veg box delivered. Fresh, in-season produce – it simply cannot be beaten.

Eat well. Exercise.

That’s the simple mantra for a healthy life. You can make it complicated – eliminating certain foods, eating a strict diet, and sticking to a regimented and punishing gym-schedule. But most of us don’t have the time – and for most of us, any kind of exercise is better than none.

So here is my ultra-simple list of five incredibly simple exercises you can do – no gym membership, no equipment, and dead easy for beginners.

1. Walking

Walking is the easiest, simplest way to get some activity into your life. Walk to the shops. Walk to work. Walk to a friend’s house. Walk around the block. Walk through the forest, up the mountain, across the fields.

Walking is incredibly under-rated as a mode of transport. You can walk a lot further than you think, and it’s a lot less stressful than driving. It’s easy to fit into your day to day life too – in fact, why don’t you go for a walk right now? This blog will still be here when you get back.

2. Starjumps, squats, pull-ups, press-ups

I know. I hate repetitive, routine exercises too. So the easiest way to work the jumps, splits, squats, pull-ups, press-ups and other bodyweight exercises is to vary it up. Combine different movements. Make it playful – remember when you were a kid, and you used to just randomly run around and jump on things? Moving is fun, and playgrounds are great places to go if you just want to climb trees, have a go on the monkey-bars, and play ‘lava-monsters’.

3. Dance

Dancing is amazing. Okay, it’s not quite minimalist in that it requires a source of music, but I’m going to assume that if you can read this post, you can get onto youtube. Go find some upbeat music, and dance like you’ve never danced before. Nobody’s watching, so just let yourself go crazy.

As a variation, try some martial arts. Pretend you’re Bruce Lee being attacked by a hundred ninjas, and get those high-kicks and super-quick punches flying.

4. Yoga

You might want a mat. But you don’t need one, really. I can’t praise yoga enough, it’s one of those things that always makes me feel better, even if I just find five minutes to really stretch. I don’t need to go into much detail here, as the famous Everett Bogue has already written the best guide to minimalist yoga around. I should note that I’ve been using his routine very successfully for the past few weeks.

5. Play with some kids. Outdoors.

Children are whirlwind dynamos of energy, and keeping up with them can be hard-work. So do your local stressed out parents a favour, and take their kids for a day out somewhere. Go to a park, and play football or frisbee. Explore the woods or some caves. Play old playground games, like ‘stick in the mud’. Or just chase them around until they or you collapse!

Now here’s the catch. To make it worth doing, you need to keep doing it. So slow down. Make it a habit to walk to work. Agree to take the kids out once a week. Make Tuesday night the night you put on your sequins and turn the volume to eleven. Make yoga part of your nightly wind-down routine.

Now – wasn’t that easier than you thought it would be?

Living a balanced life is something that I feel is they key to happiness. The growth of minimalism, the surge of interest in working for yourself as an online entrepreneur, the desire to live simply and connect with the people around – it all seems to be a reaction to a materialistic, and unbalanced life that has come to be seen as normal.

We are encouraged to believe that working relentlessly until we are 65 is what life is about. School has become increasingly like the world of work – where endless exams, projects, paperwork and uniforms take the place of play and exploration. Work has taken over more and more of our lives, with salaried workers regularly putting in more hours than contracted for, and those with part-time, minimum wage jobs frequently having to take on two or three jobs just to make ends meet.

Meanwhile, the gap between the haves and the have-nots has widened so that in 2006 the top 2% of the world population owned more than half of the worlds wealth. In order to afford the ‘standard of life’ that advertisers tell us is both normal and desirable, we are forced to take on debt, work overtime, and pay most of our income towards the upkeep of an unsustainable lifestyle. A few talented people make millions, a few lucky people inherit millions, and the rest are left to lurch from financial crisis to financial crisis.

The other day, I had to repot some of my plants. I went to the garden centre, and I paid for a few sacks of dirt. Yes, dirt – the very stuff this planet is covered with. Others pay for bottled water. It won’t be long before someone figures out how to sell us oxygen.

My very simple solution is:

• Spend less.
• Work less.
• Have more fun.

Spend Less

Downsize your house. Better still, get rid of your house. Live out of a van, or a tent, or a spare room. Learn to see the true cost of things – a £200 washing machine is nearly 30 hours of work at £7 an hour. A £400 iPad is nearly 60. A £200,000 house is 3.2 years of non-stop, 24 hour work.

The places to cut your costs are the places where you spend the most. Your rent. Your food. Your entertainment splurges. Eat more lentils. Is that chicken tikka take-away really worth spending an extra hour at work?

Work Less

Once you’ve cut your costs to the bone, you can afford to work less. Take a single part-time job. Start a minimalist business. Work from home. The less you spend, the less you need to worry about earning.

Have more fun

When you’re not working, what are you going to do instead? You’ll finally have the time to travel. To learn new skills. To cook properly. To have long, silly conversations on the telephone. To take long walks. All the things that you don’t have time for now.

I should make it clear that I’m not there yet. Unlike the many people out there that have succeeded in quitting their full-time jobs and spend their time doing what they love I still work 37 hours a week or so, and I still have a large rent payment and a lot of stuff.

But I’m determined. I’ve spent the last year reading amazing blogs. I now know that it is possible. In a year, we’ll be heading to a place we don’t have to pay rent. In that year, I’m going to work on getting rid of as much of our belongings as possible, so that we don’t have to pay to move it or store it, and so we can start with the wonderful possibility that empty space creates.

I’m working towards a balanced life. What are you working towards?

I love this sky-planter idea. It’s space saving, self-watering, and ideal for those in small living spaces. However, it does come with quite a steep price-tag… so here’s how to make one yourself.

How to make an upside-down tomato planter
How to make an Upside-Down Planter
Go Green: Upside Down Planters (re-uses plastic bottles)
Upside Down Gardening

There are several ‘zones’ outlined in permaculture, which go from the house right out to the wilderness. The purpose of each zone is different, and our level of impact on it is also different. I want to talk a bit about each zone and how we can simplify the way we work and live within it, and discuss simple ways of bringing each zone in alignment with permaculture principles.

Zone 2

Zone 2 is generally considered the garden. It’s an area that we still go to on a regular basis, and that requires our attention in order to thrive. It doesn’t need to be the patch of land to the back of your property – it could be an allotment, or a roof garden. Generally speaking, it’s going to be where the bulk of your food is grown – fruit trees, vegetable plots, chicken huts, and medicinal plants will all be put here. If you don’t have a garden, it might be the deeper pots on your balcony, the window-allotment, or similar. Zones don’t have to be a particular size or shape, and it’s important we don’t prevent ourselves from growing due to a preconceived idea of what a ‘vegetable patch’ looks like.

We can simplify this zone in the following ways:

• Pay attention to the shape of the space, the levels of light, the average temperatures and amount of rainfall, and the type of soil – before you start growing. Grow the types of foods that have always been grown in your area, and don’t try and plant your favourite exotic fruit tree that is going to take lots of time and water to look after.
• Garden to your own level of experience. Start small. There is nothing worse than spending a lot of money on seeds, plants, trellises, pots and special soil and then watching everything die. A tomato plant and some herbs is a garden, and you can make food from it.
• Develop your knowledge of companion plants. Get the plants to do the hard-work for you!
• Share the hard-work with others – start a community allotment, or get the kids involved in the back-garden.
• Perform maintenance work ‘little and often’.

Think about Wildlife

Humans share this planet with a massively diverse range if other life-forms. Due to our overwhelming dominance and cultivation of land, we have driven a lot of these life-forms to the margins, shrinking their numbers daily. Some we outright kill, through serious pesticides that poison far more than just insects. For others, we simply alter their habitat until they starve to death.

Your garden can and should provide a place where wild-animals, insects and birds can live. Encourage the diversity of life, by planting things designed to attract and nourish bees, butterflies, birds, hedgehogs, bats and so on.

Attracting the right sorts of bugs can help keep other bugs in check. For example, ants keep termites away. Ladybugs eat aphids. Birds and hedgehogs eat slugs. Let a natural ecosystem exist, and you won’t have to worry about pesticides and fumigation.

Saving your crops

Of course, if you attract lots of insects and birds, there’s a chance they might devour your hard-won fruit and herbs. Having had last years cabbage plants eaten in their entirety by a hungry pheasant, I know how quickly things can get decimated.

The quickest and easiest way to stop them is to do the following:

• Put netting over young fruit trees and bushes.
• Use physical barriers like raised beds to get them away from birds like ducks and pheasants.
• Grow lots of honeysuckle, and put out bird feeders. Give the birds other things to eat, and they’ll not bother with the fruit.

If anybody else has suggestions, please let me know! Managing pests and predators is one of the biggest challenges in outdoor gardening.