Posts by — Sally Buchan

Urban homesteading, growing or raising a portion of your own food, has become so fashionable that upscale cookware company Williams-Sonoma introduced the Agrarian collection, a line of tools and supplies for activities ranging from beekeeping to cheese making, delivered to 75 countries.

Photos of gardening beds thick with leafy greens, heirloom chickens strutting around picturesque coops and shiitake mushrooms growing on a log make the homesteading life look beautiful and delicious, while also playing down the hard-work aspect of these chores-turned-hobbies. Copper gardening tools are so shiny and pretty they seem more like rustic decorations for a farm-to-table restaurant than tools for working in the dirt. (more…)

Small wonder that interest in off-grid living is at an all-time high.

Four million homeowners have already lost the roof over their heads; 3.3 million others are in or near foreclosure, and more than 11 million borrowers are underwater by $700 billion. Of course the market will recover at some point in the future….but when?

If you have a dead-end job and a mortgage on a property which is worth considerably less than you paid for it, the temptation to hand back the keys will be pretty immense. Unless you have kids in the middle of schooling, or an ailing parent to look after, it would seem to make a lot of sense to find some cheap land in a nice community of like-minded people, and forge yourself a new life.  You can start the process by registering on LandBuddy, our free service. (more…)

The Toledo Museum is celebrating the trend towards smaller homes in new exhibit Small Worlds. Everyone with internet access can participate in learning more about small homes and they can participate in an eBay auction for charity to March 25th, 2012. (more…)

Looking for ways to lower your utility bills or maybe just reduce your electricity consumption if your power is from sun or wind?

Lowering the amount of power you use to light your home is one place to start.

About 20 per cent of your monthly energy usage goes toward illuminating your home. Slashing that bill takes a little more effort than simply turning off the lights.

Here are seven tips to help you cut your lighting costs and make instant savings.

1 Pick the best bulb: There are more energy efficient light bulbs to choose from than ever. Start by migrating to more efficient bulbs as your old ones burn out. Newer bulbs can outlast traditional ones by up to 10 times and can save you up to 75 per cent in lighting costs. (more…)

One of our readers commented recently “It’s sad that municipalities force people into huge homes, by refusing to let people build small homes. It’s all about the money (taxes) that they want to rake in.”
but now help is at hand, in the suprising shape of the National Association of Home Builders. The size of new homes shrank in 2009 for the first time in three decades, figures from the NAHB show.

The recession has driven the trend, but financial necessity isn’t the only reason behind the move to downsize. (more…)

Which would you choose? Earning money or having a meaningful, engaging life?

Suddenly people are talking about
Your Money or Your Life

- funny how it goes like that. The book was first published 17 years ago – but there is something very contemporary about its injunction to start living and stop being a wage slave – the authors call it “making a dying.”

We hope to run a diary soon from a young investment banker in Toronto who is about to start living in his car (a Porsche presumably) partly as a result of reading this book. (more…)

America needs to promote the use of renewable energy including wind and solar power to secure a stable energy supply amid a rise in global energy demand due to rapid growth in China and other emerging economies.

On a scale of 1 to 10, we give the US a score of 2 in evaluating America’s energy self-sufficiency, including nuclear power generation.

The US ratio of renewable energy to overall energy supply is far smaller than the ratios for Germany and Spain, which are promoting the use of renewable energy. (more…)

Off-Grid ideas are flowing from the classrooms of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Stanford and Virginia University into commercial products in rural India.
Here’s a look at how a new generation of off-grid whiz-kids are creating affordable, scaleable, high-tech business models to improve quality of life in rural India.

An extraordinary bunch of entrepreneurs is attempting projects ranging from rural electrification to solar-powered refrigeration systems. (more…)