MOTHER EARTH NEWS August - September 2019

Last year around this time, I wrote about trapping feral bee swarms in 5-frame mini-hives that I hung in trees. We received many letters asking for more information and updates on that project — in a nutshell, it worked really well for us. This approach to expanding or replenishing your bee stock will work fine with whichever beehive design you prefer (I prefer Layens and my wife prefers Langstroth), so long as you build the mini-hives to accommodate the frames that fit your hive body type. So, we set our seven traps up in sentinel trees, and all but one became occupied by bees. We had some problems with squirrels, or possibly packrats, gnawing into a couple of the traps, which caused the bees to move on. And as so often…

We began our journey with MOTHER EARTH NEWS in the mid-1970s. MOTHER’s most significant impact came when we built our house in 1979. Through the magazine, we learned of the potential for energy savings and alternative energy generation systems before many options were commercially available. Accordingly, we built our home in a sunny location with roof pitches, directional orientation, and an architectural design suited to adapting to various technologies that weren’t yet affordable. Over the years, we’ve easily converted to passive solar heating, solar hot water, and electrical generation through solar panels, as those technologies became viable. In addition to these alterations, we’ve also tried to improve our home’s efficiency by upgrading our windows and insulation, as well as installing a geothermal heating and cooling system. Because of these changes,…

“If more people share what works for them in their areas, we’ll all be successful growers!” Cultivating Crops in Colorado I read Editorial Director Hank Will’s “Obvious Solutions” (August/September 2018), and I want to share some solutions I’ve discovered. I live in Black Forest, Colorado, up on the Palmer Divide in the forest. The soil here is sandy loam with pockets of clay and rock. Most people here have raised beds. I have them too because of the soil, and also because of my bad knees. But I’ve learned a lot in the years I’ve lived here. We’re in Zone 4, so our growing season isn’t long. We can’t put anything in the dirt until the last chance of frost has passed (generally the last week of May or first week of June).…

You asked us to tell our stories of discovering Mother earth News (“50 Years and Counting,” April/May 2019). Back in the 1960s, our family gardened and raised rabbits in our St. Louis backyard. This was while we were raising three boys and I was working as the No. 2 administrator at Deaconess Hospital. Both gardening and rabbits were inherited loves from my childhood, and I intended to pass them on to our children. Subscribing to Mother earth News fit our life well. We subscribed early on in its history, and we’ve cherished and saved every issue, starting with the very first. A year or so after Mother earth News began, we decided, along with two other families, to acquire a farm 20 miles away in Illinois. We all went way back: The…

From growers to grocers, companies to consumers, food waste is an issue that plagues the entire supply chain. Up to 40 percent of the U.S. food supply finds its way to landfills — at great financial and environmental cost — while simultaneously, 40 million Americans are food-insecure. According to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), we need multifaceted solutions to connect and correct those issues, with policymakers, businesses, and consumers all working to stem the flow of food waste from every angle. Some groups are addressing the root of the issue by minimizing surplus, and others are coming up with ways to make use of the waste. By establishing various programs, policies, and processes, the following organizations are all approaching the problem of wasted food. A Comprehensive Roadmap ReFED believes that data can drive…

Rural areas cover 97 percent of the U.S., but contain only 19.3 percent of the nation’s population, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. And that share has been shrinking; rural populations have been on the decline this decade, to the tune of almost 62,000 fewer residents in 2011 — the year this population was lowest. But a reversal may be underway; the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s 2018 edition of “Rural America at a Glance” shows that rural counties saw an uptick in residents between 2016 and 2017, the first such growth since 2010. The increase of 33,000 people stems from natural migration and not natural change (births minus deaths), and though it doesn’t make up for the declines of previous years, it signifies improved labor and living conditions in rural…