Ohana Farm and Market

What is the main purpose of soap? To clean your skin.  Simple enough, right? Well, yes and no.   Over the long term, the soap you use everyday will have either a negative or positive effect on your holistic health.  For example, washing your hands with typical anti-bacterial soap will expose you to harsh chemicals, which cause irritation, dryness and even eczema (inflammation) after long term exposure.   For years I have used soap without really thinking about what kind of long term effect it was having on my skin. My goal was to feel and smell clean. These are good goals, but these side effects can be faked with the help of chemicals and artificial scents.  So my skin might feel clean, but it is actually stripped of all natural oils that it needs to maintain a healthy moisture barrier.  And I might smell better, but in reality my natural smell is just being masked by artificial scents. Why Goat Milk? Goat milk has been known for millennia to have...

Raking wood chips, prepping to plant a small tree. From the first time I heard about Paul Gautschi's Back to Eden gardening method, I have been hooked.  It has answered almost every major question I had about setting up a regenerative homestead here in the central Texas area, where the weather is so extreme -- either flood or drought, burning hot or freezing cold, etc. The general philosophy of Back to Eden is: Grow Things as the Creator Intended .  According to Gautschi, God revealed to him that he was gardening the hard way, which also happens to be how farmers have worked since recorded history. Genesis, the first book of the Bible, states that after the Fall, God cursed mankind and the soil so that "man would only be able to live by the sweat of his brow."  And, after mankind was expelled from the Garden of Eden, men took to growing food by "tilling the ground."   This makes a lot of sense if you look at modern farming practices, where the ground is tilled ...

Coming fresh out of the IT industry, I had developed an " I'll do this, but I don't do that " mentality. Not to say I was lazy -- I just wanted to be as efficient as possible by focusing on my specific field (software development) and outsourcing everything else.  So I didn't really question the cost of plumbers, mechanics, landscapers, etc., even to do very simple jobs that I have easily done myself.   But that doesn't really work when you're trying to work toward self a more self-sufficient, homesteading lifestyle. Not to say homesteaders should do everything themselves either. Maintaining a supportive family and community is vitally important. But I need to transition away from the outsourcing mentality and start re-imagining what I could figure out on my own.   Broken Garden Hoses We use garden hoses all over our homestead -- for filling water dishes, feeding sprinkler systems, washing things, etc.  Unfortunately, these hoses get damaged for various re...

If you stop and think about it, many seemingly mundane or trivial things are actually quite miraculous.   Take seeds, for example.  A single, tiny seed will fall to the ground and dry up (die).  Then, even in this dried-out state, it is programmed to initiate new growth (sprout) after it contacts water, seek nutrients and water from the surrounding soil, send down roots, send up green foliage, gather energy from the sun, then create more seeds to multiple infinitely more of its kind in the future.   Pretty amazing!  Growing trees (or plants) from cuttings is similarly miraculous.  A totally new fig tree, for example, can grow from a small 12-18 inch section of branch.  This can oftentimes be more efficient than growing from a seed. Propagating your own new tree requires two simple ingredients: a section of a tree branch and some moist soil.   It works better for certain species of plants and trees than others.  My casual observ...