Welcome to the Friday open thread for the Living Simply group. If you are not familiar with our group, the basic idea, from our profile, is:
A group to explore and share sustainable, simple living ideas among fellow progressives. For the urban, rural, or wannabe homesteader, this is a place to share information to simplify everyday life. Sustainable skills such as gardening, food production and storage, do-it-yourself projects for the home or farm, and backyard chickens and other livestock, as well as eco-conscious philosophies such as cooperative living, eco-cities, the Slow Food movement, and being a mindful consumer are but a few potential topics of interest here.
If you missed 'em, here's a few diaries that were republished to the Living Simply group this past week:
wide eyed lib's Free Food: Foraging in Your Yard, yet another wonderful foraging diary (for those of us who never knew that our backyards were free pick-your-own farms!).
the autonomist posted a basic primer of the humble bean soup with 1001 Bean Soups. Me personally, I love beans--cheap, easy, easy to store, yummy, and good for you--and this diary has some good tips for endless and interesting variations on a basic recipe.
And while we're talking about beans, Cook for Good discusses shrinking food packaging and rising costs with Hidden food cost: "slack fill" beans (sneaky sneaky).
In other news: If anyone would ever like to host a Friday Living Simply open thread, feel free to drop me a note here in the comments or via the Daily Kos internal messaging system. I find the open thread a great way to keep the sustainable living discussion going regardless of whether or not I've been able to post an actual diary on a specific topic that week (as is often the case for me, as I have about half a dozen unfinished diaries languishing in my drafts folder). The open thread isn't a "real" diary--just a place where I like to post links to the diaries posted or republished to the group in the past week, maybe chat a bit about something I'm doing to live more sustainably, and encourage discussion about what others are doing. So if you want to participate by posting to the group but don't have the time to write a full-fledged diary, let me know if you want to post a Friday open thread! It certainly doesn't have to be me every week, though I really do enjoy doing it. I've found the discussions in the comments to be interesting, and I always learn something. This, of course, was part of my motivation for starting the Living Simply group in the first place--to create a place to share sustainable living skills and discuss pertinent topics and philosophies--so I really like that, in addition to having some great diaries from contributors throughout the week on specific topics, the open threads have become that informal "meeting" place to share all sorts of great information.
As of the time I am posting this, the Living Simply group is the 14th most followed group on Daily Kos! Wow. So this means that this diary is showing up in the stream of 217 fellow Daily Kos users. Where y'all at? Please stop by in the comments and chat with us!
So, the floor is yours. What are you doing to live more simply?