When I’m in a browsy mood, I often check on some blogs that fall into a category I’ll call "women who do the green and D.I.Y. thing at home and take lovely photos to prove it." It’s kind of a genre these days, I think. Undoubtedly I’m drawn to such blogs because of demographic similarities between me and their writers. But I’m also interested in them because they illustrate something I’ve come to believe: that an awful lot of people out there are working very hard to make their personal lives more eco-friendly, and that such an effort can result in considerable beauty.
Easy example (and a popular one): Soulemama, where Amanda Blake Soule—who also writes books you can find at O’Suzannah—chronicles her very idyllic-looking life in Maine. She’s got four kids, a kitchen full of glass jars that in turn are full of granola and apparently endless baked goods, and the ability to sew or knit anything at all. Her blog isn’t explicitly about green living, but the hands-on, low-tech, D.I.Y. ethos is there in spades. So is a love of vintage stuff, reused stuff, and repurposed scraps that others might throw away.
Then there’s Farmama, who is somewhere out West, somehow finding time to write a blog amongst a plethora of other activities, from raising goats and chickens, to growing her own plants with which to dye wool from her own sheep, to spinning that wool into yarn, to growing food for her family…of six. I feel tired just typing all that, but it’s pretty inspiring too.
For a more urban (and a lot sharper-tongued) take, there’s Lisablog, straight outta Queens with a raft of welcome opinions on mending clothes, taking care of city trees, consumerism, and many other things. If you don’t like hearing it like it is, don’t visit.
Locally, Life in Sugar Hollow is fun for all things garden-related, plus lots of local-food talk.
I’ve found many of these blogs through another local one, the blog of my friend Zoe Krylova, who has an interesting post right now about the carbon footprint of visiting blogs! Something I never considered.
Now it’s your turn, folks. What do you like to read from the green world, whether it’s in this "green mama" genre or not?
