You are investing in infrastructure like a house

Today most of us were raised not with the stories of our families and places

Teachers held classes in woods or in the corners of fields, teaching boys and girls alike, surrounded by hedges that hid them from passers-by.

Few parents would allow their child to wander the neighbourhood unsupervised, or play in the woods, or wander in and out of other houses

Look at the food we throw away and realise how much of it is quite edible

We screen out most of the relationships that would truly help us grow into understanding adults.

Few trees have as many uses

The common snails seen in Irish gardens are the same species as restaurant snails and are perfectly edible

We use many times more energy keeping warm than our ancestors did

Continuous brightness for a lifetime as we have today, however, might be as bad as one continuous kind of food for a lifetime.

An interesting proposal

No yucky boiled cabbage here!

Here are some quick and easy recipes for extremely healthy dishes that keep your belly warm and your immune system flying during the harsh months

There is one kind of food that can be grown by anyone, indoors, in any time of year, in a few days

If you avoided watching that bit of news, you would have a bit less stress and a few moments of your life back and would have lost nothing.

A UK study found that people throw away seven times their own body weight each year. Except of course none of it ever really goes away. Some of it builds up in landfills, creating methane that worsens climate change.

Some families split over political parties or religious faith. Mine split over beetroots

In this time of year, when gardeners are planning next year’s garden, think about trying chicory

This remains one of the most effective and efficient ways of preserving food through the winter

We will always have horses and they will always need shoes

 'I lost a daughter, and miss her. I realise, though, that I had many treasured years with her, and they will never be undone'

THESE days, you spend your life paying off a house, and even building a shed or animal shelter can be expensive, as timber, brick or any other modern building material requires a heavy investment of money, time and skilled labour.

Today we are hyper-sensitive to white supremacy, yet modern people show an even more radical and sweeping temporal supremacy, the belief that all the generations before us were inferior in every way

The taste is recognisably butter, but with an umami flavour, a bit like parmesan or ripe cheese

A good root soup can warm and nourish on a winter day

These organisations were deeply woven into community life for centuries

Most of that landscape was felled for timber and paper long ago, the land given over to crops and suburbia – or to wasteland