As the demand for eco-friendly and sustainable items rises, more and more zero waste and bulk shops are opening to meet that need!

Our guest for this episode of the Positively Green Podcast is Jenna Meier, the owner of The Glass Pantry, a newly-opened zero waste and bulk store located in the Walkers Point neighborhood of Milwaukee, WI. Her goal is to make your sustainability journey a little bit easier by offering pantry staples, household cleaners, and personal care products in a package free way. The Glass Pantry offers organic, locally-made products in bulk; allowing you to stock up on everything you need, without producing all the trash. 

Opening a roadside farmstand is no small feat. When I opened my roadside farmstand I wish there was someone with all the answers to my questions, but like so much of the small farming world there’s a lot of trial and error to be had before you figure things out. That’s why I want to share with you everything I’ve learned along the way as I opened up my roadside farmstand for our farm, Green Willow Homestead.

In this first post in my farmstand series we will cover:

• The basic questions to ask yourself before you open a farmstand
• How to use the honesty system at a farmstand
• The legal things you need to know about opening a farmstand
• How to protect yourself from liability when opening a farmstand
• What security measures you should take when opening a roadside farmstand

If you are curious to learn how to hatch chicks using a broody hen and how to care for mama hen and her chicks through their first few weeks then you are in right the right place.

In my previous post I shared with you everything you need to know on how to care for a broody hen and get her to hatch chicks. I highly recommend starting there first to learn how to support your broody hen for the 21 day incubation period and her hatch.

In this post I am going to cover:

• What to expect the first few days after chicks hatch
• Where you should keep mama hen and her chicks
• What you should feed chicks raised by a broody hen
• How you should provide water to mama hen and her chicks
• Should you let mama hen and chicks free-range
• Where does mama hen and the chicks sleep
• What are the signs of a sick chick and what should I do if I think a chick is sick
• How long does a hen care for her chicks

Do you ever feel like you’re on an island when it comes to caring about sustainability? Do you wish you could get involved with a local group that also shares that passion? You can! Please welcome our next Positively Green Podcast guest Laura Loucks, Volunteer Coordinator with the Waukesha County Green Team, as we learn about green teams and building a community effort around sustainable living.

If you are trying to learn how to hatch chicks with a broody hen, you are in the right place! My first year of owning chickens I started with day-old chicks. Let me tell you it was a lot of work caring for those chicks (I don’t know how people do it who don’t work from home to be honest). Keeping poop out of the waterer, checking on chicks for pasty butt, adjusting the heat lamp, making sure they had enough food - it was constant work.

In this post I am going to teach you:

• How to encourage your hens to go broody
• What chicken breeds are the most prone to go broody
• The best place to let your broody hen hatch her chicks
• How to keep your broody hen on the nest
• The hatching options you have with a broody hen (how to latch day-old chicks and using fertilized eggs) 
• How to build a Brooder Box from one piece of plywood

Don’t get me wrong, I loved having the hands-on experience and I adore my hand-raised hens. The thing is, once I let my very first hen go broody and raise her own clutch of chicks, I realized I am never going to raise chicks myself again. Why? Because broody mama hen was one thousand percent better at it than me!

We’re having an important conversation today about the intersection of race and agriculture, the glaring issues within the clean food movement, and how regenerative agriculture keeps getting it wrong with Chris Newman. Chris is the co-founder of Sylvanaqua Farms, which is based in the D.C. region. They raise forest-raised pork, grass-fed beef, and pastured chicken and eggs.

A member of the Choptico Band of Piscataway Indians, Chris places a heavy emphasis on the indigenous ethics, values, and knowledge serving as the (often unacknowledged) foundation of the modern permaculture movement, and the decolonized worldview necessary to ensure the sustainable stewardship of natural resources. An engineer and technologist by trade, he also accepts and explores the potential of modern scientific innovation to address the gaps left by ecosystem farming in solving a sustainability problem wherein timeliness is a factor.

We’re heading to the polls and chatting all about voting today on the Positively Green Podcast! We interview Nathaniel Stinnett, founder of the Environmental Voter Project, a nonpartisan nonprofit organization that aims to significantly increase voter demand for environmental leadership by identifying inactive environmentalists and then turning them into consistent activists and voters.

Figuring out how to use your existing property, or a brand new piece of land, and turn it into a homestead can be a daunting task. In this post, I’m going to share with you how we planned out our homestead on five acres over the course of five years. It’s so fun to see where we started when we first purchased our land, and then five years later, how everything turned out. 

We’ll go over:

• How we utilized the existing land and outbuildings
• How we put in a homestead garden and orchard
• What tools and machinery we've found to be essential for homesteading
• How we integrated chickens over the course of five years on our homestead

We have another awesome lady boss guest on the Positively Green Podcast today! We chat with the CEO of Plaine Products, Lindsey McCoy. Plaine Products is a natural, refillable, zero waste body care brand that you will LOVE. Get an inside scoop of what it’s like running a sustainable business and learn how they have helped divert over 100,000 plastic bottles from landfills to date!

As someone who has suffered from intense period pain due to endometriosis, I am always on the lookout for natural and non-toxic period pain remedies. Before I dove into the holistic and natural remedies for period pain,  my menstrual cycle looked like three days on the couch with an electric heating pad, bottles of Ibuprofen, and non-stop episodes of Riverdale on Netflix. Now that I've learned to understand my cycle more and have peeled back the layers of why my period hurts so much - the biggest issue I had was finding a natural, non-toxic, and eco-friendly heating pad.

That's why I'm having Lindsay Clark of Handmade Heat on the blog today to teach us all about the unsung hero of dealing with period pain - heat! Lindsay is going to share with us why we should consider a natural heating pad, its benefits, and how it can help you give period pain the 1-2-punch. Welcome, Lindsay!