195: Cricket Aldridge on Suburban Homesteading.

Finding personal euphoria in your own backyard.

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Cricket AldridgeCricket is natural homesteader. Growing up in rural Idaho with a garden, a horse, and lots of home canned food, she brings those sensibilities to her suburban home in Phoenix. Add a little dose of cottage garden flavor and permaculture tendencies, and you’ll see why her blog, GardenVariety.Life is a reflection of everything she does. 
Cricket enjoys sharing skills that promote a meaningful and practical connection to our gardens and environment. Because so many residents of the metro Phoenix area are transplants like her, she finds that the area’s unique desert climate is often misunderstood and underestimated in terms of what is possible. That’s where the fun begins. Arizona is a burgeoning permaculture haven with homesteading written all over it, and there is nothing Cricket enjoys more than encouraging others to jump in and give it a try.


In This Podcast:

Fellow permaculturist and gardener Cricket Aldridge joins Greg in the studio to talk about her urban farm and how much she loves everything about it. She tells about some of her favorite aspects and what she’s able to grow or make from her harvests, from canning to mead making and many other things besides.

Listen in and learn about:

  • Growing up with a background in gardening and moving to phoenix
  • Transforming her desert home to an urban farm
  • Finding the resources in the valley to help her learn to thrive in the desert
  • Her farm and the animals she has on her property
  • How she replaced all the plants on her farm with edible plants and trees
  • A description of the farm
  • All the stuff she makes from her harvests
  • Canning peaches and other stuff
  • Her beehives and why she started
  • Her Facebook pages and how information is shared
  • Some of the recycling of materials that she uses in her yard
  • Raising chickens in an urban setting
  • The wicking bed she has for gardening

As well as:

  • Her failure – the time she tried using sprinklers in raised beds vegetable garden
  • Her success – how much she enjoys her garden and how much it benefits her family and friends
  • Her drive – being in nature and being connected to the past
  • Her first childhood memory about food – going down into the cellar and seeing all the canned food
  • Her advice – if you are not already growing something just stick something in the ground, then eat it.

Cricket’s Book recommendations:   

Gaia’s Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture, 2nd Edition by Toby Hemenway
Producer’s note: Click here to listen to Toby’s Hemenway’s Podcast.

How to reach Cricket:

Facebook: Arizona Backyard Beekeepers

Blog – GardenVariety.life

 UrbanFarm.org/Cricket


*Disclosure:
Some of the links in our podcast show notes and blog posts are affiliate links and if you go through them to make a purchase, we will earn a nominal commission at no cost to you. We offer links to items recommended by our podcast guests and guest writers as a service to our audience and these items are not selected because of the commission we receive from your purchases. We know the decision is yours, and whether you decide to buy something is completely up to you. 

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