Perhaps because I was born in a village (though later I grew up in a town) and I spent most of my summer holidays in the countryside during my childhood, I always have a particular feeling about fields, nature, and plants. Since I was little, I started dreaming about the day I would cultivate a garden with a lot of flowers and vegetables; and how I would achieve the goal of flower and vegetable self-sufficiency, just like all the villagers did in my hometown.
Now my dream is partially fulfilled. I have planted a lot of shrubs, flowers and some vegetables in the past two years, however, due to the disturbances from deer and groundhogs, so far, my vegetables have not been quite enough to supply one household of two adults. Plus, I am always stingy about flowers; I would rather enjoy watching them blooming on the branches (or use them for tea) than cutting them off in a vase. Therefore, I study very hard to learn which vegetables (especially those green leafy ones) are deer and groundhog resistant, and my beautiful vases are often empty.
Home-grown vegetables are just lovely. I bet that as long as you taste my vegetables such as bok choy and tomatoes, you will never want to buy them from the market again. Their flavors are rich and authentic--I never spray them nor feed them with any chemicals; their only nutrition sources are sun, rainwater, dew, and my fermented rice and banana water, as well as cow manure. So they are very happy, and I am happy too, and healthy.
Yes, it is easy to maintain health if you eat healthy food and do some garden work. Our diet is simple: Vegetables, whole fish, sea food, grains. Sometimes we eat duck and lamb meat as well. I won’t say that our food can delight everyone; in general, it is very light flavored, simply seasoned, but the materials are fresh, and we cook them in a healthy way (such as steam and braise) with healthy cookware (such as a bamboo steamer and donabe).
We don’t use artificial ingredients at all; other than sea salt and olive oil. We add the texture of the flavor with various fresh herbs, which of course we planted. Rosemary for lamb, thyme for seafood, oregano for braise and tomato sauce, scallion for fish and almost everything…
Though food is an important part, we basically follow the same principle throughout the other parts of our life: Being simple, healthy, and natural. Rise at dawn and rest at dusk; change our clothes along the change of the season instead of relying too much on the forced indoor temperature adjustment; leave the windows and curtains open to exchange the air and let the natural light in; drink tea all the time rather than other beverages; mow the lawn with reel mower and hand edge it; use wood and steel tools only-no plastic. Indeed, I have almost eliminated any sorts of plastic or other synthetic products from my house; instead, I replace them with bamboo, wood, willow, and burlap. Perhaps the only thing which I have had to compromise is trash bags—I wanted to use paper trash bags, but they broke easily, and the waste worker wouldn’t be happy if he found the bag fell apart. After a lot of research, finally I found a type of trash bag which was claimed to be made of plant starch material and be biodegradable. My garbage bag problem seems to have been solved, though these plant starch ones still have a polybag-like look.
Despite the fact that I hate plastic by nature, the ironic thing is that my parents ran a semi-plastic product mill in my teen years. I know they did that business to make a living; while now, when I can have options to choose a more favorable lifestyle, I choose my current one, and I name it “go-natural”—living in a natural way of life, where men and nature are in delightful harmony.