Autumn

  • Simple Living

    Preparing for Seasonal Living: Five Essential Tips for Embracing Autumn

    The slow transition from the balmy days of summer to the cosy embrace of autumn isn’t just a shift in weather; it’s a call to align our lives with the rhythm of nature. As the leaves change colour and the temperatures drop, it’s the perfect time to prepare ourselves for living seasonally. Whether this is the first time you are coming across living seasonally or whether you are just ready to start aligning your life with the seasons, I want to share with you some great tips to help you get started and start where you are at. Here’s a guide on how to fully immerse yourself in the magic of autumn and harmonise with the changing seasons.

    1. Reset Your Mindset

    Autumn is a time of slowing down and coming inside. Inside your home and inside yourself, and for that it is the perfect time for reflection and gratitude. As the year begins its slow wind down, it’s an opportune moment to:

    • Journal: Set aside some time each day to jot down your thoughts, accomplishments, and aspirations. Reflect on the year that’s passed and the one that lies ahead. You don’t have to journal with any intention, but instead with just what is on your mind.
    • Meditation: As nature slows down, so can you. Incorporate daily meditation into your routine to connect with the present and prepare mentally for the cooler days. My biggest tip when starting a mindfulness practice is to find a guided practice on Youtube or by downloading an app such as Headspace or Calm. Remember, meditation isn’t about having a quiet mind, but more about acknowledging your thoughts.
    • Gratitude Practice: Embrace the season by listing things you’re thankful for. This daily practice can shift your focus from what’s lacking to the abundance around you.My favourite gratitude planner is this one.

    2. Revamp Your Diet with Seasonal food

    One of the purest joys of autumn is the bounty of produce it offers. Embrace the season by:

    • Exploring Farm shops: Get a taste of autumn with squashes, apples, beetroot, leek, and more. Support local farmers and enjoy fresh, organic produce.
    • Trying New Recipes: Dust off that cookbook, ask Chat GPT or search Pinterest and dive into recipes featuring autumnal produce. Think pumpkin soups, apple pies, roasted root vegetables, and warming spiced drinks.
    • Preserving: Prepare for the colder months by pickling, fermenting, or jam-making to ensure you’ve got a touch of autumn in your pantry all year round.

    3. Reorganise and Declutter

    Much like spring, autumn is an ideal time for decluttering and organising your home. For me, living in a small home means I enjoy these between seasons (spring and autumn) as a time to re-evaluate the things around our home.

    • Wardrobe Transition: Store away your summer clothes and pull out those cosy autumn clothes such as jumpers and hoodies, scarves, and boots. It’s also an excellent opportunity to donate items you no longer wear. I do this for myself and both children.
    • Home Décor: I am the person who enjoys decorating our home for the season and autumn is my favourite season to decorate for. If you are interested in decorating for autumn you can go far beyond seasonal nature decor and pumpkins. Introduce warmer colours and textures to your home, add cushions and some warmer toned throws, and seasonal inspired decorations.
    • Digital Declutter: Clean up your devices by organising files, reading all your emails, deleting unnecessary items, and updating software.

    4. Connect with Nature

    Even as the weather grows cooler you can still make an effort to stay connected with nature and get outside, if that is a possibility for you.

    • Nature Walks: Revel in the beauty of the changing landscape. Regular walks can also help combat the early onset of seasonal affective disorder that some people experience. Getting outside in the sunshine and daylight is so important for your physical and mental health – if you can get out for at least half an hour before 10am.
    • Gardening: Prepare your garden for the colder months. Plant bulbs for spring, clear out spent summer crops, and mulch your beds. I also like to bed down my allotment and balcony for winter which includes covering the beds so I don’t have too much work the otherside of winter.
    • Nature Crafts: Collect fallen leaves, pine cones, and acorns for DIY autumnal crafts. It’s a fantastic activity for kids and adults alike.

    5. Prioritise Self-care and Wellness

    Autumn can bring with it a shift in energy as the days get shorter with less sunlight, which may require additional self-care:

    • Skincare: The colder air can be drying. Introduce natural skincare options such as tallow.
    • Stay Active: While you might be tempted to stay in, ensure you have an indoor exercise routine ready for those rainy days.
    • Mental Health: With shorter days and less sunlight, be conscious of your mental well-being. Seek professional help if needed and consider investing in a light therapy lamp if you’re prone to seasonal mood shifts. Getting out into the sunshine/daylight can really help.

    Embracing Autumn Wholeheartedly

    Living seasonally through autumn is about more than just adjusting to the cooler temperatures; it’s about aligning our habits, routines, and mindset with the natural ebb and flow of the earth’s rhythms. By immersing ourselves in the spirit of the season, we can find greater joy, appreciation, and balance in our daily lives. So, let’s welcome autumn with open arms and warm hearts.

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  • Natural Home

    Simple simmer pot to fragrance your home

    This post is about how you can make a simple simmer pot to fragrance your home. If you aren’t keen on using synthetically produced ingredients in your home, this simmer pot is a great option.

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    Moving away from a chemically based home has been something we’ve been working on for many years. As with most things that we do for ourselves and for our home we don’t ever take an all-or-nothing approach, instead preferring to take our time and figure out what works. Before we started using simmer pots we didn’t use anything to fragrance our home.

    Chemically based fragrance

    We’re surrounded by chemically based fragrances and before starting to make our own simmer pots, instead we didn’t use fragrance in our home. Fragrance has always been a big issue for me, from contributing to my migraines to aggravating an ongoing ear problem I have had since my teens. Even a quick spray of synthetic polish, or any kind of air freshener, and my ear would immediately hurt.

    When I started to look into it, because I was curious as to why, I found a whole heap of evidence to back up that air fresheners and many cleaning products contribute to human exposure to primary and secondary air pollutants.

    Air freshener exposures, even at low levels, have been associated with a range of adverse health effects, which include migraine headaches, asthma attacks, breathing difficulties, respiratory difficulties, mucosal symptoms, dermatitis, infant diarrhea and earache, neurological problems, and ventricular fibrillation.

    Recent population studies have investigated the prevalence and types of health effects associated with air fresheners. In a survey of the US population [39], in a nationally representative sample (n = 1,136, CL = 95%, CI = 3%), 20.4% of the population report health problems when exposed to air fresheners and deodorizers. Specific health effects include the following: 9.5% report respiratory problems, 7.6% mucosal symptoms, 7.2% migraine headaches, 5.7% skin problems, 4.7% asthma attacks, 3.2% neurological problems, 2.7% cognitive problems, 2.7% gastrointestinal problems, 2.6% cardiovascular problems, 2.4% musculoskeletal problems, 1.8% immune system problems, and 0.7% other health problems.

    Ten questions concerning air fresheners and indoor built environments, Building and Environment
    Volume 111, January 2017, Pages 279-284, by Anne Steinemann

    Given our generation’s obsession with cleaning our homes with all the Mrs. Hinch-inspired products under the sun, I have to say I felt incredibly grateful to physically not have been able to fall into this trap. My good old ear saved me from myself because let me tell you, I always loved a good scent.

    I also found this particularly concerning:

    Air fresheners are not required to disclose all ingredients [41], and typically do not. For example, in a comparison of declared and undeclared substances for six air freshener products [46], found high percentages of the number of undeclared substances (greater than 90%) and high percentages of the concentrations of undeclared substances (greater than 75%), relative to the total number and total concentration of declared and undeclared substances.

    Ten questions concerning air fresheners and indoor built environments, Building and Environment
    Volume 111, January 2017, Pages 279-284, by Anne Steinemann

    I also found this concerning, as a mother of two very small children:

    Children of the 90s (ALSPAC), which has followed the health and development of 14,000 children since before birth, is the first study to investigate the effects of VOCs on infants.

    The researchers found that frequent use of air fresheners and aerosols during pregnancy and early childhood was associated with higher levels of diarrhoea, earache and other symptoms in infants, as well as headaches and depression in mothers.

    Farrow A, Taylor H, Northstone K, Golding J, ALSPAC Study Team. Symptoms of Mothers and Infants Related to Total Volatile Organic Compounds in Household Products. Archives of Environmental Health. doi: 10.3200/AEOH.58.10.633-641

    There is a lot of research out there about the damage these synthetic fragrances can do, and for someone with very much physical symptoms for most of her life, it has always made sense to avoid anything with synthetic fragrances like the plague.

    The best thing about simmer pots is how natural they are

    Health is wealth as far as I am concerned, and while I cannot control many aspects of my health (a work in progress for someone with health anxiety, but CBT has helped me make massive strides) there are many I can. I can’t control fragrances, dioxins and pollutants as I move through life outside of my home and therefore I don’t even think about that, but inside my home I am more careful about what we use.

    What do I need to make a simmer pot

    Here is the great thing, you can pretty much make up any kind of pot and experiment with what you love. Today I am sharing one of my favourites, but feel free to be creative and find what you love.

    All you need is:

    • Saucepan with lid
    • Hob/Stove top
    • Natural ingredients

    Making an autumnal apple simmer pot, that you can make any time of year

    Oven top simmer pot

    Oven top simmer pot

    Tools

    • 2 apples Cut into either slices or quartered
    • 1 lemon sliced
    • 1 litre water
    • 1 tbsp dried Cinnamon

    Instructions

    1. Add ingredients to pot, mix together and place on hob.
    2. Bring to a rolling boil, reduce the temperature and allow to simmer softly.

    If you’re wondering whether these kind of simmer pots fragrance your home as well as chemical frangranced items such as plug ins or air fresheners, the answer is yes. Every time I fragrance my home this way (usually when we have guests) I always get so many comments about how good it smells. It is not only a wonderful smell but is comforting and warming too.

    If you give this a try be sure to let me know, by either leaving me a comment here or tagging me over on Instagram.

    Until next time,

  • Food, Sweet Treats

    Easy Seasonal Spiced Apple & Pear cake recipe

    We live a very seasonal rhythm when it comes to our lives and everything within it; from our home education to the foods that nourish us, the literature we consume, and what we celebrate. After a wonderful spring and summer, one where we welcomed our baby boy into our family, autumn felt like the perfect moment to settle back into our normal rhythms.

    Autumn brings with it many wonderful adventures, including apple and pumpkin picking. My grandad always has a wonderful apple crop and this year was no different. H (our toddler), had so much fun with her great-grandad picking his apple crop, some of which we were able to bring home for ourselves. We decided to make something fun with our apples, and instead of cooked or stewed apple, we decided that a warm apple cake was perfect.

    From humble beginnings

    A friend had pointed us in the direction of a perfect, seasonal apple cake, the Vegan Apple cake from BBC Good Food. It was a wonderful way to use up the apples we had picked and started us on bit of a journey into creating the perfect cake for our little family.

    We aren’t a vegan family, so although a few times we made the vegan recipe, we were able to switch the ingredients around with ease, preferring organic grass-fed butter to highly processed spreads. We’re extremely conscious of the health benefits around food and keen proponents of nutrition and bioavalibility of our nutrients and the best places to get them from, including animal products which are, for all intents and purposes demonized with sensationalist headlines and a heavy agenda (but that’s a discussion for another day maybe…). What we’ve found is that actually, the ingredients in this recipe are very interchangeable, making this a really versatile base recipe. From there we’ve done so much with it:

    • Switched our processed spreads for organic grass fed butter.
    • Switch plant based milk for the dairy alternative.
    • Used vanilla flavouring instead of almond.
    • Used a mix of apples and pears.
    • Added additional flavourings of mixed spice and cinnamon.

    Apples & Pears into a cake

    The recipe itself is easy and very simple to make with ingredients most of us have in our cupboards. What I love too is that there is nothing in it like eggs (so great for allergy sufferers), so less worry about ending up with raw mixture after cooking. It is also great for little helping hands that like to lick the spoon. It’s so easy to make, regardless of your dietary choices.

    The recipe

    Apple & Pear Seasonal Cake

    Apple & Pear Seasonal Cake

    Prep Time: 20 minutes
    Cook Time: 1 hour
    Total Time: 1 hour 20 minutes

    Ingredients

    • 300 ml Whole milk, any suitable milk will work
    • 150 g Organic grass-fed butter, any suitable spread will work
    • 1 tbsp Freshly squeezed lemon juice
    • 350 g Self raising flour
    • 100 g Golden Caster Sugar
    • 100 g Golden soft sugar
    • 1 tsp Baking powder
    • 1 tbsp Vanilla Essence
    • 200 g Pink lady apples, Any sweet apple will work
    • 200 g Sweet Pears
    • 2 tbsp Mixed Spice
    • 2 tbsp Cinnamon

    Instructions

    1. Pour the 300ml into a jug and add 1 tbsp of lemon juice to thicken for 5 minutes at room temperature.
    2. Add self raising flour, both sugars and baking powder into a bowl and mix together.
    3. Pour over the thickened milk and hand whisk until smooth.
    4. Add 1 tbsp of vanilla essence and add to the mixture.
    5. Take the butter and melt in microwave (or on hob). Add to mixture and mix until smooth.
    6. Take the apples and pears, and cut into cubes. Place them in a separate bowl and cover in 1 tbsp of cinnamon and 1 tbsp of mixed spice. Mix together until all apples and pears are coated.
    7. Add the further 1 tbsp of cinnamon and 1 tbsp of mixed spice to the mixture and whisk together.
    8. Add the coated apples and pears and fold gently through the mixture.
    9. Grease a tin with the leftovers of the melted butter and pour mixture into the tin.
    10. Cook in centre of oven for 45 mins - 1 hour on 200 degrees celcius.

    Read below to find our amazing spiced apple and pear cake, with all the additions and changes that I think you will love as much as we do.

    This recipe is so simple, seasonal and tastes incredible. I hope you love it as much as we do. If you try it, please let me know in the comments or tag me on Instagram.