We had a great Open Day in the Healthy Home celebrating Natural Health Week in March. We had a dozen observers taking notes and enjoying tastings when my partner Morel and I presented a demonstration in the wholefood kitchen as we cooked lunch. We showed people how to cook brown rice with toasted pumpkin seeds, green mung beans with fennel seeds, marinaded tofu, and butternut squash & carrots braised with apple juice. We did a tour of the Healthy Home showing people the natural, chemical-free laundry and the machines which can detect high levels of electromagnetic fields on normal household appliances. In the afternoon we covered how to have good sleep and let people experience the benefits of the Wellness Home product range. If you live in the north of England and missed out we will present another day later in the summer. (I haven't fix a date yet because I am not sure when I am travelling overseas).

When you have a natural, non-chemical home it can make doing a spot of quick DIY rather challenging. During our big spring cleaning week there were several jobs and thank heaven for the wonderful support of my parents. My dad was putting up a curtain for which we already had rings but no pole. Ever creative my dad suggested we use a new broom handle (cost £2) versus a purpose-built curtain pole (cost £25 including more rings). The problem was that the broom handle was too pale. Wood dye contains potentially irritating petro-chemicals and although you can buy clear natural varnish it is very hard to get hold of natural wood stain. What to do? Soy sauce to the rescue! It has often created permanent stains on many of my clothes so I thought it would do a good job of staining the wood with no nasty side-effects. Natural housekeeping and DIY definitely call for creativity!

The spring Women’s Wellness Retreat was lovely, another fabulous group of women and another life-changing weekend. It was interesting that most of them arrived feeling very tired (me too) as we all seemed to have experienced a low-energy winter. Spirits began to soar and vitality returned as the weekend progressed, and by the time we got to Sunday afternoon nobody wanted to leave. Jane from Sydney, Australia, can have the prize for travelling the most miles! She timed a business trip to Japan so she could fly on to the UK and join us. The feedback we have had has been lovely: "Fabulous, fabulous, fabulous!"; "A beautiful space to recharge and revitalize" and "I really do feel very inspired and refreshed - something I've been searching for for a long time. The wellbeing you exude is infectious and I hope I never recover from it!" ONLY 2 more Women’s Wellness Retreats this year – Summer Retreat June 30-July 2 & Autumn Retreat September 1-3

The Global Initiative on Asthma (strangely named after me, GINA) is organising an awareness programme of this terrible disease affecting 300 million people, so you should be reading about it in the press (all over the world). I have written an article for the Wellbeing Network here in the UK plus I've done a review of a Channel 4 TV porgramme on How to Beat your Kid's Asthma and also prepared some Healthy Home tips. Click below if this is of interest to your family - one in ten children in the UK now suffer from asthma. The TV programme was on a couple of weeks ago and it documented the effectiveness of an Allergen Avoidance programme versus using drugs. It showed it was both more effective AND cheaper. Keeping the air in your home clear of particles and allergens that trigger asthma ( and other allergies) is very important. People who have bought some of the Wellness Home products that we use and feature in our home have given rave reviews about the Air Power5 system (see photo) which not only cleans the air but also freshens and revitalises it with negative ions. The system has been tested and endorsed by the British Allergy Foundation. Email me if you are near enough to London or Skipton to come for a demo or call me.

Shirani Buffin is one of our latest customers to give wonderful feedback of her experience of some of the wellness technologies from Nikken that we use here in the Healthy Home. She says, “I have always had broken sleep and often didn’t manage more than 4 hours all night. For about 18 months before I got the sleep system last autumn I had been taking pain killers and anti-inflammatory drugs for an allergic reaction which attacked my joints and caused my knees to swell up. It was so bad that I had to spend 5 weeks on crutches! After coming to Gina's demo in her home with my friend Valerie, I decided to create my own Wellness Home including a magnetic & far infra red sleep system, the wholefood nutrition programme and the Pimag Water unit hoping that it might help me have more sleep. Within a very short time I was sleeping 50% longer which was fantastic but I didn’t expect my knee to make such an amazing recovery. My joints are now back to normal, I can play golf again, I have come off all the medication and I very much doubt I will need the knee replacement that my doctors were talking about. I am absolutely thrilled! Thank you so much. This is a fantastic result!”

Headline again about the issue of whether radiations from electricity supply lines and household wiring & technologies might be having an adverse effect on human health. These stories appeared in the UK national press last week because health ministers are finally ready to admit that houses built near pylons could be more dangerous. Electrical wiring in households is also being examined because although much weaker than a pylon it is MUCH nearer. I'll be posting more information about this on my website in the next few weeks. Irrespective of whether you live near a power line or not, one way to find out if your home is overloaded with microwave emissions is to give it a regular checking over with the Electrosmog Detector.

If you live in a non-chemical home then it stands to reason that you are going to live with a non-chemical garden. I am fairly new to gardening but I am beginning to understand the difference between plants and weeds. It appears that weeds are unwanted plants and people pay vast sums of money to buy weed-killer for them. Let me offer a humble solution. Eat the weeds! I came across this strikingly simple idea when we were wondering how to nurture the veggies that we really wanted to grow and how to deal with certain other plants that grew too well! Pictured here are the ingredients for a salad that I made yesterday with some recognizable organic items plus dandelion leaves (removed from our lawn) and ground elder. Of course you have to know which ones are poisonous, which ones are neutral and which ones are really good for you. When in doubt consult an excellent book by Richard Mabey called FOOD FOR FREE. Click here to go on Amazon to buy it. It is an esential part of our Wholefood Kitchen.