Simply Living Well – Julia Watkins
A Guide to Creating a Natural, Low-Waste Home
Description: Simply Living Well is a beautiful guide to living well, sustainably. Author Julia Watkins, of the popular Instagram account @simply.living.well, shares rituals, recipes, and projects for living sustainably, inspired by both wisdom rooted in traditional cultures and her own grandparents.
With step-by-step guidelines, gorgeous photography, and easy, comprehensive recipes for everyday use, Simple Living Well is about reducing our footprint for the generations to come.
Simply Living Well covers every area of your household — kitchen, cleaning, wellness, bath, and garden, showing you how to eliminate wasteful packaging, harmful ingredients, and disposable items.
Practical checklists outline easy swaps (instead of disposable sponges, opt for biodegradable sponges or Swedish dishcloths; choose a bamboo toothbrush over a plastic one) and sustainable upgrades for common household tools and products. Projects include scrap apple cider vinegar, wool dryer balls, kitchen bowl covers and cloth produce bags, non-toxic dryer sheets, all-purpose citrus cleaner, herbal tinctures and balms, and more, plus recipes for package-free essentials like homemade nut milk, hummus, ketchup, salad dressings, and veggie stock.
With a clean, inviting aesthetic, Simply Living Well invites you to transform your daily life to move away from harsh chemicals, plastics and wasteful practices. Live simply – well.
Review
Simply Living Well is very much a book for our time. In her introduction Julia Watkins expresses her hopes for the book:
‘It is my hope that this book will serve as a bridge between the can-do ethos of generations past and the earth-conscious mindfulness many of us seek to capture and bring into our lives today. It celebrates simplifying, slowing down, working with your hands, making more, buying less, valuing quality over quantity, and living frugally, self-sufficiently, and harmoniously with the natural world. It encourages wasting less and revering the ways our grandparents or, depending on your age, great-grandparents solved all manner of problems— feeding their families, cleaning their clothes, and caring for their bodies, minds, and spirits. It manifests the idea that people can live simply and well.’
Packed through with helpful advice the content includes:
Introduction
Low-waste kitchen
Natural cleaning
Natural wellness
Natural bath & body
Kitchen garden
Resources
Beautifully photographed, there is the opportunity to create your own cleaning supplies, cook delicious recipes using products from your own garden, plus refreshing recipes for keeping well and bath and body products.
If you are looking for inspiration about creating a more sustainable, healthy and mindful life, this wonderful uplifting, motivational book is an absolute delight.
Simply Living Well – Julia Watkins – A Guide to Creating a Natural, Low-Waste Home – Published by: Hardie Grant Books