 The annual Back to Basics Expo in Pine River has been giving Minnesotans tips on living more sustainable lives for more than a decade now. Lakeland News reporter Cheryl Moore shows us what's new for this year's event. The client that's sure is changing. Minnesotans broke out their notebooks and pens ready to take notes on everything they learned at the 12th annual Back to Basics Expo. It's kind of your one-stop shop for sustainable living. This year, Back to Basics have more than 50 vendors and 45 hands-on workshops. I sort of like to say that this is almost like DIY live, you know, so folks go to YouTube and different resources on the internet to learn about different sustainable living topics and here they can come and learn from local experts, maybe it's their neighbor, maybe it's the gentleman from, you know, the Twin Cities who's here. This year's Back to Basics Expo covered a bunch of different things. The workshops taught people how to live a better life, while the vendors saw things like homemade jams, homemade clothes, and even a homemade bicycle. We have jewelry and information, there is, gosh, anything that you might want, essentially. There's folks talking about the insulation in your house. Two keynote speakers opened the Expo with a PowerPoint and a few songs. They sing about aquatic invasive species and climate change and how we can help here in Minnesota. It's like how we use energy through energy efficient light bulbs and how we do vehicles. Do we ride share or do we buy high efficiency vehicles. So these things are very tangible things that we can do. In Minnesota, we have three laws, clean, drain, dispose. So clean, you have to clean off all aquatic plants and animals off of your boats and trailers before you transport down the road, before you drop it into a lake. After you pull it out of a lake, you ought to be cleaning all that stuff off as well. Happy Dancing Turtle, the nonprofit that throws Back to Basics, says this year's Expo raised the bar. They're open to add even more in the future. Every year we get bigger, we offer more workshops and have more vendors. This year we had our biggest vendor area yet and folks still on the waiting list, so it's great to see. Reporting in Pine River, Shawmore, Lakeland News. If you'd like to stay updated on the Back to Basics Expo, you can head over to HappyDancingTurtle.org. If you enjoyed this segment of Lakeland News, please consider making a tax-deductible contribution to Lakeland PBS.