Should I Be Growing Vegetables from Seed

One question that I get a lot at this time of the year is “should I be growing vegetables from seed?”. There are many benefits of growing your vegetable garden from seeds versus purchasing transplants.

Probably the most prominant advantage to starting your garden from seed is the fact that the varieties of seeds available to the consumer is enormous whereas most local garden centers carry only a handful of vegetable varieties. Imagine growing a diverse array of flavorful, vibrantly colored tomatoes that you may have never even laid eyes on before. Most folks don’t even know that so many varieties of fruits and vegetables even exist and it’s quite an adventure to discover them. Here’s a pic of just some of the tomato varieties I personally grew last season – most of them heirlooms.

New Year’s Resolution Garden

The holiday season is about ready to wrap up with the new year just a couple of days away. Last New Year’s we posted the Resolution Garden. Did you take part? Were you able to follow through? Well if not, it’s a whole other year and time for a new resolution to start planning that spring garden.  If you followed through on this past year’s resolution, then it is time to look at your garden journal and see what tweeks you can make to bring in an even greater bounty of fresh produce.

For those of you whom follow through on last year’s resolution garden, let us know what you did to bring in a successful garden.

“Food Technology” in America

I recently read an article in O, The Oprah Magazine, titled “Banned in Europe, Okay Here?” written by Sari Harrar. Sari reviews some of the food technology Americans have accepted, while Europeans have said no to it. The article was super informative and laid out the data really well, so I thought I would provide a summary of the article for you.

Starting Vegetable Seeds Indoors

Time to start planning for your garden? You can get a head start on your garden by starting your seeds indoors, especially if you have a short growing season. There are also other benefits to getting your plants growing indoors. Starting seeds inside improves the germination rate and a garden established from transplants tend to mature much earlier than direct-seeded ones. Yes, vegetable starts are available at your local nursery, however, you are going to be limited to just a few varieties. When starting from seed, you will have hundreds more choices to choose from. Growing from seed also allows you to have full control over whether a plant was grown in a truly organic manner. For someone that’s never started their garden indoors, here’s a step by step guideline and some common pitfalls to avoid.

Find A Green Restaurant

These days with the economy taking its toll on household budgets, a lot of people are reducing how much they dine out. However, the next time you take the family out to eat, try going to “green restaurant”.

Lowering Grocery Bill and Buying Organic

One of the reasons that I garden is to have the healthiest organic foods available for my children and myself. This is in hopes that I am around longer for them without being a health burden to them when they become adults. However, here in the Northwest as with other northern states, we have a relatively short growing season. Although we preserve the excess summer harvests and grow herbs and vegetables indoors during the winter months, we do need to purchase more groceries throughout the winter. Like most households, we too feel the effects of the recession and higher food costs which leads us to employ strategies that we didn’t use before.

Healthy Eating – Simplified

In a previous post, “Another reminder of why you should grow and eat your own food in the U.S.”, a reader commented that although it’s great to know on a broad level what to avoid eating, it would be great to have a simple guide of specific foods to eat (or not to eat). In response, here’s my attempt to simplify what we should and shouldn’t eat and what foods we can grow for ourselves.

Another reminder of why you should grow and eat your own food in the U.S.

A new study just released found that Hispanics living in Florida have a 40 percent higher chance of getting cancer than their counterparts that lived in their native countries. The conclusion of this study suggests that the lifestyle and environmental changes (foods they eat being one of them) are probably the culprit. 

Of course the recommendation is to live a healthy lifestyle and avoid smoking, drinking, and bad diets. With the abundant use of processed foods in the U.S. that contain many additives cancer, once rare,  now affects up to a third of the country’s population. 

Preserving Your Strawberries – Freezing

There is nothing like the flavor of a fresh picked strawberry from your garden or local farmer when it’s at peak ripeness. However, strawberry season is coming to a close for most of the U.S. Even though May is National Strawberry Month, in some areas of the country, like here in the Pacific Northwest, the height of strawberry picking season does not begin until the first or second week of June. Regardless of when your particular season is, that’s the time when prices are low, flavor is phenomenal and you’ll want to stock up and preserve them for use all year. Of course, there are several ways to preserve your strawberries such as canning/jarring, dehydrating and freezing. Today, I’d like to go over the best ways to freeze those red beauties. Strawberries only last about 4 or 5 days in the refrigerator, so if you want to keep eating your tasty garden strawberries well into the fall and winter, make sure you think ahead and freeze them.