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.

Recession Brings Americans Back To Basics – The Home Vegetable Garden Returns

By now you’ve probably heard of Elkhart, Indiana – the hardest hit city in this deep recession. Apparently, it has only one industry, the RV industry. If you are like me, what you did not know is that 53 percent of Amish men in the area under age 65 worked in these RV factories. When I think of the Amish community, I picture a community that, by choice, farms their land and shuns the modern day work force and its influence. However, this isn’t always the case anymore.

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. 

City Farming – Small Garden Spaces

Drive a few miles out of the city and you’ll see gardens all around, in almost every yard. Although the “grow your own food” movement is exploding, I can drive down just about any urban street in my city and see so much unused, wasted space in our urban areas that could be repurposed for growing food. Just because you do not live in the country doesn’t mean you can’t have a kitchen garden. You would be surprised to see how much can be grown in a very small area. Back, front and side yards could be better used. Patios, porches and balconies can be used for container gardening. Even fence and deck rail planters along with window boxes could be utilized instead of sitting empty.

Rainwater Harvesting – Are we facing increasing future water shortages?

The short answer… If human daily living habits around the world don’t change for the better, absolutely.

Now for the longer one… When most of us think of collecting rainwater, we might think of weathered oak barrels with rusty metal bands sitting at the corner of a an old barn – right next to the hitchin’ post. While it’s true that the practice of conserving rainwater dates back to forever ago, it’s not a practice we’ve seen much of in the past few decades in the U.S. Over time, our country’s population has come to take clean water for granted. However, this is proving to be a dangerous stance.

How to choose a composter

Many people have asked us how they decide what type of composter they should get.  The answer is: it depends.  Not much help there right?  Well, let me see if I can lay it out in an easy to understand format.

Natural Slug Control

This year, I decided to go a step further in pursuit of  aligning with the “Food, Not Lawns” paradigm.  So I decided to rip out my azaleas, periwinkle and lily bulbs from my raised garden bed in the front yard and replaced everything with salad edibles like lettuces, spinach, broccoli, cauliflower and kale. It was a bit painful since it was a beautiful display most of the year and one that I’d been cultivating for four years now. But I have so little space to grow food since I don’t get a whole lot of sun in my tiny backyard, so I took the plunge.