Category Archives: Gardening

Nutritious Food Plants You Can Harvest Quickly

Here’s a great list of quick vegetables that everyone should see.

We’ve grown them all!

We only need a few weeks to produce some nutritious vegetables and enjoy them for a great lunch or dinner.

Imagine having fresh spinach harvested four to six weeks after planting. Even better, a vegetable garden in your backyard will complement that verdant, green lawn and add some color and texture to your landscape.

There are many wholesome veggies you can grow, relatively quickly, a few steps away from your kitchen. Here are five vegetables to get you started.

Source: Nutritious Food Plants You Can Harvest Quickly – The Prepper Journal

Discover 20 Self-Sowing Flowers! | Old Farmer’s Almanac

Many flowers reseed themselves! Here’s a list of over 20 annual and perennial flowers that you can plant once and enjoy for years. And if you are busy deadheading your flowers—stop! Take a look at the seed heads you are cutting off.

Let some of the seed heads ripen until they turn brown and split open. These seed capsules are like salt shakers full of tiny seeds. Scatter the seeds anywhere you would like them to grow or just let them drop where they are.

Next spring, keep a sharp eye out for the seedlings when weeding. Some may be slow to emerge. If there are more than you want you don’t have to keep them all. Thin them out to allow enough space for the plants to fully develop. Relocate the extras or pot them up to share with friends.

Gardening-advice/discover-20-self-sowing-flowers 

Via Old Farmers Almanac

 

Save Your Seeds, Save Your Life

We are told that everything begins with seed. Everything ends with it, too. As a chef I can tell you that your meal will be incalculably more delicious if I’m cooking with good ingredients.

But until that afternoon I’d rarely considered how seed influences — determines, really — not only the beginning and the end of the food chain, but also every link in between. The tens of thousands of rows surrounding me owed their brigade-like uniformity to the operating instructions embedded in the seed.

That uniformity allows for large-scale monoculture, which in turn determines the size and model of the combine tractor needed to efficiently harvest such a load. (“Six hundred horsepower — needs a half-mile just to turn her around,” joked the farmer sitting next to me.)

Satellite information, beamed into the tractor’s computer, makes it possible to farm such an expanse with scientific precision.

The type of seed also dictates the fertilizer, pesticide and fungicide regimen, sold by the same company as part of the package, requiring a particular planter and sprayer (40 feet and 140 feet wide, respectively) and producing a per-acre yield that is startling, and startlingly easy to predict.

It is as if the seed is a toy that comes with a mile-long list of component parts you’re required to purchase to make it function properly.

We think that the behemoths of agribusiness known as Big Food control the food system from up high — distribution, processing and the marketplace muscling everything into position. But really it is the seed that determines the system, not the other way around.

The seeds in my palm optimized the farm for large-scale machinery and chemical regimens; they reduced the need for labor; they elbowed out the competition (formally known as biodiversity). In other words, seeds are a blueprint for how we eat.

We should be alarmed by the current architects. Just 50 years ago, some 1,000 small and family-owned seed companies were producing and distributing seeds in the United States; by 2009, there were fewer than 100. Thanks to a series of mergers and acquisitions over the last few years, four multinational agrochemical firms — Corteva, ChemChina, Bayer and BASF — now control over 60 percent of global seed sales.

Source: Opinion | Save Our Food. Free the Seed. – The New York Times

How to grow your own wellness garden

Besides food, one can grow many herbs that are useful medicine. Here’s a few. Be sure to click for more info.

Modern medicine owes a lot to the plant kingdom, from the treatment of heart disease to lung disorders. But plants can be useful for minor ailments and everyday self-care, too.

Growing for wellness is going mainstream. A recent survey by Wyevale Garden Centres found that more than two thirds of British gardeners consider the health and wellbeing properties of a plant before they buy it.

At Chelsea Physic Garden, a Food is Medicine Trail starts this month to highlight plants you can grow as tonics, pick-me-ups and other soothing remedies to handle the stresses of modern life.

Many are surprisingly easy to grow, even in limited city spaces. We asked Chelsea Physic Garden’s head of plant collections, Nell Jones, to share her tips for the best “wellbeing” plants to grow at home.

Source: How to grow your own wellness garden: from peppermint to turmeric easy-to-grow plants that will help with minor ailments and wellbeing | Homes and Property

Gardening when your life depends on it

Here’s a good article about “food insurance” and how to achieve it.

Few of us like to think about what life would be like if our society were to break down, even temporarily, due to internal or external factors like war, insurrection, famine or natural disaster. But most of us do indeed plan for the worst, don’t we?

That’s why we purchase health, homeowners, life, automobile, flood and other types of insurance, right? We ought to add “food insurance” to that list, and that’s the concept behind “gardening when your life depends on it.”

As with any preparation strategy, planning and resultant implementation should begin now, while things are calm. If you wait until times actually get tough, you’ve waited far too long.

It would be like buying car insurance after you hit a tree or buying flood insurance when the water is three feet deep in your living room. Here are five food production and gardening strategies that will help keep you alive during hard times.

Just remember that you will get out of this what you put into it; if you just plan on things being “broken” for a few days, your meager preparations won’t matter much if the crisis lasts weeks, months or even years.

Source: Gardening when your life depends on it: five food production strategies that may keep you alive during hard times – NaturalNews.com

Gardening and volunteering boosts mental health, relieving stress, anxiety and depression

(NaturalNews) Looking for ways to relieve stress, anxiety and depression without resorting to pills or psychiatric therapy?

Engaging in activities such as gardening and volunteering, produce obvious practical benefits, but they can also help significantly in boosting mental health and self-esteem.

A recent BBC article described the benefits of both volunteering and gardening as valuable aids to achieving a sense of personal well-being.

Therapeutic benefits of volunteering In the BBC piece entitled “Gardening and volunteering: The new wonder drugs?” Nick Triggle wrote: “There is a growing body of research that suggests volunteering is good for your health, particularly mentally. “It can help bring stability, improve self-esteem, reduce social isolation and help people learn new skills.

“For many, it can be a gateway to paid employment, which in turn has its own benefits. “In fact, there’s plenty of evidence a whole range of social and practical activities can improve the wellbeing of people.”

Source: Gardening and volunteering boosts mental health, relieving stress, anxiety and depression – NaturalNews.com

Seed Starting in Arizona for Fall

Now is the time to start thinking about the fall garden in Arizona. It’s hot, and the poor garden looks sad. Soon however, the temperatures will drop, and once again, all of our favorites can be started. Click on the link for more great info.

Midsummer and yikes is it ever hot! It is time for me to be starting new plants for the fall from seed but conditions are just too hot. What to do? Here are a few tricks.

The seeds of different vegetables have optimum temperatures for germination and right now most of them will not like this heat.

Beets and carrots aren’t too bothered by hot soil. Their germination doesn’t start to drop off until the soil gets to be over 90 degrees.

However, the optimum temperature for lettuce is around 65 degrees and germination drops off rapidly after the soil heats up to the mid seventies. Spinach does best at 70 degrees but by the time the soil is in the mid-80’s, forget about it. Some brassicas don’t mind the heat. Cabbage, Chinese cabbage, and kale will sprout fine in soil as hot as 90 degrees, while broccoli prefers cooler soil, its optimum being around 75. The germination on cauliflower drops off rapidly after soil temperatures hit 85.

Source: Seed Starting in Hot Weather | Old Farmer’s Almanac

Gardening Could Help You Live to 100

It is well-known that an outdoor lifestyle with moderate physical activity is linked to longer life, and gardening is an easy way to accomplish both.

“If you garden, you’re getting some low-intensity physical activity most days, and you tend to work routinely,” says Buettner.

He says there is evidence that gardeners live longer and are less stressed. A variety of studies confirm this, pointing to both the physical and mental health benefits of gardening.

Source: Gardening could be the hobby that helps you live to 100 – BBC Worklife

Great Peach Crop in North Carolina for 2019

After several hit-or-miss years, peach growers across the state are celebrating what is shaping up to be a solid peach growing season. “Consumers can expect peaches to be in good quantity and quality this year,” said Agriculture Commissioner Steve Troxler.

“Many growers began picking in early June with plans to continue through the end of August.” Unlike surrounding states, most of North Carolina’s peaches are sold directly to consumers at roadside stands and farmers markets. In fact, consumers can find peach orchards in about two-thirds of the state’s counties.

Troxler encourages consumers to check with their favorite peach grower for availability and timing of their favorite varieties.

To celebrate the season, the department will host Peach Day events at the State Farmers Market in Raleigh on July 11 and the Robert G. Shaw Piedmont Triad Farmers Market in Colfax on July 12. Both events run from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. and feature a peach recipe contest, free samples of peach ice cream and an appearance from the N.C. Peach Queen.

Peach lovers also can enjoy the N.C. Peach Festival in Candor July 19 and 20. The 23rd-annual event includes a parade, music, carnival rides, food vendors and lots of fresh, local peaches.

Source: NORTH CAROLINA PEACH GROWERS PLEASED WITH 2019 CROP

There’s nothing more wonderful than a perfectly ripe peach fresh off the tree. Of course, peach pie a la mode is delightful…

Start Your Garden Revolution Today

Came across this one. As Charles Hugh Smith says, “A home cooked meal is a revolutionary act.” So too is producing your very own food. There’s nothing like an amazing tomato, or the crunch of fresh lettuce. Yum!

Sometimes I think that the next Revolutionary War will take place in a vegetable garden. Instead of bullets, there will be seeds.  Instead of chemical warfare, there will be rainwater, carefully collected from the gutters of the house. Instead of soldiers in body armor and helmets, there will be back yard rebels, with bare feet, cut-off jean shorts, and wide-brimmed hats.  Instead of death, there will be life, sustained by a harvest of home-grown produce.  Children will be witness to these battles, but instead of being traumatized, they will be happy, grimy, and healthy, as they learn about the miracles that take place in a little plot of land or pot of dirt. Every day, the big industries that run our nation take steps towards food totalitarianism.  They do so flying a standard of “sustainability” but what they are actually trying to sustain is NOT our natural resources, but their control. (to read more, click on the link)

Source: 10 Ways to Sow Revolution in Your Back Yard – The Organic Prepper