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gardening, organic garden, seeds
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Featured Review: Arugula Rocket - 1 Pkt. (500 seeds) |
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Arugula Rocket - 1 Pkt. (500 seeds)
Average Customer Rating  5 out of 5
"Tender smooth leaves with robust, peppery flavor. Cook mature leaves with other greens. Ready to harvest in 35 days. Zesty accent in salad.<p>GARDEN HINTS: Grows best in cool weather. Can also be grown as a fall crop. Sow early in spring. Protect from heat with shade cloth. Likes fertile soil, ample water. Best when picked minutes before your meal. Thin plants 8"" apart. 500 seeds per packet, will plant about 30' of row. Grows best in full sun, will tolerate light shade."
Read all reviews at Burpee
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Featured Review
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5 of 5
Great stuff
December 11, 2009
By dolly from Houston
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"We like arugula so much, I have it in pots by the back door so we can easily pick it to add to sandwiches. Also excellent mixed in a lettuce salad. It does get quite peppery and rank when the weather is hot. Germinates very easily."
Read all reviews at Burpee
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Patio Decks And Accessories |
| Would it not be great, at the end of a hard day's work or on your day off, to relax outside on your patio deck? It is a daydream that many people have. But it does not have to be just a dream.You ... |
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Outdoor Garden Shed Plans - Building an Outdoor Garden Shed |
| Last year my wife and I moved house, there was not a lot of redecorating needing to be done as the previous owner, an elderly retired school teacher had been house-proud to a fault. The garden was a d... |
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Placing a Gazebo in your garden |
| Gazebos make a great extension to any garden or property. A Gazebo is usually a free standing, often wooden, square, octagonal or pentagonal structure with a roof that can be placed in your garden. ... |
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5 Herbs With Medicinal Properties You Should Know About |
| While the Indians still practice Ayurveda (a medical science completely based on the medical properties of plants and herbs) and the Chinese swear by their traditional Chinese Medicine, both o... |
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The best vegetable varieties |
[...] my seed and plant order has now grown to such an extent that I'm going to need to dig up half my flower garden to accommodate them all! |
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Growing raspberries |
In our family we say strawberries are the Beatles of the fruit world, but raspberries, which are more rock 'n roll, are the Rolling Stones. |
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Hoverfly puparia |
The snow has gone completely now, and I take these latent packages as a good sign that spring is coming.  |
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Setsubun, Halfway Through the Season |
2010-02-02. Bluebonnet seedlings. Given all the rain in central Texas since September, the bluebonnet plants are large and plentiful. |
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GBBD 201001: Jan 2010 |
| This space intentionally left blank to illustrate the bleakness. |
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Week 01: 1/1 – 1/7 |
2006-01-04. Unidentified paperwhites and spider. These paperwhites are short, but pleasantly sweet-smelling, not like some modern ones. |
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The Sensuous Garden |
Book Review: The Sensuous Garden.
Montague Don. 1997
"...this book is not about plants or plans but about gardeners with feelings and sensations." (from the introduction) |
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Cold Climate Composting |
As my friend Mort Mather says, the soil is your bank. You can't make withdrawals unless you make deposits. I get composting straw and manure from Nectar Hills Farm (where we also get the beef for our grass-fed gourmet beef jerky), which I mix with my kitchen waste to create compost that I then deposit into the soil bank so I can make fresh veggie withdrawals. Mort and I are both lazy gardeners, meaning we like to let nature do as much of the work as possible, and we just help her along.
Last winter, though, my compost pile (which, by the way, lowers my carbon footprint considerably, since that food waste won't decompose anaerobically in the landfill) froze solid, like a big block of ice. It was my first real winter after years of living in substantially warmer climates. This year, I was ready for these sub-zero temperatures. With a couple of bags of hay, some very dry, aged horse manure, and a lot of snow for insulation, I have built a very insulated compost pile.
Since I'm lazy, the pile is up against the foundation of the house, right at the bottom of the back stairs. I don't want to have to put on the snow shoes to compost all winter. This way, the compost is only exposed on three sides. On two of those sides, I've stacked flakes from the hay bales, creating a kind of straw bale shelter for the pile. The front is open, but held up about 18 inches with some chicken wire fencing, which I have now piled snow up against for insulation. The top of the pile is covered with snow, which I poured hot water down to create a cylindrical hole down to the top of the pile.
Now, when I want to compost , I just pour some fresh hot water down the hole to melt any new snow that accumulated, then I dump my compost bucket down the hole, layer some manure on top of that, and then a couple of handfulls of hay (or the cedar shreds I take out of our turtle cage when I clean it, which has turtle manure) down the hole. Come spring (or another thaw like we had a week ago) there will be a bunch of cylinders of frozen compost sticking up on the top of the pile. I'll be sure to take a picture of that scene.
But underneath all that lies the compost pile proper, where my probes have proven that composting is taking place, worms are thriving (future turtle food), and aerobic decomposition is reducing our carbon output. But the best part, of course, is that come spring, when I build some new raised beds , I'll have plenty of currency saved up for the soil bank!
Of course, if you have a little money to spend, I imagine a black plastic composter  would use insulating and solar power to keep your pile going year around, unless you're above the arctic circle. |
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Ant Wars! |
A very good friend of mine from my stagehand days recently bought a house--a fixer upper in ant country--and asked for some help on that front.
Ants go where the food is, so first, make sure there's nothing for them to eat. This is most important! Cut off their supplies!
Now the battle can begin!
Put out the ant baits you can buy anywhere, but put them outside near their homes. I used to use those metal stakes that go in the ground. They work for a while, but eventually they learn to avoid them, so you have to keep changing brands. This is the artillery to soften them up a little.
Find where they're coming through the wall. Unless they're under the house, or living in the house somewhere, they're coming in through a crack, usually around a cable inlet hole or window. Caulk. You want to seal the holes anyway, for energy efficiency.
Now you're going to have to launch an attack on their fort. Follow their trail back to the home. If you don't care about growing anything in that spot for a while, pour a bunch of vinegar down the hole. Get the 10% vinegar if you can find it, but 5% is OK. If you dig the area up after wards and compost the soil with some grass clippings and food waste, it will balance out the pH and you can use the soil again.
If you do want to grow something there immediately, you can get some Diatomaceous Earth --not the kind for pools, but the finer kind used to kill bugs--you can pile it on the mound and in a radius of a foot or so, more if it's big. The powder is so fine it clogs the breathing pores in their skin. Be sure not to breathe the stuff, as it will do the same to your lungs. They will die trying to get out. In fact, they will build a bridge of dead ants and crawl over them, so you have to keep going there, raking the area free of dead any bridges, and reapply as needed. Watch for places where they try to tunnel out, and apply there to. Obviously, you're going to have to be patient and vigilant. Kind of like democracy.
If you really want to have some pyrotechnic fun, I suggest gasoline of kerosene. Not exactly organic, but you're going to let it soak in and then light it up. Careful. I suggest some sort of fuse so you can stand back when the fire geyser spews flaming ants into the sky.
If they're really bad, there is an ant chalk that is technically illegal, but they sell it in Chinatown. It has a neurotoxin in it, so use gloves, and make sure the kid can't get near it. It's not technically organic, although a lot of people say it is. The active ingredients are Cypermethrin and Deltamethrin, which are both common, very weak insecticides which break down quickly (but are really bad for fish, so don't use near water). They are both Pyrethroids, synthetic chemicals that very closely resemble pyrethrins, which come from flowers. This is what a lot of ant sprays have in them, but I hate sprays as a lot of it gets in the air that way. Besides, they stink for days after you spray them.
Draw chalk lines where the ants are coming into the house, on concrete it works well, you have to press hard to make sure it gets into the stucco. They will not come back for a long time once they get a taste of that stuff.
Finally, learn to live with a few of them. Too many and there's obviously a food source available, so again, make sure every thing's sealed up. Battle them back as much as possible, but there will always be scouts. Kill them when you see them, but no need to freak. They're actually pretty clean, an amazing evolutionary engineering wonder. The colony acts like a single brain (I often call it the ant brain).
And they're just doing their (very important) job.... |
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Community Supported Agriculture |
This is an interesting post on Grist: It takes a community to sustain a small farm. It doesn't mention CSAs, community supported agriculture, where local residents purchase "shares" of a farm, which guarantees delivery of a set amount of food over a period of time, usually a year. But it does address the issues small, local farms face, considering that agribusiness has been putting the little guys--from farmers to butchers to truck drivers and grocers--out of business for a long time now.
Our local and organic grass-fed highlander beef (very lean), which we use for our Happy Hobo Grass-fed Beef Jerky, is from Nectar Hills Farm, which recently started an upstate New York CSA of their own, mostly for meat (they also have lamb, pork, poultry, eggs, and cheese), but also other things from the farm, like incredible organic produce during the season and organic red bamboo honey (which we also use in the beef jerky).
Nectar Hills Farm also has a new farm picture gallery, if you'd like to see some pictures of a small organic farm in upstate New York.
CSAs aren't new. You can find one near you on the Local Harvest's CSA finder. They're a great way to help your local farmer. It gets them money when they need it, and it gets you a discount on farm-fresh local and organic products on a regular basis. This food is better for you, better for the animals, and better for the environment. It is money you won't spend keeping big agri-business in business.
Our New Year's resolution is to stop eating corn-fed and factory farmed beef. You don't have to be that drastic about it, but once you research grass-fed beef in your area, you'll find an array of delicious meats that are essentially solar powered, instead of oil and corn powered, like the concentrated feed lots of industrial meat production. |
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Robin's Best Grass-fed Beef Jerky Ever! |
If you're lucky enough to be up here in the walk-in freezer that is upstate New York this weekend, you'll want to swing by the Cooperstown Farmer's Market, the last of the year, for the best Happy Hobo grass-fed beef jerky Robin's ever made.
The grass-fed Highlander's top round that this batch of jerky is made from is, as we're told, as good as they get, having spent the whole summer eating grass from the fields of Nectar Hills Farm here in central New York's leatherstocking region. When the cows have been out in the fields eating grass all summer, they fatten up and become especially delicious.
Of course, Robin thinks it's cute that I say every batch of jerky is the best. But I'm serious. She's perfected the recipe, the cows are particularly delicious this time of year. And we've switched to organic tamari to replace the soy sauce (we're making a special batch with no wheat, which soy sauce contains, for some relatives who can't eat wheat). At this point, the only wheat left in the recipe is the trace amount in the organic Worcestershire sauce, so to make a wheat-free jerky, we just leave that out.
Starting this winter, we're going to begin experimenting with other flavors of jerky. We're thinking Teriyaki, tropical, and a few others. Suggestions are certainly welcome!
We're also going to experiment with organic dog treats, but don't tell your dog yet; we want to get it just right first.
If you can't make it to the Cooperstown Farmer's Market Saturday morning, you can order our grass-fed beef jerky at the Nectar Hills Farm website. |
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