It’s been over a month since I started the shipping palette herb garden. It didn’t take long for the containers to sprout, but there is a slight problem. Initially I thought there would be a problem with the second and third rows because of the way that the water was draining down. That has not been an issue. I’ve been applying a small amount of compost...
Author Archives: Mike Lieberman
There were a total of 13 comments left to enter the hydroculture contest. To select a winner, I used Random.org to randomly select a number between 1-13. The number generated was…7. Counting from the top, the seventh comment was from Risa whose comment was, “Hey (PCOStherealdeal here)Been following your channel on YT since before you made the big move and I...
Since I’ve shown you what it’s like feeding my worms, they have gone a mating spree. They have been reproducing like crazy. I assume that this means that they are really comfortable with their environment. Not sure that my words could do much justice for how many there are, so hopefully this video can: httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UU9X8RGSL6U ...
I want to brag a little bit in this post. It’s been about 7-months since I left NYC for LA. In terms of growing food and gardening, it’s starting to settle in now. It hit me when Colleen Vanderlinden wrote 10 Things to Do Now for a Better Garden Next Spring on Planet Green. Last year during this time, I was fussing around and attempting to build small plastic...
Wanted to give a glimpse into what it’s like feeding my worms. Since I’m using a Worm Factory 360, I needed to start a new tray. Here’s what I did: Added some blended food scraps to the bottom. Covered them with some browned fallen leaves. Topped that with shredded newspaper that I sprayed down with a water bottle. Covered everything with a sheet...
Susan Reimer wrote a piece on the Garden Variety blog of the Baltimore Sun about the objections that people have when it comes to school gardens. I’m pretty sure that the mentions were specific to the Chicago area. In my humble opinion the reasons that people gave were ridiculous. Before we get to the reasons I want to express my beef with the fact that the food...
The thing that I think needs to be communicated more often is that my balcony garden ain’t perfect And you know what…who cares? Everything that I plant, grow, sprout, whatever doesn’t look great and doesn’t always work. I’ve been having problems with my cucumber containers. I think this needs to be said and said more often for a few reasons....
I noticed that there were mysterious sprouts growing in some of the containers on my balcony garden. Unsure as to what they were, I posted a picture on Between the Posts and asked. No one could identify them. They started off showing up sporadically in a few containers, but they’ve since started to grow more densely. Then I realized it. Before I left for Costa Rica,...
Organic. It’s a terms that’s thrown around like crazy, but what the hell does it mean? What is organic gardening? What is organic food? There is the USDA definition of organic, which you can try to decipher and understand because it’s as useful as the last Juvenile album. I do know what organic, living organically and gardening organically mean to me....
I am going to restart my experiment in starting seeds using hydroculture. After the first week, there was nothing. No sprouts. Nada. I thought, and from what people were saying, it could’ve been because they were getting too dry. So I put a tray under them and kept that filled with water. Still nothing. It was then suggested that it could be too dry for them being...
A few weeks ago I started the shipping pallet herb garden on my balcony. There are sprouts that are starting to grow. The top most row had parsley planted in it. Only one of the containers is actually showing parsley sprouts and they aren’t where I had initially planted them. Since when I water the garden, I water the parsley at the top, the seeds might be getting...
I think the public school system needs to be called out on their hypocrisy when it comes to nutrition and education. Jamie Oliver said it best when it comes to food and what’s going on, “You can’t scream about bad health on one hand and then strategically feed them crap everyday on the other.” That is what pretty much what happens in the school...
It’s been about a week or so since I started some seeds using hydroculture as an experiment. Since I started them, I have to admit that I’ve been a bit negligent and haven’t been taking the best care of them. I’ve put them out on my balcony garden and have sprayed them down once in a while. As of now, they haven’t sprouted yet at all. By this...
Here is another quick and simple way that you can grow some of your own food. It’s not really growing, it’s more like regrowing. First you need to have either grown your own scallions or bought some at a local farmers market. You can now re-grow green onions from the existing green onions in your kitchen on the countertop. This ideas was give to me by Leah...
There was a post on CNN.com called Organic produce – when is the splurge worth it? The title in and of itself is ridiculous that to consider buying unsprayed produce that hasn’t been treated with any chemicals as being a splurge. It shows how disconnected we have become from associating real food with health. A licensed dietician, Sonia Angel, reported that...
A few weeks back, I posted saying that all my cucumber flowers were falling offand thought it was because they weren’t getting pollinated. People were saying that this is common on cucumber plants and that they are usually a sausage party with more male flowers than female. I’ve also added a bit of coffee grinds to the soil and watered them in as well. The...
I received a message from Lica who checks out this blog. She lives in Brooklyn and doesn’t have any space to grow, so she’s been experimenting using hyrdoculture, not hydroponics. There is a difference and she explains it on her blog. She contacted me, told me about what she was doing and offered to send some to me to experiment with. Always down to experiment...
Maria Rodale recently wrote post on her Maria’s Farm Country Kitchen blog titled A Harvest of Healing. It was a beautifully written post about how there is more to gardening than just the harvest. The harvest is great, but it’s not everything. The one quote from the post that stuck with me was: With gardening, we harvest more than food and flowers; we harvest...
The project of using a shipping palette to make an herb garden is one that I originally saw on Instructables. The concept is that you water the top plant and it drains through to the plant below that and then to the plant below that. I followed the basic steps steps that were laid out there. You are supposed to drill the neck of the bottle through the top part of the bottle...
It’s been almost two months since I started to test the soil amendments in my container garden. I was testing using manure tea versus using regular compost. I had two cucumber plants that I had started from seeds. In looking at the two containers, it’s hard to make a definitive statement on which works better. If you were just to look at the containers, you’d...
