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 grown in the school gardens can’t be used in the cafeteria’s to feed the kids. According to the article: Monica Eng of the Chicago Tribune describes the garden...
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. The first, and most important, is that one of the biggest excuses that I hear from people is that they always fail when attempting to grow things. I have three containers...
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, I dumped out all of the soil (and seeds) that were in the coconut shell planters. There were about 20 in total and only three or four had sprouted. The soil was put into...
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. To me there are many things that factor into being organic. Some we have more control and access to than others. We can’t really decide that we don’t like...
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 outdoors. I’m not one to give up easily and want to get this to work. They have now been brought back indoors to pretty much start from the beginning again. I took...
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 dislodged. This is might not be allowing them to get situated and firmly root. The middle row has coriander in it and all of the containers are sprouting. I might actually...
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 system when it comes to food and food education. I am not saying that it is the sole responsibility of the education system to educate kids on food, the parents are just...
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 point, something should’ve have sprouted. I’m not saying that they don’t work and will keep the experiment going. I’ll just need to take better...
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 Stoltz, one of my friends on Facebook. You don’t need a backyard, fire escape, balcony or sunny windowsill to do this. All you need is a cup, water and your green onions. Once...
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 organic produce isn’t significantly more nutritious than conventionally grown produce. She does say that organic is safer because it’s pesticide free. I don’t...
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 good news is now I have definite female flowers with cucumbers behind them. The bad news is that the first cucumber that emerged is slightly yellowing and the flower appears...
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 with new things, I figga’d why not. The package consisted of: A-OK Rockwool Starter Plugs Hydrotron Nutrient solutions that she kindly informed me weren’t...
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 health and healing. She goes on to talk about the physical aspects that are involved in gardening – weeding, planting, carrying water, shoveling. So gardening helps...
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 below it. The palette that I had the slats weren’t close enough and the bottles weren’t long enough, so I had to adapt. Here is what I did and what was...
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 think that the regular compost was performing better since it’s a larger plant and has more flowers. If you were to take a closer look at the plants, you...
Last week it was in the news that a Georgia man was fined $5,000 for growing too much food in his backyard garden. He’s been growing on his land for 15 years and growing food was the reason for him buying the land. He’s been selling some of his excess produce at the local farmers market and giving it to neighbors as well. The reason for him receiving the fine is that it is illegal to grow that much food for the zone that he is in. I understand that it is illegal, but how is it legal for it to be illegal to grow food? Yet it’s...
I harvested the first carrots from my container garden on my balcony. The carrots were way too tiny. They were planted over four months ago in the beginning of May. I thought that this would be plenty of time for them to grow. On the outside the carrot tops were showing and looked great, but when I harvested my first carrot it was mad small about an inch and very thin. I harvested two more carrots. One was a bit fatter, but still very tiny. After I planted the carrot seeds, I didn’t do much beyond watering them. I think this might...
The flowers on my cucumber plants are falling. For the most part, they appear to be doing well on my balcony garden. They are continuing to grow up the tomato cages, but none have set any fruit, just fallen leaves. I think this might be because of a pollination issue. I really haven’t seen many bees in and or around my balcony to pollinate the flowers. In looking closer at the flowers, there are definitely a lot of male flowers, but no female flowers. You can tell a female flower because it has fruit behind the flower. So I might...
I have already given you plenty of reasons to start growing your own food and am gonna give you another. In reading an article on Grist.org about urban agriculture, I learned that, “If some sort of natural disaster or terrorist attack were to shut down New York City’s food supply chain, our supermarket shelves would reportedly be picked clean within three days. Other U.S. cities aren’t any better prepared for such emergencies, thanks to our fuelish dependence on a globalized food system.” That is pretty nuts. I...
Hard to believe that it’s the middle of September already. That means that it’s time to start planting your fall vegetables. Ok, it’s been time to plant your fall vegetables, but now it’s really time. The best thing to plant in the fall, especially if you are container gardening, are greens. Lots of greens. They will survive the slight chill, you will be able to pack them into the containers and you will get the most food from them. Greens are also great if you only have access to a shady area, which is all I...
