garden

Show me you have a seed there and I’m prepared to expect wonders — Henry David Thoreau.
Here’s a new twist on food sustainability. Inmates at Maryland’s Eastern Correctional Institution have grown 5 tons of fresh produce for the less fortunate on a small garden plot, turning rock-hard soil into food for others.
The program is similar to others taking root around the country. Inmates not only help to reduce costs for prison food, but often grow more than they can consume, and donate it to local food pantries.

Some of my early, organic urban gardening attempts resulted in wilted produce, eaten alive by aphids and other pesky bugs, and I almost gave up growing one of my favorite greens altogether – lettuce. But there are fairly simple techniques any gardener can utilize to survive these woes and create a stellar organic garden – something called additive intercropping is one of those techniques.

Growing your own organic food is extremely gratifying, but adding recycling to the mix is like winning the lottery two days in a row. When you mix the self-sustaining practice of growing your own food with the environmentally supporting habit of recycling, you are helping the world two-fold, and you get some tasty offerings in the process.
Here are 5 ways to incorporate recycling into your gardening habit:

It doesn’t matter if you have acres of space to plant your herbs, vegetables, and fruit, or if you are starting with a few small pots in a window sill; beginning your own organic gardening is a cinch when you know how to get your seeds growing right from their first stages.
Here are 5 unknown gardening tips to start and grow your own organic seedlings.

With Spring coming through, it’s time to start planning for that beautiful organic garden. Let’s face it; one great way to avoid the threat of genetically modified foods, pesticides, and toxic additives is to start your own organic garden. Whether you have gardened before or you will just be getting into it for the first time, below you will find a very helpful infographic with tons of information to make your experience that much easier.

Here’s to a greener, more sustainable world, and we can thank a novel idea from Europe to get it started. France has declared that all new rooftops in commercial areas across the country must be covered with either plants or solar panels.

It is time for some outdated, unconstitutional laws to be scrapped. Informally sharing seed with a neighbor who gardens down the street is illegal in multiple states in the US. The penalty for violating this ridiculous law is a fine of up to $7,500 a day. Like so many other senseless laws, this rule needs to be put to rest.
You can’t even give away seeds to someone in your own neighborhood under certain laws. For example, in some states you need to buy an annual permit and submit each lot of seeds for germination testing; if you don’t, you are defying the law.

For those who bother to grow their own food – a ‘radical’ act that has almost become necessary due to the GMO-laden land around us – the idea of consuming boosted plant nutrients is wildly appealing. Growing specific varieties of vegetables and fruits which are rich in phytonutrients, including anthocyanins, quercetin, lutein, and lycopene, for example, can help to prevent cancer, help us age more gracefully, and boost energy levels.

Riding the full force GMO backlash of 2014, communities and individuals alike are breaking down the door with Black Friday-urgency in search of better access to better food. Yet in a country where we continue to be limited by the bottom line of big corporate influences and their overarching monetary reach, the first sprouts of a mighty paradigm shift have been peeking through the dirt waiting for everyone to notice. What I’m talking about is growing your own food.