Welcome to Indoor Gardening Guide by Archivex-Haiti
Backyard Gardening Article
This is a selection made from among articles on Backyard Gardening. For a permanent link to this article, or to bookmark it for future reading, click here.
How to Grow Healthy Food
from: Linda Paquettewords: 400
How to Grow Healthy Food
To grow healthy food, you literally have to start at rock bottom. No matter what you’re growing, from chickpeas to chickens, the truth is that you are what they eat!
It’s no secret that all life begins with the soil. Although it may look like dirt to the naked eye, organically rich soil is a living, breathing community of microorganisms. These little denizens of the dirt are born, grow, breed, give birth and die leaving an estate of nutrition-filled remains to the soil. While they live, many of these little critters feed on undesirable elements like harmful bacteria.
Every year, gardeners spend thousands of dollars on chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides that are little more than a quick fix to gardening problems and create long-term health hazards for everyone, from humans to single-celled organisms in the soil. If you really want to grow healthy food, the first step is to keep your underground colony in good health.
There are two things you need to do to maintain healthy soil. The first is to keep out the chemicals. The second is to add rich organic matter to your soil at regular intervals.
Keep out the chemicals
No matter what amount of chemical you use in your gardening, a drop is a deluge to a microorganism. More to the point, most chemicals don’t fade away. They leech into your garden and wait to attach to some growing thing… like your plants. One example is a gardener who claims to grow organic apples. He doesn’t spray his trees, but he does use a chemical “weed & feed” application on his lawn, seemingly unaware of the systemic consequences of using chemicals.
Feed your soil
The best way to enrich your soil is to give it regular applications of composted organic matter. Compost can be anything from yard mulch to kitchen vegetable waste. If you don’t have the time to maintain a compost bin, an easy way to add organic matter to your yard is through mowing your lawn with a mulching mower. Prepared compost is also available for purchase from nurseries and home garden centers.
Remember the house that Jack built? It’s similar in your garden. The roots take from the soil to give to the stems that bear the buds that turn into the fruit…. Whether or not the fruit is healthy depends on what was in the soil.
About the Author
Linda is editor of Gardening Guides
Backyard Gardening News
Elizabeth Bublitz, Author and Creator of Pawfriendly Landscapes, is a ... - PR.com
Elizabeth Bublitz, author and creator of Pawfriendly Landscapes, is a featured writer and author at Colorado Gardening. Colorado Gardening is selling Bublitz' new book, "Pawfriendly Landscapes - How to Share the Turf When Your Backyard Belongs to ...
Read more...Gardening gurus in pulp mill war - News.com.au
IT'S the heavyweight brawl of the gardening gurus as Peter Cundall savaged former Burke's Backyard presenter Don Burke over his new role as an adviser to Gunns on its controversial $2 billion pulp mill. Mr Cundall said opponents of the proposed mill ...
Read more...Gardening gurus in pulp mill punch-up - News.com.au
CELEBRITY gardener Peter Cundall has savaged former Burke's Backyard presenter Don Burke over his new role as an adviser to Gunns on its controversial $2 billion Tasmanian pulp mill. Mr Cundall said opponents of the proposed mill in the Tamar Valley ...
Read more...U.S. City Dwellers Flock to Raising Chickens - Environmental News Network
In the backyard of a suburban home in Denver, Colorado, 22 chickens are hiding out from the law. They arrived when a member of  BackyardChickens , an online forum, ordered the birds in the mail this past May. "I actually get my chicks in today ...
Read more...Jeev out to end title drought at home - Hindustan Times
After two sleepless nights, it was a visibly tired Jeev Milkha Singh as he faced the handful of reporters at the Delhi Golf Club. Arriving in the early hours of Tuesday, Jeev explained the reasons for the fatigue. He flew overnight to Doha for a ...
Read more...Bogus Trend of the Week: Dudes With Cats - Slate
The bogus trend story thrives thanks to the journalists who never let the facts get in the way when they think they've discovered some new social tendency. Take, for example, the story on Page One in today's New York Times titled " A Locally Grown ...
Read more...Street and two veg: a green solution just outside your door - Tenterfield Star
THE English have their allotments; in Sydney we use the streets. In a variation on guerilla gardening, Sydneysiders are moving veggie plots from the backyard to the street verge, and converting formerly fallow public land into mini-market gardens ...
Read more...