Author Clara is a retired business owner, who currently works in community gardening. She operates GardenerGigs, which aims to connect local gardeners with those who need them. It’s fair to say that productive gardens are born in the fall, a time when many people are tempted to put away their gardening tools, fertilizers, and lawn mowers until next year. Think …
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What is Composting? And how to get started
In this blog, we’re going to attempt to answer the very basic question, “What is composting?” We know from experience that creating your compost from food scraps, leaves, clippings, and other organic waste products is a lot like learning to ride a bicycle. You can learn the theory of making compost, but you won’t have any composting confidence until you …
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Best Sustainability & Climate Change Solution: Grow Your Own Food!
What you can do about climate change As Geoff Lawton put it, “All the world’s problems can be solved in a garden.” At this point, if we haven’t yet convinced you that gardening is the green choice, why not try closing the loop on our food consumption by starting with composting. Here’s a little blog we wrote about how you …
Gardening in California Successfully
California’s climate is generally called “Mediterranean.” Yet it ranges across the state from the hot deserts, as in the case of Death Valley, to the sub-artic, dry, mountain regions of Western California. But what does a Mediterranean climate consist of and why is it harder to garden in California than in other parts of the United States? A Mediterranean climate …
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Permaculture Student K-12 Online
This is a sample video lesson from week 3 of Matt Powers’ Permaculture Student K-12 Online course. Matt interviews soil scientist Dr. Elaine Ingham about the different biological processes in the soil. Dr. Ingham explains how plants generally need two forms of nitrogen to grow. These cannot come in the form of N2 which we get from the air. Neither …
Bees – Pollinators and Friends
If you take a look at your garden right now (and it’s in season), you can be sure that there are dozens of pollinators, large and small, working diligently to collect pollen or eat nectar. These creatures are essential partners with many of the vegetables and fruit trees in our gardens, who rely on them entirely for their reproduction. This …
A Medicinal Herb Garden
Disclaimer: This post contains some affiliate links. The small commission we receive if you choose to purchase goes towards making this gardening education available for free! We do not affiliate for anything we do not personally use. Thanks so much for your support! BTW, If you want to listen to the audio version of this post, it is at the …
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The Value Of Heirloom Seeds
One of the most important goals in sustainable gardening is saving seeds from some of our valued plants and using them to grow the next cycle of plants the following year. Humanity has observed this cycle in nature for countless generations and learned to harvest and save seeds from the most useful plants encountered. Seeds of favored varieties were treasured …
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How to Design Meditation Gardens
I suppose the first question we should ask is, “Why meditate?” As you well know, online reader, we live in such a plugged-in, high-tech world. It is so device-driven, that the trendiest health online summits are.. Surprise, surprise… on Digital Dementia! But I think… the digital diseases we are currently suffering from are going to be solved only by going …
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Grow Your Own Food
Did you guess what the #1 US export is? The #1 export of the US is…. get ready for it… SOIL. “In the United States alone, soil disappears 10 times faster than it is naturally replenished, according to this Cornell University study, at an estimated rate of nearly 1.7 billion tons of farmland alone per year.” As Theodore Roosevelt once …