Perhaps one of the best advantages to growing your own vegetables and fruits from open-pollinated seeds is that you can save seeds. Harvesting the seeds of your best performing plants and saving them for the next year’s garden not only keeps gardening costs low, but it also ensures that each year your garden produces healthier, more productive plants that are better adapted for your specific soil and growing conditions.
Container Gardening: Growing Salad Bowls
Container gardening, particularly growing vegetables in containers, is new to me. Oh, I knew it could be done. I’d just never done it. A couple of weeks ago I moved from a house into an apartment. With the move went any hope I’d had of creating a garden that could keep my family in vegetables all summer long.
Paul Roberts on The End of Food
Did you know that it’s possible to be obese and still be starving? It seems counter intuitive, doesn’t it? Yet that’s what’s been happening for the last hundred years or more, all around the world, particularly when we watch traditional people groups start eating the nutritionally empty foods of industrialization.
Paul Roberts, journalist and published author, foresees a world where we won’t be able to afford nutrient-dense foods — a world where empty calories make us fat and kill us off. He calls it The End of Food, and in the video below he gives a brief overview of his position.
Meet An Organic Dairy Farmer
There was a time, just a few generations ago, when all food was local and organic. In the videos below, shared by the team at Cooking Up A Story, a third generation organic dairy farmer named Jon Bansen tells about how his grandfather did business. This was before pesticides & fertilizers, before milking machines & hormones & antibiotics.
Years later, modern day industrialized agriculture had taken over his farm. In the second video, Jon shares about his own journey towards transitioning to an organic dairy and producing real milk.
Vandana Shiva On the Dangers of GMOs
Until a few months ago, I didn’t know who Vandana Shiva was. Now I think of her as India’s Sitting Bull — a well-educated freedom fighter who is outspoken against the use of GMOs.
In Shiva’s home country of India, thousands of farmers are taking their lives. In the mainstream news media, reports of the mass suicides are blamed on failed crops. Shiva tells a different story. She blames failed GMO crops.
Creating Front Yard Gardens
I’ve always wanted a front yard garden. My shaded backyard is ideal for raising animals (and exuberant young boys), but not much food can grow there. Instead of food, I planted a trampoline, hammock, treehouse, slide, swing, fish pond, and sandbox.
Mark Bittman Says Food Matters
The U.S. is arguably the richest country in the world, but we rank only 45th in the world in terms of life expectancy. Why is that? In this interview clip, Mark Bittman, author of Food Matters: A Guide to Conscious Eating, reminds us that 20 years ago, we spent 17% of our income on food…