The Mystery of the Zero-Irrigation Squash

...s. The chairs in the picture above are holding over 100 lbs (45+ kilos) of food grown with zero water inputs! To top that, this was one of the healthiest squash plants we’ve ever “grown” or rather allowed to grow. How did that work? And more importantly, how can we make it happen again? I have three thoughts: 1) Perfect timing. Volunteers know exactly when to come up. They’re rarely wrong. We humans schedule planting by when we finally buy our see...

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Farm Hack

...ive blog that synthesizes high tech and low tech in the service of growing food and community. The blog is run by the National Young Farmers Coalition. While geared towards agriculture, many of the posts will be of interest to backyard gardeners. Recent subjects include a project to develop an infrared camera to monitor plant health, smartphone tools for farmers and open source appropriate technology resources. It’s exactly this kind of innovation...

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Pressure Canning Questions?

...Master Food Preserver and chef Ernest Miller will be our guest on a future episode of the Root Simple Podcast. I’m doing the interview this Friday and we’re going to talk about pressure canning. If you’ve got a pressure canning question please leave a comment on this post or call our podcast hotline at (213) 537-2591. Ernie is extremely knowledgeable and now is your chance to get those canning questions answered....

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Saturday Tweets: The Short Holiday Version

...Creating a food forest, step by step https://t.co/EbNzbzioiT pic.twitter.com/w4udZAFpbD — Permaculture (@PermacultuRRe) December 17, 2015 Car free living in LA: https://t.co/BqIysFjovk — Root Simple (@rootsimple) December 17, 2015 New winterizing the beehives #beekeeping vids on https://t.co/1y6V4k5kYj pic.twitter.com/C5wuxtE1OD — Eric Rochow (@GardenForkTV) December 3, 2015...

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Worm Compost Leachate, Good or Bad?

...uting the use of worm bin leachate. There are some caveats, however. First, it needs to be diluted–at least 1:1 and maybe, according to some sources, as much as 1:10. And you should probably test it out on a few plants before applying it to your whole garden. And, from a food safety perspective, I’d avoid applying it to leafy greens and lettuces. I’d also point out that if you have a lot of leachate it might mean that your worm bin has too much mo...

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