Straw Bale Garden Part V: Growing Vegetables

...in the bales are doing better than veggies in my two remaining raised beds. The reason, I believe, is that the beds are depleted and the compost I added to them was low quality. While more resource intensive than growing in the ground or raised bed, straw bale gardening has a lot of advantages for the beginning gardener. Integrating fertilizers into a straw bale is a lot easier than making high quality compost and a lot faster. While not a long t...

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Defining a Garden’s Purpose

...of plants as being a kind of green background material are doing a kind of gardening, albeit one that is not helping our planet. What kind of gardening did I see from the train? The photo above sums it up. The most common sight was dead grass and junk storage. In more affluent areas people had lush grass and maybe a pool. Some had vegetable gardens, a few chickens and goats. One enterprising person, somewhere between Bakersfield and Fresno, had a...

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Saturday Linkages: Of Tiny Shops and Margarita Dermatitis

...jects/ferrocement/ferrocement garden bed.html The Agony and the Ecstasy of Gardening with Children: http://www.nwedible.com/2013/06/the-agony-and-the-ecstasy-of-gardening-with-children.html … Live light Join the Aussies in a Plastic-Free July: http://www.plasticfreejuly.org/the-challenge.html Stuff to worry about With 2 Weeks’ Worth Of Trans Fat, Long John Silver’s ‘Big Catch’ Dubbed Worst Restaurant Meal http://wp.me/p2L7Ik-GvOF Four paralyzed af...

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Savoring the Fruits of Your Labor Panel Discussion

...ry 601 Santa Monica Blvd. MLK Auditorium SAVORING THE FRUITS OF YOUR LABOR Gardening and preserving stories and strategies to improve your quality of life and your bottom line. Backyard gardening and food preservation are growing popular trends, but in the real world, what can these practices do for you individually, and for the community around you? Do we create a wider consciousness of community when we grow, preserve and share the products of o...

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Straw Bale Garden Update: Success!

...input of outside resources in the form of straw and fertilizer, straw bale gardening is a great solution for beginning gardeners or for those cursed with bad soil. And the skunks that have decimated my previous vegetable gardens are unable to get up on the bales. I’m considering trying another straw bale garden during our winter season. And I’m also pondering building boxes to put the bales in to make the garden look a bit neater. Compare the stra...

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