Day to day, our decisions count

...he world–and they are delicious! Eating this way is also a good primer for vegetable gardening. It teaches you what grows well in your area, and how the seasons run, and gives you some inspiration as to good local varieties you can seek out. By the by, I thought I’d mention Azure Standard here, too. This is a U.S. based company–it does not operate in every state, unfortunately, but it delivers bulk whole and natural foods to community drop-off poi...

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Reforming City Codes

...uts in a residential zone. It was legal, for some reason, to grow and sell vegetables. City staff were very helpful in changing the code. They knew it didn’t make sense and were just as eager to change it as we were. As DRBREW points out, these ridiculous laws tend not to be enforced at all until a feud begins between neighbors. To prevent these situation we can all help create more cohesive communities. It can be as simple as throwing a party. Ou...

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Our New Straw Bale Garden–Part I

...l be a solar powered fountain. We’re going to experiment with a straw bale vegetable garden in our backyard, inspired by Michael Tortorello’s article in the New York Times. The plan is to grow in the bales and harvest the resulting compost for use in permanent raised beds (that have yet to be built). We’ll keep growing in bales until we have enough compost for the beds. The problems presented by our property–lead and zinc contamination and a backy...

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Rucola Selvatica A Foglia D’ulivo: the arugula you’ve never heard of

If I could boil down my vegetable gardening advice to one sentence it would probably be: just grow stuff that does well and tastes good. Let some other schmuck fight aphids on those Brussels sprouts. Another bit of advice is that you can never have enough arugula. The stuff at the market is wilted, tasteless crap. Grow your own and you’ve got an incredible diversity of arugula varieties to choose from. This year I grew two varieties from Franchi,...

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