Baby Tomatoes and Hope

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Big Orange Kitty watching over the babies

Small boy daydreaming next to the nursery

One of my goals right now is to become more and more separate from industrial food. Growing lots of tomatoes seems to be one of the easiest ways to start. I used to think of tomatoes and wonder how people could eat so many of them. People who grew them in their gardens would give them away by the bags-full. I thought..just how many salads and sandwiches can I eat to use all of these before they get mushy (which happens so very quickly)? I never realized the possibility of preserving them until I tried it and saw for myself how easy it is. (If mom reads this, she may have a thing or two to say to me, namely, “Oh come on, where were you while I canned all those tomatoes every summer?” Answer: Somewhere far away from the kitchen.)

What things do I buy routinely that I could be putting up from my own tomato plants? Tomato sauce, diced tomatoes, whole tomatoes, roasted and pureed tomatoes…ketchup, even! I obtained a food mill last summer and the ease of making sauce increased ten-fold. So far I’ve done nothing more than freeze the sauce and diced tomatoes in freezer containers, but canning is next on the list of attainable goals. We use a LOT of canned tomatoes in our family, not to mention all the ketchup we go through. If we could provide the majority of our own tomatoes to last the whole year, not just in those glorious pick-them-straight-from-the-vine-and-die-of-happiness summer days, I think that would be an amazing step in the right direction.

Here are some pics of our growing tomato seedlings. They are started from seed that I got from rareseeds.com. A heritage variety called Amish Paste. The claim is that they produce well and that they make excellent sauce, so here’s to hoping!

Also! This is our 3rd garden season starting our seeds without a growlight. Countless gardening sites assume that success will only come with growlights, but if I can do without, why not? I have big windowsills to hold the trays, and by rotating the seedlings throughout the day to catch as much sunlight as possible, they seem to do okay. In one of the following pics you’ll see that on very cold days, I put a space heater (on lowest setting) under the window to keep the babies from getting frostbite. 😉

Originally posted by Andi at LittleBigHarvest

It’s always hard to do…but it must be done. Culling the weakest sprouts so the hardiest one will grow into an amazing plant.

A little extra warmth on those frigid February/March mornings.

They eat up the sun and fill me with hope.

Self-Reliability Urban Gardening

6,000 lbs of Food on 1/10th Acre

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If you are insanely interested in urban homesteading like I am, you must watch this! I had briefly read about the Dervaes family before, but seeing this video amazed me. Not only are they growing huge amounts of food on very little land (enough to feed themselves and sell a bunch to local chefs), you’ll also see at about 5:30 in the video that they use very little electricity (solar powered), and bio-diesel (fry oil recycled from local restaurants). Off the grid, and growing their own food, all within a crowded urban environment. These are skills that will help us ease out of the cheap energy era. The more we know and learn from families like this, the better. Watch and be inspired!

[youtube]http://youtu.be/NCmTJkZy0rM[/youtube]

Self-Reliability

Teen Builds His Own Tiny House

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I’m really inspired by this kid! He has put a lot of thought and effort into this project: you have to watch this video. It’s long, but keep watching; you’ll be inspired. He has raised funds, reused materials, created very little waste, and built most of it himself. He even built a composting toilet. I am really amazed by the commitment and hard work shown by someone so young, and I’m happy to see young innovators like this kid in action. He will be a leader in the coming years, showing the way for others who want to downsize and live more simply.

[youtube]http://youtu.be/gMRJ9lwzCaM[/youtube]

Here is a website you can check out as well:

http://www.minihousebuilder.com/

Recycling

Soda Bottle Greenhouse

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Hmm…I wonder if I could collect enough 2-liter soda bottles to build this? How can you beat building a cozy greenhouse and preventing a whole bunch of plastic from going into the landfill at the same time? I love it! I found it on this site.

This is actually a school project from a school in Scotland, but what a great idea and a way to recycle all those plastic soda bottles we get through. I imagine this greenhouse will be a lot better than most at retaining heat during the night, which could be a real plus in some areas.

Admittedly, it will take quite some time to collect all the bottles needed for this project by yourself, by I think if you get your friends, neighbours and family to start saving up their bottles as well, it shouldn’t take too long. The important thing is to get started saving your bottles right away. As I see it, the biggest roadblock with the project is the space required to store all the plastic bottles whilst you are saving them up.

If you are interested to know more, or you want to give it a go, you can download a PDF document showing how the greenhouse was built. The PDF also includes plans and a shopping list of the other materials you need to build your own soda bottle greenhouse.

Download the pdf instructions here!

Book Review Urban Gardening

Heirlooms To the Rescue

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Here’s a review I found of the book The Seed Underground: A Growing Revolution to Save Food by Janisse Ray. A timely topic, since many of us, right now, are gathering seeds and starting plants indoors, looking forward to spring.

If you don’t have time to read yet another book, don’t fret! Do one small thing to help keep heirlooms alive: make it a goal this spring to plant at least one heirloom variety in your garden, windowbox, or flower patch. I have found several seeds that I want to try HERE, and am very excited to get planting. -Andi

Heirlooms To the Rescue

Heirloom Seeds We often think of saving seeds in literal terms: letting flowers and vegetables go to seed, whether edible at that point (squash, tomatoes) or not (lettuce); separating and cleaning the seeds, drying them, and then protecting them until we’re able to plant again. But there’s a larger issue here, one that’s apparent when you consider that 94% of the seed varieties available to farmers and gardeners in 1900 have been lost, never to be grown again. Today, many of us are involved in saving seeds from extinction. To quote an old ecological saying: extinction is forever.

Today’s activists — there’s no better word for them – have taken those extinctions to heart and are on a quest to save as many varieties of seeds as they can. Janisse Ray, author of The Seed Underground: A Growing Revolution to Save Food is one of them. Ray’s book is a sort of manifesto on the practice and importance of seed saving. While she mixes in chapters that discuss the assault on non-corporate, non-patent protected heirloom seed varieties and the dangers of industrial agriculture, most of the book is a collection of intriguing stories about those involved in the seed saving movement. There’s the story of Iowa photographer Dave Cavagnaro who teaches willing gardeners about preserving and raising heirloom squashes; legendary seed saver Will Bonsall of Maine who explains his pollination and seed-saving techniques in terms that everybody can understand — sex. Then there’s the late seed saver and poet Jeff Bickert of Vermont who gave away heirloom seeds and starts for 11 different kinds of beans and 18 varieties of potatoes. All of these people, including the Tomato Man, who offers 312 varieties of heirlooms and open-pollinated tomatoes, and the Sweet Potato Queen, who grows 40 varieties of heirloom sweet potatoes, including some which are purple, are the kinds of characters you won’t easily forget.

People aren’t the only subjects here. Ray digs up the history of the Conch Cowpea, a spreading vine that was drought resistant and adaptable to the kind of sandy soils known in the coastal south. It served as a source of protein in places where northern beans wouldn’t grow as well as providing ground cover and a silage crop for livestock. Then there’s Keener Corn, grown for dry grinding into meal. Keener corn grows a stalk that can be very tall, 10 to 12 feet, but produces only a single ear per stalk. Why bother? It makes the tastiest meal that Ray, or its grower Bill Keener, have ever tasted. Need another reason? It’s been in the Keener family for generations. Letting it go would be like putting great-grandma’s Bible in the trash.

And that’s where author Ray excels. Sure, she talks about how some heirlooms are valuable because they are disease resistant or easily adaptable to certain local conditions. And then there’s flavor. In a world where commercially-grown produce tends to all taste alike, Ray finds the kind of varied flavors that chefs, both home and professional, cherish. But above it all, Ray brings a sense of family and community to the heirloom culture. Growing food — growing unique food — makes for a social camaraderie and a sense of purpose that other social endeavors have a hard time matching. Ray is also expert at personalizing the stories, bringing in her own experiences, sometimes unashamedly so, in a way that will connect with readers. You might not feel like you’re reading a gardening book while going through The Seed Underground, It’s more like a collection of short stories with a central theme. It’s that entertaining. Let’s also say its critical reading for those who want to know where their food comes from and have decided to grow their own. I can’t think of a better way to spend a few of these cold winter nights ahead of spring than reading Ray’s book.

Real Food vs. Fake Food Uncategorized

75 Percent of all ‘Honey’ Sold in Stores Contains no Honey at All

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Just because those cute little bear-shaped bottles at the grocery store say “honey” on them does not necessarily mean that they actually contain honey. A comprehensive investigation conducted by Food Safety News (FSN) has found that the vast majority of so-called honey products sold at grocery stores, big box stores, drug stores, and restaurants do not contain any pollen, which means they are not real honey.

For the investigation, Vaughn Bryant, one of the nation’s leading melissopalynologists, or experts in identifying pollen in honey, and director of the Palynology Research Laboratory at Texas A&M University, evaluated more than 60 products labeled as “honey” that had been purchased by FSN from ten states and the District of Columbia.

Bryant found that 76 percent of “honey” samples purchased from major grocery store chains like Kroger and Safeway, and 77 percent of samples purchased from big box chains like Sam’s Club and Wal-Mart, did not contain any pollen. Even worse were “honey” samples taken from drug stores like Walgreens and CVS, and fast food restaurants like McDonald’s and KFC, 100 percent of which were found to contain not a trace of pollen.

The full FSN report with a list of all the pollen-less “honey” brands can be accessed here:

http://www.foodsafetynews.com/2011/…

So what is all this phony honey made of? It is difficult to say for sure, as pollen is the key to verifying that honey is real. According to FSN, much of this imposter honey is more likely being secretly imported from China, and may even be contaminated with antibiotic drugs and other foreign materials.

Most conventional honey products have been illegally ultra-filtered to hide their true nature

According to FSN, the lack of pollen in most conventional “honey” products is due to these products having been ultra-filtered. This means that they have been intensely heated, forced through extremely tiny filters, and potentially even watered down or adulterated in some way prior to hitting store shelves.

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) holds the position that any so-called honey products that have been ultra-filtered are not actually honey. But the agency refuses to do anything to stop this influx of illegitimate “honey” from flooding the North American market. It also continues to stonewall all petitions to establish a national regulatory standard for verifying the integrity of honey.

Ultra-filtering eliminates and destroys all medicinal properties of honey

Assuming that there is any real honey at all in the phony honey products tested by FSN, the removal of pollen and other delicate materials via ultra-filtering renders them medicinally dead. Raw honey is a health-promoting food that can help alleviate stomach problems, anemia, allergies, and other health conditions. Ultra-filtered honey is nothing more than a health-destroying processed sugar in the same vein as white table sugar or high fructose corn syrup.

The good news is that all of the honey products FSN tested from farmers markets, food cooperatives, and “natural” stores like Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods, were found to contain pollen and a full array of antioxidants and other nutrients. Local beekeepers are another great source of obtaining raw, unprocessed, real honey.

Be sure to read the entire FSN report at:
http://www.foodsafetynews.com/2011/…

Source:

http://www.naturalnews.com

Agriculture biomass Environmentalism Green Energy Sustainability

The Beginning of a Forest – Starts Here…The Carbonwood Project

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Heres a great idea from Central America

Carbonwood Project | Central America
The Carbonwood Project practices “transformational agriculture” by acquiring marginal unproductive land, planting, managing and harvesting non-food source biomass to produce biofuels.
They will plant, manage and harvest a diverse mix of Millettia pinnata, Jatropha curcas, hybrid Paulownia, and Moringa oleifera trees as a socially responsible, transformational tree plantation in the Central America.
The Carbonwood project represents a “farms to fuel” production chain employing a decentralized cost-effective modular biofuel plant model.
Additionally the trees will be useful to remediate heavy toxins from the soil and groundwater and as an erosion control solution on large scale construction projects.
These specefic breeds of trees were selected based on their abilities to:
1.) Grow on marginal afforestation lands;
2.) The trees ability to sequester substantial amounts of CO2;
3.) Representing a non-food source biomass for biofuel production
4.) Been tested, proven, and approved by international agencies for large-scale exportation and can be found on every continent in the world.

The Carbonwood Plantation creates environmental and economic value through:

* Registered Carbon Credits;
* Global afforestation / reforestation / erosion control projects;
* Phytoremediation of contaminated soils and groundwater;
* Non-food-source biomass to biofuel generation;
*Commercial hardwood lumber production;

So go check this great project out at their website.

Tags biofuel, biofuel generation, biofuels, biomass, Carbon Credits, Carbonwood Project, Central America, CO2, green energy, Non-food-source biomass, Phytoremediation, reforestation, Registered Carbon Credits

Self-Reliability

Dad and Mom? Did There Used to Be Homes Without Gardens?

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Dad and Mom? Did There Used to Be Homes Without Gardens?

by JOHN ROBB (www.resiliantcommunities.com) on OCTOBER 14, 2012

It’s pretty amazing how quickly basic facts about how we live have changed.

For example: a little over one hundred years ago, nearly every household on this planet had a garden. It’s also probably safe to say that nearly everyone also knew the farmer that grew the food they didn’t grow themselves.

Today, in the developed world, most people don’t have food gardens and almost nobody knows who grows the food they buy at the supermarket.

Simply, we made a radical shift in how we live without much thought. From self-reliant independence to vulnerable dependence in a blink of a historical eye. Not too smart.

Rather than discuss why this shift happened, it’s more important to focus on why in a few short years, nearly every household will have a garden again AND why almost everyone will personally know (and trust) the farmers and artisans that produce the food they don’t grow, preserve, or prepare themselves.

Why is this going to happen?

In the short-term, it will be driven by necessity.

Over the long-term, it will be driven by a desire for the improvements in the quality of life and economic abundance it delivers.

Unfortunately, don’t expect any government mandate or program to help you make the shift.

In fact, as we have seen so far, the opposite is more likely. Portions of the government and many big corporations will oppose it since it challenges monied interests.

The real drive of the shift to food abundance will happen because people will choose to do so.

People and communities voting with their hands, minds, and pocketbooks for the following reasons, likely in this order:

Security. Local food provides protection from increasingly severe disruptions in global food production and supply lines.
Economic. Local food production can save you money, particularly if you have a garden. Local food also creates a network of local jobs that improve the prosperity of your community.
Health. Local food isn’t only better tasting, it’s safer. You get to know and have a say in HOW your food is grown. To develop trust with the people growing it. It’s a vast improvement over being treated as a guinea pig by the GMO (genetically modified organisms) food industry and ill-served by an intentionally understaffed government health inspection system.

As the more opportunistic and entrepreneurial resilient communities finally reach the goal of producing most of what they consume locally and demonstrate the prosperity and quality of life improvements it provides (many of which will be led by people who are subscribers to my upcoming Resilient Strategies newsletter), we’ll start to see a flood of attempts to replicate that success globally.

Hopefully, these late starts won’t be too far behind to avoid substantive damage.

Resiliently Yours,

JOHN ROBB

PS: Local food, energy, water and micro-fabrication makes you and the community where you live, MUCH more resilient. For new readers that aren’t up to speed on resilience. Resilience is the ability to bounce back quickly from damage, failure, and disruption. If you are into comics, resilience is similar to the way spider man recovers his footing and bounces back after being slugged by a super villain. Mental, economic, personal, familial, and community resilience will be the most important indicator of future success in an increasingly turbulent 21st Century.

PPS: Here’s a very interesting, professionally design kitchen garden (here’s the detailed diagramfor how it is laid out to maximize production and control pests). There’s a blog covering its construction at Country Living.

Urban Gardening

Students Grow and Donate Over 100 Pounds of Food

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Students in the Study Garden Club sort and weigh some of their harvest to donate to the local food bank

Winter is firmly here; the sweet memories of warm weather, green grass, and a thriving garden are becoming more distant. Though new excitement comes along with snow (snow angels and subsequent snow ball fights, followed by hot cocoa indoors), the nostalgia of running out to the garden, sans shoes and socks, can hit hard. Especially for kids; a month might as well be a year–a whole winter seems a lifetime!

Will summer ever come back? To keep the memory alive, it’s fun to look back at the previous growing season. Not just our own fun pictures (of which we have hundreds), but also pictures of what other people have grown.

I found this series of pictures on Facebook, and was utterly thrilled. The school, Study Elementary, is in our school system. I’ve driven past Study hundreds of times, but have never visited–though now I’m so fascinated by the work of the Garden Club that I’m pondering: how odd would it be for a stranger to request a visit during the growing-garden months?

The coolest thing about the Study Garden Club is this: The club set a goal to grow and donate 100 pounds of food to our local food bank. When they tallied up their totals, they had surpassed the goal; 114 pounds of fresh produce had made its way to Community Harvest food bank. What an amazing success! I looked and found that a local newspaper noted the donation here, at this link.

Every school should have a garden, and a Garden Club with active membership. Enjoy these pictures of Study Garden Club. My little crew of gardeners and I loved seeing what Study’s students grew, and can’t wait until it’s time to get back out and try some new ideas for ourselves. Perhaps we will even try our hand at growing a cotton plant (as you’ll see in the following pics, Study did just that) this upcoming season!

Some of the fresh tomatoes donated to Community Harvest

Uncategorized

The Story of Glass Gem Corn

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Wow! This corn looks so beautiful! I’d love to try growing some! -Andi

The Story of Glass Gem Corn: Beauty, History, and Hope

By Steven Thomas |

If you’ve spent any time online lately, you might have noticed a striking photo making its rounds. Feast your eyes on Glass Gem corn: a stunning, multi-colored heirloom that has taken Facebook and the blogosphere by storm. With its opalescent kernels glimmering like rare jewels, it’s easy to see what the buzz is about. This is some truly mind-blowing maize.

For the staff at the Tucson-based seed conservation nonprofit Native Seeds/SEARCH, the viral explosion of interest in Glass Gem has been thrilling—but not surprising. As the proud stewards of this variety (along with the bioregional seed company, Seeds Trust) we are lucky enough to have grown and admired this extraordinary corn ourselves. Rest assured, this is no Photoshop sham. It is truly as stunning held in your your hand as it is on your computer screen. When you peel back the husk from a freshly harvested ear to reveal the rainbow of colors inside, it’s like unwrapping a magical present. And this is a gift that is meant to be shared far and wide.

Like many heirloom treasures, Glass Gem corn has a name, a place, and a story. Its origin traces back to Carl Barnes, a part-Cherokee farmer living in Oklahoma. Barnes had an uncanny knack for corn breeding. More specifically, he excelled at selecting and saving seed from those cobs that exhibited vivid, translucent colors. Exactly how long Barnes worked on Glass Gem—how many successive seasons he carefully chose, saved, and replanted these special seeds—is unknown. But after many years, his painstaking efforts created a wondrous corn cultivar that has now captivated thousands of people around the world.

Approaching the end of his life, Barnes bestowed his precious seed collection to Greg Schoen, his corn-breeding protégé. The weighty responsibility of protecting these seeds was not lost on Schoen. While in the process of moving in 2010, he sought out a place to store a sampling of the collection to ensure its safekeeping. Schoen passed on several unique corn varieties to fellow seedsman Bill McDorman, who was owner at the time of Seeds Trust, a small family seed company then located in central Arizona. (Today, Bill McDorman is Executive Director of Native Seeds/SEARCH.) Curious about the oddly named Glass Gems, he planted a handful of seeds in his garden. The spectacular plants that emerged took him by surprise. “I was blown away,” McDorman recalls. “No one had ever seen corn like this before.”

The story of Barnes, Schoen, and their remarkable corn is not unusual. For millennia, people have elegantly interacted with the plants that sustain them through careful selection and seed saving. This process, repeated year after year, changes and adapts the plants to take on any number of desirable characteristics, from enhanced color and flavor to disease resistance and hardiness.

The bounty of genetic diversity our ancestral farmers and gardeners created in this way was shared and handed down across generations. But under today’s industrial agricultural paradigm of monocropping, GMOs, and hybrid seeds, this incredible diversity has been narrowed to a shred of its former abundance. A 1983 study compared the seed varieties found in the USDA seed bank at the time with those available in commercial seed catalogs in 1903. The results were striking. Of the 408 different tomato varieties on the market at the turn of the century, less than 80 were present in the USDA collection. Similarly, lettuces that once flourished with 497 heirloom varieties were only represented by 36 varieties. The same held true for most other veggies including sweet corn, of which only a dozen cultivars were preserved out of 307 unique varieties once available in the catalogs. Though this data leaves some questions around actual diversity decline, the trend toward dwindling crop diversity is alarming. In just a few generations, both the time-honored knowledge of seed saving and many irreplaceable seeds are in danger of disappearing.

Though much of this diversity may be gone, all hope is not lost. The emergence of a breathtaking heirloom variety like Glass Gem reveals that the art and magic of seed saving lives on. It reminds us that we can return to this age-old practice and restore beauty, wonder, and abundance to our world. Indeed, this renaissance is already underway. The rising seed library movement is encouraging local gardeners to become crop breeders and empowering communities to reclaim sovereignty over their food. Our pioneering Seed School program at Native Seeds/SEARCH is training people from all walks of life in building sustainable local seed systems rooted in ancient traditions. And as eye-popping images of Glass Gem continue to spread around the world, Carl Barnes’ kaleidoscopic corn has become a beacon—and perhaps an inspiring symbol—for the global seed-saving revival.

To Purchase Glass Gem Seed

Many people have contacted us looking to obtain Glass Gem seed. We are currently sold out of the small quantity we had in stock, but there are plans to grow out a substantial amount this summer. Fresh seed should be available by October 2012. In the meantime, we have set up a waiting list for all who wish to purchase Glass Gem. Click here to be added to the list, and you will be notified as soon it becomes available. Native Seeds/SEARCH members will get priority access; click here to become a member. For those that have asked about its edibility, Glass Gem is a flint corn used for making flour or as a popping corn. Unlike sweet corn, it is not edible right off the cob. However, it was likely bred as an ornamental variety—for obvious reasons. Many of these exquisite ears are simply too beautiful to eat.

We encourage everyone who grows Glass Gem corn to rejoin the ritual of seed saving by setting aside your favorite selections for replanting the following year. Share seed with your friends and neighbors, organize a seed swap, or start a seed library in your community. Support Native Seeds/SEARCH in our work to conserve and protect Glass Gem corn along with the nearly 2,000 rare, aridlands-adapted crop varieties we steward in our seed bank. Your efforts and energy make a difference. As Carl Barnes has taught us, all it takes is one person to create a more colorful, diverse and abundant world—one seed at a time.

Original Article HERE