Read at : Google Alert - gardening

http://nation.ittefaq.com/issues/2008/06/23/news0218.htm

Homestead gardening becoming popular in Barind area

BSS, Rajshahi

Gardening around homesteads in both summer and winter seasons in the Barind region is becoming increasingly popular with production of different fruits and vegetables. Marginal farmers and the poor people in the vast region are mostly engaged in this venture by making the best use of spaces around their homes over the last few years. Department of Agriculture Extension (DAE) and Bangladesh Agriculture Research Institute (BARI) have been providing all-out cooperation with necessary training and required inputs to the farmers to grow fruits and vegetables for their own consumption and extra earning by selling those. DAE and BARI officials said that use of vacant spaces for producing fruits and vegetables has been seen as potential means for gradual development in the life of downtrodden in the region.

Read at : GoogleAlert - gardening

http://cashinattic.net/2008/06/20/indoor-gardening/

Indoor Gardening

A lot of people stick a fake tree in a corner, dust the leaves off every week, and call it indoor gardening, but indoor gardening has grown into much more than that lately. There are also a lot of people that thinks plants belong and should stay inside, but there are many reasons for starting an indoor garden. For instance, plants don’t only remove carbon dioxide from the air, they also remove many poisonous toxins and pollutants as well. Indoor gardening will result in beautiful decoration in your house as well as cleaner air. When picking out plants for indoor gardening, make sure the plants are adaptable and will be able to thrive in the conditions and setting in your house. Consider how much time you will be able to spend caring for the plants, how much light your house offers, and also how much money you want to spend on your indoor garden. If you are on a low budget, start with seeds or cuttings. If you have a little more money to dish out you can buy a plant that is already grown. Another thing to consider is if you want a plant that can be displayed all year or just for a season. Herb gardens are a good thing for indoor gardening; they are both attractive and edible. They will grow pretty quick and you won’t have to wait a long time to see results. Some popular herbs, especially for cooking, are chives, dill, sage, thyme, and oregano.

Read at : Google Alert - gardening

http://edition.cnn.com/2008/TECH/06/20/guerr.garden/

Guerrilla gardeners green their city on secret moonlit missions

By Lara Farrar
For CNN

LONDON, England (CNN) — On any given day amidst a backdrop of buses, buildings, cars and construction sites, Richard Reynolds can be found bent over pulling weeds, planting flowers or maybe even trimming some shrubs. Sometimes he does it in the morning or in the early afternoon. Often he goes out in the middle of the night because, he says, it’s calmer then, with only him and the plants and the city lights and the stars — and also because, in the darkness, he’s less likely to be arrested for digging up land that doesn’t belong to him. “I have been stopped by the police and threatened with arrest, which was very depressing,” said Reynolds. “They insisted I stop, which I did, but I went back an hour and a half later and finished off the job.” Reynolds calls himself a guerrilla gardener — a horticultural warrior who fights battles with flower bulbs instead of bombs to try to reclaim urban turf that has been neglected or altogether forgotten and beautify it back into green space for the enjoyment of all.

Read at : Google Alert - gardening

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/06/20/HOLIVKVK7.DTL

Let gardeners have the good yards

Scott Terry, Special to The Chronicle

Saturday, June 21, 2008

Sometimes the gardening bug chooses to infect the wrong people. For instance, I know a woman who is an ardent environmentalist and would grow her own tomatoes if she could. At some point in life she caught the gardening bug, but it’s all for naught. She lives in a condo. A shady condo at that. Which means her desire for growing tomatoes is wasted. That’s a shame. On the other hand, I know plenty of people who can’t catch the gardening bug to save their lives. I’ve seen their backyards and have surmised that they don’t know one end of a shovel from the other. Every once in a while, they might add some water to the mess of dead weeds or grass, maybe once every few weeks, which, I’d like to point out, is not what thirsty lawns are looking for. Of course, that’s all right by me. I don’t see the point of wasting water on grass, anyhow. I’d just as soon fill an unkempt yard with chickens. Or rows of corn. So I have a proposal to make. I suggest rezoning all of our urban neighborhoods into two categories: homes that can support a garden and homes that can’t. We could even divvy up the homes among people who garden and those who don’t. We would start by selecting locations with the most fertile soil and declaring their inclusion in a new “Urban Farming Zone.”

My Indian correspondent Yogesh PATEL has sent to me 5 kg of a new organic fertilizer he has developed. With my friends of the allotment gardens Slotenkouter in 9040 ST.AMANDSBERG (Belgium) we have set up some tests on different vegetables. In due time we will present a detailed report on the results. Today and with great pleasure, I can publish the first pictures showing the very positive effect on the growth of carrots. Please enjoy with us this remarkable success in one of the allotment gardens :

Edward VUEGHS in his nice allotment garden, showing proudly the effect of the PATEL- fertilizer on carrots.

Four rows of carrots sown the same day. A few weeks later the soil along the rows was treated from left to right as follows :

Row 1 and Row 2 (left) : carrots treated with a mixture of 4kg of PATEL-fertilizer per 80 kg of local garden soil.
Row 3 (center) : carrots untreated, growing in local, quite fertile garden soil.
Row 4 (right) : carrots treated with a mixture of 2 kg of PATEL-fertilizer per 80 kg of local garden soil.

See the remarkable difference in growth and this only 14 days after treatment.

Row 1 and Row 2 (left) : carrots treated with a mixture of 4kg of PATEL-fertilizer per 80 kg of local garden soil.
Row 3 (center) : carrots untreated, growing in local, quite fertile garden soil.
Row 4 (right) : carrots treated with a mixture of 2 kg of PATEL-fertilizer per 80 kg of local garden soil.

Still any doubts about the positive effect of PATEL’s fertilizer ?

In a couple of weeks, I will gladly inform you on the results of the carrot harvest by Edward VUEGHS. Stay tuned on the value of Yogesh PATEL’s organic fertilizer !

I am now wondering if this fertilizer can help us to combat drought and desertification. Therefore, I intend to use it in combination with our TerraCottem water and fertilizer stocking soil conditioner in some of the drylands, e.g. In the refugee camps in Algeria or in Tamil Nadu (India).

Yoghurt containers as mini-greenhouses

Already published at my desertification blog : http://desertification.wordpress.com

An interesting comment at “ianramjohn’s blog” : FURTHER THOUGHTS !

Read at :

http://ianramjohn.wordpress.com/2008/03/19/yoghurt-containers-as-mini-greenhouses/#comment-2090

Willem van Cottem of Desertification has a very interesting post about the use of transparent containers as mini-greenhouses. You can use them to get seedlings started indoors in the Spring, or in arid environments (since it cuts down on water usage prior to transplantation). They are also useful for transporting the seedlings.

I would be a little concerned about hardening the seedlings - that they might not be able to handle the desiccation without significant die-back - but I suspect that he has taken that into account.

MY REPLY (Willem)

Thanks for your appreciation and linking on your blog. I fully understand your concern about the hardening of seedlings developed in such “optimal” conditions. My experiments showed that it suffices to take off the covering pot for a short time every now and then. Exposure to the “indoor drought” in my house seems to harden the seedlings significantly and limits the possible development of fungi, e.g. moulds. More experiments in different conditions on different continents are certainly needed to fine-tune this method. It would be nice if people, setting up trials with such mini-greenhouses, send a short report with a couple of pictures to me at <willem.vancotthem@gmail.com>. I could then collect their information and summarize the possible advices for improvement.

Yoghurt pots as mini-greenhouses

Already published on my desertification blog : http://desertification.wordpress.com

A major part of my life has been dedicated to the combat of desertification and alleviation of poverty, in particular that of rural people in the drylands. One of my main objectives is to find cost-effective ways of helping these people to get better standards of life and to offer them opportunities to apply the best practices in that combat of desertification. Success stories have been registered in this combat all over the world. Unfortunately, these best practices are not yet applied at the largest scale. Although some very efficient and cost-effective technologies and methods have been developed and repeatedly described and recommended to decision-makers, their application rate is still dramatically poor. One wonders why it is seemingly more easy to spend billlions at enormous programs and projects than to provide reasonable financial means for large-scale application of the best practices. It sounds a bit discouraging, but it is not. The day will come that people will be aware of the necessity to turn to simple, but effective methods, instead of spending too much at non-productive initiatives. That is why my personal interest is focused on simplicity and cost-effectiveness, e.g. recycling waste or saving valuable seeds from the garbage bin (see our project “Seeds for Life” at http://zadenvoorleven.wordpress.com).

Continuously looking for new opportunities for container gardening, a wonderful method for producing food in the drylands, I recently did some experiments with transparent yoghurt pots. I thereby found an easy way to transform these pots into mini-greenhouses for a windowsill or a table close to the window.

Below you will find some pictures explaining the functioning of my new (?) mini-greenhouses, in which small quantities of seedlings can be grown before being transplanted. Maybe someone did the same before, but up to now I didn’t find traces of this method. Should you have more information, don’t hesitate to send it to me.

Advantages of this method could be :

* Possibility to grow seedlings indoors (even before Spring in temperate regions, like in Belgium).
* Possibility to grow seedlings with a minimal quantity of water (avoiding drought outdoors) inside the house in the drylands (not in the garden outside) .
* Easy way to check germination daily.
* Easy way to regulate moisture level in the “mini-greenhouse” (lifting the transparent yoghurt pot, covering the seed(lings), to aerate whenever needed).
* Opportunity to choose the right moment (dimension of seedlings) for transplantation.
* Opportunity to reuse the same mini-greenhouse multiple times (easy to clean after transplantation).

This is probably a method which could tremendously help rural people in the drylands. It suffices to offer them free heaps of “yoghurt pots” (which should not be littered anymore by people in the developed world, but washed and cleaned!) to have them growing seedlings of certain crops in an optimal way, without having to irrigate their garden daily with a huge quantity of water (isn’t saving water in the drylands a MUST ?).

I wonder if we could not set up local or regional collecting points for these yoghurt pots and offer them afterwards to NGOs for their development projects in the drylands. Impossible ? Anyway, it would be much easier than constructing a dam or boring well No. 126.417 !

Why ? Well, here are my pictures. Enjoy !

Using two yoghurt pots for one mini-greenhouse set :
Left : lid of one pot with lower part of the pot.

Right : another pot.

Click on the picture to enlarge it.
Mini-greenhouse before filling the cup inside with potting soil.

Left : lid + cup / Right : complete set of mini-greenhouse.

Left : cup with Sorghum-seedlings in potting soil.
Right : yoghurt pot used as cover.

Sorghum seedlings in mini-greenhouse. Top with 4 perforations to allow minimal evaporation and penetration of oxygen inside the pot.

Set of 3 mini-greenhouses with cherimoyas (Annona cherimola), lychees (Litchi chinensis) and sorgho (Sorghum bicolor).

Read at : Google Alert - gardening

http://www.greenhousecatalog.com/weblog/greenhouse-tips/rising-food-prices-make-greenhouse-gardening-more-attractive-and-economical/

Rising Food Prices Make Greenhouse Gardening more Attractive and Economical

June 19th, 2008 by Greenthumb

Not many consumers today would argue with that statement. With gasoline prices over $4 a gallon and diesel fuel selling for a good $0.80 cents above gasoline, everyone is feeling the pinch. Because it is costing more to transport produce, and farmers are raising prices to compensate for the increase in the cost of living, a gallon of milk now costs the same as a gallon of gasoline and fresh produce is nearly worth its weight in gold. For families with growing children at home, fresh produce is a necessity, not a preference, and putting a balanced meal on the table three times a day is becoming more of a challenge as the economy continues its downward spiral. The cost of food affects more than just our health and our wallets. The national poverty index is determined by multiplying the average cost of feeding a family. According to the US Department of Agriculture, the cost of feeding a low-income family of four has risen 6 percent in 12 months. For some families, that 6 percent increase in the cost of groceries means less fruits, vegetables and dairy products consumed each week to make up the price difference.

Read at : Google Alert - gardening

http://www.thebudgetecoist.com/main/container-gardening-green-video/

Container Gardening: Green Video

Container gardening is a great way to grow plants, vegetables and herbs without needing a lot of space. Herbs do especially well and can be grown right outside your kitchen door. In this video from About Eating, you’ll learn how to use an old farmer’s market basket to make a great container garden. Fill it with your favorite herbs and your cooking will be full of flavor all summer long.

Read at : Google Alert - gardening

http://www.bclocalnews.com/okanagan_similkameen/lakecountrycalendar/lifestyles/20438159.html

Urban gardening: tips for the growing season

Vancouver, BC (June 9, 2008 ) – Many Canadians are joining the Real Food Movement by growing their own fruits and vegetable in small city spaces with the help of Hellmann’s® Urban Gardens. Thoughtful planning and a sunlit window or balcony is all an urbanite needs to create a seasonal source of fresh food close to home. Locally grown crops have a higher nutritional value and make meals taste even better. Get started with these helpful tips from Hellmann’s and Evergreen.