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for scheduled maintenanceHow to Grow Organic Food for Family Economic Survival
This page is about:
Learning how and why to grow your some of your own organic food and the reasons
why that is important for you, your family and society.
There is no act more gratifying, more basic,
more liberating, than to coax food from the Earth. Time
and the rhythms of nature become the ultimate template by
which to live. Do it just to know that you can do it, or
do it just to live or do it to save money.
You want to talk
truly useful skill-set?
Learn how to grow some or most of
your own food or teach others how to do the same.
&If you have
access to a deck, a roof, a patch of ground no larger
than a flower bed or far more space, you can, with some of the resources listed on this page learn to feed
yourself and others. Any reasonably intelligent person
with time or patience or internet access can learn as
much about soil and gardening as the most experienced
farmers knew a hundred years ago--putting it into practice
takes time however, today is the day to begin a
Imagine going out and picking dozens of different kinds
of vegetables that grow with little or no maintenance and re-seed themselves
year after year just like plants in a meadow.
Or envision a small plot of intensely rich soil that feeds your
family with less than an hour of labor per
using less time and energy than many
Americans waste on maintaining cosmetic lawns.
Imagine hundreds of pounds of different fruits
coming from trees in your backyard. It can be done but you will
need to learn some of the basics.
information herein is to help everyone from the novice to the experienced
gardener without burying you in details.
There are no ads here. We're not out to sell you
anything. There are no donation boxes.
We're self taught in html. (Yes, we could use a designer).
Here's how this page is laid
out: Click the links to go directly to that section.
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The quick and easy guide to getting
1. Stop applying all
pesticides, fungicides, weed killers and sprays in and around your entire
garden. No exceptions.
2. Start small, 25 square feet
for example. Find the spot that ideally has sun all year in your
yard. If it's shaded part of the year, that's OK too. Avoid the area
next to buildings or fences because of possible contamination of the
soil by paint, heavy metals or chemicals.
3. Remove whatever debris is
covering the soil including rocks larger than a fingernail. If plants
already grow there that
you want somewhere else, dig them out with the shovel and plant them in the new location.
4. Cover your gardening area
with organic material such as leaves, dried grass and fine
plant material from your own or other's non-pesticide sprayed
5. Get a bucketful of good
compost from someone else's garden or crumbly black sweet-smelling
soil from under forest trees. Spread this thinly all over your
garden. You will be inoculating your soil with all manner of soil
organisms, little bugs, worms and other beneficial life forms that
are going to do most of the work for you in improving your soil.
6. Use the pick or shovel to
mix the top 3 inches of soil and organic material. Burying the
organic material any deeper just kills the critters and wastes your
energy because there may not be enough oxygen for them further down.
7. Keep the soil damp like a
wrung out sponge, not soggy. Once again, you need air in the soil for life.
8. Never walk on your soil.
Make a kneeling board out of
a small piece of scrap plywood to avoid compacting the soil and use an old cushion
to save your knees.
Create the minimum width paths to be able to reach across
a four foot wide bed from both sides.
9. Obtain vegetables in 4" square pots, a common size, or get plants from friends.
Dig a hole slightly larger than the rootball, squeeze the sides of the pot
to unstick the plant, moisten the rootball, fluff it's roots sideways and plant it. Mulch
around it on the surface with organic material like leaves or straw to keep the soil moist underneath it.
Water the root ball with a slow drip such as a bucket with a nail hole to allow air to be pulled down after the water.
10. Start your own compost heap
in a corner of the garden. Skip the gimmicks, tumblers, boxes and devices. Just heap up all the clean organic
material that you can get and mix it up occasionally, keeping it as moist as a wrung out sponge. Apply the
compost periodically to the soil around your plants as a light dusting or use it to
start your own seeds in a 50/50 mix of native soil and compost.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++=====
highly effective gardening techniques for those who want to progress and produce lots of vegetables.
The essence of creating conditions that produce
large quantities of high quality healthy food in a small
illustrated newspaper story.
University of California
http://vric.ucdavis.edu/main/veg_info.htm
simple effective thing that you can do
Begin a compost heap. Find an out of
the way place in your garden and make a
pile of leaves and grass. Save your
coffee grounds and filters, fruit
peels, tea bags, fruit cores in a milk
carton on the kitchen counter and then mix them with the leaves.
Throw a handful of dirt on top of the
pile and stir it with a shovel. Nature
will do the rest.
_______________________________________
About soil:</FONT Hundreds of generations of knowledge about soil is at your fingertips here.
A highly valuable site
for beginners:
Long and T the biology and
science of soil
Incredible website with tremendous
variety of information and techniques of soil
How to build new topsoil: solid
An important article from the Organic Consumers Association
Another incredibly useful site:
Richmond Grows,
A public seed lending library as well as a forum to provide educational materials so that every community in America and the world can establish their own seed lending libraries.
General info:
Make soil of the best
quality from table scraps and garden waste.
You can buy an expensive
ceramic compost holder for your kitchen or you
can make one for free like this:
&#91;pages 3-3 through 3-13&#93; click
"next page" on the bottom or top right to move to next
Mini-Farming
Think about these numbers:
money do 24 people
have to earn to buy food for a week? How many hours would
24 people have to work to earn that money, costing how
many commute hours?
Beautiful Canadian Government Site about
the philosophy, rewards, successes and social mechanics
of home/neighborhood farming and food independence.
From the Organic Consumers Association:
What's On My Food? is a searchable database designed to make the public problem of pesticide exposure visible and more understandable...we built this tool to help move the public conversation about pesticides into an arena where you don’t have to be an expert to participate.
""Is Dirt the New Prozac?
Injections of soil bacteria produce serotonin&#151;and
happiness.
In the time it took you to read this line, 17 people have been born. 2,000 tonnes of CO2 have been emitted worldwide.
The Worst Case
Scenario: Why you should learn and apply these techniques for personal and family survival.
The following is long and
grim. Don't read it if you want a tranquil life.
<FONT SIZE="+2" /free/ww3/100303_eating_oil.html
-------------------
Here's a historical analysis of why societies and empires that destroy their soil and the environment destroy themself.
Read it and you'll appreciate why becoming a serious gardener is one of the best things that you can do
for your financial health, the planet, for western civilization--plus it's a lot of fun.
Here's how much food an "average" American family eats in
a year. A little bit of "legal" and "permissable"
pesticide in every mouthful
adds up to a lot.
So what's wrong with a
little pesticide residue anyway?
Cancer, birth
defects, learning disabilities and more...from
pesticides?
If you don't already know about this, the
links below are a start in your education about
pesticides.
There is far more than just
pesticide information below this point. You're only a
quarter of the way into the page.
in your self interest to learn about these chemicals
&So just what's in the
non-organic
food that you're
shows you what there is in NON-organic
food and its effects on you. If you don't care about
yourself at least check out the bad things that you are
feeding to your kids.
Genetically engineered 'food' and it's effects on
your children.
Three national chains in the U.S., Trader Joe's,
Whole Foods and Wild Oats have already committed to
removing GE ingredients from their store brand
An EPA-approved pesticide is worse than the one
it's replacing
"......"Just before approving methyl iodide in
October, the EPA received a blunt letter &#91;PDF&#93;
signed by 54 prominent scientists, including the Nobel
chemist Roald Hoffman, laying out the case against the
compound. "Alkylating agents like methyl iodide are
extraordinarily well-known cancer hazards in the chemical
community because of their ability to modify the
chemist's own DNA," the scientists warned"....""methyl
iodide is so carcinogenic that scientists have used it
for years to induce cancer in laboratory tissues.
April 20, 2011
"In a new study suggesting pesticides may be associated with the health and development of children, researchers at the University of California, Berkeley’s School of Public Health have found that prenatal exposure to organophosphate pesticides – widely used on food crops – is related to lower intelligence scores at age 7.
The researchers found that every tenfold increase in measures of organophosphates detected during a mother’s pregnancy corresponded to a 5.5 point drop in overall IQ scores in the 7-year-olds. Children in the study with the highest levels of prenatal pesticide exposure scored seven points lower on a standardized measure of intelligence compared with children who had the lowest levels of exposure...."
Finally, here are the affects of the pesticides on
non-organic foods that you buy at the market.
Here's an example of how dangerous
chemicals are ubiquitous in conventional food:
From the magnificient online book
"Tangerines generally do not have good
keeping quality.... To prolong storage life,
pads impregnated with
the fungistat, diphenyl, have been placed in shipping cartons.
The chemical is
partly absorbed by the
and Federal regulations
allow a residue
of only 110 ppm. Storage trials
have shown that washed and waxed 'Dancy' and 'Sunburst', with 2 pads
per carton,
absorbed more than 110 ppm in 2
weeks at 70&#186; F (21&#186; C)...Storage of unwashed 'Dancy' fruits
for 2 weeks at 39.2&#186; F (3&#186; C) with 1 pad per
showed diphenyl absorption below
limit. Unwashed 'Sunburst' fruits
with 2 pads can be stored 4 weeks without absorbing
diphenyl. Early-harvested
tangerines are less susceptible to decay but
apt to absorb an excess
of diphenyl."
want another
(non-organic) tangerine?
But aren't government
regulators protecting us from unsafe levels of chemicals in foods
produced by big companies?
Read this for an introduction to the
concept of the "revolving door" between
government service and employment
contracts.
What's your body burden of
toxic chemicals?
The corporate clod clowns' chorus:
"Organic food is too expensive! Americans want cheap food..."Here's the ultimate in cheap factory food. Nice and
inexpensive. You're not going to eat this stuff are
you? You want to really save money on food? Behind every McD's there is a grease drum of used oil. Why you could bob for french fry bits in that all daylong for free?
Measuring food by the
A huge and varied site about the mechanics of growing different
vegetables and fruits.
Crop information and fabulous links to a constellation of
resources. This guy's site actually makes mine look
organized!
Just because it's labeled "Organic" doesn't
mean you should accept it. You need to support the small local
growers and processors that invented the organic food industry and
who do good things with the money you spend. Here's an example of the
bad guys that have muscled into the organic food
"...Cascadian Farms and Muir
Glen are owned by Small Planet Foods which is owned by
GENERAL MILLS, whose principal investors are PHILIP MORRIS,
EXXONMOBIL, GENERAL ELECTRIC, CHEVRON, NIKE, McDONALD'S,
TARGET STORES, STARBUCK'S, MONSANTO, DUPONT (weapons &
pesticides), DOW CHEMICAL (Agent Orange, breast implants,
napalm), PEPSICO, ALCOA ALUMINUM, DISNEY (exploit Third
World labor), TEXAS INSTRUMENTS (weapons: one of GW Bush's
top contributors), PFIZER. General Mills is also being
boycotted for animal rights abuse...".
Here is a link that takes you
-you'll be
BACK TO GROWING YOUR OWN FOOD:
A great page about the
philosophy and science of growing your own food in a sustainable
&Here's what can be done by a dedicated
and hardworking family. 1/10 of an acre in the middle of the city.
"Let's face it. Our world is in deep, deep
trouble and we are the "troublemakers." We have to make real,
difficult changes yesterday. Despite the obvious benefits, we are not
going to recycle, compost, or talk our way out of
Our leaders, being politicians, are not
leaders at all but are bound to be followers, who just won't be there
for us in a crisis. So, it's up to me and you to make the choice of
becoming responsible stewards of the earth."
&-------This
back yard produced the following crops only
after it was mere dirt, concrete and grass. On 1/10 acre =
4.360 square feet.
from May 7 to November 11, 2001
Strawberries
Squash Summer
Mixed Berries
Peppers 145
Squash Winter-
More information on this garden, see
UPDATE: as of 12/31/03 this garden produced a total of
6,000 lbs of food in one year on 1/10 th of an acre--and
remember the fruit trees haven't matured yet!
About this urban farm from the L.A.
Times. January 25, 2007
July 2006-"Three Tons of Produce"
best overall description of why one should grow their own
from an essay:
Mollison, 1981
This guy is the father of Permaculture and is a visionary and hero.
"Agriculture is a destructive
What are the strategies by which we don't
need agriculture? Agriculture is a destructive system. Well, we need
a lot more gardeners. Gardeners are the most productive, most
hands-on sort of agriculturists. They always have been. There never
has been any debate about it. When you make a farm big, you just
accept a suddenly lower productivity and yield, but less people get
it. That is why it is economically "efficient." When you talk about
efficient farming of this order, you are talking about dollars. When
you reduce the size of the owned landscape, providing you don't
reduce the lots to less than a quarter of an acre, the agricultural
productivity goes up. You get a lot of arguments to the effect that
breaking up large farms into five acre blocks is uneconomic. Five
acre blocks are. One to one-quarter acre blocks are not. They are
highly productive.
Now gardeners. How many gardeners are
there in the United States? Fifty-three percent of households now
garden. They garden only 600 square feet on the average. They make
something like $1.50 a square foot. These household gardens are
producing 18% of the food in the United States, at a value almost
equivalent to total agriculture."
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
A well-written and
concise series of steps that one can take to become an independent
producer of their own food.
Harvey and Ellen Ussery,
http://www.permacultureactivist.net/intro/PcIntro.htm
"My own sense of
homeland security is enhanced...when I know there is
prime farmland not far from my home that provides me with
healthy food. I feel more secure knowing that I possess
enought rudimentary gardening and food skills to grow and
process some of my own food and, even more reassuringly,
there are still many nearby farmers who have the training
and experience to operate commercial agricultural
operations." Mark Winne
"In England, you find people in
the villages who have got fed up with the rat race and
have started to farm their gardens and take part-time
You think that it's not
happening in America? At what point does one give up
searching for a "Job", the opportunity to pay taxes,
to commute, to do grunge work with no future? Many
have given up. The Informal Economy is their
salvation...
Why growing your own organic food is the best and most
liberating action you can take for the future of our republic, the
health of the real economy and as a means of hurting the really bad
Did your grandparents ever give you seeds from the old country
or the homestead? They might be the last of their kind on earth. How
to save them for the future:
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
organization that saves and sells heirloom seeds and allows people
who save their own to distribute them. There is has been a controversial firing of the originator of Seed Savers Exchange, Kent Wheatley, by the new board of directors. We no longer recommend them.
Please find local organizations that do seed saving in your area. We recommend this seed saving group that can send you a kit to establish your own seed saving library in your home town.
http://www.richmondgrows.org/index.html
--------------------------------------------------------
Yet another reason to save your own heirloom seed from the Wall
Street Journal:
"Indeed, Monsanto has already agreed to apply its biggest
biotechnology breakthrough to Romo seeds. Scientists from Mr. Romo's
company, Empresas La Moderna SA,
(and was probably drenched in
roundup pesticide).
But...there is a threat on the horizon to
people that want to grow their own food:
Here's how
corporate American agribusiness is going to make it
illegal to trade seeds of any kind, or even grow native
plants on your own
Think we're kidding? Welcome to the nightmare world of
the "approved plant list".
STOP THE WHITE LIST!
in Africa, Asia,
South America. There is no reason that people can't grow their own
food here to protect their health, save money and become more
independent.
A fabulous eclectic
about small scale, community and
biointensive agriculture.
From In-Context magazine.
&Why food prices
are climbing and how you can protect your community and family from
this threat.
This is how much an
average American family of 4 eats a year: (Yes, it's the same
picture you saw before.)
How will they survive if the
"just in time" 3 days from- farm- to- table supply lines of food
are interrupted by Natural or man-made disaster?
The definitive short
article on cheap petroleum=cheap food.
See what the
those large trade organizations with lobbyists scurrying all over
Washington is saying about this just in case you think that we are
alarmists or espouse some minority viewpoint.
So what happens when a country
is cut off from petroleum-fertilizer-natural gas and agricultural
supplies? North Korea starves to death-except for the Communist Party
leaders of course.
Cuba after the centrally run
economy was cut off from the Soviet Union did things differently and
with great success.
How erosion caused by
conventional farming is destroying the world's ability to
feed itself.
That's southern Lousiana and the
Mississippi River dumping topsoil into the Gulf of
Organic farming not only prevents
this, it builds new soil.
More resources for learning how to grow your own food:
Books about gardening and ecology
online. Download them. Free, that's a good price for invaluable
knowledge.
Are you discarding edible parts
of vegetables and not knowing it?
Secondary Edible Parts of
Vegetables
----------------
A phenominal history of agriculture from Purdue University
an incredibly through and well constructed set of links to
PERMACULTURE & REGENERATIVE AGRICULTURE sites.
place to learn from others. Enormous number ot topics and regional
subjects. Unfortunately this is loaded with ads and ads served from outside advertisers and so it's quite slow to load.
Long (but useful) explanations of all factors involved for
the uninitiated.
Why organic farming preserves soil: A nice explanation of
dangers of artificial
fertilizers:
A mini-lesson from a fabulous
Fatal H the tragedy of Industrial
Agriculture
"We know that the
massive use of synthetic fertilizers to create artficial
fertility has had a cascade of adverse effects on natural
soil fertility and the entire soil system. Fertilizer
application begins the destruction of soil biodversity by
diminishing the role of nitrogen-fixing bacteria and
amplifying the role of everything that feeds on nitrogen.
These feeders than speed up the decomposition of organic
matter and humus. As organic matter decreases, the
physical structure of soil changes.
With less pore space and loss
of their sponge-like qualities , soils are less efficient
at retaining moisture and air. More irrigation is needed.
Water leaches through the soils, draining away nutrients
that no longer have an effective substrate on which to
cling. With less available oxygen,the growth of soil
microbiology slows, and the intricate ecosystem of
biological exchanges breaks down. Acidity rises and
further breaks down organic matter. As soil microbes
decrease in volume and diversity, they are less able to
physically hold soils together in groups called
aggregates.
Water begins to erode these
soils away. Less topsoil means less volume and
biodiversity to buffer these changes. More soils wash
away. Meanwhile, all these events have a cumulative
effect of reducing the amount of nutrients available to
plants. Industrial farmers address these observed
deficiencies by adding more fertilizer. Such a scenario
is knows as a ne a more blunt
comparison is substance abuse." Link:
Read table of contents and more excerpts at this
Lovely study from Denmark:
In Denmark, during World War II, due to a food
crisis, many domestic animals were slaughtered and their
grain rations fed to humans. Consumption of white bread
was stopped, and replaced by a bread made from a
wholemeal of 67% rye, 21% oats, and 12% bran, called
Kleiebrot. Consequently, the death rate fell to the
lowest level ever registered in Europe. There were
significant declines in the incidence of high blood
pressure, heart disease, kidney problems, diabetes, and
cancer, and there were no cases of digestive troubles
(Marine & Van Allen, 1972; Day, 1966).
Misc stuff:
Yes, you can get a peach to
grow on a plum tree.
Magnificent online course
from Ohio State University.
A brilliant site with all
manner of practical hands-on things.
a New Mexico Organic garden site with an interesting design
philosophy
Check out the Urban
Farmer newsletter link at the bottom of their page.
&Huge page of resources having to
do with homesteading, food storage, tools etc.
Yet more reasons to avoid
Section on food irradiation is 1/2 down the article.
It is true that if a food irradiation industry can
be created, it will soon sop up all available cesium-137,
and thus create a demand for more. This would require the
government to start rethe cesium would become the
responsibility of states, thus relieving the federal
government of an enormous radwaste problem. processing
nuclear waste instead of burying it in the ground
somewhere...
How to raise food&|&