Weeds into Fertilizer

...things that plants need for healthy growth. This makes nettles useful for making your own fertilizer. They can accumulate nutrients and minerals in their biomass. When they break down in a compost pile, or in this case in the water, they release the nutrients. Many of these elements can be difficult for other plants to access in the soil. Nettles just happen to be very good at taking up nutrients from relatively poor soil. The point here is let y...

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Straw Bale Garden Part III: Adding Fertilizer

...es prevents fertilizer from running off when you’re trying to water it in. Fertilizer Issues Buying a high nitrogen fertilizer, even an organic one, is a bit of a conundrum. I object to chemical fertilizers, like urea, on philosophical grounds, but blood meal, a byproduct of our industrial food system, doesn’t make me feel much better. Urea would be a lot cheaper. Perhaps the best solution would be human urine. Throw a week-long party, serve a lot...

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Making It

...ctions for a wide range of projects, from building a 99-cent solar oven to making your own laundry soap to instructions for brewing beer. Making It is the go-to source for post-consumer living activities that are fun, inexpensive and eminently doable. Our goal in this book was to provide really stripped down, simple projects that use only inexpensive, easy to source materials. We also tried to use the same materials and ingredients over and over a...

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Interview With Apartment Gardener Helen Kim

...an they were this time last year. I’ve been using Dr. Earth fertilizer and making fertilizer tea. HE: Did you choose your apartment with the idea that you’d be gardening in it? If so, what should a prospective renter look for? HK: I had three main things on my mind when I was looking for an apartment: the place would need to comfortably house me, my dog, and my plants. There were so few buildings that would take a pet, so that narrowed the field c...

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