043 Growing Vegetables with Yvonne Savio

...isode of the podcast we pick her brain about: Why you should grow your own food. Favorite vegetables. How to harvest vegetables. How to prepare a vegetable garden. Making compost. The problems with municipal compost. Raised beds vs. growing in the ground. Where to buy soil. Testing soil. How to irrigate vegetables in a drought. Buried buckets for watering vegetables. Seeds vs. seedlings. Succession planting. How to plant seedlings. The website and...

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Cat Litter Compost, Installment #3

...n down all the way through. I still wouldn’t put it as it is anywhere near food crops, even though it is two years old, just to be safe. To make it extra safe — and useful — I’ve been letting the worms have at it. I’m using it as part of the mix that forms the worm bedding, so cat poo will become worm poo and the garden will be delighted. That’s how I plan to dispose of all of it, bit by bit. If I didn’t have the worm bin, I’d call it done and spr...

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The Lament of the Baker’s Wife

...think we’ve got at least 200 lbs of flour piled up here. And where will it all go eventually? Straight to my hips, sweetheart! And I know I shouldn’t complain. “We have too much food!” “There’s nowhere to put it!” “All this artisanal sourdough is making me fat!” Boo hoo. This the lament of the baker’s wife....

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Does Compost Tea Work?

...epticism. Thankfully, I can now point towards the eXtension.org webinar on making and using compost teas that I’ve embedded above. I’ll oversimplify things a bit with a few of my own bullet points inspired by what Dr. Lynne Carpenter-Boggs, Associate Professor of Sustainable and Organic Agriculture at Washington State University and Catherine Crosby, a Ph.D. candidate in Soil Science at Washington State University had to say in the webinar. Due to...

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A viewing suggestion from the media arm of Root Simple

...outside world, to the electric light burning beside me. Bless the BBC for making Tudor Monastery Farm (a title which I believe would not fly on American television). This is a quiet series showing three historians/archeologists at play in the Weald & Downland Open Air History Museum, trying out some of the skills they’d need to be tenant farmers to the local monastery. It has some of the structure of a reality show, but it seems that no one reall...

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