Tiny House Dweller as Contemporary Hermit in the Garden

...erend hermit grew The moss his bed, the cave his humble cell, His food the fruits, his drink the crystal well. It’s not too great a step from this picturesque melancholy to full desert father style escape from the consumer matrix. Right now we’re riding high on an economic boom. Inevitably there will be another bust. No sane person knows when that bust will happen again, but when it does I predict we’ll see more garden hermits and fewer tech bros....

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Best Practices for Gardening in Contaminated Soil

...est practices for dealing with contaminated soils. You should always: Wash fruits and vegetables from your garden. Also wash your hands and don’t wear shoes in the house. Compost, compost, compost! Compost dilutes the overall amount of lead in soil and encourages healthy plant growth which also dilutes the (usually small) amount of lead a plant will uptake. Apply compost annually since it breaks down over time. Plant away from painted surfaces of...

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Lessons from the 2018 Theodore Payne Garden Tour

...ticket contest winner (who gave us the most beautiful basket of home grown fruits and preserves ever–thank you Donna!) came to the same conclusion. We’ve hired a designer, which is why our backyard looks like a strip mine: A crew took out an ugly concrete patio last week and has been digging down to lower the level of the new patio they will install. The old patio was above the level of the sill plate and was causing the back part of the house to...

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Ill advised grafting projects

...the level of nicotine was within acceptable ranges, tobacco-grafted tomato fruits were considered to be safe for consumption. Self-grafted tomato cultivars also had flowering time onsets almost 11 days earlier. However, self-grafting caused 6.0% and 7.6% less total fruit yield per cv. It does remind me of the unsuccessful attempt back in the 1970s to graft hops onto cannabis root stock with the goal of creating a legal looking plant containing THC...

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Composting: Nothing is Wasted

...es, combined with, perhaps, a greater recent emphasis on eating more fresh fruits and vegetables, but oddly, we’re somehow wasting 20% more now than we did in just back in 2000. The response of the industry to our guilt is–of course–to offer us more crap to choke the landfills new consumer products to address our needs, everything from smart refrigerators which promise to keep veggies longer, to plastic storage containers with replaceable charcoal...

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