I set up my worm bins in the unused and minimally heated second kitchen. My teenager thought it was gross, and my husband was dubious, but it did work! I’ve lived in a lot of different places since then and haven’t used my old copy of Worms Eat My Garbage lately, but think I will soon. — Zana

Description
The definitive guide to vermicomposting-a process using redworms to recycle food waste into nutrient-rich food for plants.

Newly revised and updated, this 162 page manual provides complete illustrated instructions on setting up and maintaining small-scale worm composting systems.

Topics include

• different bins,
• what kind of worms to use,
• sex life of a worm,
• preparing worm beddings,
• how to meet the needs of the worms,
• what kinds of foods to feed the worms,
• harvesting worms,
• and making potting soil from the vermicompost produced.

A 63 page bibliography, 24 annotated references, a glossary,and comprehensive index make this a valuabe reference book as well as a practical manual.

Worms Eat My Garbage: How to Set Up and Maintain a Worm Composting System

This article came from: Worms Eat My Garbage at Simple Living, Sustainable Living.

Planting Trees to Save the Planet
By Tomer Treves

We all know that our planet Earth is warming up and that something needs to be done on a global scale. However, until the governments of the world unite in action, we can all do our share and contribute to a worldwide effort to save our climate from going crazy.

One of the best things a person can do to help our suffering planet is to plant a tree. Yes, one tree can make a real change. If you ask yourself how one tree can make a difference, please read the next few paragraphs. A single tree means much more than what it may seem.

Trees generate a lot of oxygen and release it to our atmosphere. It’s difficult to imagine a large quantity of oxygen, so it makes it easier to grasp when translated into the all encompassing currency – money, or more precisely, the US dollar. In a lifetime, one tree generates $31,250 worth of oxygen. Now, that’s a big number, right? But it’s far from being the sole contribution.

Trees also clear our air by absorbing air pollution. And they clean a lot of air. Again, to put this into perspective, the easiest way is to quantify air pollution control in monetized terms. Be prepared for another big number here… In a life time, a single tree provides $62,000 worth of air pollution control. Nice. Now take another breathe, because it’s not all yet.

Trees also recycle water by absorbing them and using them again and again. Put a dollar value to this process, and you get that one tree recycles in its lifetime $37,500 worth of water. And the same process goes for the soil – the tree’s roots hold the earth together literally and prevent precious soil erosion. By now I guess you’re asking, well, how much? And the answer is staggering. In a life time, one tree controls $31,250 worth of soil erosion.

A quick calculation yields that one tree contributes to our planet positive measurable actions worth $162,000. And you know what? This sum still doesn’t reflect the entire contribution. Trees do more than that. Each tree shades, protects, and houses countless animals who in their turn take their place in the big plan of Mother Nature. And to add on top of all this, just look at a tree for a minute. Isn’t it beautiful? There’s no measurement for the beauty trees radiate around them; this is pure joy.

So, what are we all waiting for? If we could all just plant a single tree today, we will be talking about billions of dollars in contribution to the global efforts to improve our climate and save it from changing beyond the point of no return.

Planting a tree is very easy. It would take you about 10 minutes of your time and even less than a dollar to purchase the young tree. If you’re the kind of person who doesn’t like mud under the fingernails, there are other alternatives. A few online services offer planting trees in return for a money contribution. If you can afford it, please go ahead. A third option which is completely free is using an online search engine that uses its advertising revenues to plant trees, like the one I use (MyGoodPage.com) and you can find a little more about it in the About the Author section below.

Planting trees is a viable way to make a personal contribution to our environment. If you can plant even a single tree this week, you will be changing the world. Hey, and while you’re out there, please give the tree a hug for me…

Tomer Treves works as VP at Infolinks and writes the professional blog Online Siesta, about online marketing, digital advertising, website monetization and in text advertising. He’s happy to help http://www.MyGoodPage.com.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Tomer_Treves

http://EzineArticles.com/?Planting-Trees-to-Save-the-Planet&id=3530468

This article came from: Planting Trees to Save the Planet at Simple Living, Sustainable Living.

Make Money With No Start-Up Costs by Gardening – Three Ways to Do It

By Robert A Robertson

When people think of how to make money with no money from home, they seem to think mainly of office activities or perhaps of artistic endeavors. One way to work at home and make money that is often overlooked is by gardening. More and more people are wanting to eat locally produced food nowadays — for better flavor, freshness, and nutrition as well as to help cut the ecological burden of the oil used in transporting food thousands of miles.

From Your Garden

There are countless ways that gardening can provide income. You can grow vegetables, fruits, or flowers to sell at local Farmers’ Markets. Don’t like spending your Saturdays at the market? You can develop restaurant customers or regular retail customers from among your friends and their friends. Grow specialty plants for better prices. Dried flowers have their place, and edible flowers are very popular.

Admittedly, most gardening is seasonal but a small homemade greenhouse or cold frame can extend the season beyond what other gardeners in your area are doing.

From Your Kitchen

You can grow a lot of sprouts in a small space. They are so packed with nutrients that you can sell for them for good prices. Broccoli sprouts have a surprisingly tangy flavor and are extremely healthful to eat.

In Other People’s Gardens

Many people don’t have time to garden. Or they start a garden and don’t have time to keep it up. Perhaps they could manage all the gardening itself but don’t have the strength or skills to prepare the beds and dig in compost. All of these situations are opportunities for anyone who likes garden work. You wouldn’t necessarily even need to have your own tools.

These gardening ideas are just the tip of the iceberg for ways a gardener can make money with no money. Don’t limit your work-at-home thinking to business opportunities you might read about. Get out in your garden — or pull out your seed catalogs if it’s not gardening season — and see what ideas you can come up with! People love fresh garden produce and there will always be a market for it.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Robert A. Robertson advises people on ways that they can earn money. He finds that most people have more opportunities available to them than they realize. He works on a variety of website projects; one of his current ones is a business-to-business one about using paper shredding companies to handle document shredding, which must be done to a high level to be in compliance with government privacy regulations.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Robert_A_Robertson
http://EzineArticles.com/?Make-Money-With-No-Start-Up-Costs-by-Gardening—Three-Ways-to-Do-It&id=3465763

This article came from: Make Money Gardening at Simple Living, Sustainable Living.

• ISBN13: 9781603580298
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher.

Product Description
The first edition of Gaia’s Garden, sparked the imagination of America’s home gardeners, introducing permaculture’s central message: Working with Nature, not against her, results in more beautiful, abundant, and forgiving gardens. This extensively revised and expanded second edition broadens the reach and depth of the permaculture approach for urban and suburban growers.

Many people mistakenly think that ecological gardening—which involves growing a wide range of edible and other useful plants—can take place only on a large, multiacre scale. As Hemenway demonstrates, it’s fun and easy to create a “backyard ecosystem” by assembling communities of plants that can work cooperatively and perform a variety of functions, including:

• Building and maintaining soil fertility and structure
• Catching and conserving water in the landscape
• Providing habitat for beneficial insects, birds, and animals
• Growing an edible “forest” that yields seasonal fruits, nuts, and other foods

This revised and updated edition also features a new chapter on urban permaculture, designed especially for people in cities and suburbs who have very limited growing space. Whatever size yard or garden you have to work with, you can apply basic permaculture principles to make it more diverse, more natural, more productive, and more beautiful. Best of all, once it’s established, an ecological garden will reduce or eliminate most of the backbreaking work that’s needed to maintain the typical lawn and garden.

Gaia’s Garden, Second Edition: A Guide To Home-Scale Permaculture

This article came from: Gaia’s Garden: A Guide To Home-Scale Permaculture at Simple Living, Sustainable Living.

Ruminating while I was walking,  I started making a list  of ways you could make money from your garden. Some of these would even be possible from an urban garden.

Here are a dozen ways:

1. Grow specialty veggies to sell.

2. Extend the growing season with a greenhouse or coldframe. This gives you items to sell earlier and later than most other gardeners.

3. Grow flowers to sell. Used to be that dried flowers were particularly in demand; nowadays, I’d guess edible ones also would be.

4. Sell the above at a local weekend market, in season.

5. With enough land and energy, start a CSA or Community Supported Agriculture.

6. Make jam from fruit you grow, or dried tomatoes, or otherwise add value to the produce you grow.

7. Grow herbs to sell. Mint, basil, echinacea, parsley, cilantro, and others are herbs I’ve grown successfully.

8. Dig garden beds for gardening newbies who don’t know how to start or for people who can maintain a garden but don’t have the strength to start one.

9. Think long term and plant fruit trees.

10. Go around to any local B&Bs or restaurants and ask if they would buy from you. Ask what they would want to buy.

11. Start plants early in the spring and sell the seedlings.

12. Grow sprouts and sell them. This would work in an urban kitchen, depending on local regulations.

Readers, ideas? Anything you have done or have thought about?

This article came from: Money from your Garden at Simple Living, Sustainable Living.

This is a way of keeping bees that is completely different from what I remember when a friend kept bees years ago. He was always talking about how much he got stung, the need for smoke, how much honey he harvested anyway, and so on. The whole thing seemed to me like all-out war between him and the bees. Did I have any interest in beekeeping after that? Ha.

But this week I heard a talk by a couple of people from Back Yard Hive, and it got me so enthusiastic that I signed up to be notified when they do a class in my area of Colorado. The difference: these people are working in harmony with the bees. They see themselves as guardians of the bees, helping them to survive.

For example, they don’t remove the honey in the autumn, when there is the most of it and the bees don’t want it removed. No, they wait till early spring when the bees are ready to get going on the new year’s honey. They get less honey of course, but they are operating in a respectful way!

I asked several questions. One was about how many stings a beekeeper might have to endure, with memories of my friend from long ago. It was a crowded location and a little hard to hear, but two different people, Corwin and a woman whose name I didn’t hear, were quite reassuring on two counts: the top bar hive is designed so that you don’t upset the hive much at all when you do harvest honey. Here’s a bit from the FAQs on their website about that:

The Backyard Hive differs substantially from traditional hives in that you don’t need to remove the entire top of the hive to see what is going on inside the hive or to remove combs. With the Backyard Hive, you only remove a few bars at a time exposing only a few inches of the top of the hive. If you remove combs carefully and slowly, the bees won’t even care that you are there. Just brush off the few bees that remain on the comb as you remove it.

Plus they talked about things like slowing down your movements if the bees seemed upset and choosing your time of day to work — exactly what time varies with the season. Here’s a video they did:

This seems much more do-able than I ever would have imagined! I’ve got friends already doing it and may well join them after a while! Whether or not you are serious about it, do take a look at the Back Yard Hive website. One comment about the site: When I first browsed the Shop page, I saw items for $295 and $350 and I gulped. Great if you want those, but further down the page they give away downloadable plans to make your own.

This article came from: Top Bar Bee Keeping at Simple Living, Sustainable Living.

Thanks to Emma Holister of http://www.art-margin.com/ for several articles—one on sprouting earlier, and now this 3-part series how to grow a micro-greens salad.For larger images, just click on any one of these pictures. —Zana

29) When you’ve harvested all the greens, you can compost the remaining root mat in your own compost bin so that after two or three months of recycling your soil mats and vegetable scraps, you can use your own compost rather than having to buy it from your local gardening shop.  Doing a compost system is very simple, with a pair of bins.  To start off, take a bin, drill holes in it for drainage:

30) The bin will need to be elevated for drainage, I have used three equal height broken bricks for this.  Set them up either outside…

31) …or inside, on a large plant pot tray to catch any drips or stray dirt.  The final set up of two bins, one for putting in your fresh soil mats and vegetable scraps, the other one full and sitting for two or three months to reach maturity, can be put in a kitchen corner, under a table, or in a cupboard.

32) Put your remaining soil mat into the bin.

33) Chop it up with a small hand spade.

34) Add your kitchen vegetable scraps.

35) Mix well with a gardening hand fork.

36) And cover.

This method of reclaiming topsoil is as important a skill to learn as growing the shoots themselves.  Knowing how to produce good quality soil is essential.  The art of composting is the foundation of self sufficiency.  Just buy a handful of compost earthworms from your local gardening shop and this method is complete.  Once the first bin is full, begin filling the second, only returning to the first to turn it once a week and it will reach maturity and be ready to use again after two or three months.

This article came from: Making Your Own Micro-Greens Salad, Part 3 at Simple Living, Sustainable Living.

Thanks to Emma Holister of http://www.art-margin.com/ for this 3-part series from her on how to grow a micro-greens salad. The first part was published yesterday, and the last will be tomorrow.

For larger images, just click on any one of these pictures. —Zana

11) Either buy a seedling tray from your local gardening store or make your own by drilling drainage holes in a shallow plastic undertray for a potted plant.  This one has a diameter of 31cm.

12) You will be placing your tray of planted seeds in another slightly larger tray for catching the water.  Your seedling tray will need to be elevated so as to permit the water to fully drain out of the soil rather than having it sit in a puddle.  Here I have used a floor tile broken into bits to provide four stable stones of equal height for elevating the seed tray.

Note for cat owners: if your cats roam freely in the same room as your seedling trays, you will notice that they rapidly transform into cat litters, as fresh soil is irresistible to our feline friends.  Either make sure that your beloved fluffies are shut out of the room for the period that you are growing the greens, or attach a system of protective mesh around the whole set up.  This can be done with sticks of bamboo tied to the table legs, around which you can attach the wire mesh.

13) Put the seedling tray on top of the stones in the under-tray and add two centimeters of (preferably organic) potting compost into the seedling tray and tamp down gently with your hand to provide a flat surface.  You can buy potting compost from any garden store and as you will be putting the remains, after harvesting the greens, into your own compost bin, you will soon be using your own home made compost free of charge.

14) Water the soil so that it is fully moistened.  The smaller the watering can the better because a larger spout is likely to disrupt the surface of the soil with an overly heavy flow.  I find that a children’s watering can is perfect.

15) Now the soil tray is ready to receive the seeds.  Take your jar and scatter the seeds onto the surface of the moist soil.  A few seeds will remain stuck in the jar, just turn it upside down and give the bottom of the jar a few knocks to make them fall out, if any still remain, gently remove them with your fingers.

16) Now, very gently so as not to damage the fragile shoots, spread the seeds out evenly on the tray of soil.

17) Sprinkle a light layer of soil on top of the seeds, just enough to cover them, and very gently tamp down.  This will prevent sunlight from harming the baby shoots that will now begin to grow upwards towards the sunlight of their own accord.

18) The top soil you have just put onto the seeds is dry and will need moistening.  However, pouring water on with a watering can will disrupt the surface of this fine layer of soil, exposing the seeds you have just covered.  Therefore, only ever moisten the top soil with a garden spray of water, as shown below.

19) After two or three days you will see that the little sunflower leaves are beginning to push through.  You will need to use your own wisdom with how much to water the soil in the first three days.  Often it is not necessary to water them at all, but in the hot months of summer, it is important to check that the soil doesn’t dry out.  If it dries out in the first couple of days, moisten only with the spray so as not to disrupt the soil.  However, once the leaves are pushing through, as in the picture below, you will notice that they rise up and at the same time raise chunks of soil into the air.  At this point the watering can is very useful so that water can seep through the soil to make it fall back down to root level.  Naturally, having soil suspended in the air in chunks above the leaves can prevent the sunflowers from growing efficiently.  If, after watering, there are still large lumps of soil suspended above the leaves, you can help it fall back down again by very gently poking it with the tips of the fingers, being careful not to flatten the whole mass down and trap the uprising shoots.

20) Here you can see how the soil naturally falls back down to root level after each watering session, exposing more of your leaves to the air and sunlight.  It is the sunlight which produces the beautiful green in your shoots.  This chlorophyl has highly healing properties as it cleans the blood and body in general of toxins, including the widely prevalent candida.

21) After a couple more days your shoots will be rising up and out of the soil and beginning to lose their black hulls.

22)  Here you can see a tray of sunflower greens that have very nearly reached maturity.  If any shoots have been completely uprooted with their roots being pushed upside down and upwards into the air along with the leaves, then just gently poke the roots back down into the soil with the tip of your finger.

23) After watering, when the leaves and remaining black hulls are moist, gently brush the tops of the leaves to help remove loose hulls.

24) Sometimes the black hulls can be rather stubborn and can be removed individually by very gently pulling the hull off with an extremely light squeeze.  If you apply too much pressure you will pull the leaves off entirely and lose a perfectly good shoot.  Avoid removing the hulls when they are dry as this is when they are stuck more fastly to the leaves.  The hulls can also be gently levered off by catching the lower, sharp point of the hull under the tip of the finger and lifting it up and off the leaves.  Any few remaining hulls will come off after the harvesting when you wash them in a bowl of water.

25) After a few more days, being sure to water the greens regularly, you should have a full tray of mature micro-greens ready to eat.

26) Take hold of them in a bunch and crop, with a pair of scissors, close to the base of the stems, but not so close you get lots of dirt.

27) Put the harvested leaves in a bowl and wash, ready to eat.  The best way to keep them fresh after harvesting is to wrap them loosely in a kitchen towel and leave in the fridge. The remaining leaves in the tray can continue to grow on your window sill, but be sure to harvest them before the shoots begin to sprout another pair of leaves per shoot, as that is when they become more bitter and lose their tastiness.

28) Do your favorite salad dressing, mix with other sprouts if you want, or eat them on their own.

[To be continued tomorrow.]

This article came from: Micro-Greens Salad, Part 2 of 3 at Simple Living, Sustainable Living.

Recently I posted an article by Emma Holister of http://www.art-margin.com/ on sprouting. Now here is a 3-part series from her on how to grow a micro-greens salad. If you’re not familiar with that term, you’ll easily see what it is from this article.

For larger images, just click on any one of these pictures. —Zana

Growing your own micro-greens is not only the easiest, cheapest and most rapid way to grow your own salads, but is also a guarantee of the highest nutrient level, freshness and organic purity of your food.

Sprouts and micro-greens have a far higher nutrient content than normal vegetables, for example lettuce, even if that lettuce is organic and freshly picked, something you are anyway unlikely to obtain from your local shop.  I recently saw in a central Nimes store a tiny handful of these same sunflower greens, packaged in polystyrene and plastic, being sold for over seven euros.

With rising food prices and the poor quality of the chemical-ridden produce sold in most stores, learning to grow your own organic greens indoors is potentially a life-saving art.  It is also a means to become self sufficient if you are able to produce your own organic seeds.  Two of the most delicious micro-green salads are black sunflower seeds and snow peas.

This demonstration is with black sunflower seeds.  You can grow the flowers in your garden throughout the summer and harvest the seeds to provide you with fresh salads throughout the year.  Sunflowers are easy to grow in a variety of climates.  I grew this batch of micro-greens end February/early March.  Because they are grown indoors next to a window in any warm room, it is possible to grow these salads throughout most of the year.  Only in the very dark and cold months of winter might this method need a supplement of electric lighting to boost its growth.

The average tray of micro-greens takes about a week to reach full maturity, at which point you simply harvest them with a pair of scissors and put the used soil mat into your compost bin where it will be recycled into fresh nutrient-rich compost within two to three months.  A rotation system of two compost bins can be set up outside or even under a table in your kitchen.  This method will be explained at the end of these instructions.

Black organic unhulled sunflower seeds are the best for growing micro greens because the seed pods come off the leaves more easily, producing a neater crop.  Attempting to grow greens from hulled sunflower seeds will produce messy crop full of rotten seeds, as not all of them are whole or alive after hulling.

1) Put three table spoons of seeds in a jar.

2) Fill the jar with water, preferably spring water or filtered.

3) As the seeds are full of air, they will float.  Some people like to jam them down with some type of weight.  However, I find that simply pushing them with the fingers so that they all become fully wet is sufficient, even if they continue to float.

4) As with your normal sprouts, cover the jar with mosquito net or muslin attached with an elastic band.

5) Cover so that the light cannot reach them, leaving them preferably in a shadey corner to assure maximum darkness for the seeds to flourish.  (The only time that seeds should ever be exposed to light is when they are pushing through soil to reach sunlight in the form of leaf shoots.  Therefore it is important to remember that all your dry seeds should always be stored in a dry, air-tight glass jar in a dark cupboard.  The jar needs to be air-tight to avoid mites getting in and feasting on the seeds.)

6) The next day your seeds will have rehydrated and swollen in size.

7) Pour out the water and hold the elastic band in place if you’re not sure it’s tight enough, otherwise you may risk dropping all the seeds in the sink.  As with all sprouts, refill the jar with water and empty it again, in order to rinse the seeds.  Always be very careful that you are indeed using the cold tap and not the hot, an easy mistake to make which will kill your seeds.

8) Put the seeds to sprout in just the same way as you do for your normal sprouts, on a dish rack, at an angle where the water can drain out easily onto a dish and the airflow is not blocked so that the sprouts can breathe easily.

9) Cover well to prevent any light from reaching the jars.  Light will inhibit the growth of sprouts.  Leave overnight, and the next day rinse the seeds and put them back to drain on the rack under the towel in order to grow for another day and night.  As with all sprouts, give them a rinse twice a day, morning and evening.

10) After a day or two the seeds will have begun to sprout white shoots outside of their hulls.  They are now ready to plant in a shallow soil tray.

(Parts two and three will be published tomorrow and the next day.)

This article came from: Beyond Sprouting: An Illustrated Guide to Micro-Greens Salad at Simple Living, Sustainable Living.