But where to put it all? Our winter squashes went on the bookcase in the hall, on a high shelf just out of reach of the dogs. It isn’t as cool as I’d like there, but we’ll just have to eat them sooner this year. Maybe by next year we will have some sort of root cellar, maybe even combined with the possible chicken house we talk about.

Our dehydrator gets used a lot. That bowl is not actually full of snakes… it contains our favorite summer squash, an heirloom called Zucchino Rampicante from Baker Creek Seeds. We grew it for several years in the highlands of central Mexico, and it did well for us this year too, our first year gardening at this house in Colorado. I highly recommend it — instead of getting fat like zucchini, it goes long and curvy.

I used to have a picture of me wearing one of these in the logo of this website, til several people told me they thought I was wearing a snake! Anyway, although the zucchino rampicante is easier to give away than plain ol’ zucchini, it can still get out of hand now and then. The larger of the two canning jars there contains dehydrated zucchino chips. and I haven’t decided yet if that will be the fate of the ones in the bowl. They are also excellent in stir-fries.

The other jar contains some of our tomatoes, dried. Sure cuts down on the space. I’ve had the 4-tray Excalibur dehydrator for so long that they don’t make it anymore, but when it needed a fan replaced last year, Excalibur had the part. Kudos to them. Recently a gardening friend of mine asked my advice about whether to get the 5 tray or the 9 tray model. I said it depends on what size batches you like to do. She got the nine-tray one and has been very busy with it since. Here it is; click on it to see it at Amazon.

Not that my trays would look that neat if my life depended on it!

The tomatoes were in some baskets but it was too hard to see if they were turning color or going bad, so I pulled out a couple of cafeteria trays that are very useful to have around. Now we can keep up with the tomatoes, or if not, I will dry more of them. Some years I’ve wrapped them in newspaper and put them in a cool place and we have been able to eat fresh garden tomatoes well into winter, but this house just doesn’t have any cool places that aren’t already full of other things.

Our carrots will be fine in the ground outside; we may dig a pit to store the potatoes…

Ah, it’s really fun to be wrapping up a satisfying gardening season!

This article came from: Storing Garden Produce in a Small House at SimpleGreenLiving.com..

In one of the most beautifully created books I’ve seen short of expensive art books, she writes about how she and her family became the core of what became the SSE. Her passion for saving valuable old heirloom seeds and keeping them from dying out runs through just about every page of the book. I was moved and inspired.

I’ve gardened mainly with heritage seeds and so unknowingly I am one of the many who owe these dedicated people a big thank you!

The book is personal autobiography woven with the story of meetings, a house where seed collections threatened to take over every inch that Ott Whealy, her husband Kent, and their children lived in! Since she and I are of the same generation, I specially enjoyed her stories of different eras.

A terrific, important, and visually pleasing book, highly recommended! It’s available at http://www.seedsavers.org/Details.aspx?itemNo=B1392. And while you’re there, browse around the site and learn more about this group. You might want to become a member or buy some wonderful seeds.

This article came from: Gathering: Memoir of a Seed Saver, by Diane Ott Whealy at SimpleGreenLiving.com..

Baker Creek Seeds...Image by Brande Jackson via Flickr

Last night I sorted through my packets of seeds, most of them heirlooms from Baker Creek Seeds, and pulled out a few to plant this afternoon. Here in Colorado at 8,000 feet it will be a while till we plant outside, but our small greenhouse has space for some lettuce, bok choy, radishes, and a few other things. Think I will plant a few tomatoes to transplant outside later, and some sweet peppers.

Gardening is becoming more important to us, and we are not alone. More and more people are taking up gardening, or resuming it.

Some reasons:

• Food prices are rising in general
• Non-organic produce is hard on the earth and on us, but organic veggies can be pricey and often not great quality if picked weeks or months before
• You can’t get the flavor any other way, except maybe by buying local produce in season
• The cost of produce that travels a long way is getting worse, both invironmentally and economically
• It’s a really good skill to have!

Here’s a new blog post I just came across and really liked: Garden as if Your Life Depended On It, Because It Will. The writer, Ellen LaConte, talks about the coming decades and how important gardening will become. Well worth taking a look!

Now off to work on our garden beds outside!

This article came from: Gardening Becomes More Important at SimpleGreenLiving.com..

We were busy getting settled in during the fall, and didn’t get around to planting the greenhouse till mid November.

Out of doors, it has gotten as cold as 29 degrees below at night here. At first we were using a small heater in the greenhouse, but it does have insulating shades we put in at night AND a small hot tub which radiates some warmth. So we got brave…

… and stopped using the heater. The coldest it has gotten to since then inside the greenhouse is about 25 degrees.

The plants seem to do just fine with these slightly-below-freezing temperatures. Most of them are brassicas like kale, kohlrabi, and brussels sprouts. Our bok choy has been doing great too.

Starting about a month ago, we’ve been eating quite a few greens from the garden. Here are some I collected a few days ago. The ones on the left I stir-fried lightly.  We ate the ones on the right in salads.

This article came from: Winter Greenhouse Gardening in Colorado at SimpleGreenLiving.com..

One of many amazing things about this program is that it was filmed over 25 years of friendship between John Peterson, the farmer, and Taggert Siegel and Terri Lang, the filmmakers.

John Peterson grew up on the family farm, taking it over as a teenager when his father died. He went to nearby Beloit College and discovered a more bohemian lifestyle. Many of his friends hung out at the farm, and that didn’t sit too well with the traditional folks in his area. Financial problems forced him to sell most of the family land, and he went off to Mexico to regroup.

When he returned, his feisty and inspiring mother lent him the money to start farming again on his remaining 22 acres. He worked 80 and 90 hour weeks, this time growing organic vegetables. His mother — now in her 80s — sold them at a stand and loved doing it. Eventually he confessed to her that the backbreaking work was getting to him, but she said the stand was her life. He kept on, and we are so glad that he did. He goes  biodynamic in his growing methods, and the last bit was so satisfying that I won’t tell you how things go for him and the farm!

Visit the farm’s website: angelicorganics.com

You can also rent the program from Netflix as we did, get  The Real Dirt on Farmer John at Amazon, or watch most or all of it at youtube. Here is the first segment:

This article came from: The Real Dirt on Farmer John: Review at SimpleGreenLiving.com..

Bees.... Image via Wikipedia

There’s a brand new how-to DVD just out from from the Back Yard Hive folks. It’s about an hour and a half, but they have kept the price to a low $19.95 to reach as many people as possible. I heard a couple of these people speak in my town a while back and I am impressed with their devotion to bees!

Here’s the blog post I wrote back then.

And here are the contents of the new DVD:

1. Features of the Top Bar Hive
2. The Location of the Hive
3. Setting up Your Hive
4. Finding Bees for your Hive
5. How to Capture a Swarm
6. Introducing Bees into the Hive
7. About the Bee Colony
8. How the colony is Organized
9. Working with the Bees
10. Adventuring into the Hive
11. Single Comb Harvest
12. Processing Honey
13. Fall Preparations
14. Preparing your Hive for Winter
15. The Future

Impressive!  Find out more at Back Yard Hive.

This article came from: Alternative Beekeeping Using the Top Bar Hive and The Bee Guardian Methods at SimpleGreenLiving.com..

He’s got a newer book out on the same topic, The Winter Harvest Handbook: Year Round Vegetable Production Using Deep Organic Techniques and Unheated Greenhouses, so I wasn’t sure about adding this one to my blog, but evidently both are selling well at Amazon.  This is an increasingly important topic, as we move toward greater self-reliance and local food.

I really like the way Coleman writes. His books are sometimes on my bedside table, interesting enough for a bit of reading but not likely to keep me awake!– Zana

If you love the joys of eating home-garden vegetables but always thought those joys had to stop at the end of summer, this book is for you. Eliot Coleman introduces the surprising fact that most of the United States has more winter sunshine than the south of France. He shows how North American gardeners can successfully use that sun to raise a wide variety of traditional winter vegetables in backyard cold frames and plastic covered tunnel greenhouses without supplementary heat. Coleman expands upon his own experiences with new ideas learned on a winter-vegetable pilgrimage across the ocean to the acknowledged kingdom of vegetable cuisine, the southern part of France, which lies on the 44th parallel, the same latitude as his farm in Maine.

This story of sunshine, weather patterns, old limitations and expectations, and new realities is delightfully innovative in the best gardening tradition. Four-Season Harvest will have you feasting on fresh produce from your garden all through the winter.

Click on the image to read more about it at Amazon.

This article came from: Four-Season Harvest: Organic Vegetables from Your Home Garden All Year Long at SimpleGreenLiving.com..

Many years ago, my mother had a garden in Southampton, NY, near the ocean on Long Island. She collected seaweed on the beach and used it for mulch. What I remember most was the abundance of tomatoes that she grew, along with beans, lettuce, cucumbers, squash, and numerous other things.

This afternoon, I came across her garden notebook for 1978 and read through it. Here are some of the excerpts regarding tomatoes. She was diligent about logging how many she picked, but she must have been less diligent about logging how many she froze or gave away, as you can tell from the numbers below. She and my stepdad couldn’t have eaten all the rest… could they?

I hope this inspires you to grow tomatoes sometime!

May 8 and 9. Planted Big Girl tomatoes (raised from seed) in garden.

May 31. Clarence gave me 6 fine tomato plants. Put 3 near western edge of garden and used 3 to replace some poor-looking home-grown tomato plants.

June 14. Started making new wire cages for tomatoes — always forget how hard and time-consuming a job it is, even with my good new wire cutters.

June 15. Finished making wire cages and put them up. Tomatoes seem very small for this late in the spring. Most of the ones I bought [and didn't describe in her journal -- Zana] bloomed before the plant was more than a foot high — a bad sign? Pinched out the blossoms but I don’t know.

June 27. At last, the tomatoes look like tomatoes should!

July 7. The tomatoes look really great. Quite a few green ones.

July 31. One tomato is showing yellowish color; many have the white-green color.

August 3. Picked a few beans and the FIRST tomato. It’s yellowish, rather than ripe, but it was pulling the branch down so much that I thought I might as well pick it. — All the tomatoes (most) have a whitish cast; they seem small to be getting ready to turn.

Aug 13. Picked 3 small ripe tomatoes.

Aug 14. Picked 3 tomatoes.

Aug 15. Picked 5 tomatoes.

Aug 16. 5 tomatoes.

Aug 17. Picked about 5 tomatoes.

Aug 18. Picked about a dozen tomatoes.

Aug 19. Picked 10 tomatoes.  Discovered yesterday that some of the tomatoes are no good inside — some kind of dark spreading rot. Don’t know what it is.

Aug 20. Picked 49 tomatoes. Gave some to neighbors, froze some for soups in the winter.

Aug 21. Picked about30 tomatoes.

Aug 22. Picked 11 tomatoes.

Aug 23. Picked 39 tomatoes. Froze about 8 pints of tomatoes.

Aug 24. Picked 42 tomatoes.

Aug 25. Picked 20 or more tomatoes.

Aug 26. Picked about 20 tomatoes.

Aug 27. Picked 10 tomatoes.

Aug 30. Picked 108 tomatoes, including some green and some small.

Aug 31. Picked 8 large tomatoes.

Sept 1. Picked 22 tomatoes. Froze 11 pints.

Sept 2. Picked about 50 tomatoes.

Sept 3. Picked 25 tomatoes. Froze 5 quarts.

Sept 4. Picked 14 tomatoes, sent some to Mary. Several tomato plants have gotten topheavy and fallen over, pulling the wire cages with them. Must find a better way to grow them.

Sept 5. Did not pick anything. (Tired of it all and working on my book of short stories.)

Sept 6. Picked 60 tomatoes.

Sept 7. Froze 5 quarts tomatoes.

Sept 8. Picked about 12 tomatoes. Gave them and some from inside to Sylvia.

Sept 9. Picked about 35 tomatoes.

Sept 10. Sent 10 tomatoes to George. Harvested 15 or 16 tomatoes. Pulled some falling-down tomato cages back up into position and propped them up with long-handled tools (spading fork, etc.).  Froze 2 qts. tomatoes. Picked 3 more tomatoes.

Sept 12. Picked a dozen tomatoes (and picked and threw away about 10 others — quality is beginning to deteriorate).

Sept 14. Picked 12 tomatoes.

Sept 15. Picked about a dozen tomatoes.

Sept 17. Picked 8 tomatoes and gave them to neighbors who walked by.

Sept 19. Picked 13 tomatoes.

Sept 20. Picked 17 tomatoes.

Sept 21. Picked tomatoes, forgot to note the number.

Sept 22. Picked about a dozen tomatoes.

Sept 24. Picked 2 tomatoes, one green, one ripe but not good.

Sept 25. Took tomatoes to neighbors.

Sept 26. Picked 7 large tomatoes.

Sept 27. Picked 4 large tomatoes.

Sept 28. Picked 4 large tomatoes.

Sept 30. Picked 5 tomatoes.

Oct 1. Picked 5 or 6 tomatoes — mostly quite green. They seem to ripen faster in the house than in the garden. Still some green ones on the vines.

Oct 2. Picked about a dozen green tomatoes and took a couple to Barbara.

Oct 3. Picked about 20 green tomatoes and threw alway nearly that many bad ones!

Oct 5. Picked about 7 tomatoes.

Oct 6. Picked abot a dozen green tomatoes. Cleaned up some of the tomato plants.

Oct 9. Picked 8 tomatoes, one red the rest green.

Oct 10. Picked about 40 green tomatoes. Some already in house have turned out to be wormy. Ugh!

Oct 12. Picked about a dozen green tomatoes, but threw away some I’d been saving in the house — suspicious of worms, probably unduly.

Oct 16. First light frost last night in the front yard. No sign of frost in the garden except one wilted tomato branch. Spent about 2 1/2 hours cleaning up squash and tomato plants. Have done 12 tomato plants — another 18 or 20 to go.

Oct 17. Worked about 2 1/2 hours cleaning up tomato plants. Did 8, have about 10 to go. Brought in about a dozen green tomatoes.

Oct 19. Must have been a real frost last night — the remaining tomato plants are reduced to nothing but stems and fruit. Maybe this is the easy way to clean them up? Just let them freeze?

Oct 21. Found one perfect, red-ripe tomato, not frozen, though most of the half dozen or so remaining vines froze the other night.

Oct 28. Finished taking down tomato vines.

This article came from: Tomato Gardening with Abundant Results at SimpleGreenLiving.com..

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

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 SimpleGreenLiving.com..

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 SimpleGreenLiving.com..