Using fallen leaves as free organic weed blocker





width=”550″ height=”316″ /> Just out of curiosity I got my hands on the USDA food database and had a little fun in Excel and the results were pretty interesting. Assuming I wanted to figure out what vegetables I could grow in my garden had the highest nutrient density. I wrote a formula for each nutrient from Vitamin A to Zinc what percentage rank across all of the foods did…
It is fairly uncommon for me to see these little green bugs on my peas. In case you didn’t guess these are pea aphids, which suck juices from the plant leaves ad spread disease between plants. This is a rare occurrence because normally it is warmer and drier this time of year and we would have our annual ladybug release to take care of these little pests. If the…
width=”549″ height=”412″ /> This is not the first time visitors have stolen tomatoes from my garden, but this year the mystery pest has gotten every ripe tomato I have grown this year, which given out cold/wet summer has only been about a dozen ripe tomatoes. I normally go with the philosophy of this land is owned by my neighborhood animals first and I am fine sharing a tomato, some…
“University of Texas, Austin. Davis claims the average vegetable found in today’s supermarket is anywhere from 5% to 40% lower in minerals (including magnesium, iron, calcium and zinc) than those harvested just 50 years ago.” Not only are those vegetables you been eating at the grocery store less tasty, but may be getting marginal nutritional value. They discuss some of the potential factors in this including use for synthetic…
I have been having a losing battle with cattails for the past couple years. This was what was lurking under my snow peas after I pulled them out. The problem with cattails is they do not emerge until the temperatures increase and given their broad root structure trying to remove them will most likely kill the plants (in this case peas) surrounding them. If you attempt to pull cattails…
We all know if you walk into a grocery store the organic produce is always more expensive than produce grown using non-organic methods. Using deductive reasoning it seems easy to determine that this would mean growing vegetables organically will cost me more than if I used non-organic methods. What is a cheap vegetable gardener to do? One disadvantage (and advantage) to organic fertilizer is that it is not as…