Category Archives: Gardening

Ever Hear of a Moringo Tree?

I was using Stumble Upon today when I came across this article about the Moringo tree. Very interesting!

Interesting enough that my husband and I decided to buy some seeds for it.

<>Normally I like to think about local plants, but this one produces food as well as grows quickly, which really cuts down my resistance. My husband and I have agreed that as much as possible when we own our own place, decorative landscaping will be local plants, but we’ll still have a garden.

The Moringo grows quickly, which is a part of the attraction. My son’s bedroom heats up worse than any other part of our house, so something that grows quickly enough to shade it would be a huge help for our heating bills. And since it doesn’t require great soil, and apparently can grow in dry areas, we have hopes for this being a good choice for our area.

One of the catches is that it requires a lot of pruning. But if the leaves are edible, I don’t think pruning will be too big a deal.

We’ve already ordered our seeds from Seedman.com. Hopefully they’ll come quickly and within a few weeks I may have more to report.

Are Bumblebees Vanishing?

There’s a somewhat disturbing report on Discovery on how bumblebees appear to be vanishing. People don’t pay nearly as much attention to them as they do to honeybees, which we already know have been in trouble.

bumblebee

Reading this article made me think. I haven’t seen bumblebees much lately in my area. They were never so common as honeybees, but they weren’t rare.

From the article:

But if bumblebees were to disappear, farmers and entomologists warn, the consequences would be huge, especially coming on top of the problems with honeybees, which are active at different times and on different crop species.

Bumblebees are responsible for pollinating an estimated 15 percent of all the crops grown in the U.S., worth $3 billion, particularly those raised in greenhouses. Those include tomatoes, peppers and strawberries.

As more of these problems show up it becomes all the more clear that we need to pay attention to what is happening in the natural world. Pollinators are one of the most vital links in the entire food chain no matter what it is you like to eat.

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A Green Lawn

It’s been horrendously hot here. Lots of wilting plants when we aren’t careful enough about watering. Most obvious to others, of course, is the lawn.

My own standards for the lawn are pretty low. I don’t need a golf course green lawn. I just need a place my kids can play.

One tip for this I heard on my local news a while back was to simply water less often, but water more deeply. Deeper waterings help the lawn for longer, and can use less water overall. I believe he said something like an inch of water a week would keep an adequately healthy lawn. I don’t know that I reach that much watering even, but I might. I’ve never put a gauge out to be sure.

We rent, and the landlord has a yard service that does what I consider to be a pretty poor job of lawn care. In other words, weeds are taking over, but all they do is cut the lawn. On the plus side, I guess that makes the care more or less organic. The minus is of course that some of the weeds aren’t exactly as good as grass for kids to play on. Another minus would be that they haul the clippings away.

If you have more control over how your yard is cared for, sites such as SafeLawns.org can be a huge help. Not everyone will like all the advice, such as allowing clover to grow, but many of their tips just make sense.

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Organic Farming Can Do the Job!

I found this post about how organic farming can indeed feed the world quite interesting. It goes so contrary to the old claims that pesticides and chemical fertilizers are the only way to produce enough food for the entire world.

There are two reports on this, one from the University of Michigan, the other from the USDA. There’s a good summary on the NewScientist website. The most interesting part is that while organic methods would decrease food production somewhat in developed nations, in developing countries organic farming could increase food production by as much as 80%.

It won’t necessarily be easy, of course. From the NewScientist article:

Carl Pray, at University of Rutgers, New Jersey, US, says there is good evidence that small-scale farming in developing countries is more efficient. This is probably because small farms put more effort in the precise management of small areas of land.

But, he says, “the likelihood of all farms reverting to ‘small farmerdom’ is a big question in an age in which labour is becoming more and more expensive. Take China and India, for instance: the demand for labour is such that people are continually being pulled out of the countryside”.

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