It's true; you can spend one tenth what you do now on laundry soap. It costs 30 to 50 cents a load for commercial laundry soaps like Tide, Era and other brand names. Many people report using alternative soaps that work and cost them 2.5 to 3.5 cents a load – and these soaps eliminate the petroleum-based detergents making them better for you and the environment.As a first timer, it took me 45 minutes to make 2.5 gallons of liquid detergent that will be consumed at ¼ cup per load. That'... Read Full Story

As much as we possibly can, we should be examining our values, our locality, our abilities and rejecting corporations in favor of what we know and hold dear to ourselves or family. Even the family garden is paying the price of our inattention to what they are doing to our seed supply. The banks and Wall Street have proven we can't trust others to do what is right for our society as a whole.The more I delve into the journey of becoming as self-sufficient as I can and move closer to the lan... Read Full Story

I think every gardener should be a garden gambler, plant early gardens and pray.Don't be afraid to be a garden gambler and plant at least a small portion of your garden early if you have the space to play with. Plants like broccoli, cauliflower, Chinese cabbage, kohlrabi, cilantro, chives and parsley are just a few of the plants you can put out and take a chance on catching a cold night or two.Farmers always say agriculture is a gamble. Like farmers, we gardeners don't control the wea... Read Full Story

The ten minute garden continues to be very little work for an amazing amount of space. On two days within the same week I used a pitch fork to break up the soil and pile it into a heap in a four by four foot square bed. Make no mistake, I still have my huge garden, but I just want to see how much a person can do with as little as a 10 minute commitment.Looking at how much I could do in just 10 minutes, I decided my bed would be a standard 4x8 foot bed and I would use the fork on another day t... Read Full Story

So just how much food can be raised in 10 minutes?We tend to measure our gardens by the square foot – there's even a square foot garden guru, a PBS host and books on the subject. Recommendations of garden footage accompany garden tillers descriptions. Size apparently matters: one of the first things gardeners mention to one another is how much space they tend.Yet there's no mention of people's most precious commodity – time. The reality is, when a person decides to garden, they en... Read Full Story

Whether you organic garden or use chemicals, raised bed gardens will out produce old-fashioned row-crop gardens. Garden beds save time, money and are good on the environment too.In a raised beds you plant the area that normally would be empty between the rows. After the bed is prepared you get more plants in a small space by placing seeds the recommended distance from one another in all directions of the last seed planted, you fill the space solid with plants.For example, up to 30 carrots sp... Read Full Story

Just moved in and want a garden this spring, but there is none at your new home? Here's a quick and dirty way – pun intended – to get a garden and you don't even have to till up the ground or remove the sod. Step 1: Locate a sunny spot in the area of the yard you want the garden. Check it morning, noon and afternoon to see how the shadows of your house or other building around it might fall onto the area. It's okay if shadows fall, but you want it to receive light 70 percent of... Read Full Story

Peat moss has to be the organic gardener's best friend and the backbone of Community Sustainable Agriculture, CSA. Organic materials decay and become humus in the soil. It is so vital to good soil health, but when many urban gardens are born, precious little is around and that's when peat moss can come to your rescue. The soil around subdivisions has been so torn-up by machinery, basement digs; backfilling foundations that most city gardens need organic material to build good soil.... Read Full Story

Water can be a destructive natural element if used incorrectly. Gardeners starting their own seeds often lose a few because they water their newly emerged seedlings incorrectly.Many gardeners use the pretty sprinkling cans sold in every gardening section of almost every Big-box store. The sprinkle head of the can appears to gently douse plants with fine streams of water. To a newly emerged seed, these seemingly fine streams of water resemble a July gully washer rain that drops two inches of r... Read Full Story

Heirloom tomatoes should be on your seed list and in your garden plan this year. In the past decade the interest in heirloom seeds – plant varieties that were once grown from seed collected each year and no longer commercially grown – has continued to increase.Unlike hybrids, the seeds from heirlooms can be collected and planted. The seeds of heirlooms will produce a plant like the parent plant. When you plant seeds from hybrids, you get something very different – usually one of the plants us... Read Full Story