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Are you kidding? About a year so ago I saw a story online about a homeowner who was violating a city ordinance by having a vegetable garden in his front yard. Idiocy. Not really. Historically coal has always been abundant in Britain and the world isnt likely to run out of clay anytime soon so...

You can watch most of the BBC TV program The Victorian Kitchen Garden on youtube. There are 13 episodes total- an introduction and an episode for every month of the year. But so far nobody has put the entire episode for October, November and December online, but the rest are complete. DVDs of...

Thus showing that an organic method is not always an environmentally sound method. Pyrethrum destroys a farm's ecosystem by killing all bugs. In terms of environmental devastation it is no different than any non-organic pesticide that does the same thing. Furthermore, the flowers used to make...

By and large USDA standards are written for the benefit of the agriculture/food processing industry. Big companies like Monsanto and Conagra want to be able to legally label their products as organic so they can charge higher prices without having to abide by the stricter organic standards that...

In the eastern part of the U.S. most organic farms are only a few acres- 10-20 at most. So there are hundreds if not thousands of people who do make their living as organic farmers- and without being land tycoons. You are assuming that is no organic way to deal with scab...

You are violating a central tenet of organic farming first thing. A legitimate organic farmer does not do monocropping if he has enough acreage not to. A 40 acre organic farm should not have 40 acres of apples. A single crop failure and the entire farm could be ruined financially and a single...

I read her book while in college. But when you live in a city in a warm climate where most things stay green most of the time the organic matter you need for her methods (mainly dead leaves) are not always easy to come by. We have trees here that do lose their leaves, but they can take 3...

A lot of people (mainly people who own commercial organic farms) insist that their products cost more at the grocery store and farmers market because it costs more to produce food using organic methods. But in my personal experience I have found that since changing to organic methods in the...

You will need a good 2 years for a pineapple to be ready to produce fruit. They do not have any kind of dormant season so keeping them indoors over the winter is a must. When the plant gets old enough to produce fruit you will need to put it in a plastic bag with an apple. The apple produces...

When I was a very young child my grandmother had a garden that must have been at least an acre. My gardens as a teenager were maybe 800 square feet. Then living in another part of town (and where I am at now) I had less than half that because the yard is so much smaller. But for a few years I...

Ive never grown fresh shell beans and Ive never eaten them but a time or two so I dont know much about them. Is there any difference between the varieties in the seed catalogs that are sold as fresh shell beans and anything sold as green/snap beans? Could green/snap bean varieties like Top...

In Victorian Era Britain kittens were used for pest control. They were put in a collar and tied to a string between stakes at each end of the garden row they were supposed to patrol to keep birds away. The cat union (not to mention the bird lobby) wont let them do this kind of work anymore.

The cat I have right now was born in a clothes basket (empty at the time). Her mother was called Demon and that was as much her occupation as it was her name so you can imagine what kind of cat she left me with when she moved down the block with the other 3 members of her litter. Demon looked...

We can have temperatures in the 80s as early as February so it doesn't matter what side of the house you plant cool weather crops on.

Ive got a planting chart that is put out by Clemson University so I can get some idea of what grows in the region I am interested in. Clemson gives actual calendar dates rather than time amounts before/after normal frost dates. Mel Bartholomew gives planting dates based on normal frost dates...

It must be nice in the real world. Where I live now you cannot count on getting any kind of green pea harvest because you cannot count on the weather staying cool long enough. And under no circumstances could you ever harvest green peas and green beans at the same time. Where I live it is too...

I've always been space limited so I've always been interested in growing things vertically (however when you are space limited something growing vertically covers much of the rest of your garden with shade so in a small space you don't really gain anything). But its never occurred to me to make...

Ive thought of this- give the chickens an area that only they use (but rotating from one part to another so the pasture/forage crops can re-grow) and then put them in the vegetable beds only when I need to get them ready for the next planting. And Ive thinking about all of this in terms of egg...

I've always heard that things like beans will produce as long as you keep them picked because they want to produce long enough to produce seed. Picking tricks the plants into thinking that they haven't produced seed so they keep going. But green beans won't survive Florida's 90+ degree heat so...

Im this way with cabbage and broccoli. I dont eat cooked cabbage, but until I started growing cabbage in my own garden I seldom ever ate coleslaw. The quality of what you can buy in the grocery store simply isnt worth the effort to turn cabbage into coleslaw. The same goes for broccoli in...