If you’re trying to grow most of your own calories, it makes sense to grow calorie-dense food, which especially points to root crops such as potatoes and parsnips. When growing biointensively, 30% of the land is often allocated for this….
Many of us get our compost materials from elsewhere, perhaps the garden center or a local farmer. And that’s okay. Most of us are gardening on the side, doing other work that enables us to purchase these inputs, thus helping…
The main biointensive method for improving soil fertility is to use compost. The purpose of compost is to bring beneficial organisms and nutrients into the soil, as well as improving water-holding capacity, drainage and aeration, among other things.
When following biointensive gardening principles, the way to relieve compaction, improve drainage and promote deeper root growth is by double digging garden beds. If you’re on especially sandy soil, you might be able to skip it. I’m on clay, which…
It’s Sunday morning, June 21st, the longest day of the year in the northern hemisphere. I’m doing my once a month garden maintenance, pulling the small number of weeds that made it through my leaf mulch, spraying some organic fertilizers…
If you can give your soil the right amount of air, water and food, you can grow healthy plants. But what makes gardening a challenge is that it can be difficult to get all of those factors right. The single…
In part 1, I talked about how organic matter is the most important ingredient for many gardens, and how mulch and compost are two of my favorite ways of using it. But there are two other ways of using organic…
There are dozens of strategies you can implement to have a more successful garden. And what your garden needs may be very different from what my garden needs. But there is one ingredient that, when used properly, is often going…
I’m a big fan of spraying organic seaweed fertilizer at least once a month in my garden. I do this primarily to help my plants deal with heat, cold, wind, drought and disease. But that’s not the most important ingredient…
Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto was an avid gardener. He noticed that 20% of the pea pods in his garden contained a whopping 80% of the overall peas.
Not all snails and slugs are pests, so if they’re not eating your plants, you don’t need to get rid of them in your organic garden. Slugs and snails are closely related. The main difference is that snails have a…
This type of pesticide spraying still happens all around the world. Our world has issues. Corruption, environmental degradation, poverty, world hunger – the list goes on and on. In my view, one of the biggest problems is our food system….