The Seed 4: Made in the Shade

Made in the Shade

Urban gardeners everywhere are looking to make the most of their limited city lots. Unfortunately many gardeners feel that without direct sunlight they won’t be able to create beautiful gardens. I hear it so many times: “I’d love to put a garden back there, but it’s just too shady”, well take heart brave gardeners! Creating your own unique and beautiful shade garden will be simple with a little planning and research. Before you go get your shovels out CLICK HERE for a few garden tips to help you have it "made in the shade".

Click Here for this complete issue of The Seed

Read more »

The Seed 3: Plant a Garden, Save a River

Rain gardens are quickly catching on as an effective and beautiful means of controlling rainwater runoff. In Minneapolis and St. Paul our current storm water management system rushes rainwater from rooftops, parking lots, and roads directly to the Mississippi river. This rapid inflow of rainwater warms up the river causing algae to grow so fast that it deprives other aquatic life of oxygen. Along the way to the river the rainwater also picks up and brings with it substances that are harmful to the rivers health such as motor oil, fertilizer, and road salt. Residents of the twin cities are finding out that by planting rain gardens they can help deal with this problem in their own back yards.

As the rain seeps slowly down the path of the plants roots in a rain garden it is filtered into underground aquifers. This natural system of filtering allows the water that passes through to be both cleaned of the toxic chemicals and cooled from the heat that it has picked up on it’s way to the garden. This clean cool water is then passed into lakes, rivers, and streams ready to sustain native aquatic animals and plants. Gardens that capture rainwater offer benefits far beyond improved water quality for the people who live near them. Perhaps equally important as the positive effect on aquatic life produced in rain gardens is the fact that when planted with native plants they become a stopping place for migrating songbirds and butterflies. These visitors bring with them an immeasurable natural and aesthetic value. When done correctly rain gardens can be a cheap and easy way of maintaining a lawn, which can add beauty and value to the property. Once a rain garden is established it won’t require any irrigation like so many gardens and lawns. Responsibly managing the water run off from any property will also minimize land erosion and structural degradation of buildings that can occur near water down spouts.

Simply put, rain gardens are a beautiful, cost effective, and environmentally responsible way to maintain a property.

Click Here for the complete version of this issue of The Seed

Read more »

The Seed Volume 2: The Garden Solution

Cultivate Financial Freedom

By Saying No to Sod

It's no secret that holistic living can work wonders for a person's well being. Eating organic food, connecting with nature, and generally “greening up” daily life has never seemed so important. Realistically speaking, though, most of us face an inescapable economic bottom line, and make the mistake of thinking that holistic living has to cost more than less healthy lifestyle choices.

Looking at the price of organic food at the grocery store, it's easy to make this mistake. I know I can't afford to pay a dollar for a single tomato, or five for a box of herbal tea. There is a simple way around this, though: The Garden Solution.

Without even considering the the potential benefits to health or property value, turning your lawn into a garden is a solid and sensible investment. With just a little time and money up front, anyone can make their yard into a beautiful investment account, and realize far better long-term interest rates than those offered by any bank I know of. Breaking down a hypothetical situation will show you what I mean.

Taking my most recent trip to Whole Foods, I saw organic raspberries on sale for four dollars per six oz. Container, half an ounce of mint tea for five dollars, and that buck-a-tomato deal mentioned earlier. If I consume one tomato, two glasses of mint tea, and three oz. Of raspberries per day, that's about $3.83 I've spent at the store. Per year, then, this small portion of organic food goes for approximately $1400.00.

That's fourteen hundred bucks for roughly sixty-eight pounds of berries, three hundred sixty-five tomatoes, and eleven pounds of mint. Eighteen healthy tomato plants, twenty large mint plants, and a few dozen berry bushes around the perimeter of my medium-sized urban yard can produce this amount of food in a single season.

I don't want my yard looking like a farm, though, and it's not good for the soil to limit the variety of flora to just a few edibles, so a diverse combination of edible and ornamental plants would seem to serve my hypothetical needs here best. If I were to transform my yard into such a garden, how much would it cost? To find out, I talked with Russ Henry, owner of Giving Tree Gardens. This is a local gardening company with a holistic and petrochemical-free approach, so it seemed a sensible choice for my inquiry.

Mr. Henry informed me of the difficulties in estimating the installation costs for my imaginary garden, because each site is unique from an horticultural perspective. Still, with the numbers I gave him, Mr. Henry assured me that, barring extraordinary circumstances, it would be reasonable to assume the price would be significantly less than the fourteen thousand dollars it could save me over the next ten years. Everything after that initial ten-year payback period (which is about half the time it takes for an array of solar panels to repay their initial cost) is, as they say, gravy

Click Here for the full issue of The Seed Volume Two

Read more »

The Seed 1: Organic Gardening, Planting, and Compost

Organic Gardening, Natural Abundance

Many gardeners who have been trained in the use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides may be wondering what the hype surrounding organic gardening is all about. With synthetic products on the market that promise miraculous growth and weed free gardening some may wonder why anyone would bother with “old fashioned” methods of gardening. Anyone who would consider switching to an organic approach to gardening will first need to be assured that the results they see from organic methods are at least equal to if not greater than their “conventional” methods.

Gardeners who have either made the switch to organics or who have always practiced organic methods can easily lay these questions to rest. Organic gardeners focus first on soil health. Plants depend on the microorganisms living in the soil to digest nutrients in the soil and turn them into forms that the plants may absorb. When we focus on the health of the soil we attempt to create an environment that is desirable for these microorganisms to exist. Compost is an organic gardeners main tool for building soil health as the same organisms that the plants rely on are fed by rotting vegetable material. Compost is not only full of beneficial microbes, but also helps to build the perfect loose crumbly soil texture that the roots of many of our garden plants need for proper growth. As a gardener who has used both conventional chemical methods and organic gardening methods I can attest that after my first season spreading compost and watching the gardens respond with phenomenal growth I was amazed! The growth results that I achieved organically in one season were easily three times greater than I had ever gotten through using chemical fertilizers and pesticides. Watching my tropical annual plants grow to completely fill in there garden spaces and witnessing a quadrupling in size of standard perennials was just the miracle I had always sought, but never found until I found compost.

After many years of using only organic gardening methods and reflecting on the health of the soil that I work with, it now seems strikingly obvious to me that if we wish to find abundance and beauty in our gardens we need to follow in the footsteps of mother nature. The microbial life that causes health in our gardens is the same life that has existed as long as the plants that rely on it. In this way compost can be seen as the most ancient of gardening traditions. We don't need any chemical concoctions to provide us with the miracle of abundance that nature has worked so long to perfect. We only need to respect the traditions of the planet that made all that we are and all that we garden.

Click Here for the full version of The Seed #1

Read more »

Welcome

Welcome to the new home of The Seed. Organic gardeners rejoice!

Read more »