SQUARE FOOT GARDENING… VEGETABLES JUST GOT A WHOLE LOT EASIER.

Mel Bartholomew, inventor of square foot gardening was not a horticulturist by trade, he was a civil engineer who sold his company and retired to his garden at the age of 42.

When Mel started gardening, conventional gardens were single row gardens, averaging a 20’x30′ ft. His very first disappointment was that tending this type of garden was really hard work. You tilled and dug and amended and weeded… and weeded, then weeded some more. It was just plain hard. So much work! all summer long.

Gardeners know, by July, your energy is spent and guess what, your garden is full of weeds. And who would blame you, its too stinkin hot to be out there doing the worst gardening task to ever exist, weeding.

But Mel went along with it, after all, he wanted to garden and he was up for the challenge. So he learned, and worked hard, but his acute engineer mind griped as each new ‘conventional method’ posed another question… and he had to know why…

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With re-creation of 1500s garden, a reminder of when herb knowledge was a survival tool

At first blush, the dozens of clay pots on the Arbor Terrace at Dumbarton Oaks seem like the treasures of a plant nerd just back from a shopping spree. In one grouping alone, you find an array of thyme, oregano, lavender, scented geranium, sage, sweet woodruff and mint.

Step back, and you see a method to this madness: The pots are arranged in a decorative circle, and for all their variety, they share one trait. They are all herbs. Culinary herbs, household herbs, healing herbs. Actually, they share something else: They were also recorded in the Padua Botanical Garden in northeastern Italy. The garden was first planted in 1545 and is the oldest surviving example of a university teaching garden. Here, medical students learned to identify plants and their pharmaceutical qualities. In an age when we have come to think of plants as mostly decorative or edible, such “physic” gardens are a reminder of a time when we needed herbs and knowledge of them to survive.

The gardeners at Dumbarton Oaks — the Georgetown estate and Harvard research institution — re-created the Padua garden to mark a gathering of scholars in May to explore the historic link between landscape and academia. That gathering is past, but the display on the Arbor Terrace, which includes an accompanying outside exhibit, will remain until midsummer.

Read more here.

The self-reliance library

by Michael Smith (Veshengro)

Aside from a large range of different tools to be able to tackle the different jobs that may come up another requirement – for lack of a better word – for self-reliance living is a bookshelf, or better a library, stacked with books on the various aspect and subjects.

The most important books in this library are those of the how-to kind dealing with the many different things you may have to tackle, as there is just no way that you can know everything. But knowing where to find the information is important.

While it is certainly true that nowadays much of this information can be accessed on the world wide web, and from there to get some material for your collection is a good idea as well, there may be a time that you can't access that info online. I therefore also advise to print out all relevant material that you may download and file those in a binder or ten.

You most important books for the self-reliance library, as already indicated, are those of the how-to kind and the older they are, often, the better. Some of the best of that kind were produced by Odhams Press in Britain in the early to mid-part of the last century, but there are also publishers who have brought out books of a similar nature.

It is true that the books by Odhams Press are old and the information, the tools and methods used may not be approved of today by the powers-that-be, and especially not by EU rules and regulations, especially with regards to electricity and such like, but that is neither here not there.

The information in such books is still, as far as I am concerned, as valid as more modern ones, especially if you are going to be dealing with things that are of that age or similar. Especially when you are going to do things yourself without, for instance, power tools and other machines then those old instructions are invaluable.

The “manuals” that you will need to learn to live a self-reliant life, and as reference when you are already at it, are those that deal with all aspects of living such a life, from growing your own food, over making do and mending and making all manner of things to building your own home even.

I found that many of the older books are much better than the newer ones and many of the newer, to be honest, are often nothing but a rehash of the old ones, but claiming to be newly written books, and I have had the misfortune to review more than one of them by now.

The one book, or two, that should not be missing in your library are the late John Seymour's “The Complete Book of Self-sufficiency” and “The Survival Handbook” (ideally the hardback version) which he co-authored with Michael Allaby and others. In fact, those two, in my opinion, are a must.

The right tools, and that includes the resources as to where to find information, in other words books, are more important in this game of self-reliance living than anything else. It is not what you know but knowing where to find the information and hot to apply same that counts. You just cannot master all the skills beforehand that you may need.

I am not going to really put together a list of books here for they will be different from country to country as that would not be very beneficial. However, for those in Britain a look around car boot sales and charity shops for the old how-to books published by Odhams Press Ltd. and other of that kind I would recommend and, definitely the acquisition, and that applies to all, of John Seymour's “The Complete Book of Self-sufficiency” and, if you can get it, “The Survival Handbook” by Michael Allaby, of which John Seymour is one of the co-authors.

General DIY books from about the 1930's onwards to around the 1970's together with homesteading books from before the 20th century and till about the 1950s also should be included as and where possible. Look for anything that deals with the aspects that you might encounter, from gardening, cooking from scratch, making do and mending, to building sheds and other kinds of buildings, up to and including a house.

Two other books that I would like to recommend for inclusion in any self-reliance library are “Skills of the Australian Bushman” and “Australian Traditional Bush Crafts”, both by Ron Edwards. They may be difficult to obtain nowadays but they are worth their weight in gold as to how those old squatters in the Ozzie outback made do, especially as many of those, if not indeed all, and ideas, come in very handy in the pursuit of a self-reliant life.

© 2016

Pflanzenpatente: Wir essen immer mehr Laborgemüse

Schweizer Gemüse stammt ­mehrheitlich aus den Labors der globalen Agro­chemie – selbst die Hälfte aller Bioprodukte.

Gleich zwei Volksinitiativen aus bäuerlichen Kreisen wollen ­erreichen, dass wir mehr ­einheimische Lebensmittel auf den Teller bekommen. Ein frommer Wunsch. Was wir essen, wird eher in einem Biolabor in den Niederlanden als im Bundesrat in Bern entschieden. Bereits fallen 95 Prozent unserer Salate – ­inklusive der biologischen – unter ein Patent der nieder­ländischen Saatgutfirma Rijk Zwaan. Letztlich kontrolliert diese, wer den Salat anbaut.

Bisher glaubten selbst gut ­informierte Konsumenten, Patente gebe es nur für genmanipulierte Pflanzen, die in der Schweiz nicht verkauft werden. Doch das Europäische Patentamt erteilt seit einigen Jahren auch für konventionelle Züchtungen Patente. Dass «Patentgemüse» den Markt erobert, scheint den Grossverteilern nicht ­bewusst zu sein. Die Migros hat «keine Kenntnis über die Anzahl patentierter Gemüsesorten». Bei Coop klingts ähnlich. Dabei ist die Mehrheit der Konsumenten gegen die Patentierung von Pflanzen – so das Ergebnis einer repräsentativen Umfrage von Isopublic. Die Migros lehnte patentierte Sorten bis vor kurzem ab, nun hat sie damit kein Problem mehr.

Vollkommen vom Ausland abhängig

Welche Saatgutfirmen hinter Schweizer Gemüse stecken, lässt sich trotz aufwendiger Recherchen nicht sicher sagen. Detaillierte Daten hat weder die Vereinigung für Samenhandel und Sortenschutz Swiss-Seed noch die Schweizerische Zentralstelle für Gemüsebau oder das Bundesamt für Landwirtschaft. Klar ist: Beim Saatgut sind wir völlig vom Ausland abhängig.

Hier weiter lesen.

Why Natural Insect Control Works Better

Interplanting flowers with food crops will promote a balanced insect ecology, which in turn will enable natural insect control without the use of toxic pesticides.

I’ve always been an organic gardener. Early on, I thought natural insect control meant using an “organically approved” insecticide, such as rotenone, to defeat leaf-eating insects — especially my arch-nemesis, the Colorado potato beetle. I dusted my potato patch several times a season in a struggle to keep the beetle’s exploding population in check, barely managing to bring in the crop. But as I learned more about the ecology of insects such as ladybeetles, lacewings, praying mantises, and assassin bugs — what some call “the good guys” — I worried that blasting away with a powder intended to kill might not be doing them any good either.

One spring I vowed to use no rotenone at all in my potato patch, even if it meant losing the crop. I was amazed to find only five potato beetles on my potato plants during the entire season. I took that as luck-of- the-draw seasonal fluctuation — until I bumped into my neighbor across the road, whose garden was less than 70 yards from my own. “My, my,” she wailed, “ain’t these potato bugs just awful. I dust, and I dust, and I dust — and I’m still out here every day, picking ’em off by hand!”

That was my epiphany about the true nature of the teeming insect community around me, and my garden’s relationship to it. From that moment, I have never used a granule of toxin — however reputedly benign — to deal with insect challenges in my garden and orchard. I now find the potato beetle to be one of the easiest insect competitors to deal with.

How to Sustain a Natural Ecosystem

Using natural insect control makes perfect sense to me now. Who wants to eat food that’s been sprayed with toxic chemicals better suited to chemical warfare than gardening? According to the Environmental Protection Agency, American agriculture uses toxic pesticides at a rate of more than a billion pounds annually, and only a small percentage of those chemicals actually make contact with a target insect. The remainder is irrelevant to insect control, but constitutes an assault on the rest of our ecosystem. Pesticides suppress the soil food web (the foundation of soil fertility), pollute groundwater and natural water systems, and destroy vital pollinators and other species.

Read more here.

Turn Unreturnable Bulk Bags into Potato Planters

In the category of “Use What You Have,” I decided to try an experiment in reusing and recycling.

When I first started building my garden and raised beds, I ordered several bulk bags of garden loam and bark mulch. This was the least expensive and most efficient way to get the material I needed for my garden, but it also left me with several very large bulk bags that I could not return or recycle in my local area. The bags are made of a sturdy, heavy-duty fabric, and I didn’t want to just throw them away, so I had to give some thought as to how I could use them.

I needed a couple more deep raised beds, though, and I was out of large scrap lumber. I decided to recycle the bulk bags into flexible raised beds in which I could grow potatoes and carrots. What this gave me were three extra raised beds with very little effort.

How to Turn Bulk Bags into Potato Planters

1.The first thing I did was decide on a location. I set the bags up next to my storage shed. This spot gets sun for most of the day, and it’s out of the way. Eventually I want to build a greenhouse here, but for now, it’s the perfect location to grow some potatoes.

2. I folded the sides of the bags outwards and down in two folds so I could raise them up as the potatoes grew. Instead of hilling up the soil around the plants, I would fill the bags in as we went along.

3.I bought some bagged garden soil on sale and filled each bag with about ten bags of dirt each. The bags are 25 liters or 22.7 quarts in size.

Read more here.

European Parliament vs petrol lawnmowers

by Michael Smith (Veshengro)

First they came for the kettles, the washing machines and the fridges and now for the petrol lawnmowers, grass trimmers, chainsaws and others.

European Parliament enacts emission limits for lawnmowers which is to say that someone in the civil service of the European Union, either in the Council or the Commission, has come up with this and the parliament was permitted to rubber stamp it.

The EU-Parliament has now enacted legislation about the emission limits of lawnmowers, grass trimmers, and other petrol-driven machinery of this kind.

From now on lawnmowers shall no longer be able to pollute the European air unchecked. The European Parliament in Strasbourg has decided about maximum emission levels for all machines with internal combustion engines that are not intended for road use.

It is not only lawnmowers and other garden and forestry tools with an internal combustion engine that are thus affected. Also Diesel locomotives, bulldozers, harvesting machines for agriculture and inland navigation vessels, that is to say freight and passenger ships that use rivers and canals, as well as those on lakes, fall under those new regulations, which will come into force either 2018 or 2019.

According to a report of the EU-Parliament engines of this kind are responsible for at least 15% of all nitric oxide emissions and 5% of all nano particle emissions in the European Union.

Those emissions have health risks associated with them. They can attack mucus membranes, cause breathing problems and irritation of the eyes, and also can affect the cardiovascular system.

The new rules also intend that all engines must be fitted with a devise that can watch over the emissions, so to speak, while the machines are being used. Thus retrofitting may become compulsory but no decision has been reached in that respect as yet and the EU-Commission is to look into that issue further it has been said.

While, to some extent, curbing emissions from all kinds of internal combustion engines is a good idea, and when it comes to machines such as chainsaws, grass trimmers, hedge cutters, when used professionally, the user tends to breathe in an awful lot of the exhaust fumes, and that cannot be good for health, the cynic in me, however, wonders as to whether this is just another way to, also, do something for the economy, so to speak, in that either having to buy new machines or getting them retrofitted with devices, will mean that people have to spend money again.

© 2016

Young girl shares gardening secrets after growing a massive cabbage

A 9-year-old girl is showing off her green thumb and the massive eleven pound cabbage she grew in her mom's garden in West Virginia.

Isabella Campos learned how to grow a small cabbage in school and wanted to try it at home.

Her parents posted the photo on social media and it has been getting a lot of attention, many people asking, "what's her gardening secret?"

Read more here.

Multitalent Kapuzinerkresse – als Pfeffer, Kapern-Ersatz und vieles mehr

Die Kapuzinerkresse ist ein wahres Gartenwunder, denn als einjährige Pflanze mit geringen Ansprüchen gedeiht sie sogar im Schatten, rankt an Gestellen hoch oder kriecht als reich blühender Bodendecker in jedem Garten. Aber auch auf dem Balkon ist sie eine Augenweide. Zusätzlich macht die Kapuzinerkresse Pflanzenschutzmittel überflüssig, denn sie hält Schädlinge von anderen Pflanzen fern.

Kapuzinerkresse – gesund und lecker

Als Heilpflanze wirkt die Kapuzinerkresse antibiotisch, pilztötend, schleimlösend, harntreibend und blutreinigend. Mit Vitamin A und einem hohen Vitamin C Gehalt, das den der Johannisbeere sogar übertrifft, sollte sie als Ergänzung auf keinem Speiseplan fehlen. Wegen ihres kräftigen Geschmacks und der Schärfe, die an Senf oder Meerettich erinnert, bietet sie kulinarische Genüsse, die weit über die Nutzung einer Kresse hinausgehen. Ihre Blätter finden sich dank des markanten Geschmacks auf Salaten, aber auch die milderen, genießbaren Blüten fallen auf Tellern in Restaurants ins Auge. Dass ihre Samen essbar sind und sogar als regionaler Pfeffer dienen, ist leider in Vergessenheit geraten.

Hier weiter lesen.

Irminsul, Odal Rune and Indalo

by Michael Smith (Veshengro)

All of those symbols have about the same meaning though about the Indalo false stories appear to be told. All three denote free men, and in the case of the Irminsul and the Odal rune in Saxon and Norse “mythology” the signs were to denote a free farm, a free craftsman, in other words a free man.

Certain quarters, such as the Amadeu Antonio Stiftung in Germany tries to claim that the Irminsul (and the Odal rune, obviously) are always signs of antisemitic right wing extremists and -extremism. Some self-proclaimed antifascists have also had a rant and rave as regards to the Indalo that is used in Spain, often by the Gitanos as well, as a talisman and a charm for the protection of the home, for instance.

What those signs are supposed to have to do with fascism and antisemitism is an enigma to me, and to others, I am sure. Only because the runes were also used by the Nazis does not mean that anyone who uses the old Nordic symbols (or the old Saxon ones) immediately is a fascist and antisemitic.

But in the eyes of those that see antisemitic ghosts everywhere and fascists the mere use of Runes to denote the original meanings immediately is interpreted as being evil. Even eco-villages and -communities are being tarred with that brush by the people of that body mentioned above and others if they as much as dare to promote real self-reliance, by trying to be as far as possible independent from government and government interference. Should there be the Irminsul as a talisman or runes being used in any way then the hue and cry goes up immediately that those are right-wing extremists and Nazis. What better way to discredit people than to make the almost infectious as anyone who associates with those also be get the same treatment.

As soon as someone does not want to dance to the neo-liberal tune that seems to have been prescribed, nowadays, and wants to live, on his own, with his family, or in a community, live different to what is given as the way we all should be living under neo-liberalism, he, she or they are immediately labeled as fascists, as Nazis, and all the rest. And it does not just stop with being labeled. Rumors are being spread about them to all and sundries to get them out of local and not so local organizations, or prevent them becoming part of them, as well as “protests” similar to those in the 1930s where it was the cry “don't buy from Jews” and “don't associate with Jews”, with the difference that it is others that are targeted in that way. Different it is, however, not.

While the like of the Amadeu Antonio Stiftung, presently, is targeting eco-settlements of so-called folkish settlers, the eco-villages of the kins domain that are created along the lines of the Anastasia books by Vladimir Megre, and others could also soon also be labeled in the same way as could, and no doubt will, any eco-commune and such in the very near future. Those and similar individuals, families, and groups, just do not fit into the prescribed neo-liberal view and must, thus, be eliminated, even if not physically then by other means. Where would the world come to if we would allow people lo live without government interference and trying to live as much as possible outside the consumer society?

© 2016