Good afternoon folks.

The posts have been a bit sparse here lately, primarily because I have been putting together a new business selling garden boxes. While the business has steadily grown, there is a ton of work to from administration and marketing to making the boxes themselves, and streamlining the process along the way.

I truly feel that growing a portion of our own food at the home and the community level is a very important part of food sustainability, which I believe is synonymous with food independence. While it is impossible for most of us to grow even a majority of our own produce individually, our garden boxes and vegetable gardens do contribute significantly to undercutting the power of our corporate food delivery system.

The cornerstone of food independence though will be consumer support of food producers who are local and organic. As responsible consumers we have to know where our food comes from, and understand the all of the costs associated with transporting food long distances from massive corporate farms.

This concept can be very easily overdone. There are some foods that can and should be imported, particularly regional specialties and luxury foods. Trade is a vital component of a sustainable community. What is important is that the majority of our basic food staples originate locally, and that all of our food is produced responsibly.

I am going to be going back to posting regularly, so please check in often.

Remember everyone buy local or grow it yourself.

Love to all,

Millard

Good afternoon folks.

I have been blogging about sustainability in food for the past few weeks because that is where I am at in my life right now. I am transitioning the habits of myself and my family to food sustainability, and I have found that it takes a lot of effort to climb out of unsustainable ruts. The good news is that the ruts are mostly psychological and the long term benefits are worth the effort.

I blogged earlier about square foot gardening, as this is the method I am using to grow my food. A key element to keeping the ongoing costs low in square foot gardening is to be able to supply your own compost, as this is the primary nutrient supply and must be replaced after every harvest.

Lucky for me, composting is easy! I’m happen to be pretty lucky actually in this regard, because the house my family is renting has a rather large backyard, and the area has a semi-rural feel to it. My throwing up a compost pit was not only allowed by my landlord but encouraged.

Some people may have more or less challenges than me between them and composting, but if growing your own food is the greenest thing you can do, composting is the essential fuel of your garden. In the near future as I work on moving to a zero waste household, I will be starting worm composting, which will enable me to use all of my food waste for composting. Right now though I will be limiting myself to basic composting of yard clippings and scrap vegetables and fruit. The main reason is that it is way simpler.

So what do you need to to compost? All you really need is an area in your yard to pile up your plant waste! If you want to keep it contained just buy buy 15′ of 5′ high wire fence, form a circle with it, and start putting your waste green in there. If you live in an apartment, you can buy a composting bin and operate on a more modest scale, but in either case I strongly encourage everyone to do it. The trick is to keep the pile not too wet or too dry, but moist, and to turn it regularly. The more you turn it, the quicker you get compost. If you are able to turn your compost over daily you can have a fantastic soil amender in two weeks, all from yard scraps, kitchen scraps, pennies of water and five minutes a day with a shovel or a pitchfork.

The picture at the top of the post is of my little operation. Yeah, I got a little fancy with a concrete block lined pit, but it does not need to be this involved. The blocks just happened to be laying around the yard. The property comes with a gardener, and every week he clips about 4-6 trashcans full of green waste. All I have to do is take the cans and dump them into the pit. It almost feels like I’m cheating it is so easy. Now the operation is only a couple of weeks old, but I can already see it is going to give me all the compost I need to grow my vegetables and them some. Below is a picture of the yard I get all of these wonderful trimmings from.

To speed up the process I may buy a yard chipper, which will turn all of the branches and leaves into a fine mulch. I saw one used on craigslist for $175, and a new would cost around $500 and up. It is definitely worth it for a larger yard.

For apartments and condos you do not have to be limited to your kitchen scraps. You can easily get some yard waste from the gardener of the complex, and this can be used in the square foot garden on you balcony or patio.

The bottom line is there is no excuse for not doing this. Food sustainability may be the most important facet of the whole sustainability picture, and no matter what your living circumstance you can do it. Grow your own food. Compost your plant waste. Save our troubled species. Repeat. This stuff is very easy, and it will help so much.

Remember, buy local, or grow it yourself everybody!

Love to all,

Millard

Good morning folks.

Ever since I started this blog I have been talking about the need for all of us to start buying local, and to start growing and making things ourselves. So what do I do this morning? I go out of my way to a Venti White Chocolate Mocha at Starbucks. I feel so guilty!

I bring this up to remind myself and my audience that it is pointless and hypocritical to go judge yourself or others too harshly. We live in a system that was designed to satisfy immediate cravings and deliver quick profits, and it is very seductive. It was not designed for sustainability. All most of us are trying to do is the right thing, while taking a few harmless pleasures along the way. Ultimately sustainability is all of us, one by one, retraining our habits, and this takes education, planning and lot of patience. If you need to go to Starbuck’s every once in a while, do it and enjoy it.

In an earlier blog I reviewed The World According Monsanto, a movie available for viewing online free. It discusses the problems associated with Monsanto and their products, genetically modified crop seeds. I initiated this blog to focus on green solutions, and I really have not suggested one for this yet. No time like the present!

When I recently put together and planted a square foot gardening box, I sent for and used heirloom seeds. The term heirloom refers to seeds that have not been genetically modified – that is, their cell nuclei have not been bombarded to make them resistant to weed poison. These seeds are non-GMO, not patented intellectual property like many other seeds. They are engineered by mother nature, and their safety and nutrition has been field tested and proven for the last few thousand years.

While there are several companies that provide these seeds locally and online, I chose to send away for 8 vegetable varieties from Baker Creek Heirloom Seed Co. They were reasonably priced, the shipping was only $3, and they threw in a couple of free tomato seed packets for me. The only complaint I had about them is that there website had slow load and refresh rates of their website.

So I have pointed you guys to step by step directions for creating simple, attractive vegetable gardens, and I have told you where you can buy pristine heirloom seeds, which I feel is key for creating your sustainable kitchen garden. You have no more excuses now! Planting your own kitchen garden or community garden is the greenest thing you can do, so get out there and do it!

Remember, buy local, or grow it yourself everybody!

Love to all,

Millard

Good afternoon folks.

I really love today’s blog, because it records my first real step in becoming a consciously sustainable person. I don’t mean becoming eco-friendly or environmentally conscious or any other nebulous phrase that suggests some effort at environmental awareness without really being concrete enough to define a measurable standard.

I have taken tentative steps before, but now that I have done my research, I know what true sustainability is, I know that is our highest goal, and I know how to get it done. I chose to start this journey to full sustainability by starting to become a producer. Yes, of course I will still consume, and for right now there a lot of holes in my game, but I am becoming a producer as well, and it feels pretty damn good.

I bought All New Square Foot Gardening because I had heard good things about it, and I wanted to start growing my own fruits and vegetables with the least amount of hassle. I happen to know that hydroponics is the most efficient way to grow anything, but it is a pretty complicated place to start. Square Foot Gardening seemed to be a good simple solution from the outside looking in. But would it deliver?

After reading it and buying the materials for starting my own square foot garden, I have to say it truly does provide a very easy way to start growing your own food. Among the many fantastic things about this method is that it can be done in any living setting, even an apartment balcony. I strongly recommend this book to people like me who do not want to deal with the hassle of gardening. The author Mel Bartholomew provides a step by step process for building your planter box, mixing the perfect soil, planting, growing and harvesting. No fertilizers. No pesticides. It is good stuff.

Below is a picture of my freshly planted 4′x4′ square gardening box.

It took me less than a week to read the book, purchase the materials, put the box together, mix the soil and plant my veggies. The author does not mention costs, so I am going to list my costs for materials right here, for your benefit:

• Heirloom Seeds (more on heirloom in my next blog): 8 packets – $23.25
• Lumber: (1) sheet of plywood + (2) 2×6 redwood – $28.59
• Soil Mix: vermiculite + peat moss + compost – $80.93
• Grid: 5/8″ x 1/4″ trim board – $14.98
• Total cost: $147.75
• Work Time: roughly 8 man hours

This was more than I expected, but most of the costs are one time. The only ongoing costs are for compost and seeds. If you compost yourself, that line item is eliminated. With Mel’s technique, seed use and waste is significantly reduced in comparison with tradition row gardening, so seed packets can last as much as five years.

So what is the payoff?

I will have to wait and find out for myself, but according to the book, here is an example harvest from a 4×4 box:

• 1 cabbage
• 1 broccoli
• 1 cauliflower
• 4 romaine lettuce heads
• 4 red lettuce heads
• 4 leaf lettuce heads
• 4 salad lettuce heads
• 16 scallions
• 5 lbs. of sugar peas
• 8 swiss chard
• 9 bunches of spinach
• 32 carrots
• 32 radishes
• 16 beets

I priced out this theoretical harvest at my local supermarket, and it came to over $115.00. If you have two growing seasons per year (this is typical), you will be in the bonus after the second harvest.

You have probably heard a million times about “getting back in touch with nature”, so I’m not going to bore you with that crap. What I do want to say is that the project is a lot fun, it is a fantastic way to beautify your yard, it has endless possibilities for adaptation and creativity, and it is one of the greenest things you can do. Sometimes I think green can be summed up in one sentence: make it yourself, or buy local. That is the long and the short of it.

The book is far more detailed and complete than this little summary suggests, so I strongly urge you to buy it, read it and make it happen in your garden.

There are a few other items I would like to mention before I sign off that I will be expanding upon in future blogs.

As I mentioned before, my researched has determined that hydroponic agriculture is the most efficient, and I love the idea, but it does require more upfront cash than a square foot garden.I will be pursuing this in the future though, so stay tuned.

One technique I will be testing in future growing is living water. I am not doing it in this first season, so this first yield can be considered as a control in my little experiment. For those of you who are not familiar with the work of Victor Shauberger or Masaru Emoto, water can have amazing regenerative and vitalizing properties given the correct energetic charging. As with hydroponics, I will elucidate in the near future.

OK, one last near future note. One method which is outside of the square foot gardening book that I did experiment with is the seed planting process mentioned in Anastasia, the first book in the Ringing Cedars series. I am late to this party, having just finished the first book, but all I can say is wow. That book has already contributed mightily to the shifting of the paradigm and the material is great, but I am not going just take it at its word. I will review that book in the near future, and let you know just how effective the practical advice in that book is based upon how my crop turns out.

That is all I have for now. Happy Passover, and love to all,

Millard