10 Tomatoes to Grow in Your Container Garden Ajith_chatie/CC BY 2.0 I tend to be a bit obsessive about tomatoes. In my summer garden, they are allotted the most space, the sunniest spots, and the beds with the fluffiest soil. 1. 'Japanese Black Trifele' is tied with 'Brandywine' for my favorite tomato. 2. While my garden generally belongs to heirloom tomatoes, I do plant hybrid 'Sungold' tomatoes every year. photofarmer/CC BY 2.0 3. If you've never grown 'Wapsipinicon Peach,' you're in for a real treat. 4. If you live in a cooler climate, 'Stupice' is a tomato you should definitely be growing. 5. In her book Grow Great Grub, garden writer Gayla Trail recommends this heirloom variety for containers, and I second the recommendation. 6. This is another variety that Gayla Trail recommends for containers, and I plan on growing mine in containers this years as well after growing them in my raised beds last year. 7. 8. I have not grown this one yet, but it's definitely on my list. 9. 10. nociveglia/CC BY 2.0
Permaculture Principles Gardener's Supply Kitchen Garden Planner, planting map | Grow Your Own Vegetables With our free online planner, you can design a super-productive vegetable garden, based on square-foot gardening techniques instead of traditional rows. Just drag and drop crops to the planting grid and the planner fills in the number of plants. Or choose from 16 pre-planned gardens. Print out your planting map and you're ready to go. Get Started or Expert Advice and Resources
Ixchel Ha | A Rain Forest Home Highly Uncivilized | getting the dirt back under our fingernails for a more sustainable suburbia Rainforest - mongabay.com Small-scale hugelkultur in raised beds Hugelkultur is a method of building planting beds by covering wood with dirt; big piles of wood and sometimes other organic matter. You can dig a trench and fill it with wood, or just pile the wood on the ground and cover it. There are many different approaches as Paul Wheaton points out, and the results are impressive. This has to be one of the most low tech systems I've ever heard of. Why would you do this? I had a big pile of firewood from some dying trees we took down several years ago, and rather than starting a new bed, I decided to convert an existing raised bed planter. When I removed the worm tower it was full of happy worm life, with worms in the tube, and hanging out of the holes in the side. After the dirt was removed I layered in the wood, and added a couple of buckets of compost from different stages. Maybe we'll go 'no till' and leave the clover in with the garden next year – not sure yet. Visit Brad's website, highlyuncivilized.com
Rainforest Portal How Nature Makes Soil, And You Can Too (Video) Image credit: Ecofilms Australia From helping to convert arid, salty desert into a productive permaculture garden, to reminding us of the astounding fact that there are 40 tons of life in just one acre of soil, Geoff Lawton knows a thing or two about the magic of soil. Here he reveals a few choice places where nature likes to make soil (it's not where you'd think!) I am assuming this clip was filmed as part of Geoff's Permaculture Soils DVD, which looks to be a veritable feast of information, tips and inspiration for those gardeners who believe in the old adage that if you feed the soil, the plants look after themselves. Certainly the notion of looking to the bottom of your pond for valuable soil, before you go buying in top soil stripped from land elsewhere, is about as simple and as important a tip as I can think of. Thanks again for the inspiration Geoff.
Conservation in Belize A bluehead wrasse in the Belize Barrier Reef, part of the world's second-largest coral reef system. Since declaring independence in 1981, Belize has enacted many environmental protection laws aimed at the preservation of the country's natural and cultural heritage, as well as its wealth of natural resources. These acts have established a number of different types of protected areas, with each category having its own set of regulations dictating public access, resource extraction, land use and ownership. Roughly 26% (2.6 million acres, or 1.22 million hectares) of Belizean land and sea is preserved within a total of 95 reserves, which vary in their purpose and level of protection.[1][2] This network of protected areas exists under a variety of management structures:[3] 1,900,469 acres (769,093 ha) of terrestrial reserves,392,970 acres (159,030 ha) of marine reserves,317,615 acres (128,534 ha) protected through officially recognised private conservation initiatives. Background[edit]
San Francisco Permaculture Garden Grows Thousands of Pounds of Food Image credit: Growing Your Greens From an awesome tour of an urban permaculture allotment through wild permaculture forest gardening on the BBC to greening the deserts of Jordan, we've seen plenty of great footage of how permaculture design can help grow healthy, productive food systems that need minimal inputs or management. Here we see another example growing in the heart of San Francisco, and I am reminded yet again why permaculture is so ideally suited to collective, community gardening. While some of its most ardent advocates will claim that permaculture designs can be almost completely self sufficient, I've yet to see a system like that. From harvesting to occasional weeding to mulching and watering, most permaculture gardens still require significant human management. While a backyard garden may get frequent attention, a community garden more typically relies on weekend workdays and big volunteer "blitzes". Many thanks to John of Growing Your Greens for a great video tour.