Vertical Herb Gardens comments on 04/22 at 01:35 AM Oh wow, I like this too. I'll have to research this...like how do they get the plants to stay in the box?! on 04/22 at 12:56 PM Hey! I want to build one too! on 04/22 at 01:00 PM My question would be how to water it. on 04/22 at 01:02 PM Inside the house environment. on 04/29 at 12:33 PM Wow, that's pretty awesome (not really a word I use that often!). on 05/26 at 03:40 AM Idon't know if you can do vertical planting, but I am doing an art project in which I give out seeds of trees that survived the atomic bombing to the people of US and the world. on 05/28 at 01:14 PM Saw this article and it made me think of your post...
Composting for Serious Gardeners With more than forty years of experience redefining gardening's boundaries, author Will Bonsall shows how readers can eliminate the use of off-farm inputs like fertilizers, minerals, and animal manures by practicing a purely veganic, or plant-based, agriculture-not for strictly moral or philosophical reasons, but because it is more ecologically efficient and makes good business sense. In Will Bonsall’s Essential Guide to Radical, Self-Reliant Gardening, (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2015) he offers readers in-depth information on growing, harvesting, and processing an incredibly diverse variety of food crops. The following excerpt is from Chapter 1, “Composting as if it Mattered.” You can purchase this book from the MOTHER EARTH NEWS STORE: Will Bonsall’s Essential Guide to Radical Self-Reliant Gardening. I make compost and lots of it, and not just because it’s something hippie homesteaders are expected to do, but because I get a kick out of doing it. So then, what do you do with it?
Cheap Do It Yourself Vertical Gardens Vertical gardening is a fun, creative way to grow plants in urban spaces! Below is just a sample of what you can create with ready-to-go planters and kits. The first few images are of GroVert Vertical Gardening Systems by Bright Green. There are two different sized panels (10 and 45), and each are planted, then hung on the wall using their included mounting bracket. The last images are of living walls made from felt pockets. These ‘pockets’ are very easy to install and plant. If you’re looking to build one yourself, you can visit Urban Zeal Planters (uzplanters.com) to see all your options. 3 Composting Techniques Everyone Should Know We all know by now that composting is important to the environment. It allows natural waste to return to the earth, while adding a nutrient rich material to our gardens. Here is a break down of the top 3 most common techniques for composting for the home gardener. Hot Composting – Open Bins Hot composting is the most intensive method, but also the fastest way to get finished compost. Build or buy three, side by side compost bins. Bin #1 will be for brown materials…kind of a holding area for things you want to compost. Bin #2 is where all the action happens. The benefits to having the three bin system is that you can continue to collect brown materials during the season in bin #1, and that once you move the compost to bin #3 to settle, you can start over again with a new compost pile. You can also create a hot compost pile in just one bin if you have don’t have space, or don’t have much material to compost… it just means you can only work on one pile of compost at a time. That’s it!
Sub-irrigated planter Sub-irrigated planters (SIP) are simple devices that allow low-maintenance, low-water consumption container gardening. A simple SIP has three major parts: a container for soil; a container for water; and a wick that allows water to be drawn from the water container into the soil container. The wick (typically made of fabric or polyester) draws water up into the soil through capillary action, where the plant roots absorb it at an appropriate rate for the plant. Aeration holes in the soil container, combined with overflow holes in the water container, help prevent the soil from becoming too wet (which may cause the plant roots to rot.) This diagram shows the major parts of a simple SIP made from a plastic pop bottle. SIPs can be easily constructed from a variety of readily available (and commonly discarded containers) using simple tools. 5-Gallon SIP Instructions It all starts with providing a water reservoir at the bottom of your container. Materials: 2 food-grade, 5-gallon plastic buckets.
How To Compost Like A Boss If you are a newbie to composting and struggle to wrap your head around exactly how to make a compost pile, then here’s a ‘how to’ graphic that shows you how to compost. When I first started a compost pile I completely botched the greens/browns ratio, resulting in a pile that took over a year to compost. It is my hope that this visual guide helps your first compost pile turn into a success, so that you can start successfully increasing the fertility of your garden soils. Click On The Graphic To Enlarge Feel free to share on your site by copy and pasting the code below: <p align="center"><a href=" alt="How To Compost" src=" /></a></p><p align="center">How To Compost Brought To You By: <a href="
Worms that can eat plastic could save us from destroying the planet. You tell me what's more repulsive: A Styrofoam cup laying on the ground... Photo by jnyemb/Flickr ...or a pile of slimy, pulsing mealworms? Photo by OakleyOriginals/Flickr Wait! At Upworthy, we tell stories for a better world.Like us on Facebook to get them first: And what if it wasn't just cups, but Styrofoam packaging, water bottles, and all different kinds of discarded plastic? And what if it wasn't strewn across the grass, but instead dumped into one massive trench? When you put it like that, the answer seems pretty obvious. Yuck. But here's something new and surprising: Those wiggly little mealworms might just be the key to fighting plastic pollution all over the world. Image by Kitty Curran/Upworthy. Time for us to fess up: We, as a species, are not very good at recycling. In the United States alone, every year we throw away about 33 million tons of plastic waste (including Styrofoam, which is basically fluffy plastic), with less than 10% of it being recycled properly. This is huge.
Potholes & Pantyhose | DIY Spinning Composter This year was my first year for a full-fledged garden. I consider it full-fledged because it produced enough to not only feed Biceps and I, but it also allowed me to dehydrate, freeze and give-away the excess. To be honest, I was just happy that anything sprouted from the earth. I give props to the composted kitchen and yard waste that we added to the soil-this garden seemed to outperform many of my neighbors’ gardens. And just in case you don’t want to go spend your hard earned dollars buying a fancy composter in excess of $100 bucks or more, I thought I would show you how to make your own using some recycled and some store bought materials for about $30 in a matter of hours. (Here’s my video for my DIY Spinning Composter.) Here’s what you’ll need for your very own composter (The store bought materials can all be found at Lowe’s): Here are the tools you will need to complete the project: Let’s get started! Determine which end is up for you and your barrel.
Zeewierfarm kan net zoveel duurzame energie leveren als windmolens Een nieuwe kant en klare zeewierfarm kan een enorme bijdrage leveren aan het opwekken van duurzame energie(dragers) uit biomassa. Dankzij het gebruik van speciale textiel- matten kan de zeewierteelt vereenvoudigd en de opbrengst fors vergroot worden. Zeewierteelt op het Nederlandse deel van de Noordzee kan volgens Energieonderzoek Centrum Nederland (ECN) net zoveel duurzame energie opleveren als alle windturbines op zee en land bij elkaar opgeteld. De baanbrekende zeewierfarm is ontwikkeld door een consortium van elf bedrijven binnen het Europese At-Sea project en op drie locaties met succes getest. Nu wordt zeewier nog geteeld met behulp van touwen en netten. ,,Deze techniek is de eerste stap naar grootschaligere productie van zeewier. Zeewier wordt nu op zeer beperkte schaal gebruikt voor de productie van chemicaliën, voedingsstoffen en eiwitten. Volgens Wortel en De Jong biedt grootschalige zeewierteelt op zee nog legio andere voordelen. Lees meer over: energie, zeewier Dit artikel:
Composting 101 for citydwellers | Page 4 As Tom Philpott wrote in the introductory essay to Grist’s Feeding the City series, urban agriculture took a huge hit once combustible-fuel machines replaced horses — and horse manure — as the vehicle of choice in cities. Farms need fertilizer, and it’s more efficient to grow where the sources of it live and poop. However, every day city dwellers throw away huge amounts of organic matter that could be turned into that precious material — through composting. Yard trimmings and food scraps make up 26 percent of U.S. waste, and once this organic matter hits the landfill, it breaks down slowly due to lack of air: your farmers-market tomato can produce methane, a deadly greenhouse gas, in a not-so-green afterlife. If you’re going to all the trouble to eat locally grown, organic vegetables, it’s rather a shame to truck their remains away to landfill prison when you could be feeding them back to the earth. So why aren’t you composting yet? First, you need to know the basics. Municipal composting
Hydroponics NASA researcher checking hydroponic onions with Bibb lettuce to his left and radishes to the right Hydroponics is a subset of hydroculture, the method of growing plants without soil, using mineral nutrient solutions in a water solvent.[1] Terrestrial plants may be grown with only their roots exposed to the mineral solution, or the roots may be supported by an inert medium, such as perlite or gravel. The nutrients in hydroponics can be from fish waste, duck manure, or normal nutrients. History[edit] In 1929, William Frederick Gericke of the University of California at Berkeley began publicly promoting that solution culture be used for agricultural crop production.[3][4] He first termed it aquaculture but later found that aquaculture was already applied to culture of aquatic organisms. Reports of Gericke's work and his claims that hydroponics would revolutionize plant agriculture prompted a huge number of requests for further information. Techniques[edit] Static solution culture[edit]