Soil Conservation

Saturday morning and it’s off to the garden center for topsoil to get the planting started.   Go ahead, pick out a likely bag from the selection. After all, you’re a gardener and you know your dirt. In grabbing a handful of topsoil, what sort of rating process do you apply? For example, does it look… [Read More]

When we look at a field of dairy cows chowing down on alfalfa and clover, think of all the milk products they give us — butter, cream, ice cream and ingredients for our favorite chocolate bars, to name some. But their diets of all that roughage produces a totally unexpected cash crop: manure. Today’s dairy… [Read More]

Why not? Egg shells, banana peels and leftovers are biodegradable, so they’ll just go into the landfill and decompose, right? Probably not.  Are you aware that because of federal regulation landfills are equipped with liners to prevent any food scraps from touching the soil?  So instead it decomposes, releasing methane gasses that municipalities recapture as… [Read More]

It’s been estimated the average air passenger leaves behind three pounds of trash when deplaning. It breaks down to 33% discarded or uneaten food, 28% paper and cardboard, and 12% plastic. (The rest must be soda cans and all those little liquor and wine bottles.) When you multiply that by four billion passengers per year,… [Read More]

There’s a new gardening trend happening in New York, where there’s precious little land for such activity.  But you must look up instead of down. Up is where there are roofs, and if your home has access to a flat one, there might be a chance to do a little urban gardening up there.  Sounds… [Read More]