by guest bloggers from the EPA’s WaterSense program. This summer’s heat wave is expected to result in a serious spike in the amount of water being used outdoors. And if steps aren’t taken to make water use more efficient, communities will face major challenges managing droughts and depletion of freshwater resources. Here are the top 8 tips to save water this summer:
Organic Gardening
16 Ways to Enjoy Your Summer Garden
I enjoy gardening, but I love enjoying my garden. And the trick to summer gardening is to be able to spend more time enjoying it and less time sweating over it. That’s why I wrote my new ebook: Maria Rodale’s Organic Gardening Secrets: Summer. I want to make your summer gardening so easy that you actually have time to enjoy it.
Milkweeds and Monarchs
Once, a few years ago, I saw these incredible flowers—kind of like giant mauve disco-ball chandeliers. When I inquired, I was told they were an incredibly invasive species of weed known as milkweed. I decided right then and there that I had to have some.
7 Ways to Care for Summer Chickens
by guest blogger Jean Nick. If you bought chicks in the spring they are about half grown by now, and they’re big enough and well feathered enough to spend their days in a run and their nights outside in a secure building or pen. Here’s how to make sure they grow to be happy layers.
Where Do Strawberries Come From?
This year I am blessed with an EPIC strawberry crop. This is the second year of them. Last year they were too young to produce much. And I know that they won’t be this productive forever, but holy cow, these babies are beautiful and perfect.
Organic Farming in a NYC
Public School
by guest blogger Alberto Gonzalez. Hatching chicks from eggs, growing kale, and making homemade vanilla ice cream with only five ingredients. I’m not talking about life on a bucolic farm, or a culinary studies program for potential farm-to-table chefs—this is what’s going on at a public school in New York City.
Create an Edible Ecosystem: No Fertilizer or Pest Control Needed
by guest blogger Kristina Jones. The idea behind an “edible ecosystem” garden is that it’s a different but complementary approach to organic farming that mimics a natural ecosystem, like a forest, but with food plants instead of trees and shrubs. Nobody fertilizes the forest or sprays pesticides, but the oaks still make gazillions of acorns. So we’re learning to garden like a forest.
Point Phillips Perennials:
Selling Hope
Yes, yes, I know I raved about Terrain a few weeks ago. But there is a different sort of nursery that I love even more. It’s the kind of nursery that’s nurtured by people who have faith in the future, love, love, LOVE nature, and have a passion for plants.
Scratch
Raised on America’s first organic farm, Scratch author Maria Rodale learned how to make everyday favorites from, yes, scratch — the way you remember them; the way they turn out best.
Order NowOrganic Manifesto
Drawing on findings from leading health researchers as well as conversations with both chemical and organic farmers from coast to coast, Maria Rodale irrefutably outlines the unacceptably high cost of chemical farming on our health and our environment.
Order Now