Showing posts with label benefits of victory gardens. Show all posts
Showing posts with label benefits of victory gardens. Show all posts
Who owns our health? Building a medicinal garden
'Dr Vivienne Lo has created a medicinal herb spiral in central London to address issues around the use of food and herbs as medicine in everyday home remedies or as dangerous substances to be regulated.'
Healing Your Liver with TEA
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Healing Your Liver with TEA
Start a 1-Acre, Self-Sufficient Homestead
'Your 1-acre homestead can be divided into land for raising livestock and a garden for raising fruits, vegetables, plus some grain and forage crops. Illustration: Dorling Kindersley'
'Everyone will have a different approach to keeping a self-sufficient homestead, and it’s unlikely that any two 1-acre farms will follow the same plan or methods or agree completely on how to homestead. Some people like cows; other people are afraid of them. Some people like goats; other people cannot keep them out of the garden.
Some people will not slaughter animals and have to sell their surplus stock off to people who will kill them; others will not sell surplus stock off at all because they know that the animals will be killed; and still others will slaughter their own animals to provide their family with healthy meat.'
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Why Gardening Makes You Happy and Cures Depression
'While mental health experts warn about depression as a global epidemic, other researchers are discovering ways we trigger our natural production of happy chemicals that keep depression at bay, with surprising results. All you need to do is get your fingers dirty and harvest your own food.
In recent years I’ve come across two completely independent bits of research that identified key environmental triggers for two important chemicals that boost our immune system and keep us happy - serotonin and dopamine. What fascinated me as a permaculturist and gardener were that the environmental triggers happen in the garden when you handle the soil and harvest your crops.'
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Toby Hemenway - How Permaculture Can Save Humanity and the Earth, but Not Civilization
'The revised and updated edition also features a new chapter on urban permaculture, designed especially for people in cities and suburbs who have very limited growing space. Whatever size yard or garden you have to work with, you can apply basic permaculture principles to make it more diverse, more natural, more productive, and more beautiful. Best of all, once it’s established, an ecological garden will reduce or eliminate most of the backbreaking work that’s needed to maintain the typical lawn and garden.'
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Food in Uncertain Times: How to Grow and Store the 5 Crops You Need to Survive
'In an age of erratic weather and instability, it's increasingly important to develop a greater self-reliance when it comes to food. And because of this, more than ever before, farmers are developing new gardening techniques that help achieve a greater resilience. Longtime gardener and scientist Carol Deppe, in her new book The Resilient Gardener: Food Production and Self-Reliance in Uncertain Times, offers a wealth of unique and expansive information for serious home gardeners and farmers who are seeking optimistic advice. Do you want to know more about the five crops you need to survive through the next thousand years? What about tips for drying summer squash, for your winter soups? Ever thought of keeping ducks on your land?'
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Dirt Cheap Eats -- Your Own Victory Garden
'A few generations ago the kitchen garden was a necessity. In recent times it has become more of a hobby, a source of fun and outdoor exercise that carries a few bonuses. No salad is fresher than the one you pick minutes before a meal; no dish gives more pride than the one you produce literally from the ground up. Today, with the economy sputtering, we may see the kitchen garden make a comeback.
'Remember victory gardens? Eleanor Roosevelt spurred 20 million home gardens by planting one on the White House grounds in 1943. A Maine neighbor's petition drive at eattheview.org asks the Obamas to renew the example. All you need to start your kitchen garden is a bit of basic information about plot size and soil, guarding your garden from wildlife, and which crops to grow.'
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'Remember victory gardens? Eleanor Roosevelt spurred 20 million home gardens by planting one on the White House grounds in 1943. A Maine neighbor's petition drive at eattheview.org asks the Obamas to renew the example. All you need to start your kitchen garden is a bit of basic information about plot size and soil, guarding your garden from wildlife, and which crops to grow.'
Read more...
Top 10 Reasons To Grow Your Own Organic Food
1. Get The Nutrition You Need and Enjoy Tastier Food!
Many studies have shown that organically grown food has more minerals and nutrients that we need than food grown with synthetic pesticides. There’s a good reason why many chefs use organic foods in their recipes—they taste better. Organic farming starts with the nourishment of the soil, which eventually leads to the nourishment of the plant and, ultimately our bodies.
2. Save Money
Growing your own food can help cut the cost of the grocery bill. Instead of spending hundreds of dollars and month at the grocery store on foods that don’t really nourish you, spend time in the garden, outside, exercising, learning to grow your own food.
3. Protect Future Generations
The average child receives four times more exposure than an adult to at least eight widely used cancer-causing pesticides in food. Food choices you make now will impact your child’s future health.
“We have not inherited the Earth from our fathers,
we are borrowing it from our children.”
– Lester Brown
4. Prevent Soil Erosion
Soil in developed nations is eroded several times faster than it’s built up naturally. Soil is the foundation of the food chain in organic farming. However, in conventional farming, the soil is used more as a medium for holding plants in a vertical position so they can be chemically fertilized. As a result, many farms worldwide are suffering from the worst soil erosion in history.
5. Protect Water Quality
Water makes up two-thirds of our body mass and covers three-fourths of the planet. Pesticides - some cancer causing - contaminate the groundwater an can pollute the primary source of drinking water.
6. Save Energy
Modern farming uses more petroleum than any other single industry, consuming a significant percentage total energy supply. More energy is now used to produce synthetic fertilizers than to till, cultivate and harvest crops. If you are growing your own food in the city, you are cutting down on transportation and pollution costs.
7. Keep Chemicals Off Your Plate
In the United States, many pesticides approved for use by the Enviromental Protection Agency (EPA) were registered long before extensive research linking these chemicals to cancer and other diseases had been established. Now the EPA considers 60 percent of all herbicides, 90 percent of all fungicides and 30 percent of all insecticides carcinogenic. A 1987 National Academy of Sciences report estimated that pesticides might cause an extra 4 million cancer cases among Americans. If you are growing your own food, you have control over what does, or doesn’t, go into it. The bottom line is that pesticides are poisons designed to kill living organisms and can also harm humans. In addition to cancer, pesticides are implicated in birth defects, nerve damage and genetic mutations.
8. Protect Workers and Help Small Farmers
A National Cancer Institute study found that farmers exposed to herbicides had six times more risk than non-farmers of contracting cancer. In California, reported pesticide poisonings among farm workers have risen an average of 14 percent a year since 1973 and doubled between 1975 and 1985. Field workers suffer the highest rates of occupational illness in the state. Farm worker health is also a serious problem in developing nations, where pesticide use can be poorly regulated. An estimated 1 million people are poisoned annually by pesticides.
Although more and more large-scale farms are making the conversion to organic practices, most organic farms are small, independently owned family farms of fewer than 100 acres. It’s estimated the United States has lost more than 650,000 family farms in the past decade. And the U.S. Department of Agriculture predicted that half of this country’s farm production will come from 1 percent of farms by the year 2000, organic farming could be one of the few survival tactics left for family farms.
9. Promote Biodiversity
Mono-cropping is the practice of planting large plots of land with the same crop year after year. While this approach tripled farm production between 1950 and 1970, the lack of natural diversity of plant life has left the soil lacking in natural minerals and nutrients. To replace the nutrients, chemical fertilizers are used, often in increasing amounts. Single crops are also much more susceptible to pests, making farmers more reliant on pesticides. Despite a tenfold increase in the use of pesticides between 1947 and 1974, crop losses due to insects have doubled—partly because some insects have become genetically resistant to certain pesticides.
10. Help Beautify Your Community
Besides being used to grow food, community gardens are also a great way to beautify a community, and to bring pride in ownership.
Original Article HERE
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