Survival Gardening for Pandemics

Food

Building a Salsa Garden

Although Christmas is around the corner and winter is definitely here, it’s never too late (or early) to start planning for next year. I don’t know about you, but one thing I love more than [ … ]

Food

Gardening Indoors- Easy and Organic

Gardening indoors is not so much an alternative to outdoor gardening, but rather another way to garden. You work in smaller spaces and will have fewer problems than your outdoor plots, and you can do [ … ]

Food

The Synthetic Path to Ruin

If you watch a lot of commercial television or listen to the radio several hours a day, you probably have your fair share of commercials that you love to hate. It seems that some stations and networks tend to run the same annoying messages a dozen or more times a day, sometimes two or three times during the same program. If you’re anything like me, you eventually just tune them out, mute the sound, or change the station. [ … ]

Food

Care and Feeding of Organic Roses

In earlier articles, we have mentioned how you can actually use roses to create not only beautiful but delicious dishes and arrangements. However, in order to have food-grade roses, you must grow them without chemical [ … ]

Food

Growing Bountiful Blueberries

Blueberries are high in vitamin C and are very versatile; they make great pies, preserves, juice, or can be eaten right from the bush. Blueberries are among the easiest berries to grow, but soil preparation is crucial to a good crop. They grow best in sandy, well-drained soil rich in organic material with a pH level between 4.0 and 5.2. Soil should be prepared well in advance, at least two weeks before planting your bushes, but some say that preparing the season before is best. [ … ]

Food

Composting in Winter

In the northern hemisphere, November sprawls across the border of autumn and winter like a damp gray blanket. While the eleventh month brings a few pleasant days to us in North Carolina, it also carries stretches of time burdened by chilly winds and cold rains. It’s enough to make an old fellow want to pull the comforter up to his furry chin and stay in bed to ride out the whole sloppy mess. Bats, bears, hedgehogs, squirrels, chipmunks, and a host of other critters are either… [ … ]

Food

Growing Great Gooseberries

Gooseberries have thorny, arching branches that grow to a height and spread of three to five feet. They flower from one-year-old wood and short spurs of older wood. Buds open to yield one to four [ … ]

Food

Growing Cold-Hardy Currants

Currants are a fast growing, deciduous shrub, which produce multiple stems that can grow five feet wide and high. Most currants are self fertile, but some cultivars are partially self-sterile, so planting them in twos [ … ]

Food

The Horror of Crystalline Fructose

As I sit down to write this column, Halloween is right around the corner. Strolling through my neighborhood, I’ve noticed a wide variety of goblins, ghouls, and tombstones decorating the lawns. In a Halloween frame of mind, I’d like to suggest a plot for a future horror movie. Imagine a place where the population receives about a quarter of their calories from a poison that is disguised as food. The overlords of this society have not only labeled this toxic substance “generally safe”…. [ … ]