Latest News

Sunday 20 Dec 2009

Mini Greenhouse Tent Saves Greens From Snow Storm

About a foot of snow fell this weekend in Asheville. Power was out for 15 hours, stores and restaurants were closed, and cars were snowed in for days. But we had fresh garden greens this weekend from our garden. Our StarterHouse portable greenhouse by FlowerHouse arrived just in time. We’ve had it up for over a [...]

Friday 18 Dec 2009

Article: That Tap Water Is Legal but May Be Unhealthy

We’ve been filtering our water for years, but after doing more research on water, decided to switch to bottled distilled water. Tap water is so bad these days that filtering it doesn’t get all the chemicals out. Flouride, in particular, was the main impetus for the switch. That’s not to say that filtering your tap [...]

Wednesday 25 Nov 2009

Article: Exploring a Low-Acid Diet for Bone Health

This isn’t news in some health-conscious circles, but it’s wonderful to see it addressed so prominently in the New York Times. This article challenges the idea, long touted by the dairy industry, that milk is beneficial in combating osteoporosis. It goes even further and suggests that maybe it is part of the problem. The science of [...]

Sunday 25 Oct 2009

Harvesting Unripe Peppers

We planted our red sweet peppers quite a bit late in the season. My plants produced a lot of peppers but did not have a chance to fully ripen before the first frost came and withered all the leaves. My gardening advisor suggested we go ahead and harvest the peppers, since they were already pretty large. Definitely, [...]

Sunday 18 Oct 2009

Tiny Urban Gardens Wherever They Will Fit

I spend a lot of time walking around my neighborhood. I used to enjoy the pretty landscaping, but over the past year or so, a significant change has happened. More and more neighbors are turning their yards into vegetable gardens; finding any patch of earth that gets sunlight and planting food. This is an older neighborhood [...]

Saturday 03 Oct 2009

Gardening and Farming on Rooftops in the big cities

Even in the Big Apple, residents are finding ways to garden. One resident has even created a 6,000 square foot commercial organic farm, on a rooftop in Brooklyn. Check out the video here. Learn more about Rooftop Farms, in Brooklyn NY.

Saturday 26 Sep 2009

Cabbage Worms – Importance of Daily Garden Checks

I was told when I put in my garden to check it every single day for damaging insects and slugs. I enjoy my morning (and afternoon) visits to my garden so much that it was never a problem to follow through on that. But with these crazy rain storms we’ve been having here in Western [...]

Thursday 24 Sep 2009

Tomato Blight in the Southeast Mountains

There’s been a lot of news lately about late blight hitting tomato crops in the north east. Sadly, the same has happened here in the mountains of Western North Carolina, where temperatures are a little cooler than most of the Southeast. We planted our tomatoes late so we never managed to get a single edible fruit [...]

Wednesday 23 Sep 2009

Local food shopping – trade produce with your neighbors

A new website called Veggie Trader is now available for any zipcode in the U.S., provided all you gardeners sign up and participate. Veggie Trader allows you to barter your back yard garden produce with your neighbors. Wondering what to do with all those tomatoes? Maybe your neighbor wants some. Make a few bucks on [...]

Saturday 19 Sep 2009

So Long, Summer Squash – Pickleworms Attack

We got our garden started pretty late in the season, but we figured we would try for some summer squash anyway. And we got a good dozen or so fruits off of it which were all delicious. Suddenly, the squashes started rotting on the plant and then I noticed little holes had been bored into each [...]

Sign up for our newsletter!