Posts Tagged ‘organic’

This weekend I’m in Tucson, visiting some family. Yesterday, we went down to 4th street, which is filled with fun restaurants, book stores, music venues and bars, artistic shops and…an organic gardening store. At first, I was a bit worried that Sea of Green would be catered only to that other kind of green (I think that probably makes up the largest majority of their sales), but after peeking inside, I saw that they had a lot of organic gardening supplies inside. My three year old neice especially liked the carnivorous plants section.  She was excited to learn about the Venus Fly Traps, and pointed out the flies that had been trapped by the tank of carnivorous plants.  We also had fun looking at the Seed Savers Exchange seed section, and I pointed out which flowers and vegetables would be easiest to grow in small pots.  We settled on Marigold seeds,

Welcome to our newest guest blogger, Rosemary Markowski, who will be covering farms in the DC region throughout the next several weeks. Rosemary is a mother, painter, and sculptor who writes about her experience as a working artist and her transition from urban homesteading to life on the farm. She will be exploring the relationship between our city and its local food sources. Rosemary lives in Bluemont, Virginia with her husband, three children and menagerie. View work at www.rosemarymarkowski.com and read more at mistakenforarebel.blogspot.com. Why are you interested in food grown in the city? If you are like many of today’s urban dwellers you are concerned with knowing where your food is coming from. With many health and safety concerns surrounding food, the fewer steps it takes to your plate the better. Food that is fresh looks better, tastes better, and is better for you. After all it was Julia

Businessweek recent ran an article titled USDA asked to decide: Does organic mean outdoor?  The article highlights many of the concerns that consumers have when making purchasing decisions and raises questions about how the government regulates labeling.  “Some insist that organic means small farms, open space and fresh air. They want the U.S. Department of Agriculture to create new rules defining the conditions in which organic hens should be kept.  Others say such standards result in food that’s out of reach for most Americans and using enclosures and other cost-saving techniques makes organics affordable.” While the difference in quality of “organic” products raises philosophical issues about animal treatment, food access, truth in advertising, and social justice, I think in this article, it’s important to focus on simply defining the different types of products out there – free range, organic, grass-fed, what do they all mean? For example, according to Businessweek:

This is a shameless plug, but it’s for a good cause.  It will make you smile on a Monday morning.  My friend Nichole, over at The Daily Bun, has been “snorging up the world since 2006.”  What does that mean, you might ask?  Well, Nichole, with her slightly twisted (yet hysterical) sense of humor, has been sending a select list of people daily pictures of bunnies for the past 4 years.  She’s added words such as “kronchable” and “blobule” to my vocabulary along the way.  It never fails - when I am having a bad day (or even a fantastic one), an email from “The Daily Bun” is a “must open” and puts a huge grin on my face.  Last year, she started a blog, and has been using that to “snorg up the world” ever since.  Check out this post, which overlaps the content of this site, entitled Organic Bunny.  I promise

I attended the National Capitol Planning Commission’s speaker series, Seven Minutes & Change Toward a Better Region, and it was an urban planner’s geek heaven!  9 presentations, and the best part is – they were all distilled down to their core, as participants only had 7 minutes to get their point across.   Several people echoed my sentiments that there is a lot of filler in most presentations, and “all should be limited to 7 minutes.” While they were all fascinating, the one that was most applicable to this blog was a presentation by Gül Güleryüz (Prince George’s County) entitled: Urban Agriculture: It’s Good Food, it’s Jobs, and it’s Fun! I learned a few interesting facts in the seven minutes, the most interesting being: Will Allen’s Growing Power is working with  a farm in Prince George’s county on gardening as an economic development strategy.  They have three hoop houses, vermiculture, and

The heat is taking a toll on my plants (more on this in a later post), but they’re still producing beautiful basil, tomatoes, and peppers.  Once (if?) we make it through this heatwave, I’ll expct a second round in late August, and, probably, through October. What did I make with all the basil?  PESTO!  (It’s in my freezer now.)

Introduce aphid-eating insects into the garden as a natural predator