Allowing your elected representatives to amend the 2007 Farm [subsidy] Bill “would be a recipe for chaos,” House Agriculture Committee Chair Collin Peterson (D-Minn.) has proclaimed. The 2007 Farm Bill is cobbled together by environmentalists, budget conservatives, anti-poverty groups, small farm advocates and taxpayer watchdog groups. In short it is a house of cards [...]

I had planned to build a cold frame and carefully document the process for this feature. I told Joel I was going to build a cold frame for this feature. I even got a hold of some very nice rough-cut cedar for the frame. My wife was happy that I was finally going to do [...]

Soil condition is the silent half of the dirt equation. As a general rule if your soil is dark and crumbly it is good soil. The other general rule is that a good portion of us don’t have the luxury of good soil. In these cases you will need to condition or amend your soil.
The [...]

Dirt. I could say that dirt is the most important part of gardening but if you know anything about hydroponics you would know that the dirt is just a handy substrate for holding nutrients and water. It’s what’s in the dirt that makes all the difference to a plant.
The nutrients required for healthy plants reads [...]

I won’t claim to be a master gardener. Heck, I’m probably not even a qualified guide in the traditional sense. I don’t have a botany degree nor a degree in agriculture from some land grant college on the Great Plains. (I did participate in 4-H for about a year when I was eight.) I don’t [...]

Webster’s would like us to believe and most would probably agree that gardening is “the act of cultivating or tending a garden”. That would be correct—but a guy would miss most of what gardening is by accepting this definition alone.
One could further distinguish gardening from, say, farming, by fundamental scale and intent. Gardening is done [...]