Picture a blustery winter day in February, the gloomy season. It’s cold and slushy outside with a blanket of gray clouds covering the sky. As you trudge through the ice, suddenly a gleam of purple catches your eye. It’s a crocus, the first bloom of the year!
Planning for those spring flowers starts [...]
Farmer Jeff and the crew at LIFE Certified Organic Farm are busy saving seeds from over 100 different varieties to add to our Nature’s Crossroads catalog next year. I hope to post lots of pictures over the next couple of months but in the interim I wanted to make some suggestions for those of you [...]
Tags: beans, easy, seed saving, seeds, tomatoes
It may still be hot and humid outside but it’s time to get your fall garden going. That means you get to revisit your spring favorites –peas, brassicas (broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower, kale), root crops (radishes, beets, carrots, turnips), and a number of leafy greens (spinach, arugula, a few lettuce varieties). You might even find that [...]
Tags: fall, gardening, root crops, season extension
Tips on avoiding late and early tomato blight from LIFE farmer Jeff Evard.
The warm weather is likely bringing your tomatoes to fruit now. The plants are working hard and anything less than ideal conditions can weaken them. A lot of the plant’s energy is being diverted away from leaf, root, and stem development and being [...]
Guest post by Jami Scholl, My Edible Eden LLC
July seems an odd time to begin keeping a garden journal. Just as tomatoes are beginning to ripen on the vine, a few pickings of green beans have already been eaten for dinner, and the lettuces, peas and spinach seem a distant memory; we tend to think [...]
Tags: garden, Jami Scholl, journal
Happy Independence Day! In our neck of the woods, it’s a holiday often celebrated with fireworks, parades, and patriotic bunting along with a barbecue (perhaps featuring some fresh green beans from the garden and maybe a couple of tomatoes if we really got a head start on our gardens this spring). It’s also a time [...]
Tags: garden, Independence Day, Victory Garden
Guest post by Luna Dirt Dani.
Welcome to the garden revolution where herbicides are replaced by herbalists! Wait, don’t kill that plant! I’m going to make medicine out of it!
It’s true; almost all the “weeds” that grow in the garden are useful food and medicine plants. Let’s first talk about that interesting word “weed.” Simply put, [...]
Guest post by master gardener and organic grower Michael Simmons.
You’ve improved your soil, planted correctly, and now await the fruits of your labors. Here are a few simple steps to take to make the harvest live up to your expectations.
The strongest defense your crop plants have against competition from weeds, attacks by pathogens, and predation [...]
Guest post by Nathan Harman of the Bloomington Permaculture Guild.
The basic concept of mulch is that it mimics the natural soil cover that any ecosystem has evolved with. Whether it is leaf cover in a deciduous forest, dry grass stalks in a prairie, or the constant compost of a rainforest, natural systems include some annual [...]
One of our biggest goals here at Nature’s Crossroads is encouraging people to garden, especially children. We love seeing people grow food for themselves and for others in their community. With that in mind, we created a garden sponsorship program where we donate seeds to charitable gardening projects like school gardens, community gardens, food pantry [...]
Tags: community, free seeds, garden, sponsorship, youth
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