Understanding the Core Values of Permaculture: 3 Key Principles

What is permaculture? The word permaculture may seem like a new buzzword in gardening circles, but in reality, it’s so much more. If your interest is in homesteading, self-sufficiency, and gardening, understanding the core concepts of permaculture could be a real game-changer. Permaculture is a way of viewing the world and its resources from a different perspective. This small but growing movement may already be influencing some of your habits.

Young woman harvesting in sunny permaculture garden Photo 170233484 / Permaculture © Sue Wetjen | Dreamstime.com

Photo 170233484 / Permaculture © Sue Wetjen | Dreamstime.com

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Starting Your Survival Garden: 5 Tips for Success

How do you like these grocery prices? If you’re like many people, you may be thinking that it’s time to start a survival garden to become more self-sufficient. There are so many benefits to growing your own food, not the least of which is avoiding crazy prices and limited availability. Let’s take a look at a few tips to help you get started.

Survival garden harvest Photo 94533701 © Alessio Andrea Balza | Dreamstime.com
Photo 94533701 © Alessio Andrea Balza | Dreamstime.com
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7 Benefits of Organic Gardening

7 benefits of organic gardening jpg

Have you ever considered the benefits of organic gardening? Modern farming is geared towards mechanization and homogenization. Instead of organic gardening techniques, most modern farmers use GMOs, pesticides, additives, herbicides, synthetic fertilizers and mass-production techniques. All this is clearly affecting our health, and new diseases are spreading rapidly among humans and animals.

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Naturally Healthy Fruit Trees — Do the Work Now!

 

arborjet productsWe planted three apple trees this past spring, and while they appear to be doing great, they also seem to have “inherited” the fungus that all of the maple trees have. I haven’t done any testing to determine what it is specifically. I just know it’s fungal and it looks like yuck. My hunch is that it’s a rust disease but I don’t know if rust diseases are common for maples, and they look the same. But I digress… I don’t believe it will kill the trees, but since the apple trees are still new, it may be a little harder for them to adapt. Continue reading

Herbs for Attracting Beneficial Insects

calendula with bee

Organic gardening is becoming a popular movement even though it was common-place to our ancestors. Of course, our ancestors didn’t call it organic gardening; they called it feeding their family. With the advent of synthetic chemical pesticides, farmers and gardeners thought their worries were over as they doused their crops with toxic chemicals that not only killed all the insects, but as was later discovered, also contributed to a variety of health issues. Continue reading

Celeste’s Garden Delights Is Delightful Reading

celeste's garden delights

I am so overdue on writing this post. I have been feeling pretty cruddy the last couple of weeks so I am behind on stuff. But, today is the day! This book rocks and I need to tell y’all about it.

So I met Celeste via email when I was setting up interviews on an article I was doing for a client. It took me a while to realize she was the same Celeste Longacre that writes for The Old Farmer’s Almanac. Duh! Just so happens I made the connection the same day her book arrived in the mail. Continue reading