Monday, April 6, 2009

Organic Gardening

Cool Little video found on Cyrus Suttons Vimeo page.


UGROW ORGANICS from Cyrus Sutton on Vimeo.

I visited the web site at ugroworganics.com and its still a work in progress. I'm going to be checking back periodically to see how it progresses.

I've been wanting to re-do the old garden in our backyard, maybe this summer. I have fond memories of the gardens my family had while I was young. We had corn, beets, turnips, cucumbers (Jesse & Danny's Cucumber patch, our equivalence of an allowance) and much more. Not only could it be a source of healthy pesticide-free foods, it can save money and be a fun family project to work on. Some interesting statistics from various sources...

  • 2.5 million gallons of pesticides are used on our food every year
  • Typical American diets feature 60-70 toxic chemicals daily
  • One of the major causes of degradation of the food supply is poor soil. Poor soil is the result of modern farming techniques.
I'd heard in the past that due to farming techniques the nutrients from say, one apple 100 years ago are equal to about 10 apples eaten now. I couldn't find the source to back that up, but I can see it being the case. Either way, making your own backyard, patio, or windowsill garden is win-win. You either get healthier, save money, have fun, or any combination of the three!

Edit: Here's some interesting follow-up found on The Cleanest Line

KEEP OUT OF REACH OF CHILDREN - Industry reps fear organic garden

The industry in question is the agroindustrial genetically manipulated monocrop chemicalification comglomerate. It's a mouthful, which is why folks in this business like to refer to themselves as representatives of "conventional agriculture," companies like Monsanto, Dow AgroSciences and DuPont Crop Protection. Let's leave aside for a moment the fact that our friends in the agroindustrial complex have been hard at work redefining "conventional agriculture" to mean "requiring the extensive use of synthetically engineered petroleum-based fertilizers to biologically barren soils with the aim of promoting growth of genetically manipulated, non-replicating seed-like products, upon which vast quantities of industrially designed petroleum-derived biocides must be applied."

Read the rest here...

1 comments:

SKM April 28, 2009 at 11:00 AM  

when you're ready to grow, check out Soil Soup. we've got the website bookmarked somewhere. wish we got to live anywhere long enough to make it a reality for us!