With food prices rising in most developed countries, people making the most of their back yards by getting into gardening and producing their own fruit and vegetables is ever more popular. As a matter of fact, according to broadcaster NBC, sales of seeds, rooted plants and fruit trees in the U.S. are all shooting up fast. Evidently, having the shortest possible produce journey from field to fork is all the rage.
Speaking to NBC News, Janet Bedell, of Venice, Florida, spoke of her new-found fondness for growing her own. She said, “Over the past year or two, when my boyfriend and I went shopping and started seeing how little we got out of the grocery store for how much, we figured we might as well give it a shot trying our own veggies and take some of the weight off our pockets.”
And Bedell is by no means alone in bedding vegetables. In a report by The National Gardening Association in 2014, the Texas-based body found more than 42 million U.S. households had come to the same decision. Some are growing their vegetables at home, others are sharing community gardens, but it still adds up to a grow-your-own enthusiast in more than one-third of all American domiciles. And the association has seen a sharp spike in the number of green-fingered wannabes since the worldwide economic crash of 2008.
Mike Metallo, the president and chief executive officer of the National Gardening Association, said, “[It] clearly shows that there truly is a food revolution taking place in America. We are seeing more people, particularly young people, actively engaged in growing their own food.”
With this in mind, New Jersey gardener Gary Pilarchik came up with a quirky but ingenious technique for growing tomatoes. Now resident in Maryland, Pilarchik has propagated a healthy presence online. As well as various social media profiles, he writes The Rusted Vegetable Garden blog, and has his own YouTube channel. In May 2013, Pilarchik posted a video using a couple of unusual ingredients in his recipe for growing tomatoes. In the clip, he buried a whole banana and an egg underneath a tomato plant. Subsequently, viewers of his weekly updates were astonished at the results.
The idea is that the banana and egg begin to rot and degrade in the soil underneath the tomato plant’s rootstock. Then the roots reach into the decaying material and are able to convey the rich nutrients from it to the rest of the plant. The nutrient mix from the decomposed banana and egg includes potassium, phosphate, calcium, magnesium, sulfur, and sodium. It gives the tomato plant a huge boost and enables it to grow strong and tall.
Additionally, Native Americans would also use another green-fingered gimmick when growing their crops they called the Three Sisters. In essence, this would mean planting three different varieties together – corn, squash and beans. As a result, each vegetable crop would offer symbiotic benefits to the other two, ensuring all three thrived.
The beans would provide nitrogen to the soil, enriching the corn and squash so they could grow robustly. The corn provided a trellis on which the beans could climb. The squash provided cover for the other two plants as they were growing, and it helped to deter some pests.
It is not just the old ways that can make a difference, new trends are making an impact as a result of the influx of new gardeners. One of these is called “attentive gardening,” an offshoot of the vogue for mindfulness meditation. Attentive gardening is a way of drawing the grower’s mind away from stress and focusing on the task in hand – in and around the back yard or plot.
Although the banana-and-egg method has been used elsewhere by other gardeners, Pilarchik has a trove of similarly useful ideas on his Youtube channel. For instance, he has a very helpful video on how to use coffee grounds in growing crops. In this case, he uses the grounds to give his plants a lift in much the same way as the banana and egg.
In the video, Pilarchik said, “You can use them in compost piles… You can also mix it into your soil. You can go into [a coffee shop] and get it for free… with labels saying, ‘Grounds for your Garden.’ You can go there practically every day. People don’t tend to take them.”
point that is often overlooked is that it is not man-made fertilizer that causes the most damage, but pesticides. Bugs and insects have the potential to wreck a gardener’s best efforts, but the use of pesticides usually does collateral damage. Consequently, Pilarchik has a great natural tip for those trying to combat winged menaces and creepy crawlies.
Pilarchik suggests using a vegetable product called neem oil to kill pests that destroy crops, because it also allows the garden’s flora and fauna to thrive. The oil is derived from the fruits and seeds of the subtropical, evergreen neem tree. In another of his videos, Pilarchik advised, “You have to be aware of what you’re buying when you buy neem oil. You want 100-per cent cold-pressed neem oil.”
Pilarchik went on to say, “You want to spray the neem oil on your plants [as part of your gardening] routine. It’s going to vary place to place, but every seven to 14 days, keep your green leafy plants… sprayed and that will stop the damage from the [pests].”
Ultimately, there are other obstacles to those looking to get into gardening than just lack of know-how. Although there has been an uptick in the numbers of people getting their hands dirty, there is a sizable group who simply can’t afford to jump on the grow-your-own bandwagon. Members of the “Generation Rent” demographic tend not to own their homes and research by the Horticultural Trades Association in the U.K. shows they have little interest in rented plots. So those people lucky enough to have nothing to stop them should really get growing.
Source:
scribol.com
