Learning to hand pollinate is a no-brainer for the indoor gardener, but its a trick even those with a backyard garden or growing tomatoes in containers on the balcony, deck or patio should know how to do. You might wonder why you would need to pollinate tomatoes grown outdoors. They are self-fertile, meaning that both male and female parts are contained in one flower, and so they produce fruit without a pollinator plant. However, the weather isn't especially cooperative every summer. Its a pretty Read more [...]

If you're like anyone else, you have a continual supply of food waste that is being thrown away. That's not just money down the drain, but the start of free nutrition for your garden plants. Its organic too, as long as you use only food scraps that were organically grown. Trace elements of GMOs and mainstream agriculture chemicals will remain if you use any other type of scraps. While you cannot use this fertilizer for hydroponic gardens if you're going to maintain smoothly operating equipment. Read more [...]

Like many a parent, I always assumed that learning about growing food was something best left for when kids were older. Wrong! A lesson learned on a simple outing to entertain a 3-year old with a budget of zero. Perhaps it all went down like it did because grandparents have more time to dream up creative outings than parents do. I knew it would be interesting for the wee tot, but she was besotted with the cute little sprouts. It was all I could do to stop her from hugging the emerging green bean Read more [...]

There are some really cool ideas for indoor gardening floating around the internet. To the unaware, they might not work out that well. DIY hydroponics setups are hot. A great looking idea that is really creative or has great artistic aesthetics gets shared on tons of blog and magazine type sites. Its exciting to see the growing interest in raising food indoors too, but some of these 'how to' ideas will or could have poor results. One thing I noticed while being led from site to site through Read more [...]

If you're at all familiar with vegetables outdoors, you might have noticed that the packets of seed you purchase every spring all have a 'packed for' date somewhere on the envelope. If you purposefully purchase outdated seed, chances are you'll have a disappointing germination rate, perhaps no sown seed will germinate at all. This leads the average person to assume that seed for fruits, vegetables and herbs have a very short shelf life. Nothing could be further from the truth. Its all in how the Read more [...]