garden – Page 3 – Things Are Good

Gardening for Beginners

Stuck inside due to the coronavirus? Why not learn to garden so when the good weather comes you can socially isolate yourself while also feeding yourself?

Rob Greenfield was nervous and hesitant gardner when he started and wants you to know that it’s ok to be intimidated by growing your own fruits and veggies. He’s created a great guide to help you get started in converting your lawn (which are not good) to a bountiful land of crops!

My goal with this guide is to help you get past the parts you may be nervous about. I want to empower you and activate you into growing your own food and sharing it with your community. Once your confidence level has risen and you feel like youâ€™ve got the hang of it, Iâ€™m confident that you can figure out the rest!

This guide is geared toward beginner and first-time gardeners in the Orlando, Florida area. I would not recommend this guide if you are outside Florida. Instead I would use myÂ Free Seed Project Gardening Guide. Florida is a pretty unique state when it comes to growing food and this guide is aimed at helping people working within the circumstances that Central Florida provides.Â This guide focuses on the basics of growing food and provides a general rule of thumb with ideas. It is by no means the end all be all of beginner gardening. However, I do feel that reading this whole guide will be extremely helpful to those of you who are just getting started.

This Guy Only Ate Food He Grew for One Year

The video above tells a story about a person who grew in his garden enough food to eat for a year. Even with a small plot of land one can grow a lot of food. At our house we find that we have food to give away at the end of the summer.

Right now is a perfect time to start planning your garden to get some free food.

I hope that you are inspired to plant some food and support local farmers and growers in your area! We definitely can’t all do what I did, nor do we need to, but in the times we live in we all certainly do something to improve the world around us while increasing our own health and happiness.
If you got inspiration from this join me on my channel for more great videos:
http://youtube.com/robgreenfield
And on Instagram @RobJGreenfield https://www.instagram.com/robjgreenfield/
Health and happiness to you all!

For Inspiration Follow the Local Learning Process of a Gardener

bee

Bees are amazing little creatures that have been around far longer than humans but now they need our help. As byproduct of industrialization and the overuse of pesticides colony collapse disorder has hit the bees and hard. There is something we as individuals can do to help the bees -start gardening. One person in Toronto has set out to document how she goes about designing her garden to help bees (and other insects) and share that knowledge with everyone. It’s a great site filled with some fun nuggets of information.

If you’re looking for some inspiration for your garden check it out. Her most recent post looked into why bees are amazing and how to identify them:

Over the summer, the native flowers we planted attracted a wide range of pollinators, including a number of native bee species. Using the City of Toronto’s useful (and well illustrated) resource, Bees of Toronto: A Guide to Their Remarkable World, I’ve done my best to identify these garden visitors in the photos below (hint: click the photos to seem them at full size). Once you start to look for these charismatic little creatures, they’re surprisingly easy to find.

Build Butterflyways for Beautiful Pollinators

bee

Every pollinator is beautiful and there is an easy way to see more of them while helping the world: butterflyways. The concept is simple: bees and butterflies are under a lot of pressure from human activity so help them on their pollination journey by feeding them. All you have to do is look up what pollinators love in your local area then plant a small garden for them, then tell others. By combining efforts with other gardeners or community groups you can create a pleasant route for our little friends.

In May and June, activities ranged from creating butterfly-themed costumes and a bike-trailer garden that won second prize in a Victoria parade, to adopting city parks in Richmond. In Markham and Toronto, Rangers built on a project started through the foundationâ€™s Homegrown National Park Project, installing a dozen wildflower-filled canoes in parks, schools and daycares. In Torontoâ€™s west end, a pair of Rangers led the Butterflyway Lane art project, painting butterfly-themed murals on two dozen garage doors, walls and fences in a laneway facing Garrison Creek Park.

In late June, Torontoâ€™s Beaches neighbourhood and Richmond, B.C. surpassed the target of a dozen Ranger-led plantings, earning kudos from the foundation for creating Canadaâ€™s first Butterflyways. The project is spreading, with neighbouring city councillors and groups clamouring to get their own Butterflyways.

Rain Gardens to Feature in Canada Blooms Competition

Canada Blooms is a competition to demonstrate one’s ability to display flowers. In the past it was based on the look of the arrangement done in a garden, now they are expanding how they think about flowers. This year they want people to submit rain gardens to the competition.

Rain gardens are preferred because they use water that falls from he sky instead of draining local aquifers or other finite sources. It’s good to see a Canada Blooms caring about the environment and hopefully they will become more conscious of nature with every year.

“Rain gardens are a brilliant concept,” says Terry Caddo, General Manager of Canada Blooms. “By creating some small adjustments in your home garden you can not only create a fuller, lush garden, but you will also help improve water quality in nearby bodies of water and ease the strain on our environment.”

Rain gardens are natural or man-made rainwater runoffs that allow storm water to be soaked into the ground and plants rather than flowing into storm drains. By diverting the water that would eventually drain out to local rivers, lakes or to the sea, rain gardens help prevent erosion, water pollution and flooding.