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Alfred Hitchcock, the master of dramatized horror-suspense, once told me that the greatest scares came in broad daylight, not in the dark. So it might be with "Food, Inc.," a documentary that opens our eyes to what we have been conditioned to feel was a "safe place" in life. We still go to grocery stores that feature pictures of rustic farms that suggest Americana. We notice that a double cheeseburger is cheaper than broccoli. We are in a rush. We buy cheap and save time. We may be fooling ourselves. "Food, Inc." shows the over-controlled world of food production, a...

How to tell you're a compulsive gardener 1. When stuck in traffic, you want to weed the median strip. 2. On a walk in the neighborhood, you look at the plants so much that you trip on the sidewalk. 3. You find yourself worrying about your neighbor's plants. Especially when your neighbor is doing something stupid. 4. You are tempted to adopt those straggly, mishandled plants at the garden center because you think you can give them a good home. 5. You want to collect seeds from half the vegetables you eat. 6. You find yourself pruning, pruning, pruning because...

Good Evening Good FRiends and Good Gardeners. The FReeper Gardening list got a huge workout this week, and I guess I should apologize for all the extra pings that probably often didnÂ’t seem to have anything to do with why we originally started our list. Unfortunately it seems it has been taken out of my hands because the politics of our times has now invaded our gardens and farms. I didnÂ’t start out to create a new thread, in fact this actually started out as an email to a friend from Church. We had gotten talking after service and he...

Teaching to students' minds, not just to the test VIRGINIA BEACH After two years of quiet planning, the superintendent of schools has unveiled his vision. Jim Merrill wants to overhaul teaching and focus on critical thinking instead of test preparation. For the past decade, the state's public schools have adjusted teaching to fit Standards of Learning tests, the yardstick used to measure school performance. "You could pass SOLs and still fail a kid," Merrill said. His new direction is the key idea behind a six-year plan. The School Board will consider a draft at its annual retreat this weekend. To...

Clint Brown began planting vegetables at age 4. His then babysitter, a retired gentlemen with an interest in gardening, got him started. Now 17, Clint has his own gardening business -- a venture that began four years ago with a bumper green bean crop and success at the Le Mars farmer's market. "He sold them so fast,"said Audrey Brown, Clint's mom. "I think that's what got him hooked." Clint's gardens are on his parent's Audrey and Steve Brown's farm west of Merrill. In April 2006 Clint got serious about his gardening business by building his first high tunnel structure, which...

June 2007 May was just about as demented weather-wise as a month can be! First—the cold, reinforced by drought, then wind and more wind. Rain, more cold, and some more wind from a different direction! It sort of felt like maybe we were actually in Auntie Em’s house, spinning round and round, being pelted by rain and buffeted by wind coming from every direction and wondering what in the world was going to happen to us. What few plants survived the frost, and didn’t succumb to the drought, gave up in the face of an extremely long and miserable nor’easter....

Please remember folks --- this article is from 2006! June is here, and along with it, summer. Gone are the soft pastels of flowering vines such as jasmine and wisteria. The bolder, brighter summer colors of orange trumpet vine and the tropical colors of mandevillas are on their way. The soft, new greens of spring have been replaced by the harder greens of maturing leaves. Crepe myrtles and gardenias and hydrangeas are showing off their colors. Now that the things we hate about warm weather are back in full force-all the mosquitoes, sand gnats, yellow flies, and various other nasty...

5 foods it's cheaper to grow If grocery prices have you thinking about cutting costs with a garden, you may be on the right track. But be careful what you plant; a garden could raise your food costs. Whether you save by gardening depends largely on where you live, what you grow and how well you resist slick gadgets and miracle solutions. If you're looking to save money rather than to start a hobby, here are five garden crops likely to give you the best return: What about tomatoes? They require moderate care and vigilance, and in short-season climates, you...

My apologies to all for the lateness of this post --- it has just been a week from you now where here. As we all morph into this holiday weekend, I would like to remind you all to take a moment to remember why this is a "holiday" weekend. Yes, we're all going to enjoy our cookouts and the 3 day weekend (well some have 3 day weekends) but I do ask that each of us take a moment and salute those for whome this weekend remembers.

Wow! What an arctic blast! Can you remember a colder Good Friday and Easter? It wouldn’t be so bad if it had been cold all along, but to be in the high eighties and then wham! Frostbite! And then, to add insult to injury, it stayed miserably cold with repeated heavy frosts until at least the tenth of April! Condolences to all of you who had your warm season gardens planted. The weather will swing in the opposite direction like a demented weathervane soon enough and we will be miserable with the high temperatures. Sure doesn’t look like we’re going...

May is a wondrous month, bursting with life and growth and energy, with color and scent and sound, a bittersweet taste of what the Garden of Eden must have been like before the fall from grace. Flowers are coming into their own, birds are nesting and hatching their young, puddles are full of tadpoles. Everything is celebrating the passing of winter and preparing for the long, hot summer ahead. With it’s perfect weather, May is the month to enjoy just being alive. May is time to plant the vegetables that need warmer weather. The soil temperature needs to be at...

I have had a week from Hades and will be perfectly honest with you all.........I completely and totally FORGOT about this thread yesterday. And so you all have my heartfelt apologies. My brain is pretty much just mush at the moment and so I am just going to share some of my favorite links.Edible LandscapingYou Grow GirlNational Home Gardening Club

Taking an early morning walk this time of year is a singular treat, like Dorothy stepping out of Auntie Em’s house into the color and sound of Oz. The same things that are always there, only instead of Winter‘s drabness, Spring’s full and glorious color. Each walk is accompanied by a symphony of birdsong, a riot of color bursting everywhere. Fallen jasmine blossoms scatter themselves on the ground like the famed yellow brick road, and blooming things pop up everywhere like the fabled Munchkins. And then, as if the colors and sounds aren’t enough, just to add a little spice,...

April is a debutante’s ball for green and growing things! Young foliage garbs the trees in gauzy, pastel gowns of gold and green and russet, like a watercolor by an old master. Their subtle color is a poignant reminder and a future foretaste of the fall’s bold leaves of orange and yellow and rust. The wild azaleas will be blooming soon, their delicate apple blossom pink petals shining through here and there and their honey sweet fragrance filling the air. The violets, from the large purple ones with heart shaped leaves to the tiny, almost invisible white ones with lance...

Seed swapping Q. I have a backyard vegetable/fruit/herb garden, and every year I wind up with lots of leftover seeds, more than I can possibly plant next time around, yet throwing them away seems like an awful waste. Is there any established way to share, trade, or recycle seeds? - Jacey, WY A. Absolutely. Seed-sharing has been an officially time-honored tradition since at least 1989, when Canada and Britain founded their respective “Seedy Saturday” and “Seedy Sunday” swaps. And in the US, the last Saturday in January is “National Seed Swap Day,” so start saving your seeds up for January...

Wow! February was sure a weather rollercoaster. Not just for us, but for most of the country, and indeed the world, with record snows and cold temperatures recorded in many places. So much for glo-bull warming! Face it, scientists-who-think-you-know-everything! Weather is weather, and mankind has no control over it, no influence on it whatsoever. We can record it, and complain about it, compare this year to that year. Bottom line is—the weather and the climate cycle as they will, hotter sometimes, colder sometimes. Wetter sometimes, dryer sometimes. All the hype, whichever way it goes, sounds suspiciously like a retelling of...

Yeah, Yeah, Yeah, I know.......many folks are still covered in snow others are facing other horrendous weather issues. They are all in our thoughts and prayers. HOWEVER - at 1:26 Eastern this afternoon Spring officially begins. Trying to find articles about the first day of spring was practically an impossibility. Oh sure, there were some out there but most of them were real downers, so I decided today might be a great share some of our favorite gardening websites. The categories of gardening and seed catalogs on my favorites list are both as long as my arm, but I grabbed...

Hey all! Since my computer decided to eat a couple years worth of my articles, and I’m too lazy to dig out the papers and retype them, I thought I’d just give you a rundown on my greenhouse and answer some of the questions a few of you have been kind enough to ask! I don’t have any formal training, other than a few years of horticulture classes in high school FFA. My grandparents and parents gardened, and I grew up following them around on the farm. I do have a great love for the land and of growing things,...

Web report To help gardeners plan for the coming season, the editors of The Old Farmer's Almanac's annual All-Seasons Garden Guide ($3.99) forecast several trends for this year. "More gardeners want to be environmentally friendly. They want to work with Mother Nature instead of fighting against her. This includes using more natural products, more indigenous plants, less water," says Janice Stillman, editor. Also: -Low maintenance, high-drama gardens: Gardeners are looking for ways to make the most out of their time in the garden. Some solutions include easy-care or self-sufficient plants that are natural beauties. -Lawn-free landscapes: More and more people...

March is blustery days and bright sunshine and rain and the smell of warming soil. It seems a magical thing—soil is always there, so how come the right combination of sun and rain and warmth lets us know that it’s time once again to garden? The technical name for the way the soil smells is geosmin—literally earth smell, but magic is close enough. Geosmin is a magic all gardeners are well aware of and accept without question, no matter what you call it. In reality, the smell is caused by a type of bacteria that grows in the soil, called...