Blue Ridge Gardener


July 3, 2009

Easy Tips for Growing Your Own Food (from GMA)

Category: News – Michael – 2:57 pm

Even Good Morning America got into the swing of things this morning…

See…Easy Tips for Growing Your Own Food

A couple of excerpts:

Some 43 million U.S. households are expected to try their hand at food gardening this year — including the Obama family — and 21 percent will be newcomers looking to green their thumbs for the first time, according to the National Gardening Association.

The association says the average 600-square-foot garden costs $70 to plant, and produces about 300 pounds of fresh produce worth $600. That’s a $530 return on your investment.

July 2, 2009

SFG Teaching Video

Category: Square Foot Gardening, Video – Michael – 9:22 am

Here is a little video that I created last week.  I am hoping that this will become a regular feature now that I have a video camera and my garden is becoming more user friendly.

I’ll keep you posted…

July 1, 2009

Square Foot Gardening Video

Category: Square Foot Gardening – Michael – 9:27 am

Here is a news piece from a TV station in Utah that gives some basics about Square Foot Gardening:

First of the month report

Category: Other – Michael – 8:58 am

Well the statistics are in for the month of June, and Blue Ridge Gardener has set some new records…

Number of visits to the site- 3550 visits (up from 3381 last month, the previous record)

Number of pages viewed- 23, 591 (up from 20, 753 last month, the previous record)

Number of hits- 32,313 (up from 27,032 last month, the previous record)

We were featured on Alltop.com several times during the month in their standared sidebar listing, and we continue to get lots of referrals from Google for various garden related searches.

Though about 70% of the visits are short (30 seconds or less), there are enough longer visits that the average visit to the site is 12 minutes (up from 10.6 minutes last month)–That means of the 3550 visits to the site, the servers have recorded 42,600 minutes of use.  That’s a bunch.

Thanks for stopping by!

June 30, 2009

Gardener’s Supply Slideshow

Category: Other – Michael – 3:24 pm

Click on link below to get a full screen slideshow of the example gardens at Garden Supply:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/28215248@N04/sets/72157617297675457/show/

Another SFG article

Category: Other, Square Foot Gardening – Michael – 3:15 pm

I ran across this article today ar Global Guerillas-

RC (Resilient Communities) Journal-Square Foot Gardening

Excerpts:

One of the most obvious and critical first steps toward community resilience (in tandem with ruthless debt reduction) is to start a garden.  This provides you with:
  • Fresh, low cost, and high quality food during the growing season.
  • The skills and the head start needed to deal with systemic breakdowns in the agricultural supply chain or rapid price inflation of foodstuffs.
  • Income potential/community connection through your local farmer’s market.
What would be interesting is to do an ROI calculation on this method.  Essentially, compare the investments in time/money etc. vs. the output (and the equivalent cost in food from grocery stores).   Given the ease of installation, almost zero reliance on tools, and low mx requirements.. I suspect it would do very well.   This method also looks fairly interesting for lawn gardening entrepreneurs (as in, everyone currently selling lawn mowing services should also be offering low cost garden services).

Weather Lore

Category: Weather – Michael – 8:34 am

Compliments of the Old Farmer’s Almanac…

When the cow tries to scratch its ear,
It means a shower is very near;
When it thumps its ribs with its tail,
Look out for thunder, lightning, hail.

–weather saying from New Jersey

Summer Wonder
There are many superstitions about summer thunder.

Some believe that it will frighten the beans into growing.

Others say that thunder in the morning brings wind, while a noon thunder brings rain and an evening thunder brings a tempest.

If there’s lightning without thunder, fair weather is on the way.

As for wind direction, “Thunder and lightning in the summer show, / The point from which the freshening breeze will blow.”