Photo credit: Cedar Sol Hydro Farm

In Northern Michigan, two former school teachers quit teaching school when their son was born six years ago and started a farm using vertically stacked hydroponic units to grow vegetables as Kristine Morris reports for Morning Star Publishing,

Sol Hydro offers sustainable farming in limited space on a clean and attractive plot of land about 10,000 feet square in size (about a quarter of an acre.) Michael and Nichole McHugh grow the equivalent of what conventional in-the-ground agriculture would need six to 10 acres to produce, and they do it using a lot less water and no toxic or synthetic chemicals.

Photo credit: Cedar Sol Hydro Farm

They don’t need large expensive equipment, and can work their farm most of the year without hiring help. There are no weeds, so they don’t need herbicides, and they cause very little strain of any sort on the land and eco-system as most of their land can be left in its natural state.
The couple does it by using a stacked hydroponic system, the Hydro-Stacker Vertical Hydroponic Growing System, invented by Chester Bullock, of Florida. Michael McHugh studied with Bullock and learned how clean, efficient, easy and – above all – sustainable farming could be with hydroponics.
“We were both school teachers before we went into farming,” said Michael. “I taught high school language arts, and Nikki taught fourth grade. But when our son Parker, now 6, was born, we wanted to do something that would allow us to work at home – some kind of family business. We had both worked in greenhouses while in college in Kalamazoo, and thought we would enjoy a greenhouse operation.”

Click to read the rest of the More With Less — Cedar Sol Hydro Farm story. Click to to to Cedar Sol Hydro Farm.

Graphic Credit: GardenRant.com

Occasionally I guest blog on other blogs or sites. Today on GardenRant.com, the four gardening women orchestrating the Rant started a two week vacation/hiatus and will be running guest posts each day. I really appreciate they ran mine since Garden Rant is one of the premier sites about gardening. My post can be found here… It is titled “Just What is the Definition of Gardening?” It seems to have generated some discussion on what is a controversial subject to some people.

Using a soil sifter, I sift my dirt and compost for my potting mix. Photo credit Rick Gush/UrbanFarmOnline.com

I cleaned out the main compost bin this week and am really happy with the results. I’m doing some seeding and repotting these days, and the compost has allowed me to prepare what I think of as the potting soil of the gods. Plants and seedlings grow particularly well in this mix, and I even give my friends bags full of the stuff.
My potting soil recipe is simple: equal parts of sifted dirt and sifted compost mixed thoroughly. The only way to make this stuff better is to let it mature a bit. Two weeks after it’s mixed, the resultant soil is fully chemically active and alive with all the microorganisms that make soil fertile.
Garden supply centers often sell bags of planting mix, but those bags usually contain only organic materials like ground up tree bark. The planting mixes are sterile, which can be good for some seeding situations, but otherwise they are a poor substitute for the real thing. The reason they contain only organic materials is mostly because that material is relatively light in weight, whereas dirt is pretty heavy. If the potting mix manufacturers put dirt in their mixes, the shipping costs would jump considerably, and they’d need to charge more for their product.

Click to read the rest of the Potting Soil Of The Gods story.

It is garden tour season. Many non-profits hook up with community, public and private gardens for organized tours as a fund raising event. This was one in Ferguson, Missouri this past weekend.

Once again, Alaskan gardeners have proven themselves to be above reproach, no matter what their former Governor does. Last weekend, they broke their own record at the Fourth Annual Nursery Pot Recycling event sponsored by The Alaska Botanical Garden and Alaskans for Litter Prevention and Recycling, along with Anchorage waste hauler, Smurfit Stone. Over 4,600 pounds of those flimsy cell packs and seed flats along with those all too familiar, green, red and black plastic pots were collected and sorted. Given how many cell packs it takes to make a pound, nonetheless add up to 2.6 tons, the number is staggering.
What is more, since this is the fourth year for the event, organizers speculate that this year’s haul is probably mostly from plants and seedlings purchased at the beginning of this year’s gardening season. No wonder there are so many flowers and vegetables on view in SouthCentral, Alaska.
The Alaska Botanical Garden is America’s first fully organic botanical garden and ALPAR promotes litter prevention and recycling and arranges for the long shipment down to Seattle. Both organizations are considering holding the event twice next year.

Graphic credit: CommonGround.ca

Ten years ago, Monsanto tried to convince the world – Europe, in particular –that genetically engineered (GE) crops were needed to ‘feed’ the hungry. At that time, the message was largely greeted with derision as a cynical ploy to sell a product that no one, including people in developing countries, wanted.
Now, the biotech industry is regrouping and re-branding itself, but the PR message looks very familiar. Food and climate change – two urgent global crises – are the context for a second major public relations push for genetic engineering. This time, however, there is an added twist: biofuels and the promise that biotechnology can fuel the world as well as feed it.
This month, the Agricultural Biotechnology Industry Conference (ABIC: September 12-15) “Bridging Biology and Business” kicks off in Saskatoon with a “Flower Power Biodiesel Workshop” aimed at the public. During this conference, we will likely see more media stories about how GE crops are needed to solve the major crises of our time. Conference sponsors include Bayer CropScience, the Saskatchewan Ministry of Agriculture, Genome British Columbia, Novozymes and Ag-West Bio Inc.
The biotech industry is attempting to participate in sounding the alarm over the global food crisis. One of ABIC’s keynote speakers, Julian Cribb, a journalist from Australia, will present a talk entitled “The Coming Famine: risks and solutions for global food security.” (This is also the name of his new book.) Cribb will stress that the urgent “global food security problem” is one of resource scarcity: we are running out of water, farmland and oil and that these and other factors, like the collapse of fisheries and changes in local climates, will all constrain our ability to meet future food needs. He is right, of course, and this is where the biotechnology industry wants to insert itself. No one disagrees that there is a world food crisis so the industry can argue this point without debate and try to take the moral high ground. Controversy arises, however, due to the corporate agenda to sell patented GE technologies as the solution, at a profit.

Click to read the rest of the Greenwashing Biotech story.

Photo credit: terren in Virginia's Flickr Photostream

In the future, an apple a day may send you to a doctor since the frankenfreaks of genetic modification  have cracked the DNA code of the apple, opening up the the development of GMO apples. The BBC reports,

A team of 86 global scientists have sequenced the genetic code of the Golden Delicious apple for the first time.
The DNA breakthrough could result in new and improved apple varieties which are more resistant to disease.
Scientists from 20 institutions took two years to unravel the code – the largest plant genome uncovered to date.

Click to read the rest of the GMO Apples In The Future As DNA Code Is Cracked By Geneticists story.

A Northbrook woman's flower and tomato garden occupies the front yard of her son's home. Photo credit: Jeff Danna/Chicago Tribune

A Northbrook, Illinois woman has found a better use for her front yard than a manicured lawn. She turned it into a vegetable garden.
But that doesn’t quite fit Northbrook’s regulations for front yard use, according to director of community planning Thomas Poupard.
The 69-year old Russian immigrant doesn’t see herself as a revolutionary. She just wants to have fresh tomatoes available for the friends and relatives who frequently visit.
“I wouldn’t do it if I had sun in the back yard,” said the woman, who did not want her name used. “The only way to get sun is to put the garden in front.”
The home in the 2700 block of Shannon Road is owned by her son, Alex Lyakhovetsky, who has been asked by Northbrook officials to remove the garden next year.
The homeowner’s mother thinks more people should grow some of their own food, for both the health and economic benefits. And she doesn’t understand who could complain. After all, she said, “it’s not a barking dog at night.”
But people have started complaining.
“We started to get calls from neighbors,” Poupard said.
The calls started after the village board discussed the problem of unkempt grass and landscaping on foreclosed properties in the village.

Click to read the rest of the Illegal Front Yard Veggie Garden story.

Wheat may be the next crop that is dominated by genetically modified seed. Photo credit: United States Dept. of Agriculture via Wikimedia Commons

Scientists at the University of Liverpool have decoded the genome of wheat – the largest genome to be sequenced to date – to help crop breeders increase the yield of British wheat varieties.
Wheat production world-wide is under threat from climate change and an increase in demand from a growing human population. Liverpool scientists, in collaboration with the University of Bristol and the John Innes Centre, have sequenced the entire wheat genome and will make the DNA data available to crop breeders to help them select key agricultural traits for breeding.

Writer Sam Brand cheerleads the new discovery in this piece in Tonic.com,

There’s a new hope for the 1 billion people who go to sleep hungry every night. On Friday, a team of British scientists announced they had cracked the genome of wheat, the third most-produced cereal in the world after corn and rice, opening the door for the creation of more productive and nutritious varieties.
“The information we have collected will be invaluable in tackling the problem of global food shortage,” University of Liverpool Professor Neil Hall said in a press release.
Five times longer than the human genome, which was fully sequenced 10 years ago, the wheat genome is the latest of the world’s big crops to be cracked. Rice was fully sequenced in 2005, corn in 2009 and soybeans earlier this year.
The particular variety cracked by the British team is one called Chinese Spring. Its sequence, which will be made available to the public at The EMBL Genetic Database, will be used by scientists across the globe to better understand the crop and determine how to improve it.

Click to read the rest of the Wishful Thinking: Frankenwheat To Feed The World story.