Sara's Garden MarketSustainable Living, Gardening, Flowers, and Food

Dinner and speaking by (Multi.) New York Times best selling author, Michael Pollan.

MORE INFO

Thursday, May 2, 2013 – 7:00 pm – Beth El Synagogue
5224 West 26th Street – Saint Louis Park, MN 55416
http://www.besyn.org/pollan

A portion of the proceeds of this event will go to benefit Appetite for Change, a North Minneapolis nonprofit which seeks to build individual, family, and community capacity to use growing cooking and eating food as vehicles for social change.

(I will not be at this event due to other commitments on Thursday evenings.)

Thanks for stopping buy!

Sara

It’s give back Wednesday, and Mendoberri in Mendota Heights, MN is hosting an event to raise money for Dodge Nature Center.

Give-Back TODAY at Mendoberri

730 Main Street, The Village off Hwy 110, Mendota Heights

11 a.m. to 10 p.m.

“10% of your total bill will be allocated towards environmental education and restoration at Dodge.”

Just let your server know that you are there for “Give-Back Wednesday.”

The Winter Harvest Handbook, Year-Round Vegetable Production Using Deep-Organic Techniques and Unheated Greenhouses, by Eliot Coleman is a very detailed and exhaustive look at winter greenhouse gardening in zone 5. I am loving the look of the greenhouses on page 64, with snow piled up around the bases of a few large greenhouses!

This book not only talks about traditional greenhouse structures in winter and how to utilize them, but many other alternative ways of gardening in the winter time. Good tips on which vegetables to grow, pest control (different season = different pests!), and garden tools are peppered liberally through out the entire book.

This is an EXCELLENT companion to Carol and Chuck’s Winter Greenhouse book.

I look forward to using both books this Spring/Summer and into next Fall and Winter as I take on the adventure of building and using my own greenhouse in the winter in zone 4/5!

I am so excited because I just read this great book. I highly recommend it to anyone looking to have a permanent greenhouse in zone(s) 4/5. They do use some supplemental heat and a small amount of electricity in the coldest/darkest months. Their greenhouse employs many innovations for keeping it’s cost and carbon footprint to a minimum and returning a yield of winter crops for 18 families in their winter CSA!!!

Watch for future posts where I will be visiting their greenhouse, and making plans to build my own this Spring/Summer!

I’ve been out of touch recently, but I’m back in 2012 with new inspiration!

I have found a few great resources about winter gardening in Minnesota! Can you believe other people are as crazy as I am? 🙂

After my little plastic greenhouse got ripped apart by all the wind we’ve been having this Fall/Winter I was inspired to look into building a permanent structure. I went to my local building store and looked at their shed kits/structures and greenhouse poly/plastic sheeting and corrugated sheet metal and recycled material. It was very exciting and totally do-able.

But NOW; An even better solution has come into focus from a link shared on facebook. (Thank you Lara!!!!) A couple in Minnesota started a solar powered organic winter greenhouse. It grew into a winter CSA which now provides organic veggies to 18 families all winter long!!!

What’s more is that they are very nice, and will support anyone who wants to try to do what they did, AND they wrote a book all about it. What better way to pass this winter than learning how to garden year-round starting this Spring??

The book is titled, Northlands Winter Greenhouse Manual, by Carol Ford.

While searching for this book I also found, The Winter Harvest Handbook, by Eliot Coleman.

Both are about sustainable organic winter greenhouse gardening. Watch for more posts as I read and review these books and start planning my permanent greenhouse project this Spring.

I could not be more excited and I am so grateful that I found these books/resources before I went ahead and started my own pioneering project with this. I will be leaps and bounds ahead of where I would have started out with all this.

Who wants to by in my Winter CSA??? 🙂 (I am only half kidding.)

I was just reading my Farmer’s Almanac for this year and found out the meaning behind the term “Victory Garden.”

In 1588 Queen Elizabeth sent riders out into the country side to tell the folks out there to prepare for war. One of the main things that was told to everyone through out the land was to plant extra food in their home gardens because without it they would be going hungry. This is was part of the reason the English were victorious over the Spanish invasion!

Likewise during WW2 the department of agriculture told people to start home gardens (which at that time were few and far between here in the U.S.) to relieve the demand for food in the grocery stores. Many families took this advice and ate better (and a lot healthier) for it!

So, the Victory Garden is just that – a sustainable way for families to maintain themselves during times of war. Thinking about all of the ways this effects the whole country is amazing to me. A war can be won due to sustainable living, in particular – gardening for our selves and not relying on the grocery stores to be there for us.

This is just as true now as it was back then. Gardening this way can conserve energy and also keep us healthier!

My tap water is so hard and full of chlorine that I have to find a different source for watering my plants.

The very first thing I did when I noticed that the chlorine was burning my plants was to go to the store and buy 3 jugs of water immediately! I was in a panic and I was worried that all my house plants were going to die! As I was using the water I kept thinking about it, and I had heard about using rain barrels etc…

And then I looked outside!! Our landscape is covered in a blanket of about 3-4 feet of snow right now and will be for at least another month or more. In fact, last year we got a snow storm in April that was feet deep. What better source for water! (Duh right?) So I am now watering all of my plants and seedlings with snow that I melt down and place in one of the empty jugs of water. (I also use a very light water soluble fertilizer every time I water.)

Thanks for stopping by!

Sara M