On getting your hands dirty.

Gardening is the purest of human pleasures. -Francis Bacon

No occupation is so delightful to me as the culture of the earth, and no culture comparable to that of the garden. -Thomas Jefferson

The single greatest lesson the garden teaches is that our relationship to the planet need not be zero-sum, and that as long as the sun still shines and people still can plan and plant, think and do, we can, if we bother to try, find ways to provide for ourselves without diminishing the world. -Michael Pollan

What is a weed? A weed is a plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered. -Ralph Waldo Emerson

It was such a pleasure to sink one’s hands into the warm earth, to feel at one’s fingertips the possibilities of the new season. -Kate Morton

How fair is a garden amid the trials and passions of existence. -Benjamin Disraeli

A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in. -Greek Proverb

Ol’ man Simon, planted a diamond. Grew hisself a garden the likes of none. Sprouts all growin’ comin’ up glowin’ Fruit of jewels all shinin’ in the sun. Colors of the rainbow. See the sun and the rain grow sapphires and rubies on ivory vines, Grapes of jade, just ripenin’ in the shade, just ready for the squeezin’ into green jade wine. -Shel Silverstein

I have never had so many good ideas day after day as when I worked in the garden. -John Erskine

Regardless of geographical region or culture gardening is perhaps the most common and shared experience of Nature. -S. Kelley Harrell

There are no gardening mistakes, only experiments. -Janet Kilburn Phillips

If you wish to make anything grow, you must understand it, and understand it in a very real sense. “Green fingers” are a fact, and a mystery only to the unpracticed. But green fingers are the extensions of a verdant heart. -Russell Page

Your first job is to prepare the soil. The best tool for this is your neighbor’s motorized garden tiller. If your neighbor does not own a garden tiller, suggest that he buy one. -Dave Barry

My garden is my most beautiful masterpiece. -Claude Monet

Kiss of the sun for pardon. Song of the birds for mirth. You’re closer to God’s heart in a garden than any place else on earth. -Dorothy Frances Gurney

Earth laughs in flowers. -Ralph Waldo Emerson

Gardening requires lots of water, most of it in the form of perspiration. -Lou Erickson

No ray of sunlight is ever lost, but the green it wakes into existence needs time to sprout, and it is not always granted to the sower to live to see the harvest. All work that is worth anything is done in faith. -Albert Schweitzer

The greatest fine art of the future will be the making of a comfortable living from a small piece of land. -Abraham Lincoln

Bread feeds the body, indeed, but flowers feed also the soul. -The Koran

When the world wearies and society fails to satisfy, there is always the garden. -Minnie Aumonier 

The love of gardening is a seed once sown that never dies. -Gertrude Jekyll

Odd as I am sure it will appear to some, I can think of no better form of personal involvement in the cure of the environment than that of gardening. A person who is growing a garden, if he is growing it organically, is improving a piece of the world. He is producing something to eat, which makes him somewhat independent of the grocery business, but he is also enlarging, for himself, the meaning of food and the pleasure of eating. -Wendell Berry

Flowers always make people better, happier, and more helpful: they are sunshine, food and medicine to the soul. -Luther Burbank

It didn’t occur to me that… that gardening, like music, could demand practice, patience, a willingness to make mistakes. -Amy Stewart

The garden, historically, is the place where all the senses are exploited. Not just the eye, but the ear – with water, with birds. And there is texture, too, in plants you long to touch. -William Howard Adams

A garden should make you feel you’ve entered privileged space – a place not just set apart but reverberant – and it seems to me that, to achieve this, the gardener must put some kind of twist on the existing landscape, turn its prose into something nearer poetry. -Michael Pollan

Gardening simply does not allow one to be mentally old, because too many hopes and dreams are yet to be realized. -Allan Armitage

Gardening is akin to writing stories. No experience could have taught me more about grief or flowers, about achieving survival by going, your fingers in the ground, the limit of physical exhaustion. -Eudora Welty

All gardeners know better than other gardeners. -Chinese Proverb

Images: Irene Kightly [2], Jenny Downing

ALSO CHECK OUT:

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Want to see more quotes? Go here.

The post 30 Quotes on Gardening appeared first on EcoSalon.

A gourmet slow food paradise in the Smoky Mountains.

In the misty foothills of eastern Tennessee’s Smoky Mountains, Blackberry Farm is a delightful and unusual hotel offering a gastro-luxe farm-to-table experience, with southern hospitality.

This being Earth Month, we’ve been reflecting on various ways we’re bringing nature into our homes, for example with micro-sized sexy urban gardens. This rural hotel/farm is at the other end of that scale, a vast 4,200 acre estate with a range of animals including sheep, which produce milk (for cheese), wool and meat; pigs, for sausages and pork; and hens (free-range, naturally), for their eggs. The animals also regenerate the pasture, fertilize, control pests and consume waste products from the farm’s food production.

The gardeners produce heirloom varieties (organically developed over generations, un-genetically-modified) of fruit and vegetables, such as apples, beans and carrots, while wild mushrooms are foraged from the woodlands. They even have black truffles – perfect with fresh eggs for breakfast.

Foodies will truly find heaven, care of the artisans of the farmstead as well as the gardeners. The farm has its own bee-keeper, for instance, and cheese-maker, butcher, plus a preservationist who makes jams, pickles and preserves. There’s a cooking school with celebrity chef guests, as well as a packed program of other food and wine events.

Accommodation is either in a beautiful private house and cottages, or guestrooms in the guesthouse: all is comfortable and classic, with four-poster beds, low-key prints or chintz in muted tones. All rooms and houses have fireplaces, high-speed internet, and integrated surround-sound systems. As well as the outdoor pool, with mountain views, there’s the spa with a wet treatment room offering the latest technology, such as various high-pressure water therapies; yoga classes are also available. Croquet, wildflower hikes and horse-and-carriage rides are other low-impact activities designed to get you in tune with nature, without harming it.

Rates from $345 excluding tax (two night minimum).

Photos: Blackberry Farm

Places & Spaces is a travel guide that will inspire you to carve out a vacation on your calendar. All of the gorgeous locations and accommodations in our guide share our concern for the environment. From tent glamping to lavish built environments, fair warning, you’ll feel compelled to pack your suitcase.

The post Places & Spaces: Blackberry Farm, Tennessee appeared first on EcoSalon.

The point of Foodie Underground is to take a look at all things related to the underground food movement, but sometimes all those cool, avant-garde, underground things start to add up and lead to more than just a small movement; they start to become mainstream.

Food carts can be found in smaller cities that don’t start with words like “San” and “New,” a town without a farmers’ market is getting harder to find, and around the country people are starting to think about what the word “organic” really means. They may have started as underground trends, but the fact that more people are paying attention to what they eat and where it comes from is a good thing.

Proof? The National Restaurant Association surveyed almost 2,000 chefs to find out what they think the trends of 2010 will be come year’s end, and the answer wasn’t bacon. At the top of the list was locally grown produce, with 88 percent of the chefs naming it a hot trend. Some of the other trends that ranked highly in various categories were restaurants with on-site gardens, environmentally friendly kitchen equipment, locally produced wine and beer, and organic produce.

Where does that put the underground food movement? In a good spot. It means that all the efforts that go into sourcing food locally, brewing craft beers, supporting community gardens, and all the other things that conscious foodies around the country partake in on a regular basis are having a significant positive impact.

The work comes in turning these trends into culinary norms; until the general population comes to expect locally sourced produce whenever possible, and puts a value on organic, fresh food, then we’ve still got plenty of hours to put in supporting the ongoing underground movement.

Editor’s note: This is the latest installment of Anna Brones’s column at EcoSalon, Foodie Underground. Each week, Anna will be taking a look at something new and different that’s taking place in the underground food movement, from supper clubs to mini markets to culinary avant garde.

Image: bokchoi-snowpea

The post Foodie Underground: Local Foods and Sustainability Really Booming appeared first on EcoSalon.

Now I see them every day. In fact, as I type these words, there is one drinking sugar water from my feeder hanging on my balcony right outside the dining room. It’s perched on the rim rather than hovering but I can see its little head going back and forth as it drinks. The rational explanation for why I’m working at the dining table instead of in my home office is the ceiling fan above me. I suspect the real reason is that I get a better view of the birds from here. With the balcony doors open for the breeze, I can also hear them when they sing.

Oh look, now it seems to be preening its wings! So cute!

While we all know that you shouldn’t feed wild animals, for fear of upsetting the eco-system and encouraging dependency, this is one of the exceptions. Scientists say that hummingbirds need all the help they can get on their long migratory journeys. Urban areas have replaced much of their natural feeding grounds so having a feeder, or planting hummingbird-friendly flowers, help even that out. On a selfish level I’ll also admit that I get a lot of joy out of looking at them!

I bought the feeder at the local hardware store last summer. My environmental principles meant that I forked out extra cash for a feeder made of metal and glass rather than plastic. Besides, I wanted only the best for my hummingbirds!

I also bought a bottle of formula to feed the hummingbirds. The idea was I’d mix one part of the red syrup with three parts of water. The information on the bottle indicated that this was the very best food for hummingbirds:

“Scientific studies have repeatedly shown that hummingbirds prefer sucrose to the monosacharides glucose or fructose. Knowing this, First Nature Nectar uses the finest food-grade sucrose and not less effective invert sugars found in other products. Not only is First Nature Nectar the easiest hummingbird food to use, it’s also the most healthy choice for these colorful visitors.”

Now I don’t doubt the quality of First Nature Nectar’s product and it definitely sounds superior to formulas that use glucose or fructose, which are less nutritious for the hummingbirds. But I now prefer to make my own, and here’s why.

My friend Kimberly saw my photos and alerted me to the fact that red dye may not be safe for hummingbirds. I did some research and it seems that while the issue is not fully resolved, there is enough convincing evidence that it should be avoided. Testing of the red dye (FDA #40) has shown no conclusive detrimental effect on human health, although it is banned in several European countries anyway. But hummingbirds are tiny creatures and they consume vast quantities of nectar, so the concentrations of red dye in the amounts they consume is quite large. I figure why give it to them if they don’t need it.

Ooh, a second hummingbird just flew in and was chased away by the first! … Sorry, I’m easily distracted …

My friend suggested that I make my own syrup by mixing one part white table sugar to four parts water. She suggested using boiling water to dissolve the sugar and cautioned against using hot tap water because of the possible bacterial content. Well, that seems awfully simple, right? Honestly, part me felt that I should trust the experts who made the syrup and I worried that white table sugar might be the wrong sort of sugar to mimic flower nectar. I told her that I’d heard sucrose was the best food for hummingbirds.

Silly me. Turns out, sucrose is the scientific term for white table sugar. So essentially I have been paying to buy a syrup made of table sugar but with the additives of potassium sorbate as a preservative and red food dye. If you Google this topic, you’ll find hundreds of helpful links – and not one suggests formula is really better.

The red dye is there to attract the hummingbirds, but my friend pointed out that the red flowers on the feeder attract them anyway. The fact that I bought a metal feeder also means that the lid and base are a nice reddish copper colour.

Since I switched to home-made syrup a week ago, the hummingbirds have been coming just as often, if not more often than before. I’m glad that I’m now feeding exactly them what they need – simple-carbohydrates to fuel their bug-hunting expeditions – without preservatives or dyes. And since one cup of sugar makes enough syrup to fill the feeder several times (I’m storing the excess in a closed container in the fridge), it’s likely that I’ll be saving money!

For all the talk of monosaccharides or sucrose, glucose and fructose on the label of the shop-bought syrup, the formula really is just sugar and water. Hold the dye.

Photo credits: Images are by the author Caitlin Fitzsimmons and used here with permission. All rights reserved.

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Once you’ve planted your summer garden, it’s a real pain to keep nibbling critters away from the lettuce, peppers, and cucumbers. Deer are particularly trying since they make quick work of eradicating an entire garden in one night. Shooing them away rarely works because they’re relentless little creatures who will keep coming back to feast on your in-ground buffet – which is why you need to take the appropriate steps to turn them away for good. Battling Bambi in a safe and humane way takes a little time, but with a little effort you can send those doe-eyed munchers packing.

DIY Life takes a look at a few different approaches including mesh fencing and border plants that make your vegetable garden less tantalizing. What really caught our eye was a solar-powered device meant to repel deer without harming a hair on their fuzzy little hides. The Guardener works two ways:

First with ultrasonic waves that are audible (and annoying) to deer but not people, and then with short blasts of water. (The base of the unit holds 3.5-gallons of water, enough for 30 or 40 cycles, so no piping is necessary.) The unit is triggered by a motion sensor, so be sure to place it where passersbys or wind will not be a problem. It works on other animals pests too.

If you’re not crazy about the idea of random blasts of water, there are some other options including a device that triggers lights and an FM radio – sure to be a huge hit with your neighbors when it’s triggered in the middle of the night.

Check out the post for additional ideas about keeping deer out of your garden. If you’ve got a great tip that’s worked for you, please share it in the comments below.

Image: Lemoncat1

The post Oh, Deer! How to Keep Wildlife Out of Your Garden appeared first on EcoSalon.

All over the world a new breed of deviant do-gooders are taking back cities and growing them green. As a movement, the first use of the term guerrilla gardening came from a 1970s group founded by a woman named Liz Christy, who took a derelict patch of private land in the Bowery Houston area of New York City and transformed it into a living, breathing garden. Today, the area is still kept up by volunteers.

Now, all over the world, a movement of guerrilla gardeners are seeking out dead urban spaces and bringing them to life, most often without permission – hence the word, guerrilla. Some groups garden in secrecy, descending on an area by cover of darkness and working through the night. By dawn, the area is alive with carbon eating flora. Other guerrilla gardener groups organize large scale meet-ups for big projects all working to green their urban landscape. Interested potential gardeners should check out GuerrillaGardening, to see if a guerrilla gardening “cell” exists in your area. If not, there are tips for starting one and building a community around your efforts.

Guerrilla Gardeners like to share their work and examples of typical green takeovers can be found on the site as well. Some important things to consider when covertly sowing your seeds are the species of plants you’re introducing to the urban environment. Natives plants, and low water use foliage is the best bet because irrigation and upkeep is typically out of the question.

Another popular type of guerrilla gardening is called Seed Bombing where the guerrilla practitioner lobs seeds into areas that dangerous or impossible to access by foot, such as freeway underpasses and fenced-in empty space. Often, these seed bombs are packed into inert vessels like porcelain coffee cups or similar that break on impact and then take root.

More above ground, and with a little digging (pun intended), tourists can find organized tours of landscapes transformed in cities across the globe. As a traveling activity, I highly recommend it. Taking part in a gardening episode in a foreign place gives the traveler access to urban spaces not normally championed by tourist bureaus, which of course, is a magical adventure in the making.

Image: The Seed Grenade

The post Guerrillas in Our Midst: The Rise of Global Guerrilla Gardening appeared first on EcoSalon.

I admit, I’m an impatient person though I prefer to view myself as a fan of efficiency. I sigh when a driver in front of me insists on waiting for the seas to part before attempting to cross a lane and recently, when making a shopping return, I insisted on re-hanging the items for customer service in order to shave off three minutes.

You’d think that this impatience would naturally make me and other type-A people far from gardening candidates, but there are a number of plants that are perfect for us that either grow quickly, offer great returns, or are simply worth the wait. Sunflowers, basil, and the butterfly bush are my top three.

From 0-5 Feet in Under 70 days

Sunflowers require very little care other than occasional watering, they can survive the heat and I like the fact that they can go from 0-5 feet in under 70 days. And talk about sustainable: you can enjoy their  bright colors, surround yourself with multiple pots to create a fortress and when their season has come to an end, sunflowers can be dried and displayed, their seeds roasted and eaten or harvested for next season.

Pesto Anytime

Quick growing, tasty, and aromatic, basil is actually a member of the mint family. Basil grows well indoors and out, which makes it perfect to keep near the kitchen. According to herbgardening.com, leaf production slows or stops on any stem that flowers, so you should pinch off flower buds to keep the plant in production or leave some to bloom for decoration or seeds. For a fantastic pesto recipe, try my very favorite from the Mossewood Cookbook.

Susan’s Pesto (Ironically not this Susan. Just coincidence)

Best served immediately, but it will keep refrigerated for 3 or 4 days. Yields: one cup. Total cook time: 10 minutes

1 cup well-packed fresh basil leaves
1 cup chopped tomatoes
1 garlic clove, pressed or minced
1 tablespoon toasted pine nuts *
½ teaspoon salt

* To toast pine nuts, spread in a single layer on an unoiled baking sheet and bake in a conventional or toaster oven at 350° for about 3 to 5 minutes, until just slightly deepened in color.

Rinse and drain the basil leaves. In a blender or food processor, combine the basil, tomatoes, garlic, pine nuts, and salt and puree until smooth. You may need to stop several times to scrape the sides of the blender or processor bowl with a rubber spatula.

PER 1 OZ SERVING: 13 CALORIES, .7 G PROTEIN, .7 G FAT, 1.6 G CARBOHYDRATES, .1 G SATURATED FATTY ACIDS, .3 G POLYUNSATURATED FATTY ACIDS, .2 G MONOUNSATURATED FATTY ACIDS, 0 MG CHOLESTEROL, 135 MG SODIUM, 3 G TOTAL DIETARY FIBER.

Reprinted from Moosewood Restaurant Low-Fat Favorites, Copyright ©1996, Moosewood, Inc. Clarkson N. Potter, publisher, New York.

Portable Spring

In the northeast, butterflies begin to emerge with the warmth of spring. There are a number of flowers that will attract them that vary in size, color and scent. According to BirdsandBlooms.com, plants with different heights will draw a diverse crowd of butterflies as they offer nectar flowers at different levels. This can be accomplished by mixing plants with different growing habits, such as trailing, bushy and upright. BirdsandBlooms.com suggest a butterfly bush in a container with coral bells and garden verbena or sweet peas spilling over the edge.

Top Butterfly Picks for Containers:

Annuals

• Floss flower
• Globe amaranth
• Heliotrope
• Lantana
• Moss rose
• Salvia
• Sweet alyssum
• Sweet william
• Zinnia

Perennials

• Agastache
• Aster
• Butterfly bush
• Butterfly weed
• Candytuft
• Chrysanthemum
• Coreopsis
• Delphinium
• Dianthus
• Gaillardia
• Goldenrod
• Liatris
• Oregano
• Penstemon
• Phlox
• Purple coneflower
• Rudbeckia
• Salvia
• Scabiosa
• Sea pink
• Sedum
• Verbena
• Veronica
• Yarrow
• Wallflower

Please send us your favorite container garden combinations!

Image: Plutor

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