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Don't know what the proper name for it is, you see them all over sold as "Chinese Five Colour", regardless they're a nice little treat with a fairly moderate burn and decent taste.  Here's the first of our season, one just emerging and a couple purple ones in the background that'll soon be...

nice and straight forward, thanks for sharing.  I find this site great for info on saving seeds, excellent general reference but not nearly as detailed instructions.     http://www.seedsavers.org/Education/Seed-Saving-Instructions/   Have you ever tried using paper bags tied around a branch to...

Sorry for the late reply, been so busy with work I somehow missed your post. We just have a couple plants, mostly to see how it grows before we try growing a decent portion of our gardens with it next year.  We've also got some amaranth growing as well, so many interesting plants to try.  Our...

If seeds are buried too deep they have a lower chance of successful germination. Why not keep them inside until after they've germinated?  Leaving  them on top of the fridge will keep the soil warm and speed up germination.

You should always spray a small portion of a plant to test the strength before spraying the whole plant, regardless if it's an organic or chem pesticide.

yep, it will work by itself.

Horticultural oil can be any light weight oil, like canola oil.  On it's own it works by suffocating bugs and interfering with the development of eggs, they're also commonly added as a surfactant to increase the coverage/effectiveness.  You'll need to use a wetting agent to get it to mix with...

  The paper actually warns about using coniferous trees due to the growth inhibitors most pines release to reduce competition. So if you're using them, I'd compost them for a couple years first to be sure.  I know jugalone takes between 2-5 years to break down after a black walnut is cut down, I...

Interesting paper, don't have time to finish it right now but I'm really enjoying reading it as I hope to incorporate it into my garden next year.  They do suggest mixing in the top layer, but in the fall because "Added to the soil, this material, rich in carbon and poor in nitrogen, may favor...

To be clear though, I still wouldn't mix grass clipping directly into my beds, I can understand adding them to the mulch on top of a bed but they said directly in the movie that mixing raw material into a bed will lock up nitrogen during the decomposition. Unless you have a source that says...

  The point of contention is whether green clippings/waste will actually add nitrogen.  In the traditional composting view, they don't, green layers don't add any nitrogen, they act as food for bacteria which decomposes the rest of the material to release it's nitrogen.  So green compost...

I'm not sure how I'm close minded, I acknowledge that chem ferts will do equally well, in fact I said it was easier to achieve high yields with them.  I personally don't use them because of the environmental impact of them, as you've presented nothing to dissuade or change that belief (in fact...

Why's the price of food skyrocketing if the current model works?  Why are we getting more 500 year storms in a 10 years then we've seen in the 400 years leading up to the industrial revolution?  If you're using tractors to till, you're part of an unsustainable model based on petroleum, the least...

I don't really understand what you're asking; did you mean "is the a reason not to plow/use chem ferts if this works as well as organic/no till methods? In general the two can be seen like this:   Commercial, chemical agriculture (or gardening on our scale) is easier to achieve high yields of...

Never meant to imply farmer's were evil, evil and good are too simplistic to be of much use in my mind. Like trying to cram all the shades of grey into either black or white, it loses all meaning.  Farmer's are no different from anyone in our society, we're taking advantage of the available...

Beyond the reasons point out by Proud Marine Dad, your post illustrates a couple of the key reasons people are moving away from the traditional ag-business model to a more sustainable one.  A lot of people don't even like the term organic anymore because of how muddled it's become.  Organic...

Could you provide some references for me to read up on it?  I don't see why bacterial feeding would change that much, but am the first to admit I'm usually wrong so I'd love to learn more. 

You answered your own question, you're using 2 different systems without adjusting for the differences.  Soil and coco have different characteristics, so they'll need different watering schedules.  Because the watering schedules are different, the amount of fertilizer used needs to me adjusted...

  Because decomposing matter actually uses up more nitrogen then it releases for the first while as the bacteria feed off it.  So if you use green waste/unfinished compost it will actually starve the plants of much needed N.

If you're interested in saving seed, this is a useful guideline to follow, http://www.seedsavers.org/Education/Seed-Saving-Instructions/.