Food growing facts you may not know.

Do you know that plants grow exponentially?

Let me explain.








Plants are programmed to double in size every few days and with growth come the various stages: germination, maturity and reproduction.

The first stage of growth is not normally seen. It is when the seed sends out roots whose job is to collect food for the plant so that it can grow. At every stage of the plant's life thee is an equivalent growth of roots under the ground as there is volume of leaves and stalks above the ground.

Once the plant has established its life support root system, it starts to grow above the ground. A plant may double in size every three or four days. When the plant is tiny, you don't notice a great change. A plant that is one centimetre tall is very little different from a plant that is two centimetres tall. However, the same growth rate occurs for the plant's whole life cycle. In the same time period of 3 - 4 days that it took to grow from one centimetre to two centimetres, a plant that is 15 centimetres tall and 10 centimetres across, will grow to 30 centimetres tall and 20 centimetres across and if that plant is programmed to start producing fruit or seeds when the plant gets to be 15 centimetres tall, that fruit will grow in those same few days. A broccoli head will double in size every couple of days for 6 or 9 days and then will start to produce flowers.

The speed that plants mature and start to produce edible fruit, leaves and seeds catches most new gardeners by surprise. It seems to take so long for the plants to start looking like the vegetables they planned to grow, that they think it is going to take forever for them to produce edible food.

Wrong! Plants mature in a very short space of time and there is only a relatively short period of time for harvesting. Zucchinis, for example, double in size overnight if left unpicked and quickly become more like torpedoes than food.

At our community farm, I see many of our new members totally surprised to find that they have missed their harvest. The vegetables that seemed to take so long to grow rapidly matured when they just weren't watching! Troy and Shona, in the picture below, keep a close eye on what's happening in their own personal vegetable gardens at the Castelen Community Farm and harvest a bountiful supply of vegetables ever week from just a tiny plot of land. This is just one of the advantages of being a Community Farm member.














If you want to take full advantage of your garden's produce remember to visit your garden regularly, pick the delicious vegetables that are ready and eat them as soon as possible because the nutrient value of vegetables starts dropping as soon as they are picked. You'll be amazed at the difference in taste between a just picked cauliflower and one that has been sitting on the supermarket shelf for a week.

Written by Bev Buckley Visit learn more

How to increase the profit from your garden or small farm

How to increase the profit from your garden or small farm NOW! (growing vegetables, fruits, nuts, berries or herbs).
As the world population escalates, food prices will rise. This trend will be reinforced by rising oil & gas prices (mainstream agriculture is dependent on oil & gas for transport, fertilizers, herbicides & pesticides). Therefore there is a great business opportunity in growing food. Over the past 18 months, I have been doing a study that takes over 100 of the main food crops and assesses and compares their profitability. This is a brief discussion paper giving you a preview. Clearly more money will be made growing the most profitable crops and this study provides you with over 100 crops ranked in terms of profitability. The crops are also categorized according to their climate suitability, so you can find for example which are the most profitable crops in the tropics, temperate or cold climates. What then are the key factors that affect profitability when growing crops? Clearly your choice of crops is fundamental to your financial success. The other factor you have to evaluate is the market demand for the crops you select and your ability to reach that market. You then need to be able to grow the crops. This subject and an overview of over 140 popular crops is covered in my book called “Growing Healthy” subtitled “How to make over $100,000 p.a. on five acres growing fruit and vegetables organically”. This book is available from the website www.growinghealthyorganicfood.com (see book 1) . For even more detail on growing effectively we have 12 monthly lessons on nature’s twelve universal principles of organic food growing. See course 1 at www.growinghealthyorganicfood.com . The other key topic in assessing profitability is cost. There are capital items like land & equipment & buildings. There are the variable costs of seeds, seedlings, fertilizers, watering, pruning & weeding, soil preparation, planting & harvesting, cleaning & packing, transport & marketing. In most of these there is a labour component and this is generally the big cost. Labour costs vary hugely around the world, where the lesser developed countries such as China & India have a big cost advantage and in the western world USA is generally much lower than say the UK or Australia. These factors and others are assessed crop by crop in my study. But for now here are some quick effective ways to improve your profitability immediately: 1. Temperature has a major impact on growth—too hot or too cold stops growth dead in its tracks for most plants. So if you are in an area that gets extreme hot temperatures (over 30 degrees C) you can improve production by using a shadehouse in the summer. Depending on the size of the area you grow in this can be a small homemade device with cloth draped over wood or plastic poles or a large walk in shadehouse with sprinklers. If you live in cold climates that get frosts or snow, then you can improve productivity and lengthen your growing season by using a greenhouse in the winter. 2. Another key factor that impacts profitability is the length of time from planting to maturity and harvesting. Fruit & nut trees for example typically take 3 years or even longer to bear a crop and then it is often then only a small crop and may take 4 to 7 years before full production is achieved. And then you get only one crop a year from most fruit trees. Fruits & nuts payoff is good longer term as the labour component is lower than for vegetables & herbs. 3. However, if you want a quick return on your investment forget fruit & nut trees. You need to focus on vegetables, herbs and berries. The typical vegetable takes 3 months to maturity. Time and cashflow are major factors in profitability, so how about these:months to grow and many of them can be grown several times a year (depending on the length of your growing season). Some vegetables you can pick many times from the one plant---it just keeps producing! 4. Let’s get specific: (a) Rhubarb is a magic crop to grow. I can pick up to 8 times in a year off the one plant. We have of course a particularly long growing season of 10 to 12 months a year, but even in a shorter growing season area you can pick every 5 to 6 weeks once the plant is mature. (b) There are some other crops that you can pick up to five times from the one plant—namely zucchini, kale and silver beet or swiss chard. (c) The other recommendation is to go for crops with the shortest time from planting Zucchini 7 weeks Radish 7 weeks Silver beet 8 weeks Lettuce 9 weeks Broccoli 10 weeks Carrots 11 weeks The exact time will vary slightly with different varieties and the weather. Conclusion: If you try some of the above recommendations you cannot help but improve your return from your activities on your garden or small farm. At least they will make it easier to cut down on your food bills by selling your excess produce nore readily! However this brief free report cannot cover all the details of growing and marketing your crops. If you want more I have recently produced a short 12 week program that does all this. It is now available as course 2 on the home page of our website: go to http://www.growinghealthyorganicfood.com/course2. This program provides a comparative analysis of the profitability of over 100 crops including helping you set up a step by step business plan to maximize the return on your land size and specific climate. This training program also gives you the use of a profitability calculator where you can input your own figures to calculate the specific profitability of a crop you grow in your climate, with your local pricing and local cost of labour and the growing time of the particular variety that you have chosen. Best wishes, Geoff Buckley.

What are the most important minerals?

Creating and maintaining a healthy balanced soil is crucial to success in growing crops organically. The father of soil science is Professor William Albrecht who studied soils all around the world all his life. He demonstrated that in terms of volume the major elements are calcium, magnesium and potassium. Nitrogen, phophorus and silcon are also significant.
Later research shows that volume is not the only important factor. Individual elements whilst small in quantity can be essential catalysts to the many chemical/biological processes that take place in plants such as photosynthesis. There is a heirarchy of elements needed for these processes to work in plants and this might also apply in humans. (I have added the most common natural food source for us in brackets).
Sulphur is necessary as a catalyst for all the reactions that begin with boron and end with potassium. This is apparently the biochemical sequence of nutrition in plants. The 8 elements in sequence are:
1.Boron (lettuce)
2.Silica (brazil nuts)
3.Calcium (broad beans & watercress)
4.Nitrogen (cucumber)
5.Magnesium (Beans, poppyseed & spinach)
6.Phosphorus (Beetroot)
7.Carbon (vitamin C)
8. Potassium (Lettuce)
There are 92 elements that make up the earth and the human body and not a lot is known about all the minor trace elements. I believe they all play a role and as an example who has heard of yttrium? This element created a three-fold increase in the lifespan of test animals!! Yttrium is found in cabbage, lettuce and tomatoes (if grown in soils that contain yttrium). Lettuce should contain many of the above important minerals and has become one of my favourite foods!!
Geoff Buckley Click here for more information on creating a healthy balanced soil.

New emerging trends in health and food.

As oil reserves are depleted…
As the world population increases…
As climate changes worsen…
As food shortages become more common…
As our soils become less productive…
As the nutritional content of our food decreases…
As our health deteriorates….

Major change has to happen soon and
three emerging trends will become clearer, namely

We will need to grow more of our own food locally in our home gardens and in community gardens, because of increasing transport costs and the diminishing number of farmers and productive land to farm (the average age of farmers in the UK is already 60; the major trend to bigger and bigger cities uses more and more land; farming used to be a major employer; agriculture used to employ more than 40% of the workforce, now it is down to 3%; farming skills have been lost).

Farmers will have to reduce their dependency on oil, diesel, man-made chemicals, herbicides and pesticides. Conventional farming is the major contributor to CO2 emissions causing organic matter levels to plummet. There will be a greater emphasis on fruit and vegetables, nuts and berries rather than cereals, grains and meat; this will come about partly because small acreage is far more productive and profitable than big farms and diversity increases production; large farms have tended to specialise on one or two crops or animals and have become dependent on transport and export markets; gardens are more productive per square metre than farms. Unemployment will also encourage more people to start growing their own food. Meats and animal products are extremely resource intensive, requiring enormous amounts of water, food and fossil fuels to produce. The widespread consumption of meat is not ecologically sustainable. Plants become even more important.

Our existing health system (Doctors & Hospitals) will collapse, because

v The cost is rising too fast to be sustainable (worsened by the financial crisis),
v Cancer, diabetes, heart disease, obesity and other problems are escalating,
v The population is ageing.
This will eventually cause a major refocus on prevention rather than treating symptoms, and a recognition that the primary cause of health problems is a deficiency in minerals in our diets.

The major common trend in all three of the above is for all families and individuals to start growing their own food without using herbicides, pesticides and man-made chemicals i.e. growing organically increasing the organic matter in the soil with compost and focussing on growing food with high nutritional content. This will overcome the mineral deficiencies and reverse the health crisis, start reducing CO2 emissions, reduce the dependency on oil, increase food production solving food shortages and starvation. Even the White House has already started a vegetable garden in 2009!Written by Geoff Buckley. For more visit http://www.growinghealthyorganicfood.com/

Why you should grow your own food

Why you should grow your own food.

One of the reasons for growing vegetables and/or is that food prices are rising dramatically; in fact in 2010 we have already seen some significant price rises and food shortages. Here in S.E.Queensland I have seen the price of onions rise from $20 per 20 kilogram bag to $80. Partly this is the result of a very wet season, which can be explained by climate change extremes which aren’t going to settle down any time soon. Organically grown carrots were unobtainable in this region for nearly six months. We are now being paid wholesale prices of $9 per kilogram for organically grown beans. Last year we received just $5. This is an 80% increase in just 12 months. What other investments have risen that fast?
The world population is already 6.5 billion and is projected to reach 9 billion by 2050. There is a finite amount of land and water and already many people are dying of starvation and more have little water; the situation can only get worse.
All agriculture depends on oil but conventional agriculture depends to a massive extent on huge quantities of oil and gas for transport, harvesting, cultivation, fertilizers and herbicides and pesticides. As oil reserves decline, prices of oil will rise further and faster. If you need to be persuaded that Peak Oil is a reality, there is one set of statistics that is totally convincing. In the 1960’s the world consumed 4 billion barrels of oil per year and the average rate of discovery annually, was around 30 billion barrels. Now, we consume 30 billion barrels of oil per year and the discovery rate is approaching 4 billion barrels of crude per year. Oil reserves are diminishing but developing countries like China & India are using more and more oil and gas and most westernized countries are still addicted to oil. This guarantees that the oil price will rise and that there will soon be shortages of oil & gas. Food prices will rise even more steeply than they have already as this happens. As oil prices rise farmers have no choice but to start switching to organic farming methods that use less oil. Many do not know how to do this and the degradation of soil that has occurred with chemical farming practices will make it impossible to do within a short time frame.

I believe everyone should grow some of their own food: because
*this activity connects you to nature
*makes you healthier through working outdoors with fresh air, sunshine & exercise
*contributes greatly to making a life worth living
* you can make a living growing in a small space
For more information go to http://www.growinghealthyorganicfood.com/ .