How to grow beetroot

Why Organic Certification is not necessarily the answer to ensure good quality food.

Organic certification implies that food grown under this label is grown without the use of chemical fertilizers and agricultural poisons but it doesn't automatically allow you to assume that it is necessarily nutrient-rich or of high quality. The organic industry is based on building up the soil by increasing humus levels and nutrient levels. The nutrients we are talking about aren't just the major ones like phosphorus, potassium and nitrogen, but the much larger range of nutrients such as selenium, boron, molybdenum and silicon. There are more than 70 trace elements that are essential for good plant health and these need to be added to the soil regularly and monitored as well. When applying for certification, organic growers need to do a soil test but no one checks whether, once certification is given, nutrient deficiencies in the soil are rectified or if there is regular input of nutrients to replace those that are taken up by the vegetables and trees that are grown in the soil. There is no on-going monitoring of the mineral levels, vitamins and amino acids in organic food in spite of the fact that these are really important in maintaining human health. We have never applied for organic certification because we have always been aware of the deficiencies in the organic certification process. We know our food is of extremely high standard because we monitor soil nutrient levels by doing soil tests regularly. Our soil organic levels are over 14% which is quite exceptional. Because our buyers respect the quality of the food we produce, know that it is freshly picked and full of nutrients when they buy it, we sell everything we grow on our Community Farm. Our only problem is that we can't grow enough to meet demand. Written by Bev Buckley For more information goto http://www.growinghealthyorganicfood.com/course1

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/

Weed Control

Weed Control.

Two organic weed control strategies are:
* the heavy use of mulch reduces weed growth significantly.
* remove weeds before they go to seed.
The key thing is that most of us realize is that herbicides are expensive and cause harm to people, plants,animals, birds, water & soil life. We used to think we had a real weed problem until we visited one of Australia's largest organic farms where we were told that their wages bill for people to weed was over $125,000 per year. They pull out weeds by hand with teams of "weeders". After learning that, our weed problems faded into insignificance.Weeding is a chore. There's absolutely no doubt about that. Weeds are probably the organic gardener's greatest enemy. They use up nutrients, and smother plants. If allowed to go to seed, they proliferate with amazing speed. But what you need to understand about weeds is that when they are a real problem it is a sign that vital nutrients are missing. The purpose of weeds is nutrient recycling. With long roots, they bring up nutrients from deep down in the soil. Pull them up and use them, as nutrient-rich mulch.Particular weeds definitely grow in response to the structure, texture and fertility of the soil. For example, where there is a calcium deficiency there are millions of dandelions and "farmers friends". Many weeds grow best in poor, infertile soil, since the basic cause of most weed problems is wrong soil conditions. So the best organic weed control system is to learn how to build healthy balanced soil and to maintain it. Part of this is developing the soil food web(bacteria,fungi,worms) to improve the soil structure and indirectly help fight weeds by helping crop plants grow better.
Some plants & trees have enough leaves to restrict weed growth. The best organic weed control strategy is to plant vegetables closely together so that they shade the ground. You can do this when you have very high levels of nutrients and organic matter in the soil.Some small-scale commercial farmers use plastic sheeting or old carpeting to control weeds but this is a problem in that they stop sunlight, water and fertilizer from penetrating and without these, the soil dies. Carpets have poisons that leach into the soil.One of our key organic weed control strategies is to use cardboard and newspapers covered in mulch between my rows of vegetables and fruit trees. Both these substances break down over time and add cellulose, a natural wood-based substance, to the soil so that mulching has a dual purpose: it stops weeds and it add organic matter to the soil.The good news is that as the mineral balance and organic matter levels in the soil improve, weeds become less of a problem and easier to pull out. Composting, mulching and worm trenching are the other main organic weed control strategies I use which, at the same time, build organic matter. To summarise the best strategies for organic weed control are:
Remove weeds before they go to seed
Build the soil organic matter
Build soil nutrient level and ensure all the elements are present and in the correct balance
Use cardboard, newspaper and mulch to shut out light
Pull out weeds when they are small and loosen soil around plants to disturb the roots of newly emerging weeds.
Make sure your compost is properly aerated, moistened and hot enough to kill all weed seeds and pathogens.
Don’t throw away weeds: use them as mulch; they contain the missing nutrients you need to improve your organic soil.
Learn to enjoy your weeds!! Weeding can actually be a very meditative and soothing process if you allow yourself to let go the judgement around weeds. In the Healthy Growing programme you will find some fascinating insights into the role of weeds in restoring soil fertility and balance. Weeds actually have a very important role in nature. For more information go to www.growinghealthyorganicfood.com

Hi,
My name is Geoff Buckley. I live in SE Queensland in Australia and have a partner in marriage and in business called Bev. We both love gardening and have been gardening here for the past 16 years. We now teach others how to grow their own food. We grow 60 different crops organically, 40 vegetables, 10 herbs and 10 fruit, berries and nuts. Our business name is Growing Healthy. We write books about gardening and farming and teach others how to grow their own organic food and how to run a business growing crops.
Our website is http://www.growinghealthyorganicfood.com/ .