#loam-pass

#loam-pass

Aquaponics systems utilize one gallon of water to produce a kilogram of leafy greens, compared to over 30 gallons in traditional farming, showcasing remarkable efficiency.

The industrious buzz of bees tackling the dregs of cherry blossom was lawnmower-loud, accompanied by back off peeps from blackbirds nesting in the ivy.

Plump, wiggly slugs may look innocuous, but they can wreak serious havoc on a carefully-curated garden, even causing total crop failure.

The herd is Navajo-Churro, a heritage breed long tended by the Diné people of the American Southwest. Resilient and rooted in a fragile history, these sheep carry something beyond wool and weight.

Grafting is the method through which two different plants from the same species or genus are joined together to grow as one. The resulting plant benefits from the qualities of the two different original plants.

Last week, I was making my morning coffee-you know, the complicated order I'm too embarrassed to say out loud at coffee shops-when I noticed the pile of used grounds in my filter. For years, I'd been tossing these straight into the trash without a second thought. But then I remembered something my grandmother wrote in one of her letters years ago: "The garden teaches us that nothing is truly waste."

The term "soil fatigue" or exhaustion refers to the condition that soil profiles take on when they've been heavily monocropped and untended. This soil is devoid of the microbial content that offers plants bioavailable food. It lacks the fungal and bacterial organisms that interact with plant nutrients.

To an unimaginable eye, a seed looks inert. Yet they are packed with genetic information and biological processes poised to unfold. All it takes is the right configuration of signals and stimuli from the environment to let them know it's time to dare to grow.

When you think of farming, what ingredients do you generally associate with a successful harvest? The basics certainly come to mind: fertile soil, plenty of sunlight and lots of water. But there are other variables that can also mean the difference between a crop of healthy fruits and vegetables and a large heap of organic waste. And it turns out that one of those variables is a very small hawk.

People grow asparagus from crowns because it shortens the long wait times for harvesting. From seed, you'll need to wait three years before harvesting asparagus. Some people consider that a waste of time. The tradeoff is that you can keep harvesting every spring for up to 15 years or more. If you plant crowns, you get a one-year jump on things. However, those crowns may have soil-borne diseases you don't know about, so there is a risk involved. Seeds remove that problem.

As concepts such as "regenerative" and "biodynamic" continue to enter the mainstream coffee lexicon, scientists continue to literally dig into the soil to give them meaning. A recent peer-reviewed study from India's Western Ghats argues that one of the clearest signals of healthy, sustainable coffee farms lies in the ground itself, with organic coffee soils performing better than soils from conventional farms treated with synthetic inputs.