It looks as though you have many folk here giving you gardening tips. I should like to suggest the Sunset Garden Encyclopedia if you’d like to learn what grows well in your area, what sort of soil you have, and what to do with the pests you’ll likely have to deal with.

Second, for resourcefulness, I have found you can make a great compost pile in a relatively short amount of time by simply using a lawn mower (if you have grass), a good quality blender and a large pit or hole in the ground. The lawn mower bag provides the grass cuttings/leaves (hopefully without seeds) and the blender provides the way to make what I call “mulch shakes”. Simply use all of your kitchen waste (all peelings, veggies forgotten til you cleaned your fridge, apple cores, no meat unless it is fish) add water, blend, pour over the grass cuttings in the hole/pit, also a blender full of water to rinse, turning it into the pile. A few weeks of repeating this process whenever the blender needs to be emptied will give you the result of richer soil. Of course, this is supposing you regularly cut your own grass and prepare your own food for this to work.

Moreover, if I can encourage you in this matter of resourcefulness, I should like to! I know of a farm nearby that uses the methane from its cow manure to provide the electricity for its entire operation along with the housing for the families that work it. There is even extra electricity produced that is given freely to the electric company who then sells it to the rest of us who have not yet been able to figure how to make our own waste produce for us.

The more individual responsibility we all can take for ourselves and the provision of our households, the better for our nation and our people as a whole.

Farming/gardening that is blessed by the God who controls the weather, actually provides true wealth that you can put your hands on for true needs enabling people to be somewhat self sufficient looking to God for help and blessing rather than relying on things like the honesty and ability of corrupt men to provide for them. In my opinion, true wealth lies in those things which the patriarch Abraham had: land, animals, wells/usable water, and hired hands.

Besides, if you can get some knowledge on farming or gardening–you’ll have a head start for the Millenial Kingdom when Jesus Christ, the perfect and eternal world Governor will rule from Jerusalem: “…and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.” Is. 2:4 And won’t that be nice!

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Can you suggest any resources for urban gardening? The Square Foot method looks like it might work well?

Also wondering about composting in the city, would like to do it, but it is very important to keep it vermin- and odor-free.

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Michelle’s suggestion back at #1 is good. But when you rake the leaves, you need to run over them with the lawn mower to chip them before putting them in the pile. Be sure you don’t have big items like rocks in the pile. Then add some lime. You may have to wait a year, they don’t compost much over the winter. It’s best if you have a compost pile, then add good soil from the bottom each year. It does wonders for a garden.

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My family was deeply involved with alternative health care and organic agriculture, going back a long way.

Some of their ideas were good ones; a lot of them were quite nutty. (My daughter thought she was going to be a nut scientist; then the thought horrified her–speaking of real nuts, the kind that grow on trees.)

I prefer to eat food that I grow than food grown and shipped from China. We have a large garden in the woods, and we belong to an organic gardening organization, but we don’t pretend to be organic farmers. I prefer to grow food that wasn’t sprayed with pesticides and was grown on healthy soil. Efarmer is a lot more sophisticated in this subject than I am.

Their is a lot of faddism and foolishness in the “organic” movement, but there is a core of good sense in it. That is: avoid monoculture, maintain healthy soil, avoid poison in your food as much as possible, avoid shipping tons of food so we can eat out of season whenever our whim inspires us, avoid eating over corn-syruped and over-processed food as a steady diet.

Free enterprise is a great system, but at this web site it is regarded as idolatry instead of as a system invented by humans. (It doesn’t come from “God.”) It works very well indeed for building computer chips and many other industrial goods.

Unadulterated and unrestricted free enterprise does not work that well in medicine and in farming. “Industrial farming” is dangerous and harmful.

I have said this many times on this web site. One of the things that conservative Christians do is adapt their ideology to changing times and then act as if they invented it in the first place. They are doing it with Sarah Palin, the pro-life feminist. In this topic, they are discovering the wonders of organic agriculture.

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To hurry things along we can immediately take all the fuel away from truck drivers, get them off their rear ends and into shape while not delivering any products. Just by making this stuff we mugged Big Momma big time. We have to stop this insanity of doing anything or making stuff. People are the real evil ones out to kill mother earth.

Pretty soon there will be no people left and the earth can return to its normal self, making the sea rise and inundating coastlines around the world as it has many times before and there will be no humans to move or worry about and the world will be back to normal as it it freezes itself solid in the next Ice Age.

We can each at least starting to do our own part by eating our pets so they don’t foul Momma’s air, water and dirt again. We have time to get a lot done before we kill ourselves I would think – not that our thinking matters in the big scheme of things.

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