Living Green: The Missing Manual

How Green Does Your Garden Grow?

One way to know exactly how your food was produced is to grow it yourself. Organic gardening isn't just for professional farmers and hippies on communes: All kinds of people grow their own food, from suburbanites with back-yard vegetable patches to city folk growing tomatoes on fire escapes. This section gets you up to speed on basic organic gardening techniques.

Tip

A great source of seeds for the organic gardener is Seeds of Change (www.seedsofchange.com), a company committed to preserving biodiversity and promoting sustainable, organic agriculture.

The Joy of Composting

Composting has two main benefits: It reduces the amount of biodegradable garbage you send to the landfill and creates compost, dark brown, crumbly, decomposed organic matter. Compost improves soil structure and health, helps beneficial microbes, attracts earthworms, and releases its nutrients slowly, so they're available to plants throughout the growing season. No wonder gardeners call compost black gold.

Compost gets created when different kinds of waste—often referred to as "green" (materials that are moist and rich in nitrogen, like grass clippings and kitchen scraps) and "brown" (materials that are dry and high in carbon, like dead leaves, shredded paper, and sawdust)—combine with air and water and decompose over about three or four weeks.

Getting started with compost

Compost is easy to make. You can just pile scraps in your back yard, but because kitchen garbage smells appetizing ...