Raised Bed Organic Gardening.

I am a big fan of raised beds, the kind you grow things in as well as the kind you sleep in. I hope, after reading the chapter on soil rehabilitation, the reader will have some idea of how difficult it is to garden the organic way in most of the soils he or she is likely to encounter. Depending on the rehabilitation methods employed, it may take years to render a sandy or heavy clay soil suitable for an organic garden. Even if one elects to remove the soil and replace it with decomposed organic material and earthworms castings, the process is going to be very labor intensive. A raised bed eliminates many, if not most, of these problems and, If you are faced with a very chalky soil, a raised bed may be the only practical way to establish an organic garden, or, for that matter, any garden. Similarly, if your garden area has a drainage problem a raised bed above ground level will solve the problem. Raised beds come in every size and shape imaginable and, thus, may be customized to accommodate any available space you might have for a small or large garden. Furthermore, several small raised beds can be arranged so that they are very attractive to the eye, a very important consideration for an organic garden. Finally, a garden surface area that in raised a foot and a half or so from the ground is much easier to work in than is a garden surface at ground level, an important physical factor for all of us as we grow older. Possibly the biggest disadvantage to raised bed gardens is the cost to buy or construct the structures. Depending of the size of a raised bed and how elaborate it is, the materials to build the structure can cost several hundred dollars. In addition, if you do not have a ready supply of decomposed organic material, it will cost a little more to fill it with suitable growing material. However, a raised bed can be constructed cheaply from used lumber, discarded bricks, old railroad ties or cement blocks, to name only a few of the possibilities available to a prospective organic gardener. Some manufactures sell raised beds with legs. These structures require a floor which increases their cost. Raised beds with legs invariably have very shallow beds which are not suitable for ideal plant growth; for this reason alone, I would avoid them. In this respect, a raised bed garden should have a minimum depth of 12 inches, a 18 inch deep bed would be better. I will not repeat the information provided in the chapter above with respect to what can be used to fill your instant raised bed organic garden. Just make sure that it contains at least 50% rotted manure and about 25% fresh earthworm castings. The remaining 25% can consist of regular garden compost, soil or some other organic material such as rotted leaves or decomposed grass clipping. Remember though, if you do not have a sufficient supply of aged manure you will have to increase the nutritional value of the mix by adding one or more of the organic fertilizers available to you at the local garden or feed store. better yet, make your own organic fertilizer by composting your organic house hold waste and newspapers with composting earthworms.

It's Time To Build The Damned fence!

We are paying a horrendous price, both economically and socially, in this country because we (our government) refuse to control our southern border. There are two primary reasons our elected leaders, on both sides of the isle, refuse to stop the illegal's from flooding across our southern border. The libs know that they are creating a permanent underclass that will forever vote for the demoratic (yes, I know this is a made up word but no real word really describes these bastards as well as this one does) party and keep themselves in power until the next revolution (have no doubt about it, when all is said and done, a revolution is the only way out of this mess). The republicans, an equally amoral and corrupt group of self-serving morons, want to make sure that their handlers in the business community have a continuous supply of cheep labor. Votes and cheap labor, that's what it is all about! Irrespective of the motives for our open border policy, we as a country can't stand much more of this insanity. The gene pool in this country is being badly diluted by the low IQ illegal's that cross our borders to join our permanent intellectually challenged underclass. Our prisons are bulging at the seams with illegal felons of Spanish decent. Our school are unable to function, in large part, because of the large numbers of low IQ Mexican children that do not speak English in our class rooms. Our welfare system is bankrupt because many, if not most, of the illegal's from south of the border end up on the public dole and our hospital emergency rooms are packed with illegal's seeking free medical care. Obviously this must stop and it must stop now! We do not need more border patrol agents and we do not need drones flying around the border in some meaningless game of hid and seek (after all we are not going to shoot anybody found to be illegally crossing the border, are we?) No, we need a fence, it's as simple as that! Fences, as was proven most recently in San Diego, work every time they are tried, no ifs and buts about it. So, let's build the damned fence! By the way, it makes no difference what they do with the ten or twenty million illegal's who are here now, that is not an issue. However, not one illegal should be given any form of legal status whatsoever, until the fence is complete, every last foot of it! Are you listening congress?

The use of peat moss in your orgainc garden.

Peat moss is as natural and organic a soil conditioners as you can get; however, there are some environmental concerns as to the use of the material in your garden. In the first place, peat bogs are endangered. There is only a finite amount of peat left in the world and when it is gone there will be nothing to replace it. Second, peat moss contains large amounts of carbon and active peat bogs remove an estimated 110 million tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere each year. Finally, there are about 562 billion tons of carbon stored in the worlds remaining peat bogs. If this peat is mined and allowed to decay in the soil this carbon will be released into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide. It is for these reasons that most books on organic gardening do not discuss the use of peat moss in the garden, other than to discourage the practice. Having said this, peat moss is a wonderful organic soil conditioner and there undoubtedly is a place for it in your garden if you are willing to pay $30.00 for a small bail of the material. Peat moss has little nutritional value but is an extremely effective soil conditioner because it retains up to 20 times its weight in water. It is used to help break up and aureate heavy clay soils and to add water retaining organic material to sandy soils. Peat moss has a low pH, about 3.4 to 4.8, so it a particularly effect component of any material used to fertilize acid loving plants like azaleas, rhododendrons and roses. Finally, with respect to the environmental implications of using peat moss in your garden, I believe the plant life that thrive in your wonderful organic garden will remove far more carbon dioxide from the air you breath than is likely to be added by the decomposition of the few bails of peat you may add to the soil. With respect to the depletion of the peat bogs, the stuff is now so expensive that the economics of the situation will not allow this to happen. So, you have my permission to add a little peat to you garden if you a few dollars that are burning a hole in your pocket, just make sure the environmental police are not looking at you from that drone circling overhead! This is an excerpt from a book I am writing about organic gardening.

Excerpt from The Earthworm Farmer's Bible

7. What do Red Wiggler composting earthworms eat? Red Wiggler (Eisenia Foetida) composting earthworms have very small mouths and do not have the greatest teeth. In fact, as mentioned above, they do not have teeth! Thus, even though they can eat almost anything that was once alive, it may take them a long time to do so. For example, if you give them a raw carrot they will not be able to do much with it until the carrot starts to decompose and softens up a bit. On the other hand, earthworms will devourer a soft cooked carrot in a few days. Along the same lines, earthworms love newspaper and can consume large quantities of paper waste in relatively little time; however, they cannot handle paper that is matted together. Thus, you will have to invest in a paper shredder if you plan to feed your earthworms newspaper. Along the same lines, earthworms love cardboard, but cannot consume it efficiently unless it is cut up into very small pieces or has been allowed to rot. Covering a worm bed with wet cardboard is a great idea because it acts as an insulator and provides a moist dark environment ideal for vermiculture. As I said, composting earthworms love the stuff. To clarify this issue, I should point out that earthworms are actually a part of a complex food chain that is found naturally in most soils as well as in the earthworm's bedding. At the bottom of the food chain are microorganisms that we cannot see including, most importantly billions and billions of bacteria that cover and help breakdown all decaying material. The next larger organisms in the food chain are the fungi, protozoa and nematodes who primarily eat the bacteria. The organisms that we can see in a earthworms beddings include spiders, saw bugs and white mites. These invertebrates consume the small organisms below them in the food chain. The composting earthworm lives on the top of this complex ecosystem and can consume all but the largest invertebrates in their environment. Of course, they do consume these larger organisms after they die. All of the creatures in the ecosystem eat each other (from top to bottom) and are in turn eaten by other members of the food chain when they die and decompose. With respect to the earthworms diet, the composting worms are not actually eating the organic waste you give them. Rather, they are eating the various microorganisms that cover the decomposing material in their bedding. The organic material, and inorganic materials like dirt, which are present in the worms bedding are consumed incidentally in the process as they eat the bacteria. As you might expect, particle size is a primary consideration when planning an earthworms diet. While earthworms cannot handle fir limbs or the limbs you gather after pruning your fruit trees, they will make short work of fir sawdust and most other wood products if they have been passed through a shredder before feeding it to them. The rule of thumb here is that the smaller and softer the food particle is the faster the earthworms will be able to devour it and convert it to worm castings. So, what can you feed Earthworms? A lot has been written about what earthworms like and dislike. For example, they are not supposed to like citrus fruit, especially the skins. To the contrary, I have found that my worms love the pulp of an orange and will also consume the rinds as soon as they soften up a bit. Composting earthworms ,however, would not do well if fed nothing but, or primarily, citrus skins or citrus pulp because large quantities of this organic material would make the worm's bedding to acidic. In this respect, everything in moderation applies here as it does with most things in life. Similarly, some authorities on vermiculture recommend that meat products not be added to a worm bin. My experience suggests that composting earthworm love meat of all types, the rottener the better. The meat waste must be buried in the worms bedding, of course, to prevent flies from having access it. However, with this proviso, meat products makes excellent worm feed. This is a particularly important point for home owners since they do not have to go to the trouble of separating meat scraps from the kitchen waste they feed their composting earthworms. With respect to home vermiculture, the only type of kitchen waste that should not be put in a worm bin is large quantities of fatty substances like grease, lard and butter. Small quantities of these products are acceptable and need not be separated from the other table scrapes you feed composting earthworms. With this notable exception, you can feed your Earthworms almost anything from your kitchen, even egg shells!

Organic Gardening- What is it, why do it?

In its most basic form, organic gardening is the growth of the various forms of vegetation without the use of the chemical based fertilizers you buy at the local nursery or hardware store. Most gardeners add various mixtures of chemical fertilizers to the soil to feed the plants they are attempting to grow. Organic gardeners, on the other hand, add natural forms of fertilizers (earthworm castings, manure, blood meal, bone meal, cotton seed, fish emulsion, etc.) to the soil to encourage the growth of beneficial microorganisms which, in turn, feed the plants and vegetables they wish to grow. In short, chemical fertilizers feed the plant directly with highly concentrated bursts of fertilizer (nitrogen, phosphorous and potassium) while organic fertilizers feed the organisms in the soils natural ecosystem which, in turn, produce the sustained low levels of nutrients, including trace elements, necessary for healthy plant growth. The advantages of chemical based fertilizers. Although the day may come when we run out of natural gas, the primary ingredient of ammonia based chemical fertilizers, it will remain abundant and relatively cheap for the foreseeable future; thus, chemical based fertilizers are, and will continue to be, a relatively inexpensive way for the gardeners to fertilize their plants for years to come. The primary ingredients of chemical based fertilizers (nitrogen, phosphorous and potassium) also are produced in a form that is readily available to the plant and thus provide, a quick fix, for a gardener whose plants are suffering from a deficiency of one of the three major plant nutrients. Note, however, as stated above, chemical fertilizers do nothing to replace the deficiencies of trace elements which may be hampering plant growth because the vast majority of these chemical concoctions are devoid of these important factors so necessary for healthy plant growth. Finally, large agricultural operations which produce crops like corn and wheat, are now, and will continue to be, dependent on the mass production of chemical based fertilizers because there simply is not enough environmentally safe organic fertilizer to meet their needs at the present time. Home gardeners, on the other hand, are not laboring under constraints of size and can easily produce enough cheap and safe organic fertilizer for their own gardens by following the relatively simple organic gardening techniques championed in this book. The disadvantages of chemical based fertilizers. Most chemical based fertilizers are produced either by the Haber- Bosch process, which combines natural gas and atmospheric nitrogen to form ammonium, or the Odda process which combines phosphate rock with nitric acid to produce a mixture of phosphoric acid and calcium nitrate. Controlled-release chemical fertilizers are most often produced from urea and formaldehyde- yuk! There are several significant disadvantages to the production and use of these potentially toxic products. With respect to the production of energy, in 2004, 317 billion cubic feet of natural gas was consumed in the industrial production of ammonia for the fertilizer industry. To put this in perspective, about 25.5 trillion cubic feet of natural gas is consumed in the United States each year for other purposes. However, as suggested above, it is not the depletion of our natural gas resources that is the primary disadvantage to the use of chemical based fertilizers; rather, it is the damage to the environment (primarily the soil and atmosphere) that speaks in deafening tones to the disadvantages of using these toxic products to fertilize the plants we grow and eat. Water pollution is inevitable in large agriculture operations when nutrients, especially nitrates, are washed into the watercourses. High intake of nitrates from contaminated ground water has been linked to thyroid cancer, skin rashes, hair loss, birth defects and blue baby syndrome, a potentially fatal blood disorder in infants. Indications of nitrate poisoning in animals include discoloration of the mucous membranes, a sluggish staggering gate, labored breathing, rapid heart rate followed by collapse, coma and, in severe cases, death. Excess nitrates in the waters of our lakes and streams induce the growth of algae. When the algae die the microorganisms that consume them strip oxygen from the water causing the death of invertebrates, fish and shellfish. Anyone who has observed a stagnate pond has experience this process first hand. For sure, it is not a pretty sight! Contamination from impurities is an inevitable result of the fertilization of plants with chemical based fertilizers. The type and concentration of these impurities, which may include fluorides, cadmium and uranium, will vary depending on the material used to manufacture the fertilizer, but you can rest assured that the inorganic fertilizer you purchase at your local nursery is never completely free of potentially toxic impurities that will end up in the food you eat if you use it to fertilize your vegetable garden. Another significant disadvantage of chemical based fertilizers, of special concern climate change enthusiasts, results from the fact that nitrogen based fertilizers are converted by soil bacteria to nitrous oxide the green house gas responsible for acid rain. Some environmentalists also believe that nitrous oxide is a significant contributor to global warming. Finally, and possibly most importantly, the prolonged application of chemical based fertilizers to the soil invariably results in a condition called fertilizer dependency. This is so, because the continuous application of fertilizers derived from chemicals eventually kills the organisms responsible for the soil ecosystems that produce natural organic fertilizers like earthworm castings. I will have a great deal more to say about this important subject below; however, for now, realize that the death of the beneficial microorganisms and larger invertebrates in the soil renders the cultivation of plants totally dependent on the continuous use of the toxic chemical based fertilizers that caused the demise of the fragile soil ecosystem in the first place. The advantages of organic gardening. Using the gardening methodology described in this book, the organic gardener can produce an abundance of healthy toxin-free vegetables for his or her table and beautiful flowers, shrubs and trees that will be enchanting for the eye using only natural organic fertilizers produced from cheap organic household waste and readily available manures from neighboring horse stables. This book on the attributes of organic gardening differs from other tomes on the subject because I emphasize the importance of vermiculture, the composting of organic waste with earthworms, in production and maintenance of a successful organic garden. Present day organic gardening can be an expensive proposition given the high cost of organic fertilizers like blood meal, bone meal, alfalfa pellets and cottonseed meal. However, one does not have to resort to the use of these expensive organic fertilizers to be a successful organic farmer. Trust me on this one, earthworm castings are the answer to the organic farmer's dream garden oasis. This book tells you how to make earthworm castings from inexpensive organic waste and how to use them in your garden. rest assured, you are on the way to becoming a successful organic gardener and I am going to be there for you every step of the way. You can do this, I know you can!

What's wrong with this picture?

The United states senate Budget Committee reports that eleven states now have more people on welfare than they have people employed. Just think of that, these states now have more people sitting home on their fat-asses watching some meaningless TV show than they have people working. But wait it gets even worse! Between food stamps, housing support, child care, Medicaid, to name only a few of the government programs that make up the so-called safety net, the average US household on welfare receives $168.00 a day in government Support. That means that being on welfare now pays the equivalent of $30.00 an hour, for a 40 hour sit at home and watch TV work week, while the average job in America pays only $20.00 an hour, that is if you are lucky enough to find full time employment. By the way, in case you haven't guessed, the states having more of their citizens, or non-citizens, unemployed than employed include the liberal strongholds of Hawaii, California, New York, and Illinois. Yes, dear reader, liberalism has been an unmitigated disaster for America and things are likely to get a hell of a lot worse before they get better! Think - large scale riots in all of our major cities: inflation rates exceeding 20%; a complete collapse of our banking system; street gangs running unchecked in an every-man for him or herself in lawless environment; and, last but not least, people dying on the streets for lack of medical care. Yes, we are headed for a complete societal collapse that will make the social disruptions in Greece look like child's play.

The Legitimacy of the Obama Presidency

Over the last eight years or so, there has been a lot of chatter from the right side of the isle about the place of Obama's birth. For some reason my conservative colleagues seem to think that the fact that our first black president was born in Kenna disqualified him from becoming president. There were many reasons this socialist should not have been elected president of the United States, but this is not one of them. In this respect, the fact that Obama's communist mother was born in the United states has never been questioned; thus, like it or not, Obama is an American citizen, irrespective of where he was born. As you will recall, John McCain was born in Panama of an American mother and no one ever questioned his qualifications to run for the presidency. On hind sight maybe they should have! However, we are now facing an entirely different kettle of fish and I would argue that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) abuse of power prior to the 2012 election so contaminated the electoral process that the results of the election were meaningless! It is becoming increasingly clear with each passing day that Obama's administration used the immense powers of the IRS to hamper legitimate efforts of Tea Party members, the Southern Christian Association and a host of other conservative groups to unseat Obama in the last election. Whether Obama knew about these shenanigans is beside the point, his supporters knew and that's all that matters! Why is the use of the IRS's attempts to thwart voices on the right such an egregious abuse of power? As you will recall, in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2010) the Supreme Court held that the First Amendment prohibits the government from restricting political independent expenditures and electioneering communications by corporations, associations or labor unions. In other words, the court equated the use of money to promote a political point of view with the sacred right of free speech, not to be screwed around with, even by democrats. The liberal democratic minions in the IRS successfully circumvented the clear cut intent of the Supreme Court in their ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, not by a direct attempt to suppress the political advertisements of their opponents, but by making it difficult or impossible for conservative groups to obtain tax free status for their organizations. Obviously, if an organization has to pay taxes of the money they raise for their political enterprises they will have less to spend on their attempts to influence the votes of those participating in the election. We will never how much difference the dirty tricks of the demorats imbedded in the IRS had on the last election. However, that is not the point; rather, the issue is whether or not every candidate running in the election, including governor Romney, got a fair shot at the prize or were conservative candidates in the 2012 election playing with a deck of cards that was stacked against them from the get-go. The answer is obvious! The 2012 election was rigged against Romney and the conservatives because their attempts to organize against Obama and other democratic candidates were thwarted, in part, by the tyrants in the IRS. As such, the results of the election should be declared null and void! There is no other reasonable solution to the problem. We must throw out the results of the flawed 2012 election and start all over again. By the way, the demorats in the IRS, and White House, responsible for this travesty of justice should spend the remainder of their days in federal prison, without, by the way, conjugal visits!