Tips for Urban Homesteading and Gardening
You can cut costs and save your dollars in the concrete jungle by adopting these practical strategies:

• Container gardening: Grow tomatoes, lettuce, potatoes and squash in pots, miniature barrels or oblong containers. Use hanging baskets to grow zucchini and strawberries. You don’t need a large greenhouse or plenty of acreage for your own supply of organic vegetables. With proper planning, your balcony could hold quite a few plants.

• Rearing fowl: You can hatch chicks from fertilized eggs by using an electric skillet on low, some water to moisten the air and a soft towel to cushion the eggs. You can then keep the hens in your backyard for a daily supply of eggs. Most US states will allow urban dwellers to raise a maximum of six hens.

• Using heirloom seeds: Your local farmers market will probably have hybrid, pest resistant tomatoes and squash plants.  These are genetically modified plants that have been grafted to make them resistant to bugs, pests and drought.  However, the vegetable will be seedless – which means that you won’t be able to re-plant any.  I would strongly advise against any hybrid seeds!  Buy heirloom seeds instead for growing your vegetables.   Heirloom plants have retained their specific traits through open pollination and are suitably resistant to extremes in weather and bio-diseases.  You’ll have plenty of seeds for frequent re-planting!

Getting Suitable Supplies

For city gardening, you can make do with containers that can be comfortably accommodated within your apartment.  If you’re in the suburbs and have a nice backyard, then you can even erect a small 12×12 greenhouse to cultivate your plants.

Space constraints will dictate the variety and abundance of vegetables and greens that you can tend.  You can utilize coffee grounds as organic fertilizer and obtain soil from the market.  If you’re rearing chickens, the coops are best maintained in an airy space and cleaned regularly.

By embracing homesteading and gardening, you’ll take full advantage of spectacular reductions in your expenses and elevated levels of vigor, energy and vim.  Maximize your intake of organic leafy greens and vegetables, and augment your health exponentially!

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If you’ve not been homesteading long or are just beginning, it may be tempting to go to your local farmer’s market and buy some of those nice, pest-resistant, hybrid plants that are supposedly easier to grow. After all, they are ‘made’ to be more user friendly right? Well, that depends.

They are often genetically modified plants (GMO) that have had artificial genes grafted into their make up to make them resist draught or blight or bugs. That’s why some tomatoes don’t really taste like a tomato.  Not only that, but by being hybrids, they are sterile or infertile for next year’s seeds. The plant you grow this year will not produce seeds for next year’s garden. You get to go spend money again on another hybrid seed.

Heirloom seeds will give you seeds to use each year from the crops they grow. Eat them this year, dry and save some for next year. Repeat. Now that’s money in the bank!

Take a look at this place that offers heirloom seeds with fast, free shipping:

Grow a Patriot Garden

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No hybrids and so all will produce seeds that reproduce thus starting out seed bank.

So, as the weather is cold and the mind is all that I can use to plant, here is our list for this year!

How does your garden grow?

Anyone else dreaming of spring?

Gotta get to plowing!

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