To start your spring garden all of the tools and directions can be found on master gardener, Lee O’Hara’s website at http://www.organichomegardener.com
View both trailers now of the award winning Organic Gardening Made Easy and the latest edition called The Organic Tomato, both available on DVD. Get the whole family involved in the number 1 hobby in the world today.
Welcome to My Garden blogs…
On this profile, blog, photos and films I add will share with you the education needed to be able to grow your own “amazing” vegetables, whether in your own yard or community. If you’re not already a gardener you only need the decision to do what you are about to start on and get done. If you are already a gardener, I think you will enjoy seeing what I do in my little garden… and I’d love to see what you can do in yours!
I have produced two easy to follow, step by step instructions that will enable you to quickly, easily and economically create and sustain your own organic home garden – whether you have 3 square feet or several acres of garden space to start from. It’s available from my website in English or Spanish. Any questions you have now about gardening organically, I will answer for you.
Thanks for reading my blogs, ordering your copy of the DVD’s and being a friend.
My best to you,
Lee O’Hara
http://www.organichomegardener.com
Kids learning about gardens by gardening…
Kids learning about gardens by gardening…
I don’t think everyone has to grow their own vegetables organically in order to be healthier. I do think that everyone who eats should, and has a right to know what they’re eating. From my daily observations the vast majority simply doesn’t have a clue.
The food choices of otherwise well educated people who take an interest in their diets for health purposes too often rely on biased statistics, mis-information and lies distributed by media supported by industries that have products to sell. Complete truth and honesty are not comfortable things to deal with. More often than not we just accept what’s easy and immediate. If they tell us a double burger with cheese, onions, lettuce and ketchup gives us all the food groups, why argue with that? If they say that ketchup is an anti-carcinogen because of the licopenes in tomatoes, we accept it without wondering how much white sugar or stabilizing chemicals we’re consuming along with the licopenes.
We accept tasteless, nutritionally vacant vegetables as simply the way vegetables are. Most people are staggered to find that daily fresh, nutrient loaded organically grown vegetables actually taste so good that they think they’ve never had vegetables before.
They tell us that we get all the nutrients we need from our food based on an analysis of their nutritional content. What they don’t tell us is that by the time our vegetables land on our dining room table, they have lost as much as 75% of the vitamins and minerals they originally had.
I think that’s got something to do with the fact that over 50% of us are on some kind of medical drug or another. I think it’s a very big factor in America’s over-weight problem.
I think if we want to really do something for our children, we’ll get them off the high tech gadgetry for an hour or so every day. I think we would take them out in the yard, dig up some earth, plant a vegetable, and learn along with them something about what they’re going to be consuming every day for the rest of their lives.
That’s what I do think.
Lee O’Hara
Road Kill and Industrial Products ~is what it looks like to me. It will look like that to you, too, once you’ve grown some of your own food without poisonous chemicals in the soil and on your vegetables.
I’ve been here in the southeast on business for a few days. It was Sunday, and I went to one of the higher end coffee shops for Sunday brunch. There were lots of fried meats and potatoes and such, which is pretty usual in a brunch buffet. I went light on that area, because I wanted some fresh vegetables. Now I’m an omnivore and I love food of all kinds. I’m not real snobbish about it either. What was in the vegetable portion of the brunch buffet sent me back for more eggs. My first thought when I looked at those “fresh vegetables”?
“Road Kill! This is the vegetable equivalent of road kill!”
I doubt if any vegetable in that buffet was any less than 10 days out of the field. There wasn’t one thing there that didn’t look like it had been grown in chemicals. And yes, I can pretty much tell what has been grown ethically, and what has been grown in chemicals just by seeing the color, texture and vibrancy. If there were any nutritional value in the entire vegetable section of that buffet, it would greatly surprise me.
I know it’s winter. I know it’s a big city and there are millions of people to feed every day. And I know that as bad as it is, it’s more, and fresher, than people had access to 100 years ago, especially during the middle of winter. But did they have to grow it in chemicals and spray it with chemical insecticides? Of course they did not. The growers have opted for the easy ways. Never mind that it might cost a little more to not poison the earth, the water systems, the ground water—and the food itself. It wouldn’t in fact, but they don’t take the time to learn.
The chemical farmers who are converting to organic methods are to be applauded, rewarded, and heartily thanked. We may not be able to get really fresh vegetables in the winter months in most of the country, but we don’t have to settle for chemically marinated vegetables.
I’m lucky enough to live where I can grow vegetables year round, but when I do buy anything I haven’t grown, I buy ‘Certified Organic.’ As more people support the return to the old ways of not destroying the environment in the quest for a quick buck through the use of chemicals, the lower the price of truly organic vegetables will be. If it’s done right, it’s cheaper to grow that way in the first place.
The better idea? Grow your own if you possibly can! The sooner you do that the happier and healthier you and yours will be. My dream is that sooner rather than later, most people will look at the vegetables they’ve been accepting and say to themselves, “Road Kill!”
Lee O’Hara
www.organichomegardener.com
My Back Yard
Try this: Alfalfa Meal, cold processed Kelp Meal, Bone Meal and Fish Meal, mixed according to the directions for your size bed, dig them well into fairly good soil, saturate it, put in your favorite vegetable seeds according to the directions on the package, and stand back. In a month or three, depending on what you planted, you’ll have the most and best vitamins that money could buy.
“Our food should be our medicine,” said Hippocrates. With our food traveling 1,500 miles, arriving at our table 12-14 days after it was harvested, it’s not very likely to contain much nutrition; much less of medicinal quality. Vegetables start to lose their vitamins and minerals, in other words their flavor, the moment they’re taken from the plant. The difference between vegetables just picked from the plant, and what the local grocery store calls “fresh,” in flavor, texture, color and appeal-not to mention vitamin and mineral content, is staggering.
You can do it. If you need or want any help, just let me know.
Lee O’Hara
www.organichomegardener.com
WHAT IS HANGING IN BALANCE?
I am. There is no “we,” but only a world full of “I.”
It all starts every day with me. It doesn’t matter what “we” do or don’t do. It only matters what I do. I can do nothing about what “we” decide to do-or not do. What I have absolute power over is what I do.
I can do something to help my neighbor or a complete stranger. I can bring a smile to a harried waitress; or I can make her moment more miserable by demanding faster service. If her load is made a little lighter, I know I’ll get better service. I can help someone understand their environmnet, knowing that if they can understand it better, they’ll want it to be better. I can help a friend see a problem from a different viewpoint by just hearing him out. I can listen-really just listen, to anyone who wants to talk to me.
I alone will decide how well to prepare my soil now for a garden that I’ll want to plant in the spring. I alone will determine whether my garden is enormously abundant; or a dismal failure.
I am hanging the balance. Only I can tip the scales in my favor.
Lee O’Hara
http://www.organichomegardener.com
ROOTS OF TOMATOES AFTER HARVEST
Did your neighbor’s tomato roots look like this when he took the plants out at the end of the season?
They should have. These root stuctures are 2-3 times what one would normally expect to see. The one with the tape measure around it is 9 inches in circumference.
It was somewhat hollow and not necessarily representative, but a very productive plant. I planted 7 started tomato plants that were labeled “Beefmaster.” They were not Beefmasters, nor were they even related to “Beefsteak.” They were some unidentifiable little tomato that left me about 400 lbs. short of what I could have expected from Beefmasters. They were very good tomatoes, but they didn’t turn out to be what I thought they were.
Over the season, the 7 plants in their 80 square foot raised bed produced only 931 tomatoes, weighing a total of 441 lbs. That’s an ave. of 63 lbs. per plant, and an average of 173 tomatoes per plant. They weighed an overall average of 5.8 ounces each.
With Beefmasters, in 2007, I had 1,400 tomatoes from 7 plants, 200 tomatoes per plant, with an average weight of almost 10 ounces each.
If you want to get your neighbor something for Christmas this year, you might consider “the Organic Tomato” DVD. (If he only gives you 5 lbs. of tomatoes next summer, you’ll be way ahead!)
Lee O’Hara
Our home is on a small hillside lot at the northeast edge of Los Angeles, between Glendale and Pasadena. We probably have one of the best climates in the US for gardening, but we do have our handicaps. Topsoil is rare. It’s been scraped away for homes and buildings. We get virtually no rain from about mid-April through about mid-October or November.
Why is it then that so many people who appear to be so conscious of health and environmental issues in every other way, don’t plant a tomato or little lettuce patch? I see gorgeous roses and hydrangeas and manicured back yards that are rarely enjoyed. Those take as much, and often even more time, energy and money to produce than it would to grow the best organic tomato most of the current generation has ever tasted.
We have “June Gloom” every year, starting about mid-May, and continuing sometime until the 1st or 2nd week in July. During much of that period, we’ll get 2-3 hours of afternoon sun, with the rest of the day being foggy and over-cast.
Over the past 24 years I’ve turned our front and back yards into raised planting beds. At first it was just with the intention of creating retaining walls, but soon escalated into growing vegetables organically. The term “Organic”, in farming or gardening, means using fertilizers and pest controls that come only from plants and animals.
One of my original actions was to keep records and statistics on what I did, and what the results were at the end of the season. I wanted to know exactly how effective my new methods were. The results were so consistent year after year, and more or less incomparable according to everything I could find about what one can expect from any given vegetable plant. Year after year I was getting 20-30 lbs. of foot long “burpless” cucumbers per seed, 30 lbs. of yellow zucchinis per seed, ¾ lbs. of green beans per seed, 100+ Japanese eggplants per plant, 40-50 bell peppers per plant, 30 lbs. of leaf lettuce from a planting bed of 15 sq. ft., etc.
As I comment on in the film, “Organic Gardening Made Easy,” we give away more than half of what I grow. The truth is that it’s more like 80-85%. After a few years, the habit of weighing and counting everything became boring. I stopped weighing and counting everything, unless I was trying something new. As in the case of last year when for the first time I planted two sweet potatoes I’d bought at the supermarket. I can tell you that four and a half months later when I dug them up I had 20 lbs. of them, with the biggest sweet potato weighing in at 3.25 lbs. But I didn’t quit keeping daily yield statistics in the case of my tomatoes!
For instance, the 7 Beefmaster tomato plants currently still growing on October 29 October, a few inches high on April 15th when I planted them in their 20′ by 4′ garden bed – produced 805 lbs. of “amazing” tomatoes between July 12th and October 20th. As they don’t still have the full rich flavor they had in mid-summer, I quit counting with maybe another 20-30 lbs. still ripening on the vines. My wife protests that, saying that they’re still 10 times better than anyone can buy.
Be that as it may, having had to do without a decent tomato for many years, my standards for tomatoes are very high. I don’t count or weigh anything I’m not willing to confess that I grew.
The full statistics on the 2007 tomato crop were:
1) From an eighty square foot raised bed (20′ x 4′)
2) 7 tomato plants
3) 805 lbs. of tomatoes harvested
4) An average of 115 lbs. of tomatoes per plant
5) The total number of tomatoes; 1,386, or 198 per plant
6) The average weight per tomato; 9.3 ounces
7) The largest tomatoes: Several at 2.25 lbs each
While I may be a world-class braggart, the point I want to make is that anyone can do it. If tomatoes don’t do well in your particular climate, vegetables that do well in your climate will do immensely better with the kind of gardening practices you’re starting to read about.
Thanks for making an organic garden in your home.
Lee O’Hara
www.organichomegardener.com
Organic Gardening Made Easy
The Organic Tomato
Now available on DVD
Check out the trailers at http:www/organichomegardener.com
Thanks,
Kathy Smith, Director
