In my humble opinion, Organic Gardening magazine and Rodale are still the aboslute best sources for organic information and healthy living available. Rodale is the great-grandparents of it all (since 1931!) - organic gardening, healthy living (founder of Prevention magazine and many others), and continue to provide useful information and a wealth of resources. Their books are the best, and the magazines are worth the subscription. Check out their mags! (I've read all of them at one time or another, other than "Best Life." ) And they have literally hundreds of books to choose from. Enjoy! (Oh, and they are a Pennsylvania-based company too).
3 comments:
I've never seen the Organic Gardening site before, thanks for passing it on. You are always such a good resource, both your own thoughts and linking to things that are useful and put out by others. I'm bad at actually referencing mags or other things in print, but I'll bookmark the website. I am just starting my veg gardening quest - do you find it is any harder/easier to take the organic vs. the conventional route?
I find organic MUCH easier. When I used chemicals (many, many, many years ago!), it got confusing...there's a chemical for every type of bug, type of plant, and form of disease out there -- so I had a shelf full of every imagineable chemical and spray. When I went organic, I simply planted as much as I could in the line of herbs/native plants/perenniels (to attract beneficial insects), and put compost on just about everything. As an organic gardnerer, I'm not a perfectionist -- I'm ok if a bug or two put a whole in a plant leaf, and I tend to let the gardens get a little grown up at times (its a GOOD thing!). The bottom line is, you have faith in nature and natural methods, not a chemical - and that's the important part!
That's sort of how I intuitively feel, that I am okay with a bug or two eating at a spinach leaf, etc though I'd prefer to keep them away as much as possible of course. And the good part I think about planting the kinds of things that keep off the bugs and kind of "protect" each other is that the gardener gets even more goodies to enjoy and eat!
Last summer I was looking at the chemical pest control and had my head spinning out of confusion - so many different sprays for different things, plus the labels say not to eat the fruit X days after spraying, etc. I ended up muddling through without any control, either chemical or organic methods. While it was ok for the most part, I do want to try the organic route this year and see what I can learn
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