Don Rosenberg Organic Gardening Interview
Continued

This is part two of LTK Organic's Organic Gardening Made Easy interview.

Every family's garden is different. A family of four may need only a trellis bed and a raised bed, while another might need only a single bed. You should think through what your family likes to eat and figure out how much space you will need per crop. I use the "Goldilocks Rule" - "not too much and not too little." You don't want so many tomatoes or squash you scare your neighbors, but you don't want so few peas that when dinner time comes around, you have only seven to share!

Start small. Locate a spot in your yard that gets six or more hours of direct sun per day. Grow a few simple vegetables your family will like and add more beds as you get a sense of how it works for you. Get the whole family involved in selecting the different crops and varieties and the kids will love planting the seeds, watering and harvesting.

Think of your garden as an "American Idol" for veggies. Try different "contestants" and if one of them doesn’t "perform" well, vote it off the show and try a new one next season. Keep your best varieties and keep trying to knock them off with new ones. That way your garden will constantly improve each year and you'll always be trying something new.

There's a lot of interest in local, organic farms as the way to solve our food problems, but the reality is that land is expensive and demand is great for the limited local produce we can grow. Organic farming is very labor intensive and therefore the produce is more expensive than what is grown on giant farms. Back yard gardeners have the space they need, can grow exactly what they want, and have the time needed to manage their crops carefully. It's easy to prune and tie up three or four tomato plants, but almost impossible to manage three or four hundred!

The current image of gardening is that it's something that takes a lot of work, and it's usually true. My approach is much easier and means that thousands of families can enjoy gardening in their back yards and involve their children in the process. When kids learn about nature and healthy eating, it stays with them all their lives. And nothing tastes better than fresh, home-grown vegetables, so they're more likely to eat them and enjoy them.

I hope to expand my approach all over the country and have Instant Organic Gardeners in lots of cities, spreading the word.

Our future is our children. They are often overweight because their diets consist of white foods – white milk, white sugar and white flour. They don't eat vegetables because the taste is lacking, and vegetables picked 7 to 14 days ago lose much of their nutritional value – and flavor. They spend their time in air-conditioned spaces and they walk on carpet, asphalt or concrete. They don't walk in the grass, dig in the dirt or play in the woods. They have never held a seed, much less planted one. They have never seen a plant grow from seed, watered it, and harvested the result.

A back yard garden gives our children a sense of knowledge and power. Now they know important things like "how does a plant grow?" or "where does our food come from?"

But unless gardening can be made easy enough for everyone to do it, no one will try. And that's why my approach makes sense.

LoveToKnow would like to thank Don Rosenberg for taking the time to explain how organic gardening, made easy, is right for everyone. For more information, check out his book, No Green Thumb Required and visit his website, InstantOrganicGarden to learn how to have a productive, simple organic garden of your own.

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