Gardening in 3-D: Growing Vertical Greens

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Relaxing in the shade of a leafy home garden.
Relaxing in the shade of a leafy home garden.
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Vine spinach, gourds, hyacinth beans, and rice beans climbing a large trellis.
Vine spinach, gourds, hyacinth beans, and rice beans climbing a large trellis.
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This innovative guide shows how familiar garden plants such as sweet potato, okra, beans peas and pumpkins can be grown to provide both nourishing leaves and other calorie- and protein-rich foods.
This innovative guide shows how familiar garden plants such as sweet potato, okra, beans peas and pumpkins can be grown to provide both nourishing leaves and other calorie- and protein-rich foods.

With more nutrients per calorie and square foot of growing space than any other food, leaf crops can be an invaluable addition to every yard or garden. As hardy as they are versatile, these beautiful, tasty vegetables range from the familiar to the exotic. Some part of this largely untapped food resource can thrive in almost any situation. Eat Your Greens by David Kennedy (New Society Publishers, 2014), provides complete instructions for incorporating these nutritional powerhouses into any kitchen garden.

You can purchase this book from the MOTHER EARTH NEWS store:Eat Your Greens: The Surprising Power of Home Grown Leaf Crops

Light Energy

A constantly replenished wave of light leaves the surface of the sun, races across 93,000,000 miles of swirling space in less than nine minutes and lands on the tender green surface of a living plant. A few trillionths of a second later, the chlorophyll in the leaf has used that photon bit of energy to combine carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen from earth’s abundant air and water into sugar, the sweet fuel of life. From this simple sugar are formed complex sugars, starches, and fibers. Plants store the energy from the sunshine in their stems, roots, and fruits. Gardeners and farmers try to manage this biological solar energy collection operation in ways that benefit them. Simply climbing a hill gave me a useful perspective on this important undertaking.

From a hillside overlooking forests and corn fields in late spring, the forest appeared as a plush unbroken carpet of 50 shades of green, while the young corn looked like green lines marked across a sheet of brown paper. Clearly, the forest had more leaves basking in the sunshine than the corn. By late August, the verdant forest was looking down on a cornfield that had already produced all the corn it could and now held lifeless amber waves of grain drying in prime farmland. Yet this cornfield was the culmination of modern agricultural science — dependent on tractors, genetically modified seeds, herbicides, insecticides, and synthetic fertilizers — while the green forest was simply neglected and ignored.

  • Published on Jun 29, 2015
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