Agriculture

Growing vegetables

We've now moved into a new flat in São Lourenço (Curitiba, Brazil), and have a small place to ourselves for a year which has some space for planting vegetables. The soil looks very bad as you can see from the first picture below, so the first step is to make it more fertile.

First session

We had to quickly pull some weeds out and clear some space for some of the potted veges we'd started growing in the pensão that were starting to die. Unfortunately the overgrown weeds had become a home for a big fat frog which had to relocate :-(

(He's been back to visit a few times now and even came into the house a couple of times and rolled beer bottles down the path at night! we've named him "Gordo")

May 2012

After about month our barren piece of ground is already looking a lot greener!

Spinach theft caught on video!

We had a great source of spinach on the path, until the landlord hired an old guy with a weed-eater to kill them all :-( but luckily Beth saw some small seeds from the plant had sprouted in the neighbours ground, so she quickly grabbed some of them while I captured the evidence on video!

Urban Growing

• PPatch Growing Communities
• Lettuce Link - information about sustainable urban community growing
• Urban Garden Share

Pests and diseases

• Tomato plant symptoms key

See also

• First flat in Brazil‎
• Building fertile soil
• HowToCompost.org
• 10 tips for making better compost
• 10 tips for companion planting for natural pest control and organic sustainability
• Companion planting, List of companion plants
• Beneficial weeds, List of beneficial weeds
• Beneficial insects
• Beacon Food Forest - Seattle Creating Massive Edible Forest Filled with Free Food
• Edible Forest Gardens
• Permaculture Now!