Help Support our mission today!
Help Support our mission today!
Our mission is one of advocacy. Advocacy for the big impact of personal green space. We seek to educate on the intentional care of our environment anywhere and everywhere in the world. From growing food to cultivating personal or shared spaces our mission is to make it accessible.
Our values focus on the physical, mental and social benefits of soil regeneration, intentional spaces and healthy living.
Join Us in our mission. My Garden Almanac is our first book to help us fund our advocacy. Whether you are planting a container, supporting the diversity of nature in your backyard or feeding your family, our ambition is to support you. My Garden Almanac is designed to enable you to test, tinker and track the information you feel to be necessary to improve and refine your garden ecosystem.
Please contact us if you cannot find an answer to your question.
We were founded because far too often the perfect becomes the enemy of the good. We want people to get their hands dirty. We want people to connect, explore and cultivate the nature world right outside their door. Cultivation is our intentions within nature's boundaries. If we are going to change our world, it doesn't matter if it is a 10 square centimeters or a 10 acres, cultivating a garden space will make a difference.
Our philosophy is that any cultivated space is beneficial. Nature exists at its best when balance is pursued. The greater the balance, the more refined the ecosystem, the greater the benefit to the most beneficiaries. If all else fails, we believe in the simple pursuit of creating topsoil appropriate to the space we are creating. Topsoil is the foundation of our earthly ecosystem.
We also believe in the many benefits interacting with nature brings to individuals. Getting our hands dirty and watching our ecosystem grow and evolve improves our health. The sights, the smells, the bugs, the birds - all extensions of the simple appropriate pursuit of creating topsoil - are good for our health.
My Garden Almanac is designed to give you primers for keeping track of your garden data. The best way to use this resource is to begin tracking and filing the data based on the system provided in the book. In the beginning, just record data that seems important. When starting a cultivation project most of the effort is finding out how nature behaves in our backyard. We are seeking to learn about our environment so that we can cultivate the best ecosystem for our specific space.
Once you have gathered the data, then seek to qualify the data you have recorded - look up references, ask neighbors, ask professionals in your area, and then refine what you wrote. Over time you will begin to see patterns in the data and those patterns will help you find your path forward in your garden cultivation. Remember our job when cultivating is finding our intentions in partnership with nature. The more we force our intentions the more work, the more risk and often the more failure.
First, we should establish that top soil means a lot of different things when it comes to garden cultivation. In the simplest definition, top soil is an assessment on the organic matter found in our garden space. For some, desert topsoil can be as a small 0.3% organic matter, where was in a rain forest, it might be 14% or higher. For those cultivating food crops it generally is around 3-6%, though the right amount is really what is the appropriate amount based on the needs of the specific space. Nature, as a system, doesn't exist in absolutes, it exists and thrives in what is appropriate for the ecosystem being assessed.
The creation of top soil benefits everything it touches and once created we have a foundation from which to create the experience we seek. While the broadest foundation is generally provided by richer top soil, however, this isn't the same for every place. Top soil in a rainforest will arguably be richer than top soil in the desert because of the percentage of organic matter, but the key for assessing the top soil in our backyard is the diversity of life in that space. All top soil, even with the tiniest percentage of organic matter, will hold more water and thus more things will grow. The more that grows in a space in turn supports more that will grow in that space. More plant diversity leads to more wildlife diversity, the more diversity the more of everything that might benefit.
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