I have been researching how to build a biodome so we can have a source of fresh organic vegetables and fruits year-round in New England. I came across this video that I want to share here. It shows how amazing a structure a properly built biodome is, and what you can grow in it, year -round, regardless of the weather and temperature outside!

We were considering aquaponics but for us, our old Victorian is just too cold in the winter to sustain delicate plant life without using lots of electricity or oil to keep it warm enough – effectively defeating the purpose of saving money and more well-being all ’round.

Please share your thoughts in the comments. I know I personally couldn’t build this, but luckily for us, my husband has the tools and the knowledge to do so. I am so excited and am hoping we can get one built in the spring of 2012.

When you care about health and the environment, it’s only natural that you’d want to grow your own organic vegetables in your backyard. Alas, many people simply do not have the time or the knowledge to nurture a garden of their own. City-dwellers lack the land even if they do have the time and desire. Fortunately, there are other options that will save you from spending all of your precious free time studying, digging and weeding.

Outsource to Professional Organic Gardeners

The first option is outsourcing the whole project. That’s just a fancy way of saying get someone or a company that knows what they’re doing to do the work of planning, planting and cultivating, for you.

Gardeners for hire can be found in most areas. These days you will usually be able to hire a company or small business rather than a single person, but this has its advantages in terms of reliability. It may be more difficult to find someone who is a specialist in organic gardening, and specifically in growing vegetables without the use of artificial chemicals.

The cost may seem steep but consider what you are getting. Not only will you have your own home-grown vegetables with zero effort on your part, but also a well maintained garden that will be the envy of your neighbors and friends. Plus the company will usually use their own tools and supplies, so you will not have to invest in equipment.

Share Cropping and Your Organic Garden

Another option that can be found in a growing number of cities in the USA is a form of that old fashioned way of farming known as share cropping. Traditionally, a landowner would allow tenants or share croppers to grow produce on his land, taking a share of the crop instead of charging rent in dollars.

In its modern form this can work in a number of ways. The simplest is that a small business will work the garden land of many householders in an area. The resulting organic fruit and vegetables are shared between the owners of the gardens and the gardening company. The company will usually sell their share to local health food stores or through an organic food delivery plan.

The advantage of this over hiring a gardener is that there will probably be no cost. One possible disadvantage is that the company will want to grow certain things that they know they can sell, which may not be what you would most like to have in your garden. However, you should be able to negotiate on this and create an agreement.

In some cases, such as the MyFarm service in San Francisco, the company may charge a fee to work as your gardener but offer the option of a much lower fee if you allow them to take a share of the crop.

Either way this kind of cooperative system can be a great service for anybody who does not want to pay per hour to have their garden cultivated. At this time it is limited to a few cities, mostly in California or the north western states, but you may be able to persuade a local organic farmer or gardener to take on the land in your garden on a share cropping basis. Or, if you’re already an accomplished organic gardener, consider starting this service in your area.

Try asking local health food stores and delivery companies for details of their organic fruit and vegetable suppliers. These people are often working small areas of rented land and may be delighted to share crop your garden so that you can grow organic vegetables without having to do any gardening yourself.

This is  the first in a series of posts I’ll be doing on organic gardening.

The Many Benefits of Organic Gardening

Large numbers of people have been seeing the benefits of organic gardening in their lives over the last few decades. It is a way of cultivating plants that does not use artificial chemicals that may damage the planet, kill wildlife and possible injure the health of people who eat the produce that is grown with the aid of these pesticides and weed killers.

It’s too early to tell what the effects of mass chemically treated agriculture and genetically modified crops will be, either on consumers or on the earth. They simply have not been around long enough for anybody to be sure. In the face of this uncertainty, more and more people are turning to organically grown fruit and vegetables and meat sources that have been grown on organic land.

Organic gardening and agriculture is not new. In fact, if you go back beyond the last 60 years or so, everything was grown organically because laboratory-produced pesticides and fertilizers simply did not exist.

We tend to think of organic food as a modern trend, but it is not at all. The word is new because there was no need for it before, that’s all. The organic way of growing things was practiced throughout history from the time that people first learnt to plant seeds until very recent times. It is the chemicals that are the modern fad.

It was the introduction of the pesticide DDT in farming in the 1950s that led to a turn in public opinion. Books like ‘Silent Spring’ by the well known natural historian Rachel Carson, published in 1962, started an environmental movement that has grown steadily in the decades since. The book’s title came from the discovery that DDT was damaging the egg shells of birds, preventing them from reproducing. At the same time, it killed many of the insects that were their food. Carson envisaged a world where there would be no more bird song.

Largely as a result of this movement, DDT is now illegal in almost all countries. However, many other pesticides are available both to farmers and to us as gardeners, and we cannot know what the long term effects of using them will be.

Most gardeners have a fairly small area of land to nurture, and there is no need to use chemical sprays on our home grown flowers and vegetables. If our tomato crop fails one year, we will not starve. If our honeysuckle becomes diseased, perhaps it is time to replace it with another climbing plant.  If our roses are home to more insects than we would like, we can wash them off or encourage their natural predators to inhabit our garden too.

There may be more benefits of organic gardening than we currently know. Isn’t it better not to take a chance with our land, our lives and our children’s health?

Click here to learn about The World’s Best Compost so you can feed your garden plants as nature intended.