Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["Liz" <liz@allslash.org>]

There are two sites (and perhaps more that I haven't come across yet) which
are trying to count the number of new gardens being planted, and encouraging
people to share stories and pictures of their gardens. One is on the social
networking site Ning, called One Million Gardens, at
http://onemilliongardens.ning.com/. It's growing slowly--when I joined
yesterday, I was the 262nd member, and I see that it has 273 members now.
One very nice feature of this site is the number of YouTube and other videos
with demonstrations and instructions on how to do gardening-related
things--build a compost pile, build an herb spiral, many others.

The other site is run by the people at Gardener's Supply, who have always
encouraged and sponsored community and individual gardens. It's called Grow
What you Eat, and when I joined it there were already 14,000-plus members.
It's at
http://www.gardeners.com/on/demandware.store/Sites-Gardeners-Site/default/Service-GrowWhatYouEat.
This is a commercial site, so of course they're trying to sell things, but I
was glad to see them also trying to track the number of people growing their
own food.

There is also Eat the View, at http://www.eattheview.org/. I don't think 
they're trying to track the numbers of new gardeners, but they are working 
toward getting gardens planted anywhere there is unused suitable space. I 
noticed that Baltimore is allegedly going to plant a 2000 square foot garden 
at city hall.  Considering what happened when my daughter tried to have a 
garden in urban Baltimore, I suspect they're going to run into some problems 
they may not have anticipated, but I'm glad they're doing it anyway.

Liz
http://life-as-a-spectator-sport.com