Posted by Author Annie Spiegelman (www.dirtdiva.com)
1. Find an area of your yard that gets 6 to 8 hours of sun a day. If this is a new plot of soil that has never been amended, you might want to do a soil test first. This will tell you the pH of your soil. Most vegetables grow best in a pH of 6 to 7, which is a bit on the acidic side. You can find a simple soil test kit at your local plant nursery. If your soil test shows a very low pH (acidic) you can amend it with limestone. If your soil test shows a very high pH (alkaline) you can amend it by adding sulfur. Both of these amendments are available at your local nursery.
2. Before you add any amendment, weed the area by hand. There are many new weeding tools on the market that are shaped like a claw and can make weeding fun! (Sort of.) After it’s weeded, loosen the soil a bit if it’s compacted. Then rake in any pH amendments and add a 2 to 3 inches of compost to the top. If your soil has been neglected for years, you can also rake in an organic fertilizer at this time. E.B. Stone’s ‘Sure-Start’ is one that I like. It’s effective and is pet & kid-friendly.
3. Now you’re ready to plant. For some helpful planting designs visit my favorite local place to buy seeds, www.reneesgarden.com. She has some vegetable plot spacing information on the website as well that’s useful and clear. You can also plant some herbs and flowers like nasturtium, Shasta daisy and yarrow, nearby your food. This will help to invite beneficial bugs to eat up any pests that come to visit your vegetables.
4. If planting from seed, straight into the ground, make sure to lightly mist your seeds every day till they come up as seedlings. You’ll want to do some thinning once the seedlings are a few inches tall. See directions on the seed package. If you’re planting a 6-pack of vegetables (seedlings), watering with a drip system or a soaker hose is ideal. This way you’re not getting the leaves wet and spreading fungal spores to your plants.
5. If your crop develops a pest or disease problem, find some garden geeks at your local Master Gardener office. (Look up local offices nationally at the American Horticultural Society’s website, www.ahs.org) Take a specimen in to be diagnosed. They’ll recommend the most environmentally sound way to approach it. Safer, cleaner gardening product recommendations can also be found at www.ourwaterourworld.com)
Today marks the on-sale date of Talking Dirt: The Dirt Diva’s Down-to-Earth Guide to Organic Gardening. The timing couldn’t be better, given that most of us gardeners are just about sick of the winter doldrums and dying to get some dirt back under our fingernails.
As Annie’s editor, I had the privilege of using this book in manuscript form while starting my first garden. It was late May last year and I had just moved into my ground floor apartment, with its little patch of earth out the back door. I was bright-eyed and ready to grow my own food, by God, if it was the last thing I did. “What could go wrong?” I thought. So I went to the Home Depot, got two six-packs of tomato seedlings, a sixer of cucumber seedlings, and an assortment of other vegetables that I’d dreamed of growing by the bucketload. “I’ll have so many vegetables,” I thought, “I’ll start visiting friends with bowls of tomatoes, copious cucumbers, bags and bags of peppers, and they’ll all start to know me as the garden girl. The dream continued to build as I planted, watered, composted, and visited my little darlings in the backyard every day after work.
Fast forward two months. Poor Annie, hard at work on her manuscript, stumbled into the unsolicited job of becoming my garden mentor. Everything I needed to know was in the manuscript draft I already had, but still, I was a new mom (so to speak), scared for my poor cucumbers and tomatoes, all of which had developed a layer of mold on their leaves from the unseasonable rain. The horror! But Annie, kind, kind Master Gardener that she is, walked me through it. She reminded me of the advice I’d already read in the manuscript, held my hand (via email, from
I—and my garden—am in a much better place now, thanks entirely to Annie. It’s February, and while it’s too early to put shovel to ground here in
--Maria Gagliano
Posted by Author Annie Spiegelman
In February, here in
Home gardeners are more interested than ever in learning how to grow their own food in an economical, healthy and safe way. If you're going to grow food, be ready to be a doting parent because growing vegetables can be a bit challenging. Erratic weather and pests like to come around and try to make you a failure of a farmer. In late February and early March here in
In colder climates, you'll have to be patient and wait till the snow melts off of your herb garden. Enjoy your time indoors perusing garden catalogues and planning your spring garden. You can sow seeds indoors or in a greenhouse now to plant in the ground after the last frost. (To check frost dates in your area, go to www.farmersalmanac.com.)
Wherever you live, before planting vegetables or fruit, find an area that receives 6 to 8 hours of sun. (Leafy vegetables can be happy with less sunlight, 4 to 6 hours.) Then weed the area like mad! Next add a layer of compost. Stop purchasing chemical fertilizers. That's like feeding junk food to your plants. They'll grow unnaturally large but be depleted of true nutrients and be prone to a disease or a pest infestation. Then you'll want to go buy pesticides. We all need to get off that vicious “fertilizer-pesticide” cycle before we contaminate more land and water, and all end up in the wacky shack!
Your new mantra should be “compost, compost, compost.” Compost will slowly feed your plants and retain water as well. A thin layer of mulch (leaves, straw) on top of that will keep your crops warm in the early spring and cool in the summer.
Good luck, sweet kumquats.
Posted by author Teresa Rodriguez Williamson
If Mr. Jack Frost a.k.a. Old Man Winter is giving you the cold shoulder and you’re ready for a little warmth in your life, then here are five scrumptious vacation spots for you sun-loving larks.
Try:
Phone: 787-722-7000
http://www.marriott.com/hotels/travel/sjupr-san-juan-marriott-resort-and-stellaris-casino/
Try: Aqua Hotel
1530
Phone: 303-538-4361
www.aquamiami.com
Playa
Try: Quinto Sol Hotel Boutique
5ª avenida con Calle 28 Norte / 5th Avenue
Playa del Carmen,
Quintana Roo, 77710, Mexico
Phone: +52 (984) 8 73 32 92
www.hotelquintosol.com
San Diego, California: For those who want an active vacation, then San Diego is your city. With miles and miles of beaches and trails,
Try: Catamaran Hotel
3999 Mission Boulevard, San Diego CA 92109
Pahone: 800.422.8386
www.catamaranresort.com
San Ignacio, Belize: When you had enough of rush-hour traffic, deadlines, and caffeine blues, then take a deep breath and head to Belize. Items on your to-do list should include: : 1. Chill with the locals 2. Sleep under the stars 3. Swim in the
Try: Ka'ana Boutique Resort
Mile 69 1/4,
Phone: 501 824 3350 or 1 877 KAANA21
www.kaanabelize.com Want more destinations? Check out Fly Solo: The 50 Best Places on Earth For a Girl to Travel Alone.
Posted by Authors Leslie Sokol, Ph.D. and Marci G. Fox, Ph.D.
Editor's Note:
Once the hustle and bustle of the New Year dies down, many of my eager, good-intentioned resolutions tend to disappear as well. Attending kickboxing three times a week? How about once a month. Packing my lunch? Hello, Chipotle! Making more time to read? Um, is that a new Real Housewives marathon? So this February, I’m taking another look at my resolutions. Instead of writing them off as failures, I’m going to focus on making at least one or two a success. It’s the “New New Year’s Eve.”
Drs. Leslie Sokol and Marci Fox, authors of Think Confident, Be Confident, provide some good advice to get started. It’s never too late to make a confident resolution—even if it is February.
--Meg Leder
Being confident is a choice. You can actively choose to be confident by taking control of how you think, and winter is an ideal time to take stock of you. Consider taking this time to realistically examine your past year, distant past, and potential future in order to work on developing a new more confident you.
The first step is to reflect on your past year. This is essential to believing you are capable because most of us fail to recognize and record in our self-view all of our accomplishments and goals achieved. To combat that, here are specific thinking “no-no’s” so you don’t stay stuck in the needless cycle of self-criticism and second-guessing:
Free from bias, now it’s time to turn your attention to the past year and write down all the things you have accomplished. Record everything, from the smallest most mundane task to the biggest boldest success. Now reflect on your larger history and do the same.
With a clear and fact-based view, take the second step of reflecting on your interpersonal life. Think back to every compliment, nice comment, thank you, piece of positive feedback, and affection you received and make note. Recognize all the data that supports you are a desirable, likeable, decent person and know no one and nothing can discount that.
The third step is to apply this positive, accurate, realistic thinking to your future since it has yet to be written. Armed with the positive perspective you have just created you are better equipped to write your future. Remember the facts remind you of your competence and your desirability. Just like you can look at your past focusing on what you have obtained rather than what you have not, you can look towards your future focusing on what you can achieve rather than what you cannot. It is time to set new goals and know as you reach for them you have what it takes to achieve them.
The key to confidence is to believe in you! Take this time to dust yourself off by cleaning out the old cobwebs of information and images that don’t apply to you so you can see yourself brightly and realistically as the capable, desirable person you are.
Posted by Marian Lizzi
It’s not every day that I get a call from
Under the best of circumstances, sending an advance manuscript or galley out for blurbs is nerve-wracking. Will the recipients – each one an expert, author, and or otherwise notable quotable – like the book? Will they rave about it, or rage against it? Will they dismiss it out of hand? Or let it languish in a snowdrift of mail (electronic or otherwise), never to be opened? Am I pissing off the very person I’m asking a favor of?
In this case, the book in question is a memoir called Atypical, written by Jesse Saperstein, an immensely talented man in his twenties who has been diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome, a mild form of autism. The book is a guided tour through his struggles, pleasures, insights, coping mechanisms, and flights of fancy. It’s filled with humor, honesty, and a generous spirit that struck me from the first page. Jesse Saperstein does not hold back.
That includes sharing his quirks, compulsions, and peccadilloes – everything from his abiding love of sending lengthy handwritten notes (I’ve received quite a few of them myself) to his short-lived hobby of hoarding droppings from the family cat (Jesse’s good-natured father made him walk that particular garbage bag to the curb straight away).
An atypical memoir indeed.
So when the phone rang and a dignified voice said, “This is
Happily, Dr. Grandin proceeded to tell me that Jesse’s writing is brilliant. I scribbled down her words and tried to keep my sigh of relief inaudible. She went on to tell me that she gets so many galleys for books about autism that she just throws most of them in the trash. (Note to self: Your worst fears are not without merit.) We got a wonderful quote from a beloved, bestselling author.
Atypical goes on sale April 6.
Posted by Marian Lizzi
As I open a fresh Word document to start writing this post, there’s an eerie hush throughout the Penguin offices. Steve Jobs is unveiling the new iPad, and those of us who don’t happen to have a lunch date today have been glued to live-blog updates, Twitter feeds, and Facebook absorbing the news, trying to catch a glimpse of what this new device will mean for our business, our books, and the weight of our backpacks.
In a strange way, the silence feels intimate. Though no one’s talking, we’re nonetheless communing – not in physical space but out in the ether. In a sense, we’re all in the moment together.
Meanwhile, back in physical space, I’ve got an empty Jiffy-envelope box outside my office, collecting spare change for earthquake victims in
Conversely, the brand-new assistant who sits five feet from my door (but who works for another department) doesn’t know my name, and I don’t know hers. I’ve been meaning to introduce myself, but the time just never seems right.
Which brings me to Peter Lovenheim’s forthcoming book, In the Neighborhood.
The book, which comes out in April, recounts the author’s quest to meet his neighbors. Sparked by a shocking murder-suicide just a few doors down, Peter realized that he and his neighbors were strangers to each other – random, unnamed people who just happened to live on the same street. How did this happen, and how could one person begin to restore the vital bonds of community that had somehow fallen away?
Peter’s quest brought him into the homes and lives of about a dozen neighbors – busy young families, elderly widowers, and everything in between. He met a brave woman battling cancer, and another grappling with the breakup of her marriage – much as Peter was grappling with a breakup of his own.
The result is a moving, honest, funny account of life on a suburban street. It’s also a reminder of what it means to be a neighbor, and how much connecting with the people around us matters.
When movie rights for In the Neighborhood were sold to Julia Roberts’s production company, I tweeted about it. When the book was selected for the Barnes & Noble Discover program – a first for Perigee – I gleefully updated my Facebook status.
But right now I’m going to wrap up this post and go introduce myself to that new assistant sitting outside my office, and offer to show her around the fourth floor.
In the Neighborhood goes on sale April 6.
Posted by author Christina Pirello
Every year it’s the same old thing. This is the year you will: lose weight, get fit, stop smoking, take care of your health, live greener, drink less (or more), be a nicer person. And every year, January comes and goes…and with it goes your resolve.
As a teacher of natural, whole foods cooking, I am faced with people with various degrees of commitment to wellness. From “I just want to get dinner on the table in 20 minutes” to “How do I prevent my husband from getting a second heart attack?” the plea is the same: people want to feel better, get fitter, reduce their risk of disease and increase their vitality and well-being. But it seems with all the information coming at us from television news reports, published studies, magazine stories, and books, most people seem not to know what to do.
I adopted a vegan lifestyle about 25 years ago so that I could live more healthfully and compassionately. To this day, my daily goal is no more complicated than to be able to collapse into bed at the end of a long day knowing that I have done no harm—to myself or others.
What does it mean to be a healthy human? I think we have lost sight of the answer. With so many things out of balance in the modern world, it amazes me that anyone can actually live with robust health, which is our birthright.
As humans, we have taken ourselves so far from what is natural that we don’t know what natural is anymore. We think it’s normal to feel tired, lethargic, to have aches, pains, bumps, lumps, bulges, dots, spots, and hair in places we didn’t think possible—and no hair where we want it! We think it’s normal to walk with hunched shoulders, head low, guts hanging over our pants, “muffin tops” spilling over our jeans, and our hair as lifeless as our skin. When we look around, the majority of people we see look like this, too, so it must be normal, right? You couldn’t be more wrong.
We eat completely inappropriate food for humans and lead lives that are about as far from what Mother Nature intended as can be, and we are paying a price for it, with tired, achy, overweight, sick, weak bodies and foggy minds. This sad state of affairs has made me passionate about my work in this life: helping people develop a healthy relationship with food so that they can make healthier choices and live vitally.
Nothing short of a total re-thinking of what you think you know will change your current habits and your current state of health. That doesn’t sound simple—and it isn’t given all the forces working against us. Whether it’s high-powered marketing from the pharmaceutical and food industries or just plain ignorance of the facts, we have an incredible uphill battle.
Not an evening goes by that I am not ranting at the television screen, fuming over some pharmaceutical ad promising us a new life, while the breathy voice reading the disclaimer tells us the possible (and endless) side effects that sound a lot worse to me than the symptoms of the ailment. Why is no one asking these pharmaceutical companies to make safer drugs for us? Why are we willing to accept drugs with side effects that will make us sicker, but in a different way? Because we can just take another drug, that’s why! It’s all about the easy way out. Thinking that there’s a magic bullet cure for all our ills has to change for us to be a healthy nation, because the way we live now is a recipe for a national disaster much worse than anything global warming or terrorists can throw our way. We need change…now!
And don’t even get me started on the relentless advertising from the fast good giants. Night after night, Papa John, Wendy’s, T.G.I. Friday’s, the Colonel, Arby’s, Quizno’s, and a host of other villains parade across our television screens seducing us with fat, sugar, and salt.
Hell, McDonald’s now has a whole campaign around “Mommyisms” talking about quality time with our kids, healthy living, and, of course, eating McDonald’s. When are we going see through the veil of lies and recognize that they have no interest in our health or the health of our families—just their wallets? When are we going to say “Enough!”?
I have just started working on a new book in which I take on all these issues—and tell your stories. Through the eyes of people in the day-to-day struggle to be well and get fit, I’ll share all the reasons we have lost our way and talk not only about the boogeymen who’ve manipulated us for their own gain, but also about our personal responsibility in this mess. But since books take a long to get written and published, this New Year’s message is just a preview of what you can expect from me in the future. Now is the time to join me in taking that first critical step toward change.
I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to eat it anymore—and neither should you!
Christina Pirello teaches whole foods cooking classes, conducts lifestyle seminars, and lectures around the world. She is the Emmy Award-winning host of the television series Christina Cooks! on Discovery Health, and author of Cook Your Way to the Life You Want and:
Check out Christina Pirello at www.christinacooks.com and her Health Education Initiative at www.christinapirello.org.
Posted by John Duff
A few weeks ago I saw the new production of Dreamgirls at the Apollo Theater featuring the very talented Moya Angela in the role of Effie White, the girl who “don’t do oohs and ahhs” behind anybody – and who seemed hell bent on destroying her own career even before it got started. By the end of Act I, she gets the boot from the group and disappears for several years, all but giving up singing. Her first big number in Act II (a fitting metaphor for her life) is “I Am Changing,” a soulful declaration of her intention to get things together and make up for lost time and opportunities.
Sitting in that audience with my publisher’s hat in my lap (I didn’t want to block anyone’s view of the stage), I was thinking, Effie, do I have a few books for you to read!
Publishers, especially ones like Perigee, love the New Year because everyone’s thinking about change: New Year’s resolutions abound – going on a diet, getting organized, starting a new relationship (or dumping some good-for-nothing once and for all). And come January publishers are lined up with a pile of new offerings to help everyone transform their lives.
The truth is that no book can really change your life. In the end, everyone does that for themselves. What a good self-improvement book can do is give you the tools to make the changes to which you’ve already committed in your heart. A book is often the response to the plaintive declaration: I want to change, I just don’t know how.
During one of our recent editorial meetings, one astute editor commented that a book she wanted us to take on was essentially a “songbook for the choir.” It wasn’t going to convince anyone to change their evil ways. (I don’t recall if it was a diet book or some other self-help tract; it doesn’t really matter.) But this book, like so many we publish, would give readers an understanding of their problems and show them ways to make the changes. The choice is ultimately up to the reader.
So, Effie, just for you, my top 10 picks for your New Year:
The Triangle of Truth by Lisa McLeod
Get Out of Your Own Way by Mark Goulston, MD
Think Confident, Be Confident by Leslie Sokol, PhD, and Marci G. Fox, PhD
Lessons from the Fat-O-Sphere by Kate Harding and Marianne Kirby
Who Are You? What Do You Want? by Mick Ukleja, PhD, and
How We Choose to Be Happy by Rick Foster and
8 Minute Meditation by Victor Davich
Fearless Living by Rhonda Britten
The Girlfriends' Guide to Getting Your Groove Back by Vicki Iovine
The Survivor Personality by Al Siebert, PhD
