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Potatoes

By Jane Lamb Say what they will about the “two Maines,” there are really three, as a drive north on Interstate 95 clearly illustrates. Notwithstanding arguable differences between settled coast and rural upland, the definable southern third of the state ends a few miles north of Bangor, when it gives way suddenly to endless forest

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Hemp

Hemp Resources: Magazine and Web Site Wendy Kochenthal’s hemp vests, belts, bags and leashes were displayed at the Common Ground Country Fair. English photo. By Jean English Last winter, Wendy Kochenthal of Jackson, Maine, took a two-month trip to the West Coast, traveling from Seattle to Baja and back again. Along the way she found

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Cover Crops

By Lee Stivers, Frances Tucker and Claudia Olivier Integrating cover crops into vegetable production systems is a good idea. Cover crops add organic matter to our often carbon-starved vegetable soils, improve tilth in soils damaged by frequent tillage or heavy machinery; recycle plant nutrients; and in some cases suppress weeds and other pests. Vegetable growers

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Herbs

Set a narrow tray in the bottom of a basket, set four pots of herbs of different textures and/or colors on the tray, and you’ve got a great gift for the holidays. To make such a gift now, you’ll have to buy the herb plants or propagate them from some you’ve been growing indoors. If

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Breadseed Poppy

Quite a few years ago, a Slovakian friend served me a dish of little soft pieces of bread sticks, coated with a sauce of ground breadseed poppy, some honey, and probably a few other ingredients. I never had anything like it. It was unforgettably delicious. While we ate, he explained that Slovaks used poppyseeds as

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Gifts

By Roberta Bailey Winter is upon us again.The days are short and the nights, long. Time to catch up on reading, knitting, sitting by the fire and reflecting. A time to rest, to peruse the seed catalogs, and dream about what we will do next year. But the seeds are dormant in their hulls, silent

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Nitrogen Fertilizer

By Eric Sideman, PH.D. Ever since humans began to cultivate food, nitrogen has been the most common limit to crop yields. Modern agriculture has answered this limit with synthetic production of nitrogen fertilizers, which has greatly increased global food production and has supported an astonishing growth in the world’s population. However, the environmental problems are

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Grow Your Own: Mesclun

By Roberta Bailey The National Gardening Bureau deemed 1997 the “Year of the Mesclun” and from my vantage point in Palermo, they called it right. The cool spring and well-timed rains of summer created ideal conditions for growing salad greens. The year is not over yet: A bed of mesclun seeded in September could feed

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Chamomile

Toki Oshima drawing. A Comforting and Healing Herb – and a Soothing Back-to-School Remedy By Deb Soule The chamomile most commonly used by herbalists is the annual variety often referred to as German chamomile. Its Latin name, previously Matricaria chamomilla, is now Matricaria recutita. Chamomile belongs to the Compositae (Daisy) family. This particular species grows

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Oilseed Pumpkins

‘Gleisdorfer’, one of the oilseed pumpkins Bonsall trialed last summer. Photo by Will Bonsall. By Will Bonsall We usually class pumpkins along with other succulent vegetables; however a particular type of pumpkin is much more nutrient-dense, in that it is an oilseed, like sunflowers, sesame and peanuts. For centuries, Eastern European farmers have raise pumpkins

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