The Dow Dominion

Today's article in my frugal food-growing guide will be short and sweet.  However, it is one of the most crucial parts of the guide: Saving money on seeds, tools and soil. Most of the big box stores sell seeds and tools for a ridiculous mark-up.  I've seen seeds sell for $1.50 per packet at places like Lowes, and their tool selection ranges from $20 to $100+ for a single tool.  And forget about plant starts... every year, they reduce the amount of plants you get in a pack and charge a little more than they did the previous year.  Not a great way to save money on growing food. You should know that you have cheaper options, though.  Much cheaper options.

  Will Choline make you smarter?  Here are the key points you should know.   Choline supplementation may improve declining cognitive abilities of individuals with Alzheimer's disease and similar cerebral health issues. The only well-designed human study on choline in healthy individuals thus far shows a small benefit for increasing attention span in middle-aged women, using doses of up to 500 mg of supplemental choline per day. Most studies investigating choline supplementation for cognitive performance enhancement in healthy individuals are plagued by bad experiment design, too few subjects, or both.  Further research is needed. Aim for the adequate daily intake of 550 mg for men, 425 mg for women.  For reference, a normal-sized chicken egg contains about 140 mg of choline.  ADDENDUM 04/15/2015: Although I still recommend obtaining the adequate daily intake of choline for possibly improved cognitive function, I DO NOT recommend obtaining choline from eggs.  There is mountin

Welcome to the next installment of my frugal food-growing guide .  If you are following this series, hopefully by now you have started collecting food scraps, leaves and other organic material for your very own compost pile.  You can read more about that in Part I of my guide . Today, I want to write about some particular aspects of planning out your frugal vegetable garden before actually delving into the creation of it.  Planning for this kind of project is absolutely necessary, since each plan will be unique and different based on several different factors.  Some of them include your location, the amount of space available to work with, time of the year, you (or your family's) particular tastes in vegetables, space-to-production ratios and various other things.  This article will focus mainly on planning which vegetables and fruits you decide to grow in your garden. First, let's start on the assumption that you found a suitable space for your future garden.  This means y