Learn to grow your own food from 38 experts

Mark your calendars for March 7 to 13 for the Home Grown Food Summit. It is an online gathering of 38 experts in backyard food production, homesteading, and off-grid living. Presented by researchers, organizations, and best-selling authors to help you become more self-reliant. Not only is it entirely online, so that you don't have to travel anywhere, but it is also free!

I'll be presenting a talk on the basics of raising goats, and here are some of the other topics that will be covered:

• How organic gardeners produce 2X to 10X greater yields
• How to spend $0 feeding your chickens
• Guide to making $80 worth of compost per week
• Legally keeping chickens and goats in the city
• Natural beekeeping... how to do it WITHOUT chemicals! 
• Raising your own superior eggs, milk, and meat... in your backyard
• How to get FREE access to local seed varieties
• The BEST species of worms for backyard composting 
• Instant solutions for growing food -- without land
• 24 herbals you can use to treat colds, flus, allergies, infections, and more
• Protect yourself as a small-scale farmer from the 5 most common lawsuits
• Understand the Cottage Food Laws (CFLs) that regulate food production on your property 
• Our role in breaking the monopoly of big chemical and seed companies
• Lessons we can learn from World War I & II trends in food production
• How science supports backyard gardening as a cure for most major diseases
• Creating a garden biosphere
• Addressing wildlife and insect issues to rebalance your garden
• Recipes for herbal drinks you can make every day for better health
• Learn easy, brilliant, FREE secrets for composting in place
• Save $100s making your own fish emulsion fertilizer

And did I mention that it's free?! PLUS, you'll get 2 bonus e-books, just for signing up: "How To Make a Simple and Effective Watering System For Small Livestock" and "Top 10 Survival Plants: How To Grow Them and Collect Their Seeds." Click HERE to sign up!

Beans: the perfect intro to seed saving

Did you know that pinto beans, kidney beans, black-eyed peas, and other dried beans are simply seeds? If you grew beans last year and dried some for eating through the winter, you can use those very same beans to plant in the spring. Although saving seeds from some vegetables can be complicated because of cross-pollination issues, this isn't normally a problem with beans, which makes them a perfect introduction to the world of seed saving.

When we grow beans, we only pick the smallest and most tender beans to eat as green beans. Once we can see the seeds bulging in the pod, we leave them on the vine to dry. Then in the fall, when they are completely brown and crunchy, we pick them. We normally shell the beans by hand while watching television or chatting around the kitchen table. This excellent video from Seed Savers Exchange, however, will show you how to do it more quickly by threshing and winnowing.



Why would you want to grow your own beans when you can buy them cheaply at the store? Because you can easily grow them organically and because you can grow a huge variety that is not available in the grocery store. There are literally dozens of different beans available, such as Cherokee, calypso, rattlesnake, and lazy wife. In addition to having different looks and flavors, they also have different attributes.

For example, one reason I grow lazy wife beans in my garden is because they are a favorite of Japanese beetles. Yes, you read that correctly. Because the beetles love them, they ignore my other beans. It's a win-win because I get a great crop of green beans from other varieties, and it makes it easier to knock the beetles into a bucket of soapy water in the evening because they are all congregating on the lazy wife beans. When you grow different varieties, you'll soon discover which ones grow best in your garden.